Bookmarks

Why Retaining Walls Collapse — Practical Engineering

>>"You can get many types of earth to hold a vertical slope temporarily, and it’s done all the time during construction, but over time the internal stresses will cause them to slump and settle into a more stable configuration. For long-term stability, engineers rarely trust anything steeper than 25 degrees. That means any time you want to raise or lower the earth, you need a slope that is twice as wide as it is tall, which can be a problem."<< Trig example. Arctan(0.5) = 26.6 degrees... 'twice as wide as it is tall' is the kind of practical rule of thumb a builder would see and remember.

What David Graeber, ‘Dawn of Everything’ Author, Left Behind

>> "They weren’t paying taxes, they weren’t calling police, and, rather than relying on hierarchical structures of authority, they were making decisions collectively. The Malagasy didn’t call attention to this state of affairs. They just went about their business, behaving [...] as if they were already free." << I think most people do this. The State only pops into existence when certain boundaries are crossed, and most people can spend most of their lives within the boundaries without causing The State to manifest.

When It Comes to Problem-Solving, New UVA Study Finds That Less Is More

>> "We are going to pay you $1 if you can renovate the structure so that it will hold a real masonry brick above the little Lego person’s head without collapsing. There is a pile of other Legos that you can use, but each one is going to cost 10 cents from your bonus. For most people, their first inclination is to grab some extra Legos and add three more bricks under the platform. About 60% of people pursue that solution under normal conditions." << I want to know if I put a lego brick back do I get an extra ten cents; and I want to know what the 40% who didn't add bricks did. If the 40% subtracted bricks and the sample size was less than say 100 people then this is basically a coin toss. >> "Well, for another group, we explicitly mentioned that “removing pieces is free.” This was superfluous information – people in both groups knew it was true when we quizzed them about it – but it brought subtraction to mind more easily. In that group, more people subtracted." << OK, how many more? Note: *adding* a prompt to the experiment...

The melancholy decline of the semicolon - The Post

>> "Lancaster's linguists believe that the end of the semicolon, along with shrinking sentence lengths in novels, is a reflection of a society addicted to social media. The shift, commented Justin Tora of the University of Galway, is part of a "more realistic way" of writing for the modern age." << Non-fiction: "The Moon, and the Condition and Configurations of Its Surface" by Edmund Neison has a sentence that extends to one and a half octavio pages set in wonderful letterpress type with several layers of punctuation (semi-colons, commas, dashes). It is a sentence to tobbogon through, leaning into the turns.

Web SDRs

Search the HF bands for free. People put their SDR based radio systems online and allow multiple users. Fascinating to compare locations and aerial systems.

Oral-History:Lloyd Espenschied - ETHW

>> "Then we had to do something better than that, so Carty decided that he was going to try to bridge the oceans, just like that. The only tubes we had were these little power tubes of about ten watts each. I supposed we had 100 watts at the most. But the prospect was that we could build bigger tubes, so Arnold and the tube shop got busy to produce bigger and better tubes. Three or four men were dispatched to various places, Paris, Canal Zone, Mill Island, California and Hawaii to do the receiving. The Navy promised to cooperate, to let us install a new powerful transmitter that we were going to build at the foot of the towers at Arlington. John Mills made the arrangements there. Later on, Heising took his tube racks, hundreds of these fifty-watt tubes, down there and tried to make them work in parallel."<< 1915 wireless telephony transmission from Washington to Paris and Hawaii. Receivers would have been navy? Armstrong regens? 60kHz so very long wave, ground wave. >> "I did and found that it had a lot of interference, it was no good. I went and erected my own antenna out in Pearl Harbor, which was then a wilderness, only a power station, an officer's building, and a storage building on the docks. I ran this antenna between a water tank and smokestack, then down into an old carpenter's shop where I did the receiving, thanks to B.W. Kendal's homodyne reception, which was invented then and there. Homodyne reception means that the detecting oscillator was oscillating in unison with the received carrier. It had to be in exact unison, and the control was so exact that I couldn't move my body after setting it properly. I had to stay perfectly still and then receive it." << Direct conversion. I'm assuming audion oscillator and rf and af amplification

Org Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text

Runs through org mode markup for simple cases and contrasts with ascii doc and markdown

GMB's list of Air Ministry equipment numbers

Comprehensive information on the radio equipment used in the second world war in RAF planes and on the ground. And thanks to wayback machine for keeping stuff like this once the original isp/author drops off their perch!

Fundamentals of the MiniWhip antenna

>> "A whip has a capacitance of almost 10 pF per meter of length, slightly dependent on it thickness. A circular metal plate has a capacitance of about 0.35 pF per cm diameter (proportional to the diameter, not to the area, as one might expect). I haven't found a formula for a rectangular plate, but the shape should not matter too much, so a typical MiniWhip has about 2 pF of plate capacitance. That capacitance is important, because together with the amplifier input capacitance it forms a capacitive voltage divider. If the plate or whip's capacitance is smaller, less voltage remains when the amplifier is connected." << So should I use a small spike or a square of tin? Research continues

Pretty Inline Symbolic Mathematics in Org-Mode | Harry Askham

SymPy, LaTeX and emacs org mode. Getting interesting

Simplifier - About

>> "Fundamentally, my work here is about creating a stable foundation of technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves. As of writing this, I believe I have done this on a conceptual level, but I intend to continue this work to the highest level of technology that I can achieve on my own." << Fabricating your own triode and tetrode valves is pretty impressive (access to machine shop and vacuum equipment capable of 10 milliTors helps but even so...). Via brutalistwebsites.com

Re: Discoverability (was: Changes for 28)

>>"However, people actually use Emacs, so a greatly incompatible change in Emacs is as unthinkable as a greatly incompatible change in the New York City subway." "We have to build new lines through the maze of underground pipes and cables." << Via HN in an article about the values of emacs. Modernising an old (software) city is hard work.

Antenna Options | aavso

>> "A small loop that I have recently been using with good results utilizes two 15 inch-long wood crosspieces that are cut from 3/4 inch square stock. Notches are cut in the center of each piece, 3/4 inch wide and 3/8 inch deep. Vee notches are cut 1/2 inch deep in the end of each piece. The two pieces are then assembled in the form of a cross, using glue for attachment. The frame is then wound with 200 turns of #26 enameled wire. Both ends are terminated at one of the arms. A two terminal tie point is mounted on the arm to serve as a connection point. This loop was resonated to 24.0 kHz for the NAA frequency. Polypropylene capacitors were used to give the loop a high Q. A twisted pair of wires was also connected to the terminal point, along with the capacitors. The value of capacitors to resonate at 24.0 kHz was 1320 pf. This completed loop had a Q of 37 and a half power bandwidth of 650 hertz. This narrow bandwidth helps to reject unwanted signals. Ceramic capacitors from Radio Shack may be used in place of the polypropylene type with a somewhat wider bandwidth." << Corresponds t0 around 34 mH for the inductance of the loop ignoring the stray capacitance (which might be quite large).

Does having prime neighbors make you more composite? | bit-player

>> "...the neighbors of primes have 2 as a divisor, which gives them an immediate head start in the race to accumulate divisors. Twin tweens have a further advantage: All of them (with one exception) are divisible by 3 as well as by 2. Why? Among any three consecutive integers, one of them must be a multiple of 3, and it can’t be either of the primes, so it must be the tween." << Nice bit of simple logic - could almost use this as an investigation for H tier GCSE students...

Stanford researchers find whales are more important ecosystems engineers than previously thought

>> "Phytoplankton are a vital food source for krill, small fish and crustaceans – which are, in turn, consumed by larger animals, including whales, birds and other fish. But whales also help sustain phytoplankton. Through eating krill and then defecating, whales release iron locked within krill back into the water, making that iron available to phytoplankton, which need it to survive." << Loops up and down the food chain.

‘Liverpool Quay by Moonlight’, Atkinson Grimshaw, 1887 | Tate

The autumn evenings draw in and the current fashion for very low colour temperature lighting resembles the early Edison bulbs...

Fascine Mattresses: Basketry Gone Wild | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

>> "The oldest image is a 1676 painting by Matthias Withoos, which illustrates the repair of a dyke. However, there are references to brushwood constructions in hydraulic engineering already in the sixteenth century. Many fascine mattresses remain functional today, centuries after their construction. Willow wood becomes rock-hard underwater and almost doesn’t deteriorate." <<

Mort Sahl, giant of political comedy who emerged from S.F. clubs, dead at 94 | Datebook

>> "...at San Francisco’s hungry i in the early 1950s, he broke new ground with what was then a radically casual approach to performing — riffing, as if by free association, from the headlines in the folded newspaper he always carried and dressed as the UC Berkeley mathematics graduate student he was at the time, in what would become his trademark V-neck sweater" << Traffic management? Question is did he ever write the thesis? Via NextDraft

Project Stardust: A Photographer Scours Rooftops Across the Globe for Minuscule Cosmic Particles | Colossal

>> "Larsen, who works in the geosciences department at the University of Oslo, has been at the forefront of micrometeorite discovery since 2009 when “a shiny black dot suddenly appeared on my white veranda table while I was having strawberries for breakfast.”" << Utter magic. The noticing certainly paid off

Calculating Current Limiting Resistor Values for LED Circuits | Nuts & Volts Magazine

Noteworthy for consideration of the effects of resistor tolerance on the range of voltages in the circuits. Also for analysing networks of LEDs in series and parallel configurations.

How a Librarian and a Food Historian Rediscovered the Recipes of Moorish Spain - Gastro Obscura

>> "In tūma (eggplants “Looking Like Ostrich Eggs”), whole peeled and boiled eggplants are arranged vertically in a casserole topped with grated cheese, garlic, olive oil, and chopped walnuts." << I'm thinking of those little aubergines, about 2 inches long and an inch in diameter... >> "the long-lost carrot recipe which calls for boiling the pieces until tender, browning them in olive oil, and simply finishing them with vinegar, garlic, and a sprinkle of caraway seeds" << Nice side dish (carrots cut in half lengthways and halved, so about 3 inches long...

SAK Kungsbacka receiving station for SAQ Grimeton | The audions

This took a bit of finding.

Marconi's Three Transatlantic Radio Stations, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia

Startup comes to town promising jobs and accepts free land and a sizable grant. But this one succeeded!

Alan Dein’s East End Shops | Spitalfields Life

>> "But I have always loved peeling paint, paint that has been weathered and worn seafront textures, and this was just at the last moment before these buildings were going to be redeveloped, so I photographed the shopfronts because this landscape was not going to last." << Colour documentary of an area before the (inevitable) rent driven redevelopment.

De Forest and the Navy, January 1947 Radio-Craft - RF Cafe

>> "In April, 1914, the de Forest company wrote to the Navy, stating that it was about to display a new form of receiver at an exhibition sponsored by the Bureau of Standards, and asking that a representative of the Navy Department be present. "This includes the use of the audion as a detector of undamped oscillations," the letter said. This was enough to cause immediate and thorough inspection, and it was found that these receivers fitted exactly the Navy's desire for c.w. reception. It was also said that these receivers "did not include feed-back coils, hence did not violate existing patents." " << Clarke was around at the time and evaluating receiving systems for the navy. He states a paragraph above this that he had seen a coil based feedback system. The de Forest Ultraudion receiving system was an audion that fed back via capacitance (external plus grid-anode I suppose). It replaced the small arc based heterodyne detectors. Amazing for 1914-16 ish period. Clarke is coy about Armstrong probably because of all the patent court cases.

Hakai Magazine

Nice podcast series on aquatic soundscape

What the Irish Ate Before Potatoes | Bon Appetit

>> "Grains, either as bread or porridge, were the other mainstay of the pre-potato Irish diet, and the most common was the humble oat, usually made into oatcakes and griddled (ovens hadn't really taken off yet). And as was often the case in the more northern parts of Europe, the climate made growing wheat relatively difficult, so it was reserved for the fancier parts of society, and consequently thought of as a real treat." << Active experimentation on griddled oatcake recipes starts now. Alas, without the butter. >> "For veggies, the Irish relied on cabbages, onions, garlic, and parsnips, with some wild herbs and greens spicing up the plate, and on the fruit front, everyone loved wild berries, like blackberries and rowanberries, but only apples were actually grown on purpose." << Seems fine to me, but how to store the vitamin C over the winter? Jams?

Physics 331 | Advanced Laboratory I, Fall 2008

I almost understood Lab2_handout. Biasing of a common emitter amplifier stage.

The “Decline and Fall” of Rome — A Dangerous Idea? - Los Angeles Review of Books

>> "Since Gibbon, historians have “blamed” Rome’s fall on a wide range of causes from degeneracy to lead poisoning, from excessive bureaucracy to Christianity. But in his final chapter, Watts demonstrates the absurd lengths “political commentators” will go to use Rome to buttress their criticism of modern politics and society. If even Rome fell, it can happen again." << The idea of the Fall of Rome used to justify an opinion about the current time. The actual history is economics and military power as usual.

pedro lopes research home - pedro lopes research

Does research into human computer interface looking at a games and VR sort of terrain. Interesting stuff.

Antique Radio Forums • View topic - Obscure early battery sets | Bowman

>> "My Dad was a Tool maker as a young man and worked for the Mason & Hamlin piano company. He saw opportunity in the growing technology of Radio and decided to set up his own business. With only meager capitol he set up shop in an old barn on the property of the home he rented in Lexington, MA. The exact date I do not recall but it had to be either 1912 or 1913. At first he concentrated on components for radio reception equipment only and did obtain several patents. I can still see him, assisted by Mom, making fixed capacitors from melted paraffin wax and other materials at the kitchen table. The project grew and in time he rented space for a small factory in Cambridge, MA. Here he manufactured crystal sets, two types of telegraph keys, the heavy marble base spark key and a lighter model; oval metal base with a shorting bar. His last product was the old familiar five tube (201-A) hetrodyne, battery operated receivers. The plant was open half day on Saturdays and may Dad would take me with him when he went to work. I had my first indoctrination into Radio watching the men putting together and wiring the Broadcast Band receivers. Also the Plating area of the plant where the key components were chrome plated intrigued me no end. When the 1929 depression hit things went down hill. Unable to collect on outstanding invoices from many of his customers the cash flow ceased. He put a great deal of his personal moneys into an attempt to save the business and keep his 14 employees on the payroll. This went on for a few months and as the situation showed no signs of improving in the near future he accepted the advice from his lawyer and closed the plant." << Knowing when to get out (keep a roof over your head). Radio boom then bust in USA

No Firefox on i386 of OpenBSD 7. Compilation gives errors | ports/www/mozilla-firefox/Makefile - view - 1.460

Via the OpenBSD Webzine. The suggestion to use seamonkey is sound, and there have been warnings about the status of the i386 port for ages.

The Right Tunes? Wavemeters for British Army and Air Force uses in World War One time - ACDavies_wavemeters_Oxford_conference.pdf

>> "‘A tune’ at 400 feet (e.g. 2.5MHz) and ‘B tune’ at 1025 feet (950kHz) were separated sufficiently for such simultaneous operation, and the Admiralty decided to add further ‘tunes’ for their own use, at first with the intention that their wavelengths would be kept secret." << Security through obscurity has a long history. Measuring frequency before frequency meters.

Remystifying Supply Chains - by Venkatesh Rao - Ribbonfarm Studio

>> "The supply chain crisis is in some ways more unprecedented than Covid itself, given that containerized supply chains, and the world of distributed, networked, computationally coordinated production they enabled, are only a few decades old." <<

State of the art circuit? - The RadioBoard Forums

Lots of references to FET and bipolar junction regenerative circuits. I like the idea of a varactor tuned regen. Could be small and rugged quite easily for going to very RF quiet sites.

Professor Dick Hobbs, Criminologist | Spitalfields Life

>> "Once a posh woman who wanted to buy some paint asked, 'Do you work here?' and without missing a step he said, 'Not if I can help it.'" << Dodging and weaving. How people got through.

