As a freelance scientist – er, ex-physicist – I can’t help taking an interest in the particle physics research planned for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. And as one of teh internets’ numerous ukuleleists, I can’t help writing a short song about it and putting it on my blog. Happy Friday.

So Derren Brown “predicted” all of the lottery numbers. It was certainly a good bit of TV but will we discover on Friday that it was just split-screen camera trickey? This video expresses my view on the matter…

Update: Noticed my visitor stats go through the roof because of this post – thanks to everyone who’s visited. If you enjoyed the video, please rate/comment/subscribe on YouTube or use one of the links below to share it more widely.

This is what happens when I take a break from work: I make silly things and put them online.

Into my head the other day pops the phrase “Three former Doctor Whos are we.” No idea where that morsel came from, but within 24 hours I’ve recorded a song. Then I remembered Jason’s great Doctor Who cartoons and within another day had made a video.

Non-fans will find the lyrics a bit obscure, I’m afraid, but here it is anyway for your viewing pleasure:

August isn’t the most topical month for a Eurovision Song Contest posting. At May’s content, juries were reintroduced to combat allegations of political voting, with each country’s votes being decided half by phone vote and half by a jury of “industry experts”.

The European Broadcasting Union has now revealed what the results would have been if voting had been by jury only. Norway would still have won, although not by as huge a margin. Here are the jury and actual votes side-by-side.

The most notable difference from a UK perspective is that the music industry experts put us two positions up, in third place. Perhaps they were more likely to be sympathetic to a Lloyd Webber track than Europe’s wider population? Phone voting alone would have placed the UK tenth.

Both Greece and Turkey – upbeat tracks with strong performances on the night – found more favour with the audience than with the juries, while France’s ballad and Israel’s “worthy” entry reach the juries’ top ten, but not the audiences’.

The EBU has also released full country-by-country breakdowns of the voting. The UK scored six 12s from juries, but only one by phone vote (and only one on the night). Here’s how the votes cast by the UK through telephone vote and jury vote compared.

I’m surprised to see that Germany’s swing number topped the UK’s jury vote – but the jury was outvoted by the audience, who managed to get the 12 points for Turkey while placing Germany ninth. Norway’s strong performance on both lists contrived to place it second overall, higher than on either. Again, Greece fared much better with the telephone voters, as did Lithuania, Denmark and Portugal.

If you take a similarly geeky interest in how the votes from each country were affected, you can download the full voting data from the Eurovision website.