…and cartograms from these dutch guys.
International development institutions spend a lot of effort assembling statistics and assessing changes. Mapping Worlds wants to enhance the value of these data, to better detect and analyze differences between countries or regions.
That’s nice.
Things may look a little odd around here for a while
(as discussed in the pub yesterday)
This here is a recording of all the music in Super Mario World. One guy plays all the instruments, the interpretations are interesting whilst remaining reasonably faithful to the spirit of the original, and it’s surprisingly good. I like the way lots of the tunes merge together like a super-twee prog rock epic.
We won. It was announced on the same day as the bombings, which kind fo made me forget. Anyway we recieved a rubber arrow in the post yesterday as a token of our greatness which seems to have dissapeared allready.
In spite of the fact that it usually has some good writers and good articles (Most notably, John Gray and JG Ballard can often be found pedaling their especially over the top and exhileratingly bleak take on things between its covers), there are several reasons why I never buy the New Statesman. All these reasons are summed up neatly by the following.
Luckily, our new male Brazilian au pair has decided not to take his family’s advice to return home after the Stockwell shooting
You find yourself bored at work sitting in front of a computer…
More boring programing stuff I’m affraid. Writing a web service in Perl at the moment. Doing objects in Perl is all very well and good “you need a deep understanding of the way objects work” they say smugly. But IMHO that’s just bollocks , the whole point of OO is that it’s an abstraction that makes it easier to write nice clean understandable code with simple syntax, Perl does all sorts of horible pointer gymnastics to ‘objectify’ its code (which has to happen anyway but it should be hidden from the user) but the syntax is ambiguous and convoluted (In Perl? shocker!). I’m going to get angry about lack of typing soon and I don’t know where that will lead so i’ll stop now.
So just to summarise and have some kind of point to this post, I think one of the aims in designing a programing language is to make it easy (or even *eek* necessary) to write neat, maintainable code, allowing for neat abstraction. Perl purposefully steers away from this for philosophical rather than practical reasons, with all sorts of implications for error checking, debugging and the development process in general. Basically Perl requires you to be disciplined in order to create something maintainable and readable, that stuff comes free with some other modern languages which put practicality first. Will you…
Now the guy who sits opposite me ‘TV guy’ wants to talk about Lost. Pretty rubbish really givent he amount of hype we’ve been subjected to, mind you, i only watched the first bit as they cut big brother into the middle of it and that lunatic Craig, having been evicted, was busy shredding his last scraps of dignity, and it proved literally unwatchable. I’ve done pretty well this year, only watched about 30mins of Big Brother in total, usually late at night just before giving up and going to bed. Need to stop thinking about this and go back to Perl. What will you do next?
k thnx bye.
It’s the list where you can vote for the funniest films of all time, and it’s wrong. It’s mainly wrong because Zoolander isn’t on it and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is. I always thought that those list programmes on channel 4 were rubbish because I hadn’t gone to the site and voted in advance for the films/albums/breeds of dog that I thought should be included but as it turns out the whole thing is founded on a faulty voting system (in this case a voting system that fails to recognise the brilliance of Zoolander and also Love and Death (seriously, who thought Annie Hall was funnier than Love and Death?)). The list is just wrong! If you were wondering, the correct answer to the question ‘what are the funniest films ever?’ off the top of my head it would probably be something like this (in no particular order) :
Oh sorry, I just realised that it’s the ‘greatest comedy films of all time’ not the funniest films of all time, well, I suppose that’s vague enough criteria for them to be allowed to include ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ in there, inspite of the fact that it’s possible to watch the film without laughing or feeling any kind of emotion, positive or otherwise, apart from hatred for Robin Williams.
What funny films do you like? Which is the worst Robin Williams film? (Bicentenial man is my vote, though for some reason I want to say AI even though he wasn’t in that)
Found this when looking for phillip pulman related stuff in response to the massive amount of JK Rowling related stuff that’s being forced on me at the moment from all directions. This that is
On humanitarian grounds alone we ought to shut it down: it is quite simply too cruel to people to treat them like that - to say to a young man like Prince William ”No matter what your talents, your interests or your inclinations, you shall never have a career, you shall never be allowed to make a reputation or contribute to society as an engineer or a scholar or an architect or anything else except a stuffed dummy that opens hospitals and makes speeches that are written for you by someone else. You shall waste the most vigorous years of your life in hanging around making meaningless conversation with people who are desperately nervous in case they make some minor mistake in etiquette. No-one will ever relate to you simply as one human being to another, no-one will ever contradict you, no-one will ever tell you the truth about yourself. You will be flattered, lied to, crawled to from morning till night; your attention will be fought over by servants and courtiers, who will reward your disapproval with fawning apology to your face and poisonous bitterness behind your back. If you can persuade some unfortunate woman to marry you, her life will be a misery. Nothing she does will escape the sordid attention of the press, and if she deviates in the slightest degree from conventional ideas of beauty, every photograph of her will be as unflattering as possible, and her appearance, her dress sense, her weight, her very features will be mercilessly scorned. If you utter your opinions in public, you will set half the country against you; if you utter no opinions at all, you will be scoffed at as empty-headed. And so on, till you die.”
Check out this excellent review of why the space shuttle is a bit of a joke. you might miss this in the foot notes
The original Shuttle plan called for launch costs in the range of $10 - $20 million. A commonly cited figure puts the actual cost at $400 million.
So to put these things in space costs
$400 000 000
And refering to an earlier post…
Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending
Which, to give you a better idea of size, is written $1 700 000 000
So there’s 28 shuttle flights scheduled over the next 5 years (which to recap, for those at the back, the aforementioned article points out are pretty pointless) 28/5 = a mean of 5.6 flights a year 5.6*400000000 = 2240000000.
$2 240 000 000 a year for pointless manned space flight.
$1 700 000 000 is how much we’d need to spend to give everyone clean drinking water.
hmmm.
Anyway, I’m a supporter of unmanned space exploration even though it is essentially pointless, I tend to believe that exploring and finding out new stuff and generally expressing curiosity is an important part of being human. On the other hand, the amount of money wasted on sending people into space, as opposed to lightweight naturally vaccuum resistant machines (cooling issues aside), is actually pretty disgusting when you put it in any kind of context.
BONUS : Richard Feynman’s excellent apendix to the report on the challenger accident. If I remember correctly this was meant to be part of the main report but was considered so embarrasing that it was sidelined and was lucky to get an appendix in the final document.