Calculating Coils For HF

An approach to pile wound coils. Needs SI or at least convenient metric version

A Brief Introduction To Criminality | Spitalfields Life

>> "They were different from the other men who populated my small fifties world. Unlike the ex-servicemen who nervously smoked and drank tea through tense evenings of heavily edited reminiscences in my parents’ home, these market men were relaxed, but wary. Of what, I was not certain. They were very well dressed, in trilby hats and overcoats over dark suits, though they seemed to talk in code, and my grandfather always politely refused the coins that they offered to me." <<

Edwin Howard Armstrong - regenerative receiver

The 'contender' image shows Armstrong's first regenerative receiver based on positive feedback in an audion valve. As you can see, the receiver is built up out of separately cased laboratory components. I often wondered how this could possibly work with stray couplings, hand capacity effects and stray capacitance. The answer is in The Electrical Experimenter for January 1915 where there is a description of Armstrong's circuit. The wavelengths covered are 5000 metres to 10000 metres, or 30 to 60 KHz. Those were the frequencies used for commercial CW traffic at that time. Not far off some audio equipment!

Morning Call: BoJo's Big Speech

>> "That’s the essential tension at the heart of the Conservative party. “Levelling up” is a project of the Prime Minister: cutting Universal Credit is a project of the Chancellor's." << Minimum wage £12.50 and rents capped at £150 a week. Then I'll believe the rhetoric. £12.50 per hour is £24K full time with holiday pay, which puts my capped rent at 32% of earnings, just about meeting OECD recommendation of housing cost *maximum* of one third of income.

How to replace estimations and guesses with a Monte Carlo simulation

Applies a statistical method to estimating software scheduling times. Strikes me as somewhat brittle (The Thing You Don't Know About Comes Along).

AM Loop Antennas - 3 Foot Ribbon Cable Loop

Tuned loop using ribbon cable. 3m run of 10 wires is a few quid on ebay. A quick way of hacking up a loop.

Reviews of the Low Cost MLA-30 Wide Band HF Magnetic Loop Antenna

Wide band active loop antenna 5: cheaper commercial option for trying out. Will need proper lead and 50 ohm input (HF-3) on receiver. I might try the passive loop first with nice tubing on a pole and then see how the noise level goes.

Small Loop Antenna for HF Reception

Broadband (untuned loop) 4: might not even need the preamplifier. Balanced loop to unbalanced feed using a small 'binocular' ferrite core to make a transformer.

How Japan’s Thomas Edison Built the Nation’s Most Complicated Clock | SJX Watches

>> "Time is indicated via a pointer fixed on the bezel at 12 o’clock, with the face making one counterclockwise rotation a day to show the time. But because traditional Japanese time is seasonal, the silver discs with numerals for the hours move gradually throughout the year. During spring and summer, the discs indicating daytime spread apart, since days and longer, with the opposite happening during winter. During the summer solstice, the daytime discs are the furthest apart, with the nighttime discs so close as to be almost touching." << Seasonal hours by clockwork: move the markers and use equal time for the hands. The markers change more slowly! Genius.

Loop antenna links both active and passive

Just that old page of links. Will probably need the way back machine

Loop Antenna.

Active loop aerial article 3. This one has a gas discharge device across the loop gap to protect the broadband amplifier. Loop is 1.5mm multi-strand wire in conduit bent into a circle. There is a relay to allow receive/transmit which I don't need. Runs a 650 mW max transistor with 30mA collector current, 100 ohm collector load and 50 ohm combined emitter resistor. I make that something like 180 to 200 mW per transistor so a TO-5 metal case with little wiggly heatsinks...

Simple active receive loop - PA1M - Amateur Radio

Active loop article 2 - 2 metre circumference circle of aluminium. Small loop means low signal (but noise reduced more)

The G8CQX Active Loop Antenna.

Active loop article 1. 2m per side square 16 gauge copper

Mick Jagger went to a dive bar in Charlotte and literally everybody missed him - by Jeremy Markovich - North Carolina Rabbit Hole

>> "So yes, it is possible for one of the world’s most recognizable men to walk into a bar in Charlotte and not be recognized. People who live in brick bars should not know Stones." << I actually think that this is perfectly fine. And the same about building the flats round the bar.

Solenoid inductance & impedance calculation

Deals with the transition from the infinitely long solenoid to short solenoids with l/D > 1 then l/D = 1 then l/D < 1. Derives the classic Wheeler correction formula, and various optimised approximations for the Nagoaka coefficient. Heavy use of special functions. Good warning about online coil calculators!

A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas | The Economist

>> "Mr Chiesa says that giants were a standard embellishment of faraway places in Norse folklore and, indeed, Galvano cautioned that “no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features.” The Dominican was scrupulous in citing his sources. Most were literary. But, unusually, he ascribed his description of Marckalada to the oral testimony of “sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway”." << Fishermen of Bristol were fishing off the Grand Banks around 1100 AD according to Kurlansky's book.

Tuning Coil Construction High Selectivity Crystal Radios

Parallel tuned aerial circuit and aperiodic detector with lowish coupling. Interesting view on length to dia for the solenoid style coil.

Wayback machine snapshot of k7qo's morse code tutorial CD

Alas, Chuk's Web site appears to have gone sometime in the last two years. To mount the iso image on Linux just as root... mount -o loop k7qo_code_course.iso /mnt/iso Then just copy the files to a directory and chmod them as 777 (last optional).

2013-AWA-Review-Vol-26-compressed.pdf

>> "Although his prime interest was mathematics; Hazeltine also became highly interested in the work of Howard Armstrong. Not only had Armstrong patented the regenerative circuit but he also wrote a paper with possibly the first scientific analysis of how the Audion tube worked." << Genealogies in engineering: Major Armstrong solved problems for the Army in the fields of Flanders and Hazeltine designed a well-regarded maritime receiver for use on ships. the SE-1420, from the relative comfort of NY. The SE standing for - I kid you not - the Navy department's Bureau of Steam Engineering which is where radio contracts were issued and managed. Steampunk or what?

Guest Post by Brian Austin: Wartime Wireless Intelligence and E.W.B. Gill - Innovating in Combat

>> "Every hour, and almost on the hour, those Zeppelins would report their position to the High Seas Fleet under whose command they fell. These regular wireless transmissions were a bonanza of the highest order for the listening British wireless stations with their associated direction-finding facilities. Not only was warning given of an impending attack, several hours before they crossed the British coast, but their positions and courses were plotted as they lumbered on." << Culture of an institution can have unanticipated effects

A Walk With Suresh Singh | Spitalfields Life

>> "The librarians always helped me and I could spend hours there. It was a sanctuary from the mayhem outside, a kind of university of the ghetto." << Libraries closing and those that remain may have less staff and be forced to have less of a social inclusion ethos. Internet does not fill the gap. What do we do?

Goodhart’s Law Rules the Modern World. Here Are Nine Examples - Bloomberg

>> "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." << Goodhart is still working!

Living Stingy: The Waddington Effect

>> "There is always a finite chance that the new part you install will be defective, and as a result, you've removed a perfectly good part and discarded it, in favor of a bad one." << A touch of the Beysian priors? I use a recycled corporate laptop and have never had a problem with hardware with this particular one. It has survived 4 years of corporate use and so probably no 'Friday afternoon' parts close to tolerance.

Hacker News Disease | 01

>> "The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool doesn’t know he doesn’t know." << Atrib Lao Tzu. I'm printing it in 72pt aimed at ME. And trying to get into the mind set of asking questions before volunteering help.

Much less than, Much greater than

A is much less than B depends on the range of variation in the context where A and B are measured sort of. Nice

Lee.pmd - 10LeeMarconiBeacon2008.pdf - The Marconi BeaconExperiment of 2006-07*

Marconi got lucky with the sunspot minimum and propagation?

H J ROUND on radio engineering, rec. 1952. - YouTube

This is hilarious. And interesting, from the first 20 years of effective commercial radio communications

"So You Want to Learn Physics…" Physics — Susan Rigetti

Nice try, but characterising Feynman's Lectures as Medium is putting down quite an anchor!

eha1 - Armstrong ephemera

Photos of Edwin Armstrong's setups including the regenerative receiver lashed up from huge lab boxes (long wave was the whole game in those days) and WW1 stuff. All from the Houck collection. Magic.

Marconi's First Transatlantic Wireless Experiment Joe Craig, VO1NA

>> "In addressing the Royal Institution, Marconi stated he could hear the Poldhu signals using untuned detectors, but not with a tuned receiver. Marconi attributed this to 'the varying capacity of the aerial wire' as the kite supporting it moved about in the wind." << Dirty spark transmitter and untuned receiver - just about possible

Radio's First Message -- Fessenden and Marconi

Nice background on the technology

Neolithic burials and vast Gallic complex with Celtic statuary unearthed in France - The Archaeology News Network

The second terracotta figurine towards the bottom of the page is actually me. Seriously, I love this kind of stuff and I want one of those vases (I suspect bowls but never mind).

The Connection Machine Legacy - CM 30th Anniversaries, Tamiko Thiel. Artificial intelligence parallel programming supercomputer design.

Interviews with some of the people who made the connection machines. Tamiko Thiel designed the casing and external appearance of the machines - many people have said how they found the appearance engaging and the machines are in a museum.

64K - Perhaps WSL2 Should be a Wake-up Call

>> "[...] you see more and more laptops running things like i3 and dwm than back in 2010 -- and these tools haven't gotten any better in these ten years. The fact that a substantial part of the FOSS community seriously prefers using what is effectively the Windows 1.01 interface with a few more features and anti-aliasing instead of any of the results of nearly a decade of UX-focused work in KDE, Gnome, or Cinnamon is a pretty convincing hint that Linux' whopping marketshare in the desktop space isn't so whopping just because of evil Microsoft's monopoly." << Substantial part?

The case for mutual educational disarmament | The Economist

>> "[...] one family’s outlays on schooling raise the bar for everyone else. Families are drawn, often unwittingly, into educational arms races. They spend money and time on after-school tutoring or extra-curricular activities (so-called shadow education) in the expectation that it will improve their child’s position in the queue for advancement. But they quickly discover that everyone else is doing the same, leaving them in the same position as before. They are in fact worse off, because of the costs and frustration incurred. “If everyone stands on tiptoe, no one sees better,” Hirsch noted. And their feet also hurt." << Fred Hirsch's Social Limits to Growth was a major read when I first went to University. The educational 'arms race' the author of this article describes also places the children caught up in it under a degree of pressure that can be counter productive.

Tumult grips White House amid week of Afghanistan failures - BBC News

"History is going to judge us very harshly, I believe, if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we are fearful of the phrase nation-building or we do not stay the course." Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oscillograph - Wikisource, the free online library

Armstrong had access to an 'oscillograph' at the college laboratory in summer 1911 and 1912

Reading Hayek in Holland - Market Urbanism

>> "Hayek’s thesis is that central economic planning displaces competitive markets and, when broadly applied, paves the way for totalitarianism. The premise of Holland is that strict central planning is necessary to avoid being underwater." <<

tim hunkin home page

Just watched the Secret Life of Radio with the new comments at the end. Magic. I'm rationing the Components series...

DIY FM tuner with 6CW4 nuvistor and ECC85 - UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum

No interest whatsoever in building an FM tuner using valves, but, this thread contains a wealth of information and ideas about the process of frequency mixing and about digital processing of radio signals. And, yes, it comes back to Nyquist and Shannon by the end.

g00fie on eBay

Local geezer for small parts

The Irresistible Transistor - IEEE Spectrum

>> "Knowing that quartz tubes were key to making germanium pure enough for junction transistors, the crafty Krim cornered the market on quartz tubing. “And I did one other thing," he says with a sly smile. “There was a company in Missouri called Eagle-Picher, at the time the country's biggest zinc refiner. They threw out germanium as a by-product of zinc refining. So I bought it all up."" << Engineering semi-conductors (and markets by the sound of it)

Writing great alt text: Emotion matters - JakeArchibald.com

Interesting thoughts around the content of the alt tag for Web images.

Guest post by Keith Thrower: Technical factors affecting CW radio communication in WW1, part 1 - Innovating in Combat

>> "For several years, from 1907 to 1913, the audion was only used as a radio detector, as its conduction mechanism and general principles of operation were not understood. De Forest carried out some experimental work on low frequency amplification for telephone repeaters, but his early efforts were not successful. This was probably because he used r.f. instead of a.f. coupling and did not correctly bias the valve." << Not sure what is meant by r.f. coupling? Transformers wound for radio frequencies or RC coupling with a capacitor too low in value?

Selena Vega 215 Circuit

>> "Interestingly they take output to the DIN socket through resistor R2, before the preamplifier stage, therefore, changing the bass, treble, or volume control will have no effect on the DIN output." << My Vega stopped working suddenly, I use it on batteries. A quick check with the multimeter suggests that something is pulling a lot of current (battery voltage drops from 9v to 3v when you switch it on with new batteries). Quick and dirty test: unhook the power amplifier board and see if the DIN socket produces any output into an external amplifier. Next candidate is the smoothing capacitor I suppose...

Plants, Heavy Metals, and the Lingering Scars of World War I - Atlas Obscura

>> "Because of their strange and beguiling qualities, metal hyperaccumulators—of which there are known to be around 500—are of enormous scientific interest. Thanks to their thirst for otherwise toxic materials, they have great potential as tools in the recovery of highly polluted sites. By sucking heavy metals from the earth and hoarding or redistributing them, they might prepare the ground for other, more sensitive organisms. In this way, nature begins to heal over her scars." << Could we become 'hyperaccumulators' ourselves and sequester e.g. plastic, carbon &c in ways that isolate these substances from the cycles?

Who Invented the Superheterodyne?

Was Armstrong an original genius or a superb implementer of principles first devised by others? Armstrong had dealings with de Forest through his war work, and met HJ Round at Marconi in London on the way to France with the American army,

DXing With The Heathkit CR-1 Crystal Radio • AmateurRadio.com

>> "The traps allow me to significantly null any strong signals that could be covering up a nearby weaker signal. For nulling, I set the signal generator on the frequency of the pest signal and then tune the trap for a null while watching the meter. Once everything has been tuned, I’ll often just sit and wait for the desired signal to fade up to a detectable level on the crystal radio and then confirm its audio match to what can be heard on the spotter radio. Very often, a signal initially too weak to be detected, will quickly pop up in signal strength to an easy-copy level for several minutes, before dropping below the threshold of diode detection level once again." << Seems like a very distilled sort of experience. Plus describing 50kW as a 'blowtorch' is location specific, I live a short ride from half a megawatt of RF on medium wave. That idea of chucking the entire output of a small power station up a 50 ohm matched aerial is probably a European thing though.

Old_Radio_Frequency_Books

Stuff by Fleming from early (pre audion) period here, the days of spark gaps and alternators and industrial plant. Also amateur stuff with neat cover illustrations.

Understanding Heidegger on Technology — The New Atlantis

>> "First, the essence of technology is not something we make; it is a mode of being, or of revealing. This means that technological things have their own novel kind of presence, endurance, and connections among parts and wholes. They have their own way of presenting themselves and the world in which they operate. The essence of technology is, for Heidegger, not the best or most characteristic instance of technology, nor is it a nebulous generality, a form or idea. Rather, to consider technology essentially is to see it as an event to which we belong: the structuring, ordering, and “requisitioning” of everything around us, and of ourselves. The second point is that technology even holds sway over beings that we do not normally think of as technological, such as gods and history. Third, the essence of technology as Heidegger discusses it is primarily a matter of modern and industrial technology. He is less concerned with the ancient and old tools and techniques that antedate modernity; the essence of technology is revealed in factories and industrial processes, not in hammers and plows. And fourth, for Heidegger, technology is not simply the practical application of natural science. Instead, modern natural science can understand nature in the characteristically scientific manner only because nature has already, in advance, come to light as a set of calculable, orderable forces — that is to say, technologically." <<

Mathematician Proves Huge Result on ‘Dangerous’ Problem | Quanta Magazine

"Take a number, any number. If it’s even, halve it. If it’s odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. Repeat. Do all starting numbers lead to 1?"

