Yesterday a European Union directive went into effect, prohibiting mobile phone carriers from charging so-called roaming charges when a subscriber leaves one country and enters another. From yesterday every subscriber should pay the same price wherever they call from in Europe.

Finland has negotiated an exception and we will continue to pay more to make phone calls from another country.

In a post on Facebook Ian McNabb, Liverpool singer and songwriter (and former frontman of The Icicle Works) wrote that Sgt Pepper did not stand up as the masterpiece people usually hail it as. He argued that The Beatles blew it by including the wrong tracks from those available, and thus fatally weakening the album. He implied that they could (and probably should) have recognised this at the time and fixed it. He then suggested how they could have done this.

The idea of representing ideas or thoughts diagrammatically is not a recent one. As early as the third century, Porphyry of Tyros produced map-like images to demonstrate the structure and workings of Aristotle’s philosophical concepts.

However the current usages of the terms “mind mapping” and “concept mapping” are relatively recent. Both terms have known inventors, who have spent many years developing their ideas, and both terms arise from theoretical assumptions or research. Despite the apparent similarity of the terms, and despite the fact that both describe methods of representing ideas diagrammatically, they have completely different aims, and work in very different ways.