Corgis, The Queen and Princess Beatrice.

At this time of year the Queen hits the Highlands.
The dogs come too.



Oh dear. It looks like the Queen's corgis have been acting a bit rough whilst on their holidays in Balmoral, the monarch's rather chilly, gloomy and under-heated home in Scotland.


Brenda has always liked corgis. Her first one was called Susan.

The Queen has three Corgis – Monty, Holly, Willow. She also has three Dorgis (cross-breed of Dachshund and Corgi) Cider, Candy, Vulcan.

Whilst on holiday, she would bury the children in the sand to the great amusement of the corgis.



Perhaps it was the travelling or the change in routine. The corgis set on the Norfolk terrier owned by Princess Beatrice. Here's a picture of her with the dog. The dog is on the right. Many think that the unfortunate princess looks like her father in drag. How do they know this with such confidence?



It seems that the official royal dog walker lost control of the pack and they attacked the non-corgi interloper. Another vet bill no doubt.

Fax for the memory

The first commercially available digital fax machine was the Dacom Rapidfax first sold in the1960s. It used digital data compression technology that was initially developed by the Lockheed company for efficient transmission of digital images from satellites.

Nowadays in the UK, most fax machines can be found in office cupboards, attics and junk shops. But according the news this week the fax is thriving in Japan.

Calligraphy is respected art in Japan and many professionals write letters by hand rather than type them.

Email is often perceived as a characterless means of communication, if you'll forgive the pun.

Almost 90% of Japanese businessmen surveysayer entry say that a fax machine is a vital business tool.



The majority of job applications and CVs are handwritten because Japanese employers like to judge applicants' personalities from their handwriting.

Could you imagine that in the UK, where many school leavers are unable to write decent English. Text speak is even used in GCSE exams I'm told.

So I dug my old fax machine out, with plans to fax rather than post letters. The cost of UK post is a real disincentive to the art of letter writing.

Two problems:-
- You can't get the thermal paper any more.
- Hardly anyone has a fax. They're all in other cupboards or attics.

FresianBook, milk yields and social networking in cows

Another story that avoids the Olympic 'O' word. You couldn't make it up.

Despite our double dip recession that's looking for its triple dip, there seems to be no shortage of money for pointless academic research projects.



The University of Exeter has got both DEFRA and independent milk industry funding for a study into the social skills and friend-making ability of cows.

The aim is to electronically tag a herd of cows and then to study their movement by satellite tracking over three years. This will help them to understand how cows make friends with other cows, develop those relationships, achieve boundless happiness and then increase their milk yield.



I'm not sure of the relationship between happiness and milk yield. But we do know that oxytocin, the milk releasing hormone has a direct effect on serotonin neurons in the brain. This could be a case of the tail wagging the cow. So much for the null hypothesis too.

On a comparative biology basis. Do women who are more sociable, with more friends have a higher milk yield? I don't think so.

Evidence That Oxytocin Exerts Anxiolytic Effects via Oxytocin Receptor Expressed in Serotonergic Neurons in Mice
Masahide Yoshida, Yuki Takayanagi, Kiyoshi Inoue, Tadashi Kimura, Larry J. Young, Tatsushi Onaka, and Katsuhiko Nishimori

The Journal of Neuroscience, 18 February 2009, 29(7): 2259-2271; doi: 10.1523/​JNEUROSCI.5593-08.2009