Aspidistra Transmitter - PWE

Wayback machine shows photos of the interior of the Aspidistra propaganda operation involving one of the most powerful medium wave transmitters then available.

The logic behind three random words - NCSC.GOV.UK

Memorability vs security. A salted hash should make a stolen file of password hashes hard to crack. Three random words (with some numbers perhaps) is better than Pa55word in practice and more likely to be used than a really good random string. The article has links to the maths and the reasoning.

Everyone Should Build At Least One Regenerative Radio Receiver | Hackaday

>> "One of the first electronic projects I worked on was just such a circuit. It came courtesy of a children’s book, one of the Ladybird series that will be familiar to British people of a Certain Age: [George Dobbs, G3RJV]’s Making A Transistor Radio. This book built the reader up through a series of steps to a fully-functional 3-transistor Medium Wave (AM) radio with a small loudspeaker." << I dodged that particular bullet but have fond memories of an octal valve TRF radio with 6J5 and 6V6 in the audio and some kind of minature pentodes in the RF section.

The Lives of Typewriters and Large Data-sets: The Will Self Archive - English and Drama blog

>> "Unfortunately, instead of the more-forgiving Blu-Tack that Self mis-remembers, he used double-sided adhesive pads (‘holds securely and permanently,’ runs the strapline). They now form an obdurate bonded pile that hides all its words. The stuck pages are a material reminder that a paper archive is fundamentally a set of physical records: conservation expertise will be required to un-do part of that physical record – the fused pages with tiny bits of Liverpool embedded – to reveal another and more important part, the text itself (a text that is also physically rendered, by the hammered registration of the typewriter)." <<

Simple Systems Have Less Downtime | Greg Kogan

>> "Ships contain simple systems that are easy to operate and easy to understand, which makes them easy to fix, which means they have less downtime. An important quality, considering that “downtime” for a ship could mean being stranded thousands of miles from help." << Being old enough to remember 500kHz emergency frequency transmitters (duplicate from the normal HF and VHF, simple and again separate aerial, frequent testing) I appreciate this. Stuff has to work.

Ben Nuttall - The surreal experience of my first developer job

How not to run a company (of any kind). View from the ranks of a somewhat randomly managed software company. Via HN where people are chipping in with similar stories.

RTE Long Wave under essential maintenance - The Irish World

Which explains a lot...

Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35

>> "The mantissa and exponent each have a sign; positive is represented internally by the digit 0 and negative by the digit 5. This may seem random, but it actually makes sign arithmetic easy. For instance, when multiplying numbers the signs are added: positive times positive has 0+0=0 which indicates positive. Negative times negative has 5+5=0 indicating positive (the carry is dropped). Negative times positive has 5+0=5 indicating negative. This is one of the tricks that helps the Sinclair code fit into the small ROM." << Outrageous but clever

Cory Doctorow: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results – Locus Online

>> "Understanding that relationship requires “thick description” – an anthro­pologist’s term for paying close attention to the qualitative experience of the subjects of a data-set. Clifford Geertz’s classic essay of the same name talks about the time he witnessed one of his subjects wink at the other, and he wasn’t able to determine whether it was flirtation, aggression, a tic, or dust in the eye. The only way to find out was to go and talk to both people and uncover the qualitative, internal, uncomputable parts of the experience." << ML is correlation sets without any underlying theory and may be sensitive to selection bias in the training data set. >> "Quantitative disciplines are notorious for incinerating the qualitative ele­ments on the basis that they can’t be subjected to mathematical analysis. What’s left behind is a quantitative residue of dubious value… but at least you can do math with it. It’s the statistical equivalent to looking for your keys under a streetlight because it’s too dark where you dropped them." <<

Simple Scottish Bannocks Recipe - Scottish Scran

Oatmeal and wheat flour risen with buttermilk/baking soda. Quick bread. Recipe starts half way down and makes two rounds.

Foods of England - Clapbread or Havercake

Oat bread recipe: it is a bannock style griddle cake raised with bicarbonate of soda. Wondering what they used instead of that in Tudor times...

I wasn't raised like a contractor's son so I didn't grow with the Hole Hawg. How... | Hacker News

>> "I wasn't raised like a contractor's son so I didn't grow with the Hole Hawg. However, working in the financial mines of the bank kingdoms in my youth, I discovered Unix. It lived in grey boxes and spoke in grunts like cd and pwd in black windows. It didn't have shiny buttons and easy-grip handles and didn't like to dialog box. It worked tirelessly in the cold rooms of the machines. Legend had it that you could depend on it if your life depended on it. Most people didn't go in those rooms. Some who went only did enough to get the job done. But I felt different. I thought once you opened its shell, there was a lot that it could say and lot one could learn. I found an old book containing its language and started to say the words to see if that worked. And it did. It spoke in the most beautiful 80-column voice and answered only what you needed and no more. We communicated and our chats grew longer - almost like scripts in a play." << >> "Decades have passed and it has gone beyond the cold rooms to our warm pockets. It still works tirelessly. You can still depend on it. It has changed its shape and wears colours if you want it to. But deep down, I know it to have the same kernel of truth. If you want to talk to it in those ancient grunts, it will still answer back. And that to me still is the most beautiful language." << Comment by noisy_boy on Unix in an HN thread

The Liverpool Cowkeepers – “Where there’s muck there’s brass” – FOPH

>> "Cowkeeping became an established part of the city economy and as other towns did Liverpool developed its own Cowkeeper Association. Social activities and outings for example to New Brighton beach meant that the next generation also married into similar farming families from the dales, which helped to keep the community alive. Quite often when they returned to visit the dales they told their relatives to ‘get themselves to Liverpool’." << For a short window of time, perhaps 50 years, it was easier to stable cows in the cities than to bring milk in from the farms...

At The Jewish Soup Kitchen | Spitalfields Life

>> "For the past twenty-five years Stuart Freedman has worked internationally as a photojournalist, yet he was surprised to come upon new soup kitchens recently while on assignment in the north of England. “The poverty is back,” he revealed to me in regret,“which makes these pictures relevant all over again.”" << It's never been away just less visible

I like to think that if we tried installing Windows 10 entirely via floppy disks... | Hacker News

Floppy disk installs, current OpenBSD base install would be around 300 floppies with current compression formats.

The Plan for the Rust 2021 Edition | Hacker News

HN thread with some resources for learning enough Rust to know what they are on about (e.g. borrow checking).

The Generational Divide in Software Developers | Hacker Noon

Not sure about all this but something is changing with approaches

What did the ancient Romans eat? - BBC Travel

>> "Grains, legumes, vegetables, eggs and cheeses were the base of the diet, with fruit and honey for sweetness. Meat (mostly pork), and fish were used sparingly, and as the empire expanded beginning in the 3rd Century BC, Romans welcomed new flavours – be it pepper from India or lemons from Persia." <<

The Tyranny of Spreadsheets | Tim Harford

<i>"It was an astonishing story that would, in time, lead me to delve into the history of accountancy, epidemiology and vaccination, discuss file formatting with Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, and even trace the aftershocks of the collapse of Enron. But above all, it was a story that would teach me about the way we take numbers for granted."</i> Old versions of Excel had limitations on the number of rows that a spreadsheet could contain. Also the maximum number of columns was for ages 256 which made year planners in my preferred style with resolutions of 1 day difficult...

Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches | Science | AAAS

>> "Van Wingerden’s favorite beachcombing spot is no ordinary stretch of sand. Nearly half a kilometer wide, the beach is made of material dredged from the sea bottom 13 kilometers offshore and dumped on the existing beach in 2012. It’s a €70 million experimental coastal protection measure, its sands designed to spread over time to shield the Dutch coast from sea-level rise. And the endeavor has made 21 million cubic meters of Stone Age soil accessible to archaeologists." << Crowdsourced archaeology - what a nice idea, includes local people and makes direct connections to last ice age as we try to mitigate warming.

Fifty years of Bell’s theorem | CERN

From 2014 - Bell's theorem and subsequent work

Primo Levi's Last Moments | Boston Review

>> "Primo Levi's lifelong friend, Nobel laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, cast the first doubts on the suicide a few days after the event. If Levi wanted to kill himself, he, a chemical engineer by profession, would have known better ways than jumping into a narrow stairwell with the risk of remaining paralyzed. "Did anyone see him jump over that banister?" she asked rhetorically. "Did anyone find a piece of paper announcing his intention to end his life? Suicide is a far too quick conclusion."14 She expressed what probably many others, myself included, silently suspected." << I've not read the cycle, only the Periodic Table, The Wrench and some of the journalism. Via memex blog, a bit sad and sort of forensic case study of what may have been an accidental fall.

How I Write Code, Take Notes, Journal, Track Time and Tasks, and Stay Organized using Emacs

A short book on emacs as a working environment. Emacs is (relative to Electron based IDEs) light to run on a laptop and has a vast range of packages and functions.

Old pattern powering modern tech. - by Taras Tsugrii - Software Bits Newsletter

Why a SATA SSD is 5x as fast as a mechanical hard drive but an M2.nve is 25x the read speed of a mechanical hard drive.

What is the Axiom of Choice? | Jay's Blog

A truly mind bending page on this old chestnut. Complete with parity bits modelled through hats. Set theory but set in a wider context.

I critiqued my past papers on social media — here’s what I learnt | Nature

>> "In 2019, my institution, the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. This committed us to stop using journal impact factors and similar metrics to assess individuals. This changed our hiring, evaluation and promotion criteria. To build on these improvements, we could ask candidates to engage in self-criticism, to say what they would now do differently. We could request a ‘negative CV’ — a list of failed applications and rejected papers." << Sounds like a start

Dream on, little mudokon | The Old Computer Challenge pt1.

"I stuck my head out and saw the proposed challenge. Since I have the perfect match in the form of IBM's T42 and I do enjoy the occasional self-flagellation, I hopped on board. I see it as a useful experiment as far as monitoring of one's usual habits goes and re-evaluating the things that will undeniably be missed due to hardware limitations." Looks like another T42 owner

Solene'% : The Old Computer Challenge

1 core and 512Mb RAM? No problemo. T42 Thinkpad is still plugging away.

'Re: C style in OpenBSD' - MARC

Paraphrase: Computer programs are meant to be read by humans. The computer just needs a stream of voltages on the CPU pins in the right order to trigger various circuits. Humans work in teams on large collections of complex programs, so they need conventions so as to be able to read and understand each others' work. The conventions that are most accessible to new members of the team tend to be those that use straight forward constructions and that avoid complex or clever features of the programming language.

W6NUT 147.4500 MHz Renegade Repeater

A 'free speech' repeater on the US VHF amateur band. Mayhem.

Curt Trig

A brief history of trigonometric approximations to calculate the values of sin, cos &c and an explanation of the method used on Apollo 11 computer.

Poisson's Equation is the Most Powerful Tool not yet in your Toolbox

Nice page about the heat equation

Ena.Computer

Valve based 8 bit computer designed this century as a giggle. I reckon it produces around 1.2Kw of heat or so. Pity it isn't calculating primes...

The Last Days of Target

Love a good upgrade

The Paradox of Control - The Convivial Society

>> "Rosa's “guiding thesis” on this score is that "for late modern human beings, the world has simply become a point of aggression," an apt phrase that seemed, sadly, immediately useful as a way of characterizing what it feels like to be alive right now. The world becomes a series of points of aggression when, as Rosa puts it, "everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful." << Horribly, this fits. I'm working on going with the flow but it is hard work.

The Limits of Optimization - The Convivial Society

Baseball as an example of extreme optimisation of parts perhaps damaging the whole. Baseball is a finite game with defined ending and quantitative scoring. Other activities in society (e.g. politics, business) are infinite games where the rules are not defined, there is no end, and 'scoring' can be tricky. Via HN as might be guessed.

Re-counting the Cognitive History of Numerals | The MIT Press Reader

>> "The one thing they weren’t really used for is what we now think of as pen-and-paper arithmetic — lining up numbers in columns. That’s because in classical antiquity and indeed, until the past few hundred years, arithmetic was an embodied and material practice (e.g., on a counting board or abacus) whereas numerical notation was used for writing and recording. This division of labor is very common throughout the world’s numerical notations, most of which were never manipulated directly for arithmetic." << So use of the Arabic numerals in columns enabled abstract arithmetic free of mechanical device limitations?

Watery Worlds | In the Pipeline

>> "The paper uses a technique whose full name I am only going to type out once: ultraviolet-excited time-resolved heterodyne-detected vibrational sum frequency generation (UV-TR-HD-VSFG) spectroscopy. This allows spatial resolution a few molecule layers thick at the surface and femtosecond time resolution of changes in the OH stretching spectrum – just what you need to answer this sort of question." << Chemistry where you can see the bonds ringing...

Is Vim Really Not For You? A Beginner Guide

Vim tutorials, set of 5. I can get along in Vi (e.g. configuring a new OpenBSD install from default) but Vim is more specialised.

sourcehut hub

$20 per year to maintain a project (or multiple projects, not sure) as a weekend/hobbyist programmer. Good excuse to learn to use git properly and to shift over my astro code.

Expanding TeX's newif

An extended analysis of the \newif macro from the TeXbook

Brazil Covid: Deaths plunge after town's adults vaccinated - BBC News

>> "A Brazilian town has seen a 95% drop in Covid-19 deaths after almost all adults were vaccinated as part of an experiment, researchers say. Serrana, with 45,000 inhabitants, saw cases plunge after a mass vaccination with the Chinese-developed CoronaVac. The team said those who had not been vaccinated were also protected by the reduction in the virus's circulation. The findings suggest the pandemic can be controlled after 75% of people are fully dosed." << Wonder if they will track levels in this city for (say) a year after the initial finding. Allows for new variants brought by visitors &c.

Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

Old paper about the thinking behind windows 95. Topical with the 'Sun Valley' Windows 11 designs being revealed slowly.

Justin Garrison's personal site | The document culture of Amazon

>> "Meetings start with reading. Depending on the length of the document, we’ll read anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour. If the meeting has a long document (six-pagers are the longest) and many attendees, the meeting will be scheduled for enough time to read and discuss." << This seems to be such an effective idea. Definitely systems not goals, and the *preparation* of the document will help those calling the meeting clarify the ideas and information

In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance - Rest of World

>> "Trueno knew exactly what to do when he unboxed his computer. “The first thing I did was to install Audacity,” the rapper said. The second was to start recording — he described his world on the netbook’s inbuilt microphone, rapping about what he saw, heard, felt, and knew about his barrio." << $10 microphone, state issued netbook, audacity, 160M YouTube views. Video has er - urban - imagery so be careful about context when viewing.

Stormont crisis averted. Until the next crisis… – Slugger O'Toole

>> "It is pretty damning that we are not able to sort out these issues locally. What is the point in spending hundreds of millions on Stormont every year if they cannot make the hard decisions? Or any decision on anything?" << The same could be said of Westminster in some ways but, yes, the Province does seem to be in some kind of stalemate. I don't have a solid grasp of NI pressures, but Slugger O'Toole gives me a little bit of an insight.

Raphael Samuel’s Farewell To Spitalfields | Spitalfields Life

>> "The whole industrial economy of Spitalfields rests on cheap work rooms: rentals in the new office complex are some eight times greater than they are in the purlieus of Brick Lane, and with the dizzy rise in property values which will follow the new development, accommodation of all kinds, whether for working space or home, will be beyond local people." << A surprising amount of city evolution comes down to the rent.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions - outline

My copy may have been oxfamed during a move some decades ago. This outline servers as a useful reminder. Via HN

Using Paper for Everyday Tasks - Christine Dodrill

>> "Doing nothing to keep track of my tasks only really works when there are external structures around to help me keep track of things." << That would be teaching. The timetable drives most things, the last IW screen in this week's lesson is the plan for next week's lesson. The scheme of work for the year is a paper plan though I suppose - at least a rough route map. An example of 'systems not goals'.

