...but don't worry, I'm not stopping blogging at Science 2.0! So really, this is just shameless self promotion. Especially since the new blog has nothing to do with science - it's history, or humour - but it's been rather lonely there for the first few days of its existence, so I thought I'd undertake a little "marketing".

I've always had a love of the old satirical magazine Punch, and after I unexpectedly found myself in a secondhand bookshop the other week, I unexpectedly found some old Punch anthologies, and rather unexpectedly found myself buying a load of them. I got rather addicted to reading them, and so I thought I'd start a blog where I could post a little snippet every day.

Apparently people are eating their pet's food, and they're getting salmonella poisoning in return. Or at least, that's the impression provided by the news coverage.

The FDA started a "year-long nationwide effort to test pet food for salmonella contamination, but the key concern is not the health of dogs and cats - it's of their owners." FDA investigators began in October taking samples of dry pet food, pet treats and diet supplements from distributors, wholesalers and retailers like PetSmart, PetCo, WalMart, Costco, Sam's Club and Target, articles noted. 

At the Michael Jackson trial yesterday, the following exchange took place between the lead prosecutor and the Star defense witness, anesthesiologst Dr. Paul (Walter) White. Prosecutor: Dr. Shafer, when Dr. Murray noted that Mr. Jackson was no longer breathing, why didn't he call 911? Dr. White: My name is actually Dr. White. Perhaps I should be wearing a nametag. In any case, the house didn't have a landline. Prosecutor: But Dr. Murray had a cell phone in his hand. Dr. White: I speculate that he was waiting for the Verizon guy to appear and show him how to use it. Judge clears the courtroom. (Jury leaves temporarily). Judge to Witness White: I am fining you $1000 for being monumentally stupid.

Yeah – Sascha Vongehr – yours truly – also known variously as attention craving publicity click whore or “$h*!-spammer” according to promptly censured commentators, has now finally achieved his only aim in his sorry-@$$ life and pimped up his titles so hard that he blows up – reader numbers are skyrocketing! That makes him really happy because it is only attention and clicks he craves – no more, because clicks he hopes make him happy, though strangely he is actually no happier than before, but more clicks surely must work mood lifting eventually.

Europe is moving forward at high speed to build ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility), to be completed by the end of the century. The location for the facility will be announced next year, possibly at the opening ceremony of the summer Olympics. Three prototype lasers are being built in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, scheduled to become operational in 2015.

ELI will be made up of 10 beams, each twice as powerful as the prototype lasers, allowing it to produce 200 petawatts of power – more than 100,000 times the power of the world's combined electricity production – for less than a trillionth of a second.

The name of George Augustus Linhart is in fact "widely unknown". In effect, he was a Viennese-born USA-American physicist-chemist, partially associated with the Gilbert Newton Lewis' school of thermodynamics at the University of California in Berkeley.

As a lone small boy, he had arrived (from Austria via Hamburg) at New York in 1896, but was officially USA-naturalized only in 1912. He was able to pick up English in the streets of New York and Philadelphia, when occasionally working as a waiter and/or as a tailor - just to somehow survive. But, nonetheless, he could successfully graduate a high school in about one year - and then went to the universities for his further education.