There’s an entirely sensible campaign now in the UK to encourage people to switch off appliances left on standby, saving both greenhouse gas emmissions and money.

I try hard to be environmentally friendly – low-energy light bulbs and appliances, using cycling and public transport etc, but I confess my computer CPU isn’t switched off from one week to the next. (Although I do switch off the screen.)

The problem is it takes so long to fire it up again. And it seems strange that this problem hasn’t been solved – it is one of the primary annoyances of computing. And it also drives us mad at work, where an average of several crashes per computer per working day (usually right on deadline) wastes huge amounts of time in restarting. (I used to believe the claim that Apples never crashed – Hah!)

But finally, it appears, there is a solution in sight. About time!

Australian editors are traditionally interested in the Northern Territory only for crocodile wrestling stories and lurid murder trials, the latter category in which the Falconio murder trial definitely falls.

(A brief summary: a British couple were driving along an Outback highway. She reports that their car was flagged down, the man was shot, she was tied up, but fled and hid in the bush for five hours, before flagging down a passing truck. The boyfriend is presumed dead, but no body has been found.)

As might be predicted, media coverage depicting Darwin as “Hicksville” has upset the locals. The Chief Justice is ensuring he gets his name in all the papers, asking of the writer of the offending article: “How did he get out? Presumably by horse and carriage?” Entirely in line with the script.

Also in line with the script, all aspects of the reputation of the dead man’s partner is being trashed in court, despite the fact that she is a victim of forced imprisonment, serious assault etc and spent many hours in fear of her life. The fact that all of the details she gave of her ordeal, no doubt in a state of shock soon after, and subsequently, don’t exactly square up, is hardly a surprise. From what I know of the nature of memory in shocking circumstances (some from personal experience), she will have eventually constructed out of fragmentary memories a coherent narrative for herself; there’s nothing solid about memory.

Actually, she’s already been found guilty of not being sufficiently “womanly” – ie breaking down in public – just like Lindy Chamberlain.

.. at Saturday’s conference.

Bishop Francis Godwin, author of the (posthumously published in 1638) Man in the Moone, which might be called the first piece of science fiction. His central character, writing what is structured as autobiography,, “translated from the Spanish”, is a priest who reports on training swan-like birds to carry him on their annual migration to the moon. There he finds a utopia with no disease, no crime etc, and is told that anyone who shows any problems is shipped down to Earth, thus explaining why it is is such a sinful place.

John Wilkins, the first secretary of the Royal Society, who knew its author, actually revised a scientific paper to take account of it. The book, taken at face value by most readers, went through more than 20 editions in the next two centuries, also being translated into French, German and Dutch. Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe both read it.

Robert Recorde (c.1510-1558) “the most important teacher of mathematics of the English Renaissance, also a neo-Platonist. He wrote books, in English (importantly) on arithmetic, astronomy and algebra, some in the form of what would now be called “teach yourself”. Claim was laid for him as having “laid the foundation for mathematics and technical learning in general society”. He was also a civil servant and got himself into trouble in Ireland, eventually dying in prison.

Sir George Beeston who was knighted after fighting with Drake et al against the Spanish Armada, and has a lovely tomb in St Boniface Church in Bunbury.

William Cornysh (or Cornish, a Renaissance musician, introduced by a researcher who has the lovely plan to research the lives of “nobodies”, one being an anonymous person – a delightful idea.

The idea of David Rizzio, the Italian, supposed to be the lover of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was murdered with such dramatic political consequencies. He was seen as the prototype for the Italian lovers and Catholic villians of Elizabethan and later drama.

I also learnt about the contradictory funeral monuments of the wonderful Elizabeth Hoby, and the way people used almanacs as frameworks for their “diaries”, also sometimes commenting when the weather forcast was wrong!

I spent yesterday at the Roehampton University Renaissance Lives Annual Conference, which was brilliant. I really liked the fact that the sessions didn’t mostly consist of papers being read out, but of short off-the-cuff explanations of research, followed by wide discussion.

And the discussion, while sometimes focused on detail – with lots of excellent stuff about women’s lives – was mostly about the big issues of writing about history – are biographies and biographers writing about archetypes or individual lives; can you recover historical emotions? what is autobiography/life-writing (is using this description for a tomb taking things too far?); do biographical subjects still have agency after their death? what impact will technology have on the discipline (more focus on communal rather than individual lives through the ability to analyse large amounts of data was the answer given, although I think inter-discipinarianism is more important personally) – the description of this as “thick historicism” was accurate, I thought.

But the day started with what someone later labelled “classic 19th-century old historicism”, with David Starkey talking about his biography of Henry VIII. You had to give him marks as a performer, there was more than a hint of mischief-making, and it certainly woke up everyone first thing in the morning, so I guess you could say he did his job.

But I wasn’t the only one bristling at the statement “all historical progress depends on sons quarrelling with their fathers”, while the claim that historians “from council houses” just couldn’t understand war, the aristocracy and the like certainly did raised others’ blood pressure. (This was despite the fact that he later contradicted the “sons” remark by attributing the entire English Reformation to Anne Boleyn, or at least to Henry’s sexual desire for her! He claimed the only “Protestants” in England before her influence were a small number – who “would have fitted into a Portakabin” – at the “fleapit” of Cambridge. Not from what I know of the London of the time …)

But, as I said, it was entertaining.

… hold the front page. The Observer proclaims the rise of the New Puritan – “A generation of young, educated and opinionated people determined to sidestep the consumerist perils of modern life.”

It also runs a scare story about the new drinking laws, but it also manages to conclude that a significant group of young people are trying to live in a healthy, green way. (I tend to agree, in part I guess because I’m a bit of one myself (without the “young” bit).

Two nicely matched articles in today’s Guardian – wondering why society today is so gullible – focusing particularly on bird flu hysteria. When the front page of The Sun is taken up by a death of a bird meaning, in its terminology, the feathered kind, there must be a new “dead parrot” sketch in there somewhere – but then again, perhaps it is beyond parody.

I could hardly believe that anyone had given this stuff a thought, until I went into my local small Sainsbury this evening and found poultry of all descriptions covered in half-price or less stickers. Just had a very nice expensive free-range duck breast fillet (baked in honey and mustard-seed mustard in case you were wondering) that usually would have been £3. It cost me £1.20 – I foresee poultry meat being the predominate source of protein in my diet in the immediate future.

Then, the Guardian, debunking one scare (while it continues elsewhere to promote bird flu) runs an expose on the lab that keeps finding MRSA everywhere. Funnily enough, none of the other, accredited labs, which happen to be run by trained scientists, can.

So all those poor senior citizens terrified out of their wits – that if they touched an NHS door-handle they were going to die – were misled by their newspapers. It’d be nice to think the pensioners will know better next time.

In other news, as (nearly) always Matthew Parris offers an original take on the news. You mightn’t have thought it was possible to find a new angle on the Tory leadership contest, but he has, and although I’ve only been resident in England for seven years and wouldn’t presume therefore to claim to more than dimly understand the class system (although I’m sure it is still going strong): it is that the rise of David Cameron is the return of the toffs.