Gemini is Useless

>> "This comment is, essentially, correct. Gemini is useless: it can't do nearly anything that HTTP/HTML can, its design ignores most of the progress in web technology over the last 30 years, and its feature set is so minimalist that it forces the user far outside their normal experience of what the web should be like. Using Gemini, initially, feels disorienting and pointless." << Everything old is new again: I can just about remember using a gopher client on a dial up connection to a terminal session on a Unix box in London. The quote used above this paragraph in the article mentions newspapers in 1850, of course, later, the 'news' arrived over the wire on tickertape...

Beware of tight feedback loops

>> "That’s because initially, the learning environment is gentle. The path is well-travelled, there are easily accessible guides, things work according to common sense. As we become proficient, the environment becomes harsher, with noisier feedback. Improving is not as easy. At higher levels of skill, further progression depends on self-learning, on discovering or inventing new practices and knowledge. As skill increases, the gap between optimizing for metrics and optimizing for mastery widens." << Ties into Schon and his 1st and 2nd order changes. Noise in the feedback loop may have effects that increase the error.

ADPIE - The Five Stages of The Nursing Process | Nurse Theory

>> "ADPIE is an acronym that stands for assessment, diagnosis, planning, implementation, and evaluation. The ADPIE process helps medical professionals remember the process and order of the steps they need to take to provide proper care for the individuals they are treating." << Incremental cycle might be good for maths teaching as well! As long as the assessment phase is small and light weight (a conversation and a couple of examples) and the whole cycle is done on the fly in a lesson rather than some huge monolithic process spread over weeks.

Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders - Earthly Blog

>> "When all the predictions were added up and scored, hedgehogs lost out to his second category: Foxes. Foxes were the opposite of hedgehogs. They had complicated advice and were skeptical of even their own predictions. Tetlock also found that foxes were less likely to be famous because contingent advice is harder to explain in a sound bite." << Try to find the foxes in any situation, but, because they produce complex advice/writing with caveats, they will be less likely to bubble up to the popular channels

A mystery cube, a secret identity, and a puzzle solved after 15 years | WIRED UK

>> "What Hall really remembers now is not the world of Perplex City, but the community. She’s a person who talks fondly about the “good internet” – a time before social media really took hold, when the web was still more of a trusting and optimistic place. “There was none of the dystopian stuff we have now,” she says. “Just the idea that all knowledge is accessible”. Through Perplex City she got to know archaeologists, city planners and all sorts of “clever, interesting people” whom she otherwise may not have met." << Humans are about community and shared endeavours.

Chronicles of Charnia • Damn Interesting

>> "The sun burned less fiercely, so the weather might have been cooler than expected for the latitude. The moon loomed larger and closer in the sky than it does today and, relatedly, the day was three hours shorter. Tectonic activity was more vigorous, the Earth being half a billion years closer to the intense heat of its primordial accretion." << I tend to forget the tidal effect of the Moon and the cooling off of the Earth's interior. This is 600 million years ago, so a period equal to one seventh of the Earth's age earlier than now.

Between Golem and God: The Future of AI | 3 Quarks Daily

Extended riff on the AI as Golem theme, nicely done, with many links that will keep me going for a few mornings. Another one from John Naughton's substack memex. He is doing the reading and selecting so I don't have to.

How to opt out | medConfidential

Just in case

Pluralistic: 05 Jun 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

>> "...this passive media wasn't the "must-see TV" of the 80s and 90s. Rather, it was the passivity of the recommendation algorithm, which created a per-user linear media feed, coupled with mechanisms like "endless scroll" and "autoplay," that incinerated any trace of an active role for the "consumer" (a very apt term here)." << And the algorithm uses captured data to tailor that stream to individual users, or, at least to IP address level. So its not Coronation Street at half 6 on Tuesday for 15 million people, but a multitude of echo chambers designed to increase engagement... Doctorow link from John Naughton's blog (again, its good)

> Time and again, we see these systems producing errors ... and the response has... | Hacker News mjburgess

>> "There are entire fields sold on a false equivocation between conceptual and statistical association. This equivocation generates novel unethical systems." << The HN thread on the Atlas of AI book below

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

>> "We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, “Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,” invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous." << AI is defined as the whole supply chain here. The actual training set/data set and model extraction bit is a small part of the whole chain, but then non-AI based production is increasingly similar.

Paul Feyerabend (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

>> "Removing his sweater he picked up the chalk and wrote down three questions one beneath the other: What’s so great about knowledge? What’s so great about science? What’s so great about truth?" << Always good to try these questions out now and again. And also >> "How does science differ from witchcraft? Does it provide the only rational way of cognitively organizing our experience?" Via John Naughton's newsletter/blog.

THE MANDELBROT MONK

>> "When Schipke saw the translation, at once he saw it for what it was: an allegorical description of the iterative process for calculating the Mandelbrot. In mathematical terms, Udo's system was to start with a complex number z, then iterate it up to 70 times by the rule z -> z*z + c, until z either diverged or was caught in an orbit." << Or saw what he wanted to see in a phrase written for a different culture and time? Or you can check the date at the bottom of the page...

My org mode setup | mt. solitary

>> "...tasks: I open the fridge and notice we are out of milk, so add TODO Buy milk to my inbox," << Perhaps I just lead a very simple life but I just go down the shop and buy some more milk. No need to log the task. When I was some kind of manager and had to keep track of lots of small annoying tasks that could not be dealt with immediately, I just used a shorthand pad and stuck up the leaves on a notice board. When done, they came down. Org mode is of interest because of its outlining capability.

How counting neutrons explains nuclear waste

Prose explanation of the table of nucleotides and why some isotopes are radioactive.

Returns to Scale in Broken Windows | Fantastic Anachronism

Large scale destruction in a city can lead to higher rents in redeveloped areas. Effect mainly through displacement of low value businesses and replacement by higher rent buildings with fewer owners. Examples include Katrina aftermath as well as Boston and San Francisco fires (century ago)

All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people | by Marianne Bellotti | Medium

>> "Italian researchers Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rino Falcone have a model of trust in which it’s observability not success that is the key factor. Under their theory an entity that is silently successful can end up seen as less trustworthy than an entity that visibly fails. If we recover from failure quickly and efficiently, trust increases. Whereas when we succeed and no one notices we become more and more unknown and uncertain." <<

V.I. Arnold, On teaching mathematics

A rant for the ages

How to Design Programs, Second Edition

Dr Racket based scheme exploration of computing and the process of abstracting an algorithm

The Switch – Creatures of Thought

Big list of blog posts also a book about electrical switches -> computers via relays and valves. Bit of a swerve around Hollerith cards but looks interesting

Is abstraction killing civilization? | datagubbe.se

>> "What is robust? Is it my iPhone, going for weeks and months without a reboot? Is it the famous uptime of Novell's file and printer servers, with documented instances running for 16 years? Is it the multi-year uptimes of a plethora of Unix, Windows and VMS machines? Is it the 365+ days (and counting) uptime of some random Linux web server I've got access to? Is it turnkey systems like IBM i, offering continuous availability?" << I had to switch my aging Blackberry Classic off this morning. I had to have two goes because I had forgotten the process (hold power key down through the whole of the countdown, don't release as countdown starts). Must be not far off a year since the last time I had to do this (restart after it got glitchy)...

Summoning Cthulhu by Parsing HTML with Regular Expressions

This one always brings a smile to my face. Just being able to copy and paste Z̷͎̐a̶͉̓l̵̟͛g̷̺̐ȏ̸̙ into a text box and have it render correctly is *major* when you think about it

Passengers refused boarding amid testing confusion - BBC News

>> "Sally later booked another flight to Belfast which didn't require a test and travelled to Dublin from there." << No supervision or monitoring of the use of transitive routes.

Hillsborough trial: Men acquitted as judge rules no case to answer - BBC News

>> "That a publicly funded authority can lawfully withhold information from a public inquiry charged with finding out why 96 people died at a football match, in order to ensure that it never happened again - or that a solicitor can advise such a withholding, without sanction of any sort - may be a matter which should be subject to scrutiny." <<

Potemkin Data Science. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and… | by Michael Correll | Medium

>> "Villages in a Potemkin country, if you will. When data science becomes too Potemkin-y, then we have lots of people working (and working very hard!) for seemingly no useful end other than to, at best, impress a handful of people in upper management." << Had to use middle-paste to defeat the Medium clipboard zombies but got there. Most MIS information is noise really in my world. >> "An example I often use is to imagine that you are given the sales performance of a bunch of products. We’ll assume that, in reality, the sales of each product are in fact drawn from the same distribution. But we don’t know this, of course. And so, through pure sampling happenstance, one of the products significantly underperforms the others. We can pick this trend out and report on it, either to suggest intervention (say, rebranding or increasing the marketing budget) or to suggest non-intervention (because the uncertainty is too high, or the risk of a multiple comparisons problem is too great). Both action and inaction could be pitched in a way that sounds “smart” and “data-driven.” If I don’t intervene, then next year sales are likely to go up (through regression towards the mean), and so I look wise to have urged caution. If I do intervene, then my sales are still likely to go up, either because of regression towards the mean and/or because increasing marketing budgets tend to make sales go up in any event. So in either case it looks like we made a smart decision, and data science came to our rescue." << This chap has sussed out the ruse. Astrologers in 1600s and data scientists now. The square root of N is so important (c.f. V. I. Arnold's essay).

The End IS Near. No, Seriously.. All epidemics end, even the Black Death… | by Donald G. McNeil Jr. | May, 2021 | Medium

This is quite good, especially the paragraph that starts "We will probably have bad seasons and good seasons, as we do with flu." I can't quote that paragraph because of Medium's brain dead hijacking of the clipboard.

original vi - What are differences between POSIX vi and minimal vi implementations, if any? - Vi and Vim Stack Exchange

Nice portable posix vi clone (stevie based). INSTALL and docs/README work fine. Just need (on Slackware) to symlink the man page as follows... ln -s /usr/local/share/man/man1/xvi.1 /usr/man/man1/

History of VI editor and its derivatives

>> "BJ: No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow." << Bill Joy on Vi

René Descartes and the Fly on the Ceiling | wild.maths.org

>> "The coordinate system we commonly use is called the Cartesian system, after the French mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), who developed it in the 17th century. Legend has it that Descartes, who liked to stay in bed until late, was watching a fly on the ceiling from his bed. He wondered how to best describe the fly's location and decided that one of the corners of the ceiling could be used as a reference point." << I'm stealing that one

H I Sutton - Covert Shores [How to draw submarine cutaways]

Uses paint for the drawing and renders through GIMP for the fills. Use what you have I suppose. Via HN discussion about GIMP 1.1

Ulysses : James Joyce : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

A pint in a pub is a possibility on Bloom's Day this year. Just keeping an eye on the variant. I'll have full vaccination status by then.

Distraction free writing with Emacs - philnewton.net

I rather like the sound of the olivetti-mode. It loads larger fonts and removes the toolbar/menu bar and resizes to full screen. Via Sacha's emacs links page

Ontological Perspectivism and Geographical Categorizations | SpringerLink

>> "On this basis, physical geography can be regarded as a cognitive partition mainly focused on entities like deserts, seas and hills, but not on political boundaries or administrative units. Conversely, human geography would represent the act that mentally splits the geographical world in entities such as nations, regions and districts.Footnote 1 In addition, transport geography pays particular attention to roads and streets, but less to postal districts or seabeds, and so on, according to other geographical areas of investigations and branches." << Via HN discussion about knowledge graphs. Echos of a set of outcomes mapping to many kinds of event. Assemblages?

The Yale Review | Victor Brombert: "On Rereading"

>> "Yet even this closely examined self tends to elude him, for it is multifaceted, constantly evolving and mutating. Flux is indeed the great lesson. Human nature is multifarious and unstable. Life allows for no fixity. A terse formula sums up Montaigne’s project. “I do not depict being. I depict passage.” I have reread these words many times in my mind." << Via John Naughton's 'memex' blog posts and email newsletter. A book is a fixed structure, your response to re-reading it and comparing with original reading shows how your views/thinking have changed. Even finding new things that were not noticed before.

GitHub - bignimbus/trombone.js: A digital trombone for your web browser

Doesn't sound much like a trombone but makes a raucous noise and good fun

Interlacing, Deinterlacing, and Everything in Between

>> "The first thing to note about analog television is that the standards we’re talking about were developed in what, in electronics terms, was the Dark Ages: vacuum tubes, not transistors. Printed circuit boards weren’t used and all wiring was point-to-point. Capacitors were still called condensers. So a lot of the systems were designed around technical constraints that just wouldn’t be as relevant." << 405 line interlaced positive video with 5MHz bandwidth and broadcast on around 60MHz (band I). Summer evenings with favourable tropo and you got pop music from Germany and even opera from Italy mixed in for free sometimes...

100R — liveaboard

>> "As with most things in life, 20% of anything does 80% of the work. When moving into a smaller space, it is important to find that 20% and surround yourself with things purposefully. Single-serving tools and kitchenware will not do." << Works for applied maths as well. 20% basic principles will get you *most* of the idea. Not all, and not enough to plan experiments with high costs, but enough to see what is going on.

5 things I learned while developing a billing system - Arnon Shimoni

Currency and charging people money can be complex. I shall perhaps be more tolerant of clunky payment pages in future.`

The Filing Cabinet

>> "Could capitalism, surveillance, and governance have developed in the 20th century without filing cabinets? Of course, but only if there had been another way to store and circulate paper efficiently. The filing cabinet was critical to the infrastructure of 20th-century nation states and financial systems; and, like most infrastructure, it is often overlooked or forgotten, and the labor associated with it minimized or ignored." << Card indexes, filing cabinets, lever arch box files and year planners. All props of the 'office' now not mandatory.

Utopian Modernism in London: A Series of Drifts... | Features | Archinect

My kind of buildings. I have minority tastes...

60Fe and 244Pu deposited on Earth constrain the r-process yields of recent nearby supernovae | Science

How the really heavy elements from exploding stars wound up as part of the Earth's crust. A few *hundred* plutonium particles found in a sample of rock from a deep borehole and analysed by scientists. Pity I can't read the actual paper except by hauling my carcass 6 miles to a physical library and ferreting out the dead tree copy then photocopying it. Madness, and people wonder why conspiracy theories get so much traction. Science looks like random magic anyway because the underlying logic is behind paywalls.

Shizuo Kakutani (1911 - 2004) - Biography - MacTutor History of Mathematics

>> "The trip across the Atlantic was long and hard. There was the constant fear of being torpedoed by the Germans. What, you may wonder, did Kakutani do. He proved theorems. Every day, he sat on deck and worked on his mathematics. Every night, he took his latest theorem, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. Each one contained the instruction that if found it should be sent to the Institute in Princeton. To this day, not a single letter has been received." << Perhaps needed to improve redundancy of communication channel. Seriously, perhaps notebooks &c not allowed on ship??

Random Walks

" A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever. " Shizuo Kakutani (mathematician working in probability related fields) I have a sudden desire to simulate a random walk on a discrete two dimensional grid (see the plots) and then on/in a three dimensional grid.

Writing a Programming Book in 2021 | Hacker News

>> "A programming book should teach a language through a sequence of small, complete code samples, so clearly delineated that a scuba diver 30 meters deep can work out what's the code, what's the blather. The main activity of reading the book should be puzzling out how each code fragment works. Skip the "word problems" and focus on simple combinatorial tasks that exercise the language." << Basic maths through examples? Small pared down problems?

