Boing Boing posted this puzzle (have a look or the rest of this post will be meaningless). Being lazy I wrote a little program to determine all the possible solutions to the equation a.b.c = 225 expecting to be given a single answer, unfortunately that didn’t happen and six possible solution sets were returned.

Of all 6 solutions these first three seem most likely :
ages[1,3,75] house number = 79
ages[1,5,45] house number = 51
ages[1,9,25] house number = 35
these next 3 solutions seem less likely as the olddest person in the house would normally be an adult :
ages[1,15,15] house number = 31
ages[3,5,15] house number = 23
ages[5,5,9] house number = 19

Can anyone see what I’m missing in the question which would allow the census taker to know with absolute certainty their ages? Obviously he has the advantage of knowing the house number and being able to make a good guess at the age of the door answerer but beyond that I’m stumped.

Or any other IM service, I don’t care, it’s just that Google are big and open protocol and have a nice clean interface, as Nick said, ‘this is like msn yonks ago - it’s great’…

• RSS/ATOM to IM client, I think Miranda might do this allready but I’ve never got that to work.
• The Guardian’s over by over cricket coverage delivered straight to my IM client along with one line ball by ball score updates.

Straight outta Hong Kong, Electroplankton arrived at the Harlsden DHS depot on Monday .Despite the fact that I tend to pay extra to get these things delivered properly, rather than rely on the chronically untrackable Royal Mail/international equivalent, I always end up cycling to Harlsden to pick the parcel up because they only deliver at stupid times (i.e. when I’m at work, the only times when I’ve not been at work is when they deliver it at 7:30 on Saturday morning and I have a terrible hangover) and refuse to consider giving a more accurate time for redelivery than “sometime between 7:00 and 18:00. The worst time was when I got the train thinking it would be quicker and I ended up having to run all the way from Wilsden Junction to the depot so I could get my XBox home and get to my DnD game on time.

Anyway the ‘game’ is great. In case you don’t know, what you do is manipualte various species of electroplankton which make simple noises according to simple rules. The results are hypnotic, often beautiful and occasionally a horrible mess but all these are equally valid outcomes, the software doesn’t judge you.

In the setup shown above you bounce little fish off leaves, the angle of which you can adjust, and the position hit the leaf determines the pitch of the note they produce (I think), you can also cause flowers to bloom by getting all the leaves to turn red. It’s very reminiscent of the wonderful ball droppings.

Remember when Brian Eno was allways going on about generative music but never really came up with the goods? Well Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton is the goods, a commercial generative music album; you can put it in performance mode and have a perfectly passable ambient record generated for you on the fly, sound wise think Warp’s Artificial Inteligence compilations, or you can play (with) the music yourself (some of the setups really do feel like otherworldly musical instruments) manipulating the algorithms through a simple user interface.

So is it a game? Is it art? Yeah I think it probably is both, it makes you realise that playing instruments and doodling and generally the act of creation is also a game, which when you think about it seems obvious I suppose.

It would be a cold hearted Perl monger who didn’t raise a wry smile at the black poetry of

Useless use of a constant in void context at perl_module.pm line 159.

Perl’s error reporting is generally poor because it’s an interpreted language, but sometimes Larry Wall’s idiosyncratic use of English shines. Many Perl errors are of the type “Somethings wrong somewhere between line 10 and line 600 but I’ll be damned if i know what, sorry”. This example is the exact opposite, it tells you the exact location of your mistake and rather than saying something about incorrect usage, or bad syntax, or something similarly formal, it just comes straight out and tells you that the line is useless, and by extension you the programmer are useless.

“Useless use of a constant in a void context”

The way the first couple of words flow together and seem to contradict one another, can there be such a thing as a “Useless use”? (This is particularly interesting when considered alongside the superficial exactitude of the message.) The bleakness and existential despair engendered by the words useless and void as they boom their message of run time failiure from the dark, infinite depths of your terminal window. Truely this is one of the great error messages of our time.

