I haven’t watched 30 Rock because it’s name and premise are too similar to Studio 60 (which I also haven’t watched) and I have a strange sense of loyalty to Aaron Sorkin even though by leaving The West Wing half way through he showed he feels no such loyalty to me. Anyway, on the strength of this youtube clip I’m prepared to download a couple of episodes and give it a chance; what with uncanny valley being one of my favourite explanations for things, and people who look like J Mascis being one of my favourite types of people. Maybe it’s the new Larry Sanders, someone must have said that already though so I’ll need to come up with a fresh angle for pub conversations.
When I’m in my office alone, particularly if I’m in over night for an election or whatever, which I’m not at the moment, I’m just in early, it feels like a long distance aeroplane flight.
via Neil
A very American internet list of books; the top 106 books tagged “unread” in library thing
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list
To take advantage of my stylesheet and highlight things all the italics and underlines are also bold but that doens’t mean I’ve read them, just that I think it looks better to do it that way. Also opinions: Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t often talk about specific concrete worky things here (or anywhere else for that matter) but I just wanted to mention what I thought was an excellent idea I had this morning that didn’t make it, presumably because it would appeal only to info graphics geeks and the tone is maybe a bit wrong.
Background: You know how there’s some football thing happening in Moscow next week? Yeah don’t worry I didn’t either but apparently there is. It’s difficult to get visas to go to Moscow at the best of times, if you’re a football fan trying to get one at short notice it’s really difficult and, you know, two British teams abroad, cheap vodka etc. there’s bound to be a pretty high attrition rate on the way there and then some are going to be stuck in customs/ prison and be unable to leave once they get there.
The idea: So what I wanted to do was to recreate Josef Minard’s Carte Figurative (considered by some to be the best statistical graphic EVAR) but the with lines representing British football fans instead of Napoleonic Soldiers. We’d use the same visual style to show how many set off, how many get left behind at various border crossings and how many get stuck once they arrive in Moscow. Clearly a brilliant idea.
We climbed to the top of the 5th highest waterfall in the world (according to the guide book though there seems to be some dispute; wikipedia places it 18th and the world waterfall database ranks it 20th), our legs are still aching.
This is what it looks like about half way up:
This is a view from the bottom, you can’t see the lower part of the falls:
I really need not to eat any more beef for quite a while, vegetarian options in California being surprisingly hard to come by (or at least hard to choose when they’re more expensive than cheese burgers which are the one thing American cuisine gets consistently right. Having said that we did have some really nice food, including the über-Californian sea food tacos, I’m definitely going to try to recreate those).
We also saw amongst other wild animals; desert tortoises, coyotes, and sea lions:
Also a black bear! Which I failed to photograph.
And a some not so wild but very photogenic jellyfish.
Over the last few years I’ve seen an increasing number of cartograms used to display single dimensional country by country statistics such as GDP, carbon emissions, electoral college votes etc with varying degrees of success. My team has been involved with production of a few too (1. 2).
Hello, I’m going away for 3 weeks. I’ll take lots of photos to post when we get back. When we return we’re moving flat so you’ll have to come over and check it out before we start messing it up to make it nicer. Especially you lot who we haven’t seen properly for ages.
My favourite website at the moment is muxtape it’s very web 1.0, no community features or ratings or tagging or what have you, the only customisation is that you get to choose a hex colour. You just make mix tapes. Here’s mine constructed of fragments remaining on my work hard drive after I last purged the music directory.
Incidentally, whilst the casette in the image above claims to be “GREAT FOR EVERYDAY RECORDING” that’s actually a lie. I had just such a tape onto which i copied Wilmslow library’s double CD of Future Sound Of London’s preposterous ambient sound-scape Lifeforms. After only one playing the ultra thin 120min tape was already stretching.
As is traditional just before I go on holiday I’m ill at the moment. This did give me an opportunity to watch the remade Assault On Precinct 13 yesterday, pretty poor. It’s got her out of the Sopranos in it and Omar out of The Wire was in the Sopranos last night hopefully when I start Wire 4 when we get back from holiday I’ll spot someone else in it and the Markov chain will continue. Needless to say, it didn’t have the proper music…
Also, and finally, I got round to playing the new Advance Wars and by simple virtue of the fact that :
they’ve ditched CO powers.
You can skip ALL and I mean ALL speech and
3. you can turn off all battlefield animations not just combat ones
it is the best in the series. I blasted through the first 15 missions in a satisfyingly swift 4 hours, blissfully unaware of whatever stupid storyline they’ve dreamed up to accompany the tactical shenanigans. Though I do still miss the biggest tank being called Medium Tank.