The Beauty of Amazon's 6-Pager

>> "The down side to the 6-pager is that writing a good six-page evidence-based narrative is hard work. Precision counts and it can be hard to summarize a complex business in 6 pages, so teams work for hours preparing the document for these reviews. But that preparation does two things. First, it requires the team writing the document to really deeply understand their own space, gather their data, understand their operating tenets and be able to communicate them clearly. The second thing it does is a great document enables our senior executives to internalize a whole new space they may not be familiar with in 30 minutes of reading thus greatly optimizing how quickly and how many different initiatives these leaders can review." << 6 pages A4 in 12 point with 16pt subheadings comes in at around 4500 words. <strike>Knock 500 to 1000 off for tables/charts, still that is 3500 words</strike>. Takes a bit of time. Ooops, appendices to the 6 pages are provided for tables/charts!

The Obsessive Scholar Who Rescued Iceland’s Ancient Literary Legacy

>> “And that is the way of the world,” he wrote early on, confidently explaining his methods. “Some men put erroribus (errors) into circulation, and others afterwards try to eradicate those same erroribus. And from this both sorts of men remain busy.” << Árni Magnusson via HN. Spammy page.

Seeds From a 142-Year-Old Science Experiment Have Sprouted - The New York Times

>> "If species like this can survive underground for decades or even centuries, they may pop up on land that people are attempting to turn into native plant habitat — “presenting surprises and maybe even challenges to restoration projects long into the future,” said Lars Brudvig, another team member and an associate professor of plant ecology at the university." << Successful weeds are always hardy. They survive such immense selection pressure from us!

Download - Gentium

Using Gentium Book Basic as a compromise for class notes. Modernist but with some serifs. Looks OK with Gill Sans as heading font.

Panic Blog » The Future of Code Editor

>> "Launching Nova reaffirmed to us how technologically diverse web development has become. During its development, we got requests to support libraries and technologies we thought long dead, as well as requests for brand new frameworks we’d never heard of. The churn of new web tools and tech is rapid and constant. This is why having a flexible extension system is essential for a modern web-focused IDE. But that’s where the trouble lies." << Churn makes jobs. New framework adopted by new Web app business. Lots of takeup. Lots of sites use framework. Years pass.... new people don't know the framework but use the new thing instead. Website gets re-written in new thing. Prayer wheel turns...

Sample EPS inclusions

Oldschool dvi layering to produce a labelled eps file

Why Aren’t Text Message Interventions Designed to Boost College Success Working at Scale? - By Ben Castleman - Behavioral Scientist

>> "Fast forward to the present, however, and numerous recent experimental studies show that these statewide and national text campaigns have not had the same impact on college enrollment or persistence as we estimated in the initial RCTs. Nor does the efficacy of large-scale text campaigns seem to vary based on content framing, timing, delivery method, or the offer of one-on-one assistance." << It got old?

John Lanchester · Gargantuanisation · LRB 22 April 2021

Informal and breezy approach to a serious subject - the strange invisibility of modern shipping. Covers quite a lot of information and gives out key references in addition to the book being reviewed.

A Different Kind of Theory of Everything | The New Yorker

>> “The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven,” he told me, “would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” << My head hurts. Must stop knocking it against this wall here...

Solving the Regex of Madness - and a few thought about snarky answers on StackOverflow

>> "For XHTML, this means you can identify individual syntax units like comments, start tags, end tags etc. But you cannot match start tags to end tags using a regular expression alone, since elements can be nested arbitrarily deep." << Match start tag and have a counter...

Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction

>> "In 1927, Einstein used the following example. Suppose you direct a beam of electrons at a screen with a tiny hole and ask what happens with a single electron. The wave-function of the electron will diffract on the hole, which means it will spread symmetrically into all directions. Then you measure it at a certain distance from the hole. The electron has the same probability to have gone in any direction. But if you measure it, you will suddenly find it in one particular point." <<

There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) | Eukaryote Writes Blog

>> "Also of interest to us are the non-tree “woody plants”, like lianas (thick woody vines) and shrubs. They’re not trees, but at least to me, it’s relatively apparent how a tree could evolve into a shrub, or vice-versa. The confusing part is a tree evolving into a dandelion. (Or vice-versa.)" << Malleability of forms of life is a marvel.

Email explained from first principles at Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (ESMTP)

'Modern' email process explained

Solve Math Equations That Are Stubborn as a Goat | Quanta Magazine

>> "Math teachers have stymied students by sticking goats in strangely shaped fields for hundreds of years, but one particular grazing goat problem has gotten the goat of mathematicians for more than a century. Until last year they were only able to find approximate answers to the problem, and it took a new approach with some very advanced mathematics to finally produce an exact solution." << UK this tends to be a scale drawing / locii problem at basic maths level

How TeX macros actually work: Part 3

>> "Rather than providing an internal “alphabetical listing” of all the commands that TeX knows about, it does something a bit different. TeX converts the entire sequence of characters—present in the name of a command—into a single integer, which will be used to identify (represent) that command. Internally, TeX maintains a big “dictionary” of all known commands into which it save/stores the integers calculated from command names—note that dictionary doesn’t store the actual command names themselves as sequences of letters (called strings). TeX uses that dictionary for all of its built-in commands (primitives) and it will use it to store details of any macro (command) created by users: the name of your macro is turned into an integer and that integer is “registered” inside TeX’s dictionary." << You just sort of *know* that Knuth has read Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme. The 6 part Web page about TeX as a programming system is excellent - very slow and deliberate build up of the central idea.

A London Inheritance - A Private History of a Public City

Blogging about father's photographs usually around London.

Higher order calculator

Taking bison and yacc round the block to show how an interpreter works. Just compiles and when used with rlwrap you get a useful command line scientific calculator.

Online Etymology Dictionary | Origin, history and meaning of English words

A new site to mess on while I'm procrastinating.

Chasing the Sun — The New Atlantis

>> "Hīroa’s Vikings of the Sunrise, important contribution that it was, contained mysteries his account could not resolve, such as the matter of the sweet potato. Its presence, along with that of other non-native flora, including the calabash (or bottle gourd) and the soapberry, were tantalizing suggestions about South American–Polynesian exchange. Each of these plants is native to South America and exists in Polynesia only in cultivation." << Interior = dense jungle, livable areas on coasts, the sea is the highway. So hard to think in that mindset now but thousands of years ago that was how it was...

Rust's Most Unrecognized Contributor

>> "A little appreciated fact: Rust was largely built by students, and many of them interned at Mozilla." << Computer science students. From 'good schools'. Computer languages being for human beings not computers, the place where you get the people who design the language will determine the extent to which the language is accessible to other human beings. The Ellen Ullman thing.

Diffie-Hellman for the Layman. Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman are… | by Boris Reitman | Apr, 2021 | Medium

I always find this stuff confusing...

CABINET / Trading in Atoms for Bits

>> "It is a debate broadly familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in the nature of money, or even looked idly at a banknote for a bit: how do I know that money is real? I want to phrase the question in this somewhat awkward way to capture how it can be reasonably answered. We can ask it at the level of a particular token of money—how do I know this money is real?—with the feel and texture of a note, the security threads, watermarks, and ultraviolet inks. We can ask it at the level of some type or variety of money, perhaps expressed as a preference for one currency as more “solid” than another, for instance, or for cash over credit, or gold over both: how do I know this kind of money is real? Finally, we can ask it at the level of money as such—what is money that it has value for us, and how do we know that value? How do I know that money is real?" << It can buy wine and bread? Interesting

“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” | Hacker News

Static or dynamic linking at system level looks like one of those trade-offs. It would be nice if there was a (mostly) statically linked distribution to point to...

A Quick MetaPost Example

This tutorial works with tetex as installed on Slackware 14.1 and 14.2 without modification. Metapost figures inlined in the TeX source are feasible.

Truly unified inbox – BlackBerry got it right and nobody has since | Hacker News

>> "Then there was Verizon pushing them to release phones that would work well on their new 4G networks, while Blackberrys were being optimised for 2.5G as one of their CEOs was determined to preserve the selling point of great battery life." << People want thin shiny phones. Then they buy cases and complain about battery life...

An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git | Tag1 Consulting

>> "University of Helsinki used it because it worked on DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix, which is why I got introduced to it. And now my fingers are hardcoded for it. I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. But my hacked-up piece of historical garbage works just barely well enough that I've never been really forced to teach my old fingers new tricks." << Waiting for the 'Torvalds uses Nano' threads. :-) >> "In fact, I guess I could say that I've been wanting an ARM machine for much longer than that - back when I was a teenager, the machine I really wanted was an Acorn Archimedes, but availability and price made me go with a Sinclair QL (M68008 processor) and then obviously a few years later a i386 PC instead." << What would have happened if Torvalds had been able to scrape the cash for his Archimedes? Would we all be running Lucent Unix?

Puncher’s Chance | Declan Ryan

Two boxing clubs around here now, and a shop in the covered market specialising in gloves and equipment.

Truly unified inbox - BlackBerry got it right and nobody has since W.C. Fan

This is the reason I'm hanging onto my Classic, plus it is the right size for my hands. I can triage email/messages one handed on the way down the escalator to catch the train (assuming commuting comes back into fashion soon). Try that with the portable flat screen televisions they sell as phones now.

Jeffrey Paul: How Not To Run A Vulnerability Disclosure Program

>> "...and second when the third-party service they picked turned out to be run by idiots that have decided that graceful degradation in the face of feature incompatibility, one of the core foundational tenets of the world wide web since its invention, despite a nice two-decade run simply isn’t important anymore in 2021, and that serving blank pages to..." << Graceful degradation is the idea that the (assumed text) content of a Web page will be readable on just about any device (e.g. Nokia 3120 from 20 years before times via wap), and that enhanced features such as images, javascript, adverts, auto-play videos, modal popups inviting subscriptions &c will come into play as you climb the evolutionary ladder of browsers. Seems it lost.

FFmpeg cheat sheet · GitHub

Create a slide show video from images looks good

LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function - Microsoft Research

Excel is Turing complete. Man the barricades. Keep a watch for the zombies. Fred(a) in the corner with the two monitors can now define his(her) own functions even if your policy prevents the use of macros. VLOOKUP to arbitrary function definitions....

Beej’s Guide to C Programming [pdf] (beej.us)

500 pages with examples. Informal in style

Comment on Unix versus Emacs | Protesilaos Stavrou

>> "The main problem with such a framework is that there is no layer of integration between those tools. When you actually start piecing together a system you are introducing complexity on a case-by-case, ad hoc manner, because you now need to write extra code that connects the otherwise disparate tools." << I just use the DE and system clipboard as the integrator. EMACS for a light weight IDE. RStudio for stats, OpenOffice for handouts, presentations and data cleaning. The file system does a handy job keeping data organised...

Richard Borcherds (Fields Medalist) on the Monster Group, String Theory, Self Studying and Moonshine - YouTube

2h video with audience questions

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Doubts about teapot supremacy: my reply to Richard Borcherds

>> "Borcherds also proposes a “teapot test,” according to which any claim about quantum computers can be dismissed if an analogous claim would hold for a teapot (which he brandishes for the camera). For example, there are many claims to solve practical optimization and machine learning problems by “quantum/classical hybrid algorithms,” wherein a classical computer does most of the work but a quantum computer is somehow involved. Borcherds points out that, at least as things stand in early 2021, in most or all such cases, the classical computer could’ve probably done as well entirely on its own. So then if you put a teapot on top of your classical computer while it ran, you could equally say you used a “classical/teapot hybrid approach.”" << The teapot test could become a standard I think. Especially when managers who are outside a particular domain of knowledge come back from a meeting with The Big New Idea. (Aaronson then makes the point about the real teapot being dropped being a sample of one of all the possible teapot droppings where the quibit based sampling computation could provide a distribution. Its contingency vs structure again sort of)

Interview with Michael Lucas *BSD, Unix, IT and other books author - nixCraft

>> "My mother recently sent me the first book I ever wrote. It is six sheets of paper, folded over and stapled into a book. I don’t know how old I was, but it’s written in crayon. Fortunately, my work has improved since then." <<

Web Safe Colour Pallet

This one splits the greyscale colour codes out nicely.

How Dürer shaped the modern world

>> "If Albert and the Whale were a room, it would be an alchemist’s laboratory with a stuffed crocodile suspended from the ceiling, full of freaks and fascinations, reef-encrusted in time." << Sold

Frank Chimero · Everything Easy is Hard Again

>> "My web design philosophy is no razzle-dazzle. My job is to help my clients identify and express the one or two uniquely true things about their project or company, then enhance it through a memorable design with a light touch. If complexity comes along, we focus in on it, look for patterns, and change the blueprint for what we’re building. We don’t necessarily go looking for better tools or fancier processes. In the past, I’ve called this following the grain of the web, which is to use design choices that swing with what HTML, CSS, and screens make easy, flexible, and resilient." << Perhaps his Web sites look a little different from the white space all around huge pictures style. >> "All of that bundled together is the popular way to work in 2018. But other people’s toolchains are absolutely inscrutable from the outside. Even getting started is touchy. Last month, I had to install a package manager to install a package manager. That’s when I closed my laptop and slowly backed away from it. We’re a long way from the CSS Zen Garden where I started." << CSS Zen Garden was a tutorial and portfolio Web site where designers put up samples of their work. All the mark up was readable, often with comments.

How ‘Things’ In Fiction Shape the Way We Read | The Nation

>> "Temporalities overlap in this sign: The word “chicken” is a ghost from a bankrupt restaurant that was replaced by an auto insurance business with a white owner. This layering of past and present is indicated in an object in flux, but also one that appears to passersby sturdily embedded in the city’s infrastructure, such that white motorists keep stopping and asking for the chicken auto insurance." << Thing theory sounds interesting. My childhood was spent mostly surrounded by things made of wood metal paper and stone. Now it is often plastic. Pens have always been plastic, but desk objects have transitioned from metal to plastic. Cameras transitioned from a once a decade purchase of an expensive precision mechanical device to an app on a phone.

Retro nostalgia & why my new website looks like Window 9x ~ Ash Kyd

This site is quite a shock to the system. It does look very like win95 (minus the random BSODs).

Am I FLoCed? | EFF page about Chrome's Federated Learning of Cohorts

>> "FLoC runs in your browser. It uses your browsing history from the past week to assign you to a group with other "similar" people around the world. Each group receives a label, called a FLoC ID, which is supposed to capture meaningful information about your habits and interests. FLoC then displays this label to everyone you interact with on the web. This makes it easier to identify you with browser fingerprinting, and it gives trackers a head start on profiling you. You can read EFF's analysis and criticisms of FLoC here." << Back to the Charles Isbell / Lex Fridman podcast. People's behaviour does cluster into distinct groups when analysed on various axes (think scatter diagram in vector space) and these clusters can be used to make predictions about future behaviour that are quite accurate. EFF doing their bit here...

The Nation's Corn Belt Has Lost a Third of Its Topsoil | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

>> "The baseline for soil in Iowa is visible on land owned by Jon Judson, a sustainable farmer and conservation advocate. His farm hosts a rare plot of original prairie grasses and wildflowers. Under the prairie, the soil is thick and dark, with feet of organic matter built up and plenty of moisture. The next field over is a recovering conventional field like Watkins’ farm, and the effect of years of conventional practices is obvious. The soil is pale and compacted, with only a few inches of organic carbon, much less soil moisture, and a lot more clay." << Still time but not much

Understanding quantum computing through drunken walks - Stack Overflow Blog

>> "Even though this is a simple example, all quantum algorithms work the same way: by exploiting the quantum spread in clever ways that fit the structure of a problem. There are many applications for quantum algorithms, so it is an exciting time to start exploring quantum programming." << You just know how this is going to go. People working in the softer domains (outside chemistry and engineering) will tend to select problems that work with qubits because quantum computation really is the big new thing and careers can be made. Problems that don't fit the properties of qubits will become sidelined. 'Our tools determine our thoughts' again for the new age. Nice use of a few carefully designed animated gifs to illustrate key points.

