ANAHEIM, CA -- (April 16, 2004) -- The world record for biggest wave ever ridden was officially shattered this evening at the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards presented by Monster Energy when Pete Cabrinha of Hawaii picked up a check for $70,000 to match his amazing ride on a 70-footer.

Cabrinha, 43, rode the wave on January 10 of this year at the break known as Jaws on the North Shore of Maui, near his home in Haiku.

For McGinn, our favoured modes of explanation, typically involving units, and elaborated by combinations and mappings, don't address the question of how the sensation of redness will always be novel to someone who has never had it before.

The same kind of limitation may apply in physics. Look at how hard it is to get your head round quantum theory, or more recent exotica like superstrings. Other developments in physics also weaken the case for reducing everything to one explanation.

And there are disunities of explanation within physics. Although since Newton most explanations have involved particles and forces, there is now a whole new class of explanations for all those phenomena like, say, how many grains will tumble down the sides of a sand pile if you trickle a few more on top. These involve laws that still show, as cosmologist John Barrow puts it, that the world is highly compressible, in the mathematical sense. But they don't really resemble laws like gravitation or electromagnetism.

We now have a modernising, classless political consensus consisting of a non-socialist New Labour party and a pro-capitalist New Conservative party, neither of which is much concerned to conserve the historic institutions. While in the old days socialists argued, very reasonably, that it was the duty of the state to improve the conditions of the lower classes, and Old Tories argued, also very reasonably, that it was their party's duty to maintain the privileges of the upper classes, today all the parties agree, or pretend to agree, that it is the job of the state to do away with class altogether, regardless of the fact that our political institutions grew out of that class system and have depended on it ever since for their health and strength.

So what would the ushering in of a classless society really signify? Essentially, the end of the tradition of linking power and wealth to the ideal of selflessness. What began as a reforming movement to abolish class consciousness is, therefore, in danger of ending up as a movement to abolish class conscience.

When Danzig Baldaev was a boy his father, an eminent Buryat ethnographer, was denounced as an "enemy of the people" by the Soviet authorities. Danzig was later sent to work as a prison guard. His life's work, the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, has just been published by Steidl/Fuel. Photos by Sergei Vasiliev.

The researchers came up with a way to direct the movement of the pins to create specific patterns under the fingers.

While the system can to recognise circles, lines, squares, or letters such as V, the perception of more complex symbols is highly individual.

For instance, the '@' sign might feel like a spiral, the word 'I' as a wave that flows towards the person and 'you' as a wave that flows away.

During construction of the lab's five-storey tall ATLAS instrument, which is soon to be used to search for an elusive particle called the Higgs boson, a precise optical system was used to align the silicon detectors used to monitor the trajectory of subatomic particles.

By modifying the instrument and passing it above the grooves used to store audio on vinyl, the researchers were able to visually record their position to an accuracy of a one thousandth of a millimetre.