- 1st
- Overexposure is great → What is this?: Click for a closer look
- Iain M. Banks Culture megafanboi geekfest → Iain Banks is like Counting Crows: none of his work is my absolute favourite, but almost everything he does is at least very good. The quality of his writing is consistently high, often very high, and occasionally perfect. Can you imagine a gruesome death for a computer? IMB can. I first read about Banks’ Culture [...]
- Property is theft → If you read the previous post, you’ll see I’ve linked some books to Amazon in an attempt to acquire what we in the industry call filthy piles of stinking lucre. I doubt it’ll work, but it could generate some high quality sociometric data. I promise not to compromise my stated opinions or linking ethics. Meanwhile, why [...]
- The Hitch-hikers guide to the Hutton Report → There's something very familiar about all this
- 2nd
- What does half a decade of email look like? → I have here nearly a hundred megabytes of email from the last 5 years, so I thought I’d have a look at it. But how do you look at something that big? Data visualisation to the rescue! If I plotted each byte as a pixel, I’d have a 125-screen wide bitmap, so instead I plotted [...]
- 4th
- Steel enlightenment → In an effort to move Rusholme away from its fry-pit wasteland image, some blob of government has hired a construction crew to dig up the pavements and presumably put something better there. Today I walked past a guy doing double-handed joystick-operation of a big earth-mover, and I realised Marshall McLuhan was incomplete: in some ways, [...]
- Hair Monster found in Mathspace → Paul Bourke has, amongst other wonders, some scary renderings of Julia fractals over the quaternions. Here’s one of them: Aaargh! What you see is only a 3D slice of the true horror, as the quaternions form a 4-dimensional algebra. (You didn’t think it stopped at complex numbers, did you? And it doesn’t stop at quaternions either; there [...]
- 7th
- Computerless computing → I’ve been on the internet for nearly 10 years now, age 11 to present, and my computing strategy has been consistent: ever faster, ever bigger, ever more expensive. It might be time for that to change. Yes For £50 per month you can get 125Mb of GPRS data transfer, which is plenty for text only communication. o2 [...]
- Barbarian hordes swarming M14 → This dodgy MSN page lets you see some crime stats for your postcode. Hmm. Local robbery rate is 1000% above the national average. Lovely. Only 350% more burglaries than normal though! I suggest a local crackdown on unlocked footlockers.
- 8th
- Number Theory Tools → The latest issue of the hexannual Mathematics Today, aside from having an interesting article on Google’s Pagerank algorithm, has a cool little puzzle called Enigmaths, which is basically a number crossword. The clues are things like, “6 across: multiple of the reverse of 7 down; 7 down: a square minus 6 across” which look impossibly [...]
- 9th
- Ministry of Scain → British FBI will require neither ruth nor evidence. Reminds me of those ‘PC cleaning’ programs that take up megs and megs of space and leave their own crap lying around the filesystem, inciting the purchase of yet another layer of clean-sweep utilities. Yet another layer of policing, yet another layer of government. I say we [...]
- Landspeeder → Wow, easily the best Mars picture yet: Discarded backshell and parachute NASA’s Mars Rovers website is pretty good all round, but I bet my URL for this picture lasts longer than theirs.
- 13th
- Teengers: thieves, thieved → Won't somebody please think of the children?
- 18th
- Coding vs. Gaming → Danny O’Brien summarises Will Davies: Will is developing, I think, a set of connections between gaming and coding. That you can only game explicitly defined code, and that codifying something leaves you at risk of being gamed. And if you try and artificially model something that isn’t following your rules, you could easily end up playing [...]
- 22nd
- Sony vs. You → Sony hardware has no trouble convincing you to buy it. It looks nice and is built well. You can find Sony stuff in any Shiny Things shop, and the person who sells it to you will have tidy hair and white teeth. Back in the 80s and early 90s, this was all that mattered: a [...]
- 24th
- London == leftists? → ‘Meh’-level Guardian comment claims: London, too, has American levels of ethnic diversity but is the most leftwing part of Britain. I present the following as evidence to the contrary: Old Trafford
- 25th
- TEH PASHION OF TEH CHRITS!!11!1 → (Warning: extreme blasphemy ahead. Put your censor goggles on now.) So that crazy Mel Gibson decides to up the stakes in the War on Jews with gore-fest snuff flick The Passion of Christ. Blurgh, I say. Let the religious psychos have their fun. I’m just disappointed that he missed the opportunity to create a film of [...]
- 28th
- Size down, dumb down? → I saw the new tabloid size Independent sitting next to its big twin on Wednesday. The headline story on both was the earthquake in Morocco. The big paper said “562 killed” and the small one said “560 killed”. Hmmm. Perhaps the small one is published fractionally before the big one, but I prefer to think that [...]
Posts
Oneliners
Eek. I made a ‘media’ category.
(0)Mitch and Dane - Gloria.sid. So much tune in only 8Kb.
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Michael Howard tries to rid the Tory party of its racist scumbag image by sacking racist scumbag MP. Could be setting precedent for sacking the rest too.
(0)Number Theory Tools 1.1 for your number theorising pleasure. Lets you check whether you have an efficient number of fingers or not.
(0)Yahoo search now has a cache link. Will they beat Google to offering this as a paid remote backup service?
(0)There are so many of us, but they are so rich.
(0)Religious studies to cover atheism. Marvellous. We’ll corner the beast sooner or later.
(0)The Marmite FAQ. “The breweries pay Marmite to remove the yeast from their factories.”
(0)“Watch out! Bad things can happen on Friday 13th.”
(0)World’s first realistic flash animation. Its offensive start is thoroughly explained (via b3ta)
(0)MP to meet minister over cocklers. Why did I read “MP to meet minister of overclockers”?
(0)CSS visited pages disclosure. Just thought this one up myself; glad to see it’s known.
(0)An Eccles classic: “You see, the university has removed most of the blackboards, and the ones left are only two dimensional.”
(0)House full of eBay junk. A not-so-funny OCD tale (via BoingBoing)
(0)Ultimate BTTF tie-in merchandise: flux capacitor y-fronts!
(0)Ironic typo of the week comes from Coding Theory: ‘Error-correcting cod’
(0)Did anybody else think the music in Pirates of the Caribbean was a mixture of the themes from The Rock, and The Settlers?
(0)I have a pencil sharpener made by RAPESCO. I tried to comply, but the site is being DDoS’d.
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