The TTY demystified

>> "Beware, though: What you are about to see is not particularly elegant. In fact, the TTY subsystem — while quite functional from a user's point of view — is a twisty little mess of special cases. To understand how this came to be, we have to go back in time." << The effect of many work-arounds for contingencies in the context of the time...

The Healing Power of JavaScript | WIRED

>> "I began coding when I was 10 and have been running with it ever since. Self-taught, mostly. I had a preternatural awkwardness with others. The machine was literal in a reassuring way, and seemed to promise access to a world that even the adults around me couldn’t fathom. In this way, the code became a friend—a nonjudgmental buddy." << I have a theory that this *relief* in being able to control a small portion of one's world through programming may be a generational one-off contingency to do with the late 20th century. Access to small programmable worlds may not be as obvious (say) now. I've just started reading a recently published computer book that contains a marginal note explaining that a device *with a keyboard* will be needed to proceed to the later chapters. Truly "...our writing tools are also working on our thoughts." Via HN

Embrace the Grind - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

>> "So I used the same trick as the magician, which is no trick at all: I did the work. I printed out all the issues - one page of paper for each issue. I read each page. I took over a huge room and started making piles on the floor. I wrote tags on sticky notes and stuck them to piles. I shuffled pages from one stack to another. I wrote ticket numbers on whiteboards in long columns; I imagined I was Ben Affleck in The Accountant. I spent almost three weeks in that room, and emerged with every bug report reviewed, tagged, categorized, and prioritized." << An hour a day on something. Look back a month later. Can work for smaller tasks. Also the *space*, I like flipcharts around the room to record who does what when. They can be altered and rearranged.

Fractal Rendering in Emacs

Emacs has netpbm format for images (I should have guessed) built in and accessible from elisp

How I Do Generative Art: In Praise of Netpbm — Infinite Negative Utility

I like stuff like this. The file format is very literal, you can in principle sit down with some squared paper and draw out an image then type the pixel values into a text editor...

Greeks Bearing Gifts | Lapham’s Quarterly

Techne in history

North Ireland Farl (Soda Bread) - Curious Cuisiniere

Quick skillet bread for breakfasts. Two cups flour, one cup buttermilk, 1tsp baking soda, half tsp salt. Improvise the buttermilk using 1 cup milk and a tbsp of lemon juice or vinegar (or yoghurt, anything acidic to react with the bicarb).

Gregory Szorc's Digital Home | Surprisingly Slow

There is something very reassuring about people who know this much about how the hugely complex software build processes we use now actually work. In detail. And who shave a few milliseconds here and a second there off each step.

An Apology to COBOL: Maybe Old Technology Isn’t the Real Problem

>> "Before we go any further, let’s lay down some basic facts. COBOL was developed around 1960 as an early programming language that dealt in abstractions. That is, it allowed developers to give commands to computers in plain language. It’s oriented toward business functions and still runs many of the world’s most important financial systems, including the IRS and banking giants. There are hundreds of billions of active lines of it, and that number is growing over time, not shrinking." << If COBOL and its associated database has enough potential abstractions to represent the business logic of the organisation, and if the implementation of the program can cope with the traffic, why not use it? We don't redesign basic algebra every 10 years or so.

A Little Closer to Finding What Became of Moses Schönfinkel, Inventor of Combinators—Stephen Wolfram Writings

More about Moses Schönfinkel. I think Wolfram could have a popular science biography on his hands here, perhaps linking this story of an individual working with very abstract ideas to the larger history that was churning around Schönfinkel. We now have first hand experience of how hard it is to spot History when you are in it...

House of Lords - Crossrail Bill - Minutes of Evidence - Annetta Pedretti

A philosopher and architect talking past a bureaucratic structure about actual structures and how to articulate local planning issues. This page and the next three. Looks like the script of a play.

Brunel University Research Archive: The cybernetics of language - Pedretti, Annetta

>> "This paradox is resolved where a language is seen as constructed (for a particular purpose), and thus the circularity is unfolded, considering that (i) in terms of a constructive function of language, there is no language (something is in the process of being constructed); (ii) in terms of a communicative function of language, such a construction is in the process of being accepted (something is being negotiated); (iii) in terms of an argumentative-function of language, a language (accepted, eg. having, been negotiated) is used to negotiate things distinct from-this language." <<

Ergodicity, What's It Mean | Hacker News

A pointer to a short illustration of the difference between an ensemble average and a time series average. The HN discussion has code snips you can copypasta into Julia and Python

Fed up with the Mac, I spent six months with a Linux laptop. The grass is not greener on the other side

HN rage link bait. This gentleman seems to have very highly polished methods for dealing with his everyday tasks. Those methods were honed on the MacOS operating system and associated software. Seems logical that attempting to replicate those methods on a different platform may not be the best thing to do.

GitHub - emikulic/darkhttpd: When you need a web server in a hurry.

A Web server for static pages in a 2500 line c file. Can run in your ~/bin and be used locally to test a simple static Web site.

On the Decline of Perl [external factors] - nntp.perl.org

>> "I will conclude this section with an analogy I once saw for a similar concept explained in terms of spoon colours. In some crazy world wherein it would be useful if everyone picked the same coloured spoon, it turns out we all use green spoons. Why green? Dunno, it's pretty arbitrary. I'm sure the makers of red spoons and yellow spoons and all the other spoons are pretty annoyed about it, but in the end it doesn't matter. All the colours of spoon are just as good for eating soup, but one colour had to be picked so we'd all use the same one, and it turned out to be green. Perhaps we (the Perl core) are sat here trying to sell our blue spoons, and wondering why nobody wants to buy them any more. Do we want to turn our blue spoons a little greener, and make them less distinctively blue in the hope of making them more attractive? Would that help?" << Contingency in language choice, with network effect as an amplifier.

The compiler will optimize that away | RoyalSloth

>> "Well, for one it’s sad to know that even if we get better compilers or faster hardware, the speed of our software is not going to drastically improve, since they are not the reason why our software is slow. The main problem that we have today lies in utilizing the CPUs to their full potential." << The table that follows this paragraph is an eye opener. Going from a 5400 rpm mechanical hard drive to an SSD - even on SATA 2 - gives a four to five fold improvement minimum on the latency of a read from disk storage. I've noticed that a Core Duo 2 with SSD when used for everyday tasks isn't that noticeably slower than an i5. Pure processor based stuff (e.g. a graphics filter in GIMP) shows the slowness of the older laptop.

GitHub - oliverphilcox/Keplers-Goat-Herd: Solving Kepler's equation via contour integration, implemented in C++

Looks like an exact analytical solution for Kepler's equation. After, what, 400 years or so?

Inside a viral website - Not Fun at Parties

The chap behind istheshipstillstuck. He used what he uses every day at work - a complex programmatically based Web application published from a version control system, with live queries to newspapers. One wonders if a bit of html and a few links updated every hour would have been any less popular? But then I liked the embedded satellite beacon map, and failed to find the foghorn. All that functionality would be hard to provide quickly without the application stack. The digression on what you have to go through to actually sell an NFT was (depressingly for artists) interesting.

Font size is useless; let’s fix it @ tonsky.me

Looking at how e.g. times new roman 24pt always looks smaller than e.g. Georgia. The mysteries of the em square. Nicely illustrated and a 'brave' background colour (#fdbe29 and hst 42, 84,99). Via HN

A Single Equation that Rules the World | by Samrat Dutta | The Wisest Friends | Medium

The logistic map quation. Builds into period doubling experiments.

Cantor's Paradise

This particular substack looks interesting...

How to iterate over files returned by ls - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

looping over ls -1c is dodgy but useful. Grunge bash.

The forgotten medieval fruit with a vulgar name - BBC Future

>> "The exact chemical mechanism involved remains elusive, but broadly, enzymes in the fruit break down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars such as fructose and glucose, and it becomes richer in malic acid – the main culprit behind the sour taste of other fruits such as apples. Meanwhile, harsh tannins, which contribute to the bitter astringency of younger red wines, and antioxidants such as ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), are depleted." << Modern name: medlar. The trees fruit in European winter but the fruit needs to ferment a bit so sugars are released. Early cultivated fruit, so possibly a food source that was displaced by easier to manage fruit and by preservation methods and later shipping of fruit from warmer climates.

The beauty of the ampersand and other keyboard symbols | The Spectator

>> "Many punctuation marks were invented by the ancient Greeks, evolved by the medievals and fixed by the early printers. The colon, for example, which means ‘limb’, was invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium — not the playwright, but a librarian. It originally looked like a full stop and was intended to mark a breathing space between sections of text for the purposes of reading out loud. The great seventh-century linguist Isidore of Sevile then decided on a three dot system for different lengths of pause: low dot for short pause, middle dot for medium pause, high dot for long pause. A variety of competing ideas were used by different orders of monks in the Middle Ages and Cock-Starkey says it was Caxton who ended the chaos by coming up with the slash, colon and full stop." << The spaces between words are recentish as well - 7th or 8th century in Northern scriptoria

tech-x11 - default ctwm config thoughts

The .ctwmrc configuration file attached does actually work on Slackware 14.2. Fonts shonky small fallback size (bitmapped I suppose).

mikeash.com: Friday Q&A 2010-12-31: C Macro Tips and Tricks

Multi-statement macros section explains why you sometimes see do{ lines } while(0) in macro definitions in the pre-processor section of a c file.

When laziness is efficient: Make the most of your command line - Stack Overflow Blog

>> "My most common pipe involves adding | grep -i $searchTerm after a command with long output I’d prefer not to pick through manually, if I’m only searching for one thing. (You can use -A and -B to add lines before and after for context, with the number of lines you want as a parameter after each flag. See the grep man page to learn more.)" << Yup, done that one. Good for locate searches where you don't want all the doc pages showing up just the executables and libraries.

explainshell.com - rsync -av ~/Documents/directory user@server:~/backup/

Seems to search for snippets from the man page and display them in the order of your command options. Nice idea.

Solene's percent % : Opensource from an author point of view

>> "Having to deal with multiple people contributing to a project I started for myself on one architecture with a limited set of features is surprisingly hard. I don't say it's boring and that no one should ever do it, but I think I wasn't really prepare to handle this." << Everyone who takes on a coordination or management role finds this out. The experience cannot be distilled into a book or guide, you have to walk the walk. It strikes me that open source projects may allow people to gain this kind of experience much earlier in their career than in corporate employment.

Turndown Demo

JS parser that can convert html back into markdown. Damned useful. Did the obvious (converted on of my Web pages with very simple markup into markdown, then fed the result through Gruber's original markdown). The main issue is that <pre> tags get ignored and so the resulting markdown processes the <pre> blocks just as paragraphs. Some funny character issues as well (UTF-8 stuff).

Everything to Know About Japan's Cherry Blossom Festivals

We have hanami (花見) here now

michaelthompsonart.com - Dali signature on blank piece of paper (prepared for a print)

NFT half a century ago

How Salvador Dalí Accidentally Sabotaged His Own Market for Prints - Artsy

>> "“With aides at each elbow, one shoving the paper in front of Dalí and the other pulling the signed sheet onto another stack,” writes author Lee Catterall, “it was claimed that Dalí could sign as many as 1,800 sheets an hour for $72,000. The practice provided a quick way to generate payment for a hotel or restaurant bill.” Indeed, having reneged on an agreement to produce 78 tarot card illustrations for the James Bond movie “Live and Let Die,” Dalí would resort to precisely this tactic to settle his debts. Between 1976 and 1977, the artist signed 17,500 blank sheets of paper for the tarot prints that had yet to be produced." << NFT pffft. Salvador had it sorted 50 years ago. The article mentions that a pr-signed blank went for $40. I wonder how much such an artifact would be worth now?

The Noguchi Filing System Keeps Paper Documents Organized On Its Own

Things that you used most recently on the left of the shelf. Things that you have not worked on for ages migrate to the right end of the shelf. After some time, put the things on the far right into a box and hide them away. Nice.

Newstatesman Morning Call

>> "My unpopular opinion is that the Chancellor has a point: there are advantages to a degree of in-person working that can't be replicated remotely, particularly if you work in a collaborative or creative industry. The consequences of the end of office-working will, I am convinced, be particularly ruinous in the longterm for new starters, people without social connections, and those born outside of big cities." << Probably about right. Perhaps a mix of office and wfh for flexibility?

Blocked Suez Forces Ships to Look at Long Trip Around Africa – gCaptain

>> "The possibility of alternate routes is the starkest example yet of how the canal blockage is starting to ripple across maritime transportation for everything from finished goods to energy and commodities. Even before the 400-meter long Ever Given got blocked on Tuesday, the pandemic sowed havoc in supply chains with shortages and delays." << Single points of (relative) failure. At the end of the day it is down to an extra payment on the freight charges, which have a smallish impact on final retail prices.

BiteofanApple | Why All My Servers Have an 8GB Empty File

>> "As of last year, all of my servers have an 8GB empty spacer.img file that does absolutely nothing except take up space. That way in a moment of full-disk crisis I can simply delete it and buy myself some critical time to debug and fix the problem. 8GB is a significant amount of space, but storage is cheap enough these days that hoarding that much space is basically unnoticeable... until I really need it. Then it makes all the difference in the world." << Clever trick! Via daringfb. Linode server so probably not an encrypted disk and probably small.

partitioning - How to expand an encrypted ubuntu partition with LVM - Ask Ubuntu

60Gb is small for an SSD these days...

calc.exe is now open source; there’s surprising depth in its ancient code | Ars Technica

>> "The actual calculations are performed by this ancient code. Calculator's mathematics library is built using rational numbers (that is, numbers that can be expressed as the ratio of two integers). Where possible, it preserves the exact values of the numbers it is computing, falling back on Taylor series expansion when an approximation to an irrational number is required." << Will need to see how it does functions e.g. atan. Probably when the taylor series and CORDIC algos come in to play. Excel can do fractions (look up the & notation for separating numerator and denominator) but num/den limited to int length.

NFTs are a dangerous trap | Seth's Blog

>> "THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method that’s used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That’s on purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go up, not down." << 'Proof of work' requires the calculation of large numbers of hashes (I think) hence the electricity requirements. Needs regulating. Via daringfireball

Lawyers used sheepskin as anti-fraud device for hundreds of years to stop fraudsters pulling the woo

>> "Sheep deposit fat in-between the various layers of their skin. During parchment manufacture, the skin is submerged in lime, which draws out the fat leaving voids between the layers. Attempts to scrape off the ink would result in these layers detaching—known as delamination—leaving a visible blemish highlighting any attempts to change any writing." << Immutable record (via HN)

Introduction to Plotting (GNU Octave (version 6.1.0))

The qt option looks a bit naff do using gnuplot for now.

Douglas Adams' note to self reveals author found writing torture | Douglas Adams | The Guardian

>> "Adams’ archive, 67 boxes of stuff, is held by St John’s college, Cambridge. James Thrift said: “People have been dipping in and out of it for various projects but the discussion has always been what is going to happen to it?”" << Edit, digitise and publish on t'web, sell boxes to Austin Texas, retire?

#975902 - octave-gui always shows "undecodable token: �01b(hex)[?2004h" in the prompt - Debian Bug report logs

Octave 5.2.0 compiles fine on Slackware current using configure, make and make install. The issue in this bug report is sorted by putting 'set enable-bracketed-paste off' in ~/.inputrc. Now I had better see what .inputrc is actually about.