It was really good, similar format to that ‘Spellbound’ documentary, but actually better. Unfortunately it continued the appaling title/good documentary trend by being named Stuff the World. If you get a chance you should definately check it out. The subjects of the film are, to put it mildly, a bunch of oddballs but most of them come out of the film pretty well, even if it’s only in comparison to Roy, who we see only towards the end of the film as he butchers his way around South Africa in pursuit of a leopard to stuff for the contest. “I just love being able to bring these beautiful animals back to life” - THEY WOULDN’T BE DEAD IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU, YOU FUCKWIT. Never before have I wished so hard that someone would get mauled by a Leopard or a Lion or die horribly in a freak… well a freak anything really. The final scene in which Roy appears is so mindblowingly repulsive that I’ll have to tell you about it in person so you can see my arms gesticulating wildly and my face turning furious red in order to get any idea about it. The whole thing made me wonder about the wisdom of releasing African mega-fauna into the US.

[Added a few months later]
The British Guild of Taxidermists points out that their members work primarily with salvaged specimens, which i think was pretty adequately shown in the documentary, the horrific practices of some of the US taxidermists kind of cast a bit of a shadow over the program as a whole though.

Aim for the head.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sir John Stephens:

‘there is only one sure way to stop a suicide bomber determined to fulfill his mission: destroy his brain instantly, utterly.’

(from here)

Meanwhile across town, the world continues to be turned upside down, this time because the most coherent and sensible response to the apparent shoot-to-kill policy comes from The Times specifically an
article by Michael Portillo (!)

To add to that impression [that if a man is running it is reasonable to deduce that he has a guilty reason for doing so] the Home Office leaked the story that there were irregularities in de Menezes’s immigration status. That is disgraceful. Even if it were true it would be irrelevant to his death, but this poison was released, I suppose, in order to help explain why the man was running away (which, as it turns out, he was not). The Home Office’s conduct has to be investigated too, which is another reason for needing a public inquiry.

…

The commissioner has repeatedly referred to the Met’s shoot-to-kill policy. That has puzzled me. When I was defence secretary, ministers used to spend hours agreeing the rules of engagement for our troops deployed in, say, Bosnia. Quite rightly, elected politicians signed off the detailed conditions in which British soldiers could use lethal force. It should not be a matter for a policeman to decide in what circumstances a person can be killed in Britain. Elected people should have that responsibility.

…plus lots of other accurate and timely criticism of the whole mess. That link again

Amanda and James’s new website: Here it is. If (A) you’re single and have friends or (B) you have single friends, then this is the site for you!
Once more, here it is.

Ballardian consumer riots are so hot right now! Of course consumer riots are nothing new, as long ago as the 1980’s fat women in the US were crushing the skulls of toddlers to get their hands on ‘Cabbage Patch’ dolls, but those riots allways had a edge of trailer trash desperation/entertainment about them. Now, the more middle class the product the better, and that’s HOT! HOT! HOT! What’s more, these young profesional riots aren’t restricted to decadant Western states, now middle eatern monarchies are getting in on the act too!

Reports say the new showrooms have 200% more space than the old stores.

In case you were wondering where the midpoint between Television Center and Middle Temple was, here’s the locus…

full size

Inspired by Nick’s post. I had to do two lists so i could mention tomatos and butternut squashes in the light of my earlier pedantry.

Vegetables

• Potato
• Carrot
• Parsnip
• Brocolli
• Spinach

Fruits

• Banana
• Strawberry
• Passion Fruit
• Butternut Squash
• Tomato

Just so we can be clear, the following things are also, using the technical (accurate) definition, fruits… courgettes, peas, aubergine, peppers, basically most things that you think are vegetables are actually fruits and no number of US court judgements are going to change that, if a judge said that octopuses were birds because we sometimes eat them in the same context as we do chicken (on skewers, in salads) would that make it so? No of course it wouldn’t.