Entirely anecdotally, a lot of younger people who grew up post-smartphones are a... | Hacker News

>> "Entirely anecdotally, a lot of younger people who grew up post-smartphones are adept at using tools they know but have a very poor understanding of how computers actually work. Teacher friends say they see kids not knowing how to use a mouse and jabbing at the (non touch) screen instead, which is kind of what I’d expect my computer-phobe parents to do." << I've seen teenagers who can whizz around the Web and do amazing things with multimedia using apps, but who have no idea about things like spreadsheets, or the *idea* of a record being made up of fields... Perhaps there is a place for ICT after all? Just don't call it that.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications: Audacity

>> "One goal is that its user interface should be discoverable: people should be able to sit down without a manual and start using it right away, gradually discovering its features. This principle has been crucial in giving Audacity greater consistency to the user interface than there otherwise would be. For a project in which many people have a hand this kind of unifying principle is more important than it might seem at first." << I gather there are moves to change the UI/UX of Audacity in future versions (via HN) so one hopes that the paragraph above is printed out in a large font and displayed above the monitor...

Thinking inside the box - An Ode to Stable Interfaces: R and R Core Deserve So Much Praise

>> "A few days ago, a friend and I were riffing about the wonderful stability of R and (subsets of) R packages. The rigorous ASAN/UBSAN/Valgrind/… checks, while at times frustrating for us package maintainers when we do not have easily replicable setups [1], really help in ensuring code quality. As do of course all other layers of quality control at CRAN, and for R." << Running scripts from some years ago with recent packages.

VUW Accidentally Wipes Desktop Computers | News | Critic Te Arohi

"Victoria University of Wellington accidentally deleted all the files stored on its desktop computers last Friday. Items in the H: drive, M: drive, or the cloud were still accessible." IT staff at my last full-time employer always asked people to save to their home drive. It was harder for email (pst files didn't catch attachments for some reason) and for data kept inside applications (the default Save As... was mapped to home drive). Also personal backups for non-PII files like a thesis!

What I learned in two years of moving government forms online | by Josh Gee | Medium

>> "Getting city workers to accept online submissions rather than traditional paper ones is the bulk of this work. On average, it took me about 30 minutes to make a digital form and five weeks to meet with, earn the trust of, and get buy-in from the employees who would use it. Even if they were excited, the nitty gritty details took a lot of back and forth." << That five weeks would have other stuff going on as well, so allow 10h for telephone tag, some meetings and the sending over of drafts. I can believe a 20:1 ratio.

A History of the Console (When Computers had Personality)

>> "The computers we use today have style and processing power, but when it comes to personality, we'd take a Dec VT100 over the latest MacBook Pro anytime." << Having done the card punch/coffee batch dance and a little bit of amber screen squinting, I'm not actually sure that I agree. Keyboards great, screens dim, fuzzy and squinty (and hot sometimes).

Q&A with John Kozubik, rsync.net - Console

>> "OS: macOS. I have no data stored, locally, on my workstation - everything is on a server I keep at a datacenter so I initiate my work in the terminal by port-knocking, logging in over SSH and attaching to my GNU screen session. When I login, one of those Twilio scripts sends an SMS alert notifying me of that fact." << Just a shell and a browser...

My father was famous as John le Carré. My mother was his crucial, covert collaborator | Books | The Guardian

>> "Very few, very wise people saw through them both, of whom the most recent and the most absolute is Richard Ovenden, who examined the papers my father loaned to the Bodleian library in Oxford and observed a “deep process of collaboration”. His analysis is a perfect match for my recollection: “A rhythm of working together that was incredibly efficient … a kind of cadence from manuscript, to typescript, to annotated and amended typescripts … with scissors and staplers being brought to bear … getting closer and closer to the final published version.”" << Editing the days rushes. Cut and paste (literally, or cut and staple). I wonder if you could have a book crew similar to a film crew? Dump the auteur?

Newstatesman Morning Call

>> "I think what we're observing is, in part, a struggle within our political culture to deal with upsets or hiccups that aren't anyone's fault, and a process that is almost reliably unpredictable. The mass manufacture of vaccines is famously one of the most difficult and sensitive processes in pharmaceutical engineering. The coronavirus vaccines are being produced at scale all around the world, with manufacturers having to exactly replicate complicated conditions without the vast collection of data that would typically go into moving a process from one factory to another, in a ramp-up that would usually take years." <<

How the Europe and the United States Lost COVID-19

>> "Francois Balloux, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and computational geneticist at the University College of London, goes further. “It’s not obvious that different measures taken in different places have clearly led to different outcomes,” he says. “There’s a lot of idiosyncrasy, and I think it’s simplistic to say that the countries that have controlled or eliminated the virus did things extremely differently. If you just list, for instance, the interventions that places like New Zealand or Australia have implemented, they’re not drastically different — in stringency nor duration — than in some other places. The country that had the strictest lockdown for longest in the world is Peru, and they were absolutely devastated. I think the slightly depressing message,” Balloux says with a sigh, “is that there is not just a set of policies that will bring success and can just be applied to any place in the world.”" <<

Information is surprise | plus.maths.org

>> "Shannon stayed clear of the slippery concept of meaning, declaring it "irrelevant to the engineering problem", but he did take on board the idea that information is related to what's new: it's related to surprise. Thought of in emotional terms surprise is hard to measure, but you can get to grips with it by imagining yourself watching words come out of a ticker tape, like they used to have in news agencies. Some words, like "the" or "a" are pretty unsurprising; in fact they are redundant since you could probably understand the message without them. The real essence of the message lies in words that aren't as common, such as "alien" or "invasion"." << Ties in with Chaitin's stuff around randomness

audio notes - Noah.org

More ideas for using SoX. I tried the noise removal line on a recording made with the built in mic on a laptop and it works OK but makes you sound a bit like a clanger. Playing with parameters might help.

Sox in phonetic research - Phonlab

Some useful SoX commands explored with examples.

Synthesizing simple chords with sox – We Saw a Chicken …

Expands on the SoX man page for the synth sub-command

GitHub - dechamps/audiotools: Random potpourri of docs and tools related to audio measurement and analysis.

Use of SoX commands from within python/numpty scripts to analyse test signals.

HOWTO: SoX audio tool as a signal generator | Audio Science Review (ASR) Forum

SoX comes with a full install of Slackware. Some of the example command lines in man sox are generating errors when run in the actual installed sox so I'm googling.

Rob Pike on Twitter: "/bin/true used to be an empty file. The shell would open it, do nothing, and exit with a true status code." / Twitter

The inevitable professionalisation of computer programming depicted in one short thread.

Yeah. Maybe on Youtube, only the extremes exists. Sweden has thousands of remot... | Hacker News

This comment encapsulates why I waste time on HN so well.

Covid: The inside story of the government's battle against the virus - BBC News

Some stuff I didn't know in here.

Covid-19: France, Germany and Italy suspend AstraZeneca vaccine - BBC News

>> "However, experts say the number of blood clots reported after the vaccine were no more than those typically reported within the general population. About 17 million people in the EU and the UK have received a dose of the vaccine, with fewer than 40 cases of blood clots reported as of last week, AstraZeneca said." << 40 cases from people who had been vaccinated I presume. The signal here is so close to noise in our age group that it is difficult to understand how have a rational basis for un-suspending the vaccine. I'll be turning up for my second AZ shot on the dot!

Why are Climate models written in programming languages from 1950?

>> "In this post, I discuss the question of wether climate scientists lost the “bad software sweepstakes”. I’ll cover the basics of climate models, what software is commonly used in climate modeling and why, and what alternative software exists." << Well, the maths behind the atomic bomb dates from around 1938 (Bohr-Wheeler model) and the maths behind the Apollo mission dates from (arguably) eighteenth century France with some help from seventeenth century England. Climate models are *maths* that is evaluated step by step.

Triangulating Math, Mozart and ‘Moby-Dick’ - The New York Times

>> "As she explained in her Gresham application, a key motivator of her interest in that position and, about 15 years earlier, in joining the faculty of Birkbeck — a college offering working Londoners evening courses — was that “at the heart of both organizations is something to which I am deeply committed: giving people from all backgrounds access to education and learning." <<

Freddie Gibbs and Moxie Marlinspike decrypt the modern American Dream

>> "Real change happens in private. It’s something we’re used to in our ordinary life. And as more of our ordinary life moves online, I think privacy is something to bring with it." <<

Ai Weiwei answers 20 questions from his son, Ai Lao

>> "He told me about the order he was presenting them in. He had printed them out, used scissors to cut strips, with one question per strip, used his lottery machine to mix the strips, and then pasted the strips one by one on a sheet of paper. This would make the order random. Now it was my turn to write the answers." <<

The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram

>> "In an era more profoundly organized by Big Tech than our own elected governments, the new culture to be countered isn’t singular or top-down. It’s rhizomatic, nonbinary, and includes all who live within the Google/Apple/Facebook/ Amazon digital ecosystem (aka GAFA stack). With digital platforms transforming legacy countercultural activity into profitable, high-engagement content, being countercultural no longer means being counter-hegemonic. What logic could possibly be upended by punks, goths, gabbers, or neo-pagans when the internet, a massively lucrative space of capitalization, profits off the personal expression and political conflict of its users?" << To quote Monty Python 'there's more to this redistribution of wealth than meets the eye' (Denis Law, Denis Law riding through the glen...)

Translating Newton’s Principia – Newton's Principia: Translation, Beneath the Surface

>> "It makes no sense to ask for a translation of The Principia as Newton might have written it had he lived today. But there are problems with trying to transport the reader back to the time of Newton. We are all changed by technological advance. We have amazingly accurate watches, but one of the ways in which Newton timed the fall of balloons, dropped from a height in St. Paul’s cathedral, was to use a pendulum." << My phone is synchronised to network time so long term accuracy guaranteed (as long as I remember to charge the battery). My old digital watch which cost less than a tenner is good to a second a month or so which is about 3 parts in 10 million. I can measure the width of the path to my house using satellites.... This book looks interesting but it is eye wateringly expensive compared to the University of California's edition. I also have Chandrasekhar's re-write into modern notation.

World Cities Database | Simplemaps.com

The free list is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licenced. So I'll need to link to this site if I use it.

012. I Shipped, Therefore I Am - Hardcore Software

>> "I recall sticking to my ground only because it seemed so obvious and even trivial. In hindsight, I had no experience with how off-the-rails things can go by making small changes toward the end of a project. These would be changes in the mother of all files, WINDOWS.H. I really can’t believe I advocated making that change. I’m pretty sure later in my career when sitting in the other seat I never would have accepted it so late." << If I understand this correctly it was good the author stuck to his guns!

Basic Bread Recipe — Based Cooking (https://based.cooking)

Quite fussy, and always far to much yeast and far to quick a rise, but nicely presented.

Pasta sauce — Based Cooking (https://based.cooking)

Not sure what 'based' cooking actually is but this is a nice minimal Web site with simply presented recipes. Mostly meat though. This tomato sauce recipe could do with some vague time/readiness indications like 'fry onions on a low heat for about 5 minutes or until translucent'. That's just me though.

The Rebel Physicist on the Hunt for a Better Story Than Quantum Mechanics - The New York Times

>> "The idea is to scan a new swath of desert by levitating a hundred-nanometer-size glass bead with a swirling web of electric fields inside a high-tech refrigerator and monitoring the bead’s motion with lasers. The whole steel-and-glass contraption, when finished, will stand about four feet high and, if it works as planned, will either detect history-making Whoops! as vibrations of the bead in excess of what quantum mechanics predicts, or otherwise lop two more orders of magnitude off the desert, shrinking its size from that of the United States to that of New York City, as measured from the top of the Bronx to the bottom of Staten Island." << Small physics perhaps providing a lower bound

Excel Never Dies - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

Apart from the strange spammy meme gif at the top this looks to be a good analysis of why MS Excel is so widely used in most organisations.

Covid-19: School rapid test cannot be overruled, says minister - BBC News

>> "The Royal Statistical Society is one of the bodies which wants to see all positive tests in schools confirmed with a PCR test to avoid such cases." "Prof Sheila Bird, a member of the society's Covid-19 Task Force, has said false positives were "very likely in the present circumstances" because the large-scale testing, coupled with the low infection rates, meant the number of false positives could outnumber the true positives." << I think this is referred to as 'an unforced error'.

COMPOST Issue 01: The Salt of the Cosmos by Tal Milovina

>> "In his theorizing of augmented reality, Nathan Jurgenson suggests that there is no “IRL”: the digital and the physical co-constitute each other, with the world away from keyboard (“AFK”) shaping digital infrastructures and online socializing informing our physical selves. The internet, in other words, is wrapped up in the ongoing affective crises of capital and empire." << A new entry in my personal periodic table of the elements.

Decoding Cardano's Liber de Ludo Aleae - ScienceDirect

Historical exploration of Cardano's Book of Games of Chance. All the common tricks and cheats with some early probability theory mixed in.

The ergodicity problem in economics | Nature Physics

>> "Famously, ergodicity is assumed in equilibrium statistical mechanics, which successfully describes the thermodynamic behaviour of gases. However, in a wider context, many observables don’t satisfy equation (1). And it turns out a surprising reframing of economic theory follows directly from asking the core ergodicity question: is the time average of an observable equal to its expectation value?" << Just waiting for the Keynes quote in the HN comments on this article...

Week 43, popular, wide-ranging, functional

>> "Part of the problem of social media is that there is no equivalent to the scientific glassblowers’ sign, or the woodworker’s open door, or Dafna and Jesse’s sandwich boards. On the internet, if you stop speaking: you disappear. And, by corollary: on the internet, you only notice the people who are speaking nonstop." <<

Ian McEwan on Bach, Philip Roth and Living an Episodic Life ‹ Literary Hub

>> "...abandon the keyboard and take up a pen (black ink is best) return to the notebook that is the essential companion to the screen, and write this word: contains. At speed, write down, impulsively, everything that next section or chapter must or might contain. Then cook dinner." << I like the cook dinner part... I do find that writing down things to do or mention sort of clears them out of the mind and stops a lot of churning.

Girl & Computer: Reflecting on the journey that got me to where I am today. | Medium

>> "I wrote programs in BASIC, though for the life of me I can’t remember what any of them did. The programs that were the most fun, though, were the ones whose assembly I painstakingly transcribed, hunting and pecking with my tiny fingers, from the back of magazines — pages and pages of letters and numbers I didn’t understand on any level, and yet they made magic happen if I got every single one right." << This is how a lot of people got started then (early/mid 80s). So how do they get started now?

Random: Probability, Mathematical Statistics, Stochastic Processes

Statistics one stop shop (theory, data sets, apps). Needs a proper look.

This guy holds the world record for collecting spreadsheets

>> "Fischman collects spreadsheet software—boxes full of disks, manuals, and other accoutrements that were standard fare in every office until we started downloading most of our apps. It’s a surprisingly rich hobby, given that the 1980s and early 1990s saw booming competition among software giants, startups, and even unexpected contenders such as Boeing (yes, the aircraft company)." << Niche hobby. Wonder if he has a copy of !Eureka.

Daemon - a small and powerful daemon supervisor, with (e)logind support, for babysitting our PipeWire's user target daemons - Testing Wanted

Random reference to 趙無極 in a technical support forum. Amazing.

Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works - Solomon - 2021 - Hastings Center Report - Wiley Online Library

looks important. Via HN

Slackware 14.2 ssd and trim on encrypted drive howtos:hardware:ssd - SlackDocs

enable trim for encrypted root by adding the --allow-discards option to the cryptsetup step in /boot/init-tree/init script. Two instances. Then edit /etc/luks/luks.conf to set issue_discards = 1. Reboot, all good. OK for small SSDs which you have not written random numbers all over.

Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation - CHM

>> "And as Pat tells the story, Dennis had submitted his thesis. It had been approved by his thesis committee, he had a typed manuscript of the thesis that he was ready to submit when he heard the library wanted to have it bound and given to them. And the binding fee was something noticeable at the time . . . not an impossible, but a nontrivial sum. And as Pat said, Dennis’ attitude was, ‘If the Harvard library wants a bound copy for them to keep, they should pay for the book, because I’m not going to!’ And apparently, he didn’t give on that." << That quote about progress depending on unreasonable people springs to mind... The flat-topped unbearded Ritchie on his motorbike (Dad on pillion) is a nice image. This article gives an overview of the state of computer science research before there were computer science departments. I like the idea that Godel/Church/Turing defined the border between computable/non-computable and then the compsci types started to explore inside the boundary to see if they could measure complexity of computation needed...

How Was It Typed – Dennis Ritchie Thesis

>> "I paid the technical typist in our department to type my PhD thesis on her IBM Selectric typewriter. After it was complete, I noticed that she had omitted an entire paragraph of one of the proofs in an early chapter. To correct this would have required her to retype a large chunk of the thesis, so I let it pass. During my defense, the external examiner remarked that this particular proof was a little terse..." << Well, at least the external had read the proofs! I have dim recollections of a *huge* mechanical typewriter with an enormous bank of keys with mathematical symbols on being used by one of my teachers. Middle school so somewhere around 1968 or a year either side. A lot of low circulation specialised review books in the 80s had hand written mathematical formulas and typeset text, I presume that compromise came from the wide use of camera ready copy. It worked for us. The linked page investigates the unusually good and consistent typing of Dennis Ritchie's thesis. The authors hypothesise that Ritchie modified the vertical line spacing of his electric typewriter to allow half line spacing in a consistent way and chose a slightly more dense typeface so that the half line space provided a good super/subscript appearance. Has a hacker style feel to it and therefore seems plausible!

Decreasing levels of coronavirus across the UK - BBC News

>> "The figures, for the seven days up to 19 February, reveal around 421,300 people in the community with the virus." << Call it half a million, that means one mutation every two days on average. The vast majority of those mutations will cripple the virus. The odd one now and again will give rise to a new variant. I'll feel a lot happier when this clocks down to 50k infected or less..

musicForProgramming("62: Our Grey Lives");

>> "Episodes 1 to 61 of Music For Programming (the first ten years of the series) were edited to equal lengths and played simultaneously. The resulting cacophony was passed multiple times through an array of analogue and virtual signal processing devices until the centre-of-gravity between antagonism and attractiveness was found." << I've had ideas like that. A handful of recordings of Goldberg Variations (say) started together (no change in length or playback speed) and just see how long it takes to descend into chaos.

Authentic Injera (Ethiopian Flatbread) - The Daring Gourmet

>> "Injera is traditionally made out of teff flour, the world’s tiniest grain and also one of the earliest domesticated plants having originated in Ethiopia and Eritrea (where injera is also widely consumed) between 4000 and 1000 BC." << My local 'modern parent' health food shop has bags of teff. Might try these...

Former CNN star Soledad O'Brien becomes a media critic - Los Angeles Times

>> "O'Brien has tried to make “Matter of Fact” an alternative to the Beltway-centric Sunday shows, with reports that focus on people affected by issues rather than depending on pundits or elected officials." << We used to have that in the days of mass-audience television in UK. Seems to have become fragmented...

Astead W. Herndon - The New York Times

Articles that are not all about un-named sources in Washington.

Patrick Wright

>> "Who could resist the discovery that Johnson had once written to the philosopher Hannah Arendt in New York, inviting her to sit with him and enjoy the sea view from the promenade at Sheerness?" << Having grown up in a (economically) depressed seaside town, I'm probably going to have to read this. Might wait for the paperback in June - might even be able to buy it in an actual bookshop.

Ancient Roman Farmer’s Meal – Flatbread and Moretum – Historical Italian Cooking

unleavened flatbreads - basic

Reconstructing the Menu of a Pub in Ancient Pompeii - Gastro Obscura

>> "According to Dr. Anna Maria Sodo, director and archaeology officer of the Antiquarium of Boscoreale, in the Vesuvian area alone, only 40 percent of the urban dwellings of the working poor and 66 percent of the middle-class homes had fixed hearths for cooking. To meet this high demand, there were at least 80 food and beverage outlets at Pompeii (the site has yet to be fully excavated)." << Just Eat / Deliveroo would have had a field day if they could have invented pushbikes... Seriously similar figures for poor areas in Victorian cities especially London.

Choose Boring Technology

Summary: running a new business is hard. Keep the actual technology as simple as it can be and base it on things that are well understood.

Quantum Diaries

>> "So when a computing-heavy project came up at Fermilab, Sieh opted to replace the more expensive IBM and SGI hardware and the software that came with those machines. The new software she decided on was a version of Linux distributed by software company RedHat Inc., mostly because it was free and had the option to be installed in batches, which would save a ton of time. At the same time, RedHat’s Linux was simple enough for scientists to install at their desktops on their own. The computing project, running on Linux, was successful, so the laboratory kept using it." << And they have been dropped in the poo twice now in 20-odd years... But there are ways out (Springdale and the new ones)

Lessons from A Pandemic Anniversary - Insight

>> "There were three pieces of information which, in combination and properly interpreted in context, told us a lot: the WHO repeating China’s cover-up of human-to-human transmission on January 14th; China locking down all of Wuhan on January 20th and admitting the existence of human-to-human transmission; and a paper in New England Journal of Medicine authored by scientists from China, many from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, and some from Hong Kong." <<

FactCheck: how reliable are the UK’s coronavirus lateral flow tests? – Channel 4 News

>> "...The schools minister replied: “No, about a third have false negatives”. He added that pupils would get two tests each, three days apart." << Assuming that 3 day gap means tests could be independent events (dodgy) then one ninth chance of two false negatives in a row... depends on prevalence in neighbourhood how much transmission continues... Interesting to see how that pans out.

Seeing Like a State: A Conversation with James C. Scott | Cato Unbound

>> "The crown’s interest we resolved through its fiscal lens into a single number representing the revenue yield that might be extracted annually from the domainal forests. The truly heroic simplification involved here is most evident in what was left out of this utilitarian and minimalist conception of the forest. Missing were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for crown revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been of great use to the population but whose value could not easily be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch, fruits and nuts as food for people, domestic animals, and game. Twigs and branches as bedding, fence posts, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots for making medicines and for tanning; sap for resins, and so forth." <<

In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics - Slow Boring

>> "But even more so, social media incentivizes the wrong kind of reading. Today you read someone from a rival school of thought in order to find the paragraph or sentence that, when pulled out of context and paired with a witty Twitter quip, will garner you lots of little hearts. I’m as guilty of doing this as anyone. A lot of very smart people have poured a lot of time and energy into making you want to collect those little hearts." <<

Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

>> "From the outset I want to note that agriculture, especially subsistence agriculture, typically is not planting simple mono-cultures of a single crop. I opted to focus in this series on bread because it is usefully simple for a number of reasons. It lets us focus on wheat and barley, which are relatively simple crops to talk about but also (in the broad sweep of Eurasia where they were the primary crop) provided the majority of calories for the vast majority of people. Vegetables, fruit, meat, other animal products (along with sauces and things derived from them) were in the ancient Mediterranean generally expensive things, used by most normal people (read: the not-super-rich) to flavor a meal that still consisted mostly of bread, when they were available at all. That’s because (as we’ll see) wheat and barley were efficient and cheap to grow at scale." <<

Opinion | California Is Making Liberals Squirm - The New York Times

>> "Writing this piece, I found myself thinking about Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist.” Kendi’s central argument is that it is policy outcomes, not personal intent, that matter. “Racist policies are defined as any policy that leads to racial inequity,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2019. “And so, for me, racial language in the policy doesn’t matter, intent of the policymaker doesn’t matter, even the consciousness of the policymaker, that it’s going lead to inequity, doesn’t matter. It’s all about the fundamental outcome.”" << I'm reading this as: sod the statues, build council houses where they are needed and build them now.

Data & Society — Data Voids

>> "In Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be Exploited, Golebiewski teams up with danah boyd (Microsoft Research; Data & Society) to demonstrate how data voids are exploited by manipulators eager to expose people to problematic content including falsehoods, misinformation, and disinformation." <<

Man in a MacIntosh | Books | The Guardian

>> "It was necessary to know every alley, every cul-de-sac, every arch, every passageway; every school, every hospital, every church, every synagogue; every police station, every post office, every labour exchange, every lavatory; every curious shop name, every kids' gang, every hiding place, every muttering old man . . . In fact everything; and having got to know everything, they had to hold this information firmly, to keep abreast of change, to locate the new position of beggars, newsboys, hawkers, street shows, gypsies, political meetings." << There is too much in reality. You have to select and focus.

The Unofficial Way To Migrate To AlmaLinux From CentOS 8 - OSTechNix

Remove branding, install Alma repository package, merge and reboot. I'd be removing the CentOS kernels myself as well.

News | Rocky Linux

Nothing new about any kind of ISO release or build logs or anything for the Rocky Linux RHEL recompile. Nice t-shirts.

Index of /almalinux/8.3-beta/isos/x86_64/

Alma Linux RHEL recompile is downloadable as a beta release tracking RHEL 8.3. Boot, minimal and 'everything' ISOs available

Matt Genge Uses Dust From Space to Tell the Story of the Solar System | Quanta Magazine

>> "Round and multicolored like tiny marbles, micrometeorites are as distinctive as they are ubiquitous, yet they escaped notice until the 1870s, when the HMS Challenger expedition dredged some up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. (On land, the accumulation of terrestrial dust tends to overwhelm and conceal the cosmic kind.)" << 10 particles per year per square metre means needle in haystack? So yes somewhere windy and clean like the Antarctic. They must be on the top end of the particle mass distribution though.

How to insert text before the first line of a file? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

(echo "some text" && cat filename) > filename1 && mv filename1 filename works for me as (echo $(date) && echo "" && cat file) > file1 && mv file1 file

The Curious Wavefunction: Victor Weisskopf and the many joys of scientific insight

>> "Along the way, he got nearly every factor of two and pi wrong. At each of these mistakes there would be a general outcry from the class; at the end of the process, a correct formula emerged, along with the sense, perhaps illusory, that we were participating in a scientific discovery rather than an intellectual entertainment. Weisskopf also had wonderful insights into what each term in the formula meant for understanding physics. We were, in short, in the hands of a master teacher." << Makes me feel slightly better about the odd slip

In their own words: Trinity at 75 - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

<< "In addition to the true initiator, there was a simulated initiator of the same size which was used to mock up the assembly program. Morrison amused us with a version of the slight of hand game, 'pea under the shell,' where he would confuse us by exchanging the real ball with the simulated initiator." << Don't try this at home folks...

Download the Atkinson Hyperlegible Font | Braille Institute

Sans font that increases the differences between letters. Via HN.

Bill Evans Webpages: -Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard 1961, Scott LaFaro, Paul Motiam

>> "Exactly forty years ago this summer, on June 25, 1961, three young jazz musicians - the piano player Bill Evans, the bass player Scott LaFaro, and the drummer Paul Motian - went down to a New York basement, smoked, yawned, joked a bit, and got to work." << Audience? Summer Sunday afternoon in a basement before air conditioning. Must have been into the music.

Broken Time - Believer Magazine

>> "By now I’ve heard so many different interpretations, in such a far-flung variety of settings, that a Platonic ideal of the melody resides in my mind untethered to any actual performance. It’s as if “Nardis” were always going on somewhere, with players dropping in and out of a musical conversation beyond space and time." <<

A consensus is forming among the commentariat that Keir Starmer is not up to the job. Does it matter?

>> "The other world is occupied by people who get their news in short bursts on music radio; who absent-mindedly check the news on the BBC home-page or app before getting on with an online shop or the day’s work; who might have Radio 4’s Today programme on but don’t really listen to it. This is the world where general elections are won and lost." << Closer to Scandinavia or closer to US? Collective provision and higher tax or low tax and thin state?

Coronavirus: South Africa's COVID lockdown may have created 'herd immunity' | World News | Sky News

"In the densely packed townships that surround the major cities, residents were forced to queue for essentials like food and social security payments, creating what Dr Hsiao described as "new networks for the spread of the disease". Social distancing was practically impossible on plots where 20 or more to people are often forced to live at close quarters." Actions can have consequences that were not predicted

Opinion | Expelling Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Just Crazy Talk - POLITICO

"Nowhere in the Constitution—and this is excellent news for freshly sworn [...] does it stipulate that a House member must have the mental capacity to cook on all four burners." I cherish opening paragraphs of this nature

Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance | by Tomas Pueyo | Medium

Nice phrase to describe lockdown until very low level of cases then implement test/trace/isolate properly. And close borders. We did not do this.

Debian Buster install in old computer | by Miguel Sampaio da Veiga | Hacker Toolbelt | Medium

You can use the Debian netinstall image OFFLINE to provide a very thin CLI system with just the Standard Linux Utilities. Then follow parts of this guide to get Xorg and a light weight window manager going along with nmtui.

How to be clear – gilest.org

>> "Understandably, writing separate texts for every different audience means more work, and most people don’t have time for that, so they skip it. But that’s often the cause of the failure." << The 'that's' in the second sentence makes me backtrack to the paragraph above to check what the subject is. How about "Not writing separate texts is often the cause of the failure". Now I can link that to previous point without backtracking.

AlmaLinux Beta Release Update – Almalinux Blog

Sometime next week so by 5th / 6th Feb apparently for beta release, I assume that will include an installer.

Community Update - January 2021 | Rocky Linux

Rocky Linux installer test and repositories Feb 28th target date.

Send This to Anyone Who Wants to Know WTF Is Up With GameStop Stock

>> "“Shorting” is a bet that a company's stock will become less valuable. This is done when an investor sells shares of a stock that they do not own. Essentially, they sell shares of a stock at a certain (high) price in the belief that sometime in the near future the price of that stock will go down. They will then be able to buy the stock at the lower price to “cover” their shorts, “closing” the deal and pocketing the difference between the price they sold at and bought at as profit." << Isn't a promise to supply that they are selling at the high price? To sell actual shares, would they not need to provide the share certificates or the digital weightless equivalent? I have always found this stuff mystifying.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML | Hacker News

The HN discussion for the link that should be below

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML – Terence Eden’s Blog

>> "Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility)." << Basic html with simple forms good. Still need to sort something for devices with out of date TLS libraries - emergency unencrypted mode?

Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus - Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus

History of the personal computer told through a television series. Some interesting links and podcasts.

The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books

>> "By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population." << Senate as per 2018 in this interesting essay.

Space Telescope Shows Galaxy-Size Bubbles Over the Milky Way | Quanta Magazine

>> "The structure was so obvious that it barely seemed necessary to describe it in writing. But “Nature wouldn’t accept [us] simply sending a picture and saying, ‘OK, we can see this,’” Predehl said. “Therefore, we did some analysis.”" << Results that are clear enough to stand by themselves with little interpretation are rare!

Old compilers and old bugs [LWN.net]

>> "The relevant bug, though, was reported in 2014 and fixed in November of that year. That fix was seemingly never backported from the (then) under-development 5.x release to 4.9.x, so the 4.9.4 release did not contain it. Interestingly, versions of 4.9.4 shipped by distributors like Red Hat, Android, and Linaro all did have the fix backported, so it only affected developers not using those versions." << Compiler bug fixed in later version. Most of the popular and large distributions who kept the original version *backported* the fix, thus masking it. Only came to light with less popular and less patched distros

Re: Making Debian available

>> "So the current situation is that we make an active effort to produce two different types of installation media: one that works for all users, and one broken for most laptops. Some sort of FOSS version of an anti-feature. Then we publish the broken version on the front page, and hide very carefully the version that works." << Debian-dev mailing list. Priceless.

Biden’s Inaugural Speech Won’t Unite the Country. Here’s What Could. - POLITICO

>> "Biden presents an arresting possibility. He can revive a brand of politics that once again revolves around concrete things, rather than symbolism. If he passes ambitious legislation for infrastructure spending, as he promises to do, these will literally be concrete things. For the beneficiaries of such spending, which would include many Trump voters, this will matter more than, to cite a random example, an argument over whether Neera Tanden, his nominee to be budget director, has said too many mean things about Republicans on Twitter." << My preferred form of 'concrete thing' in the UK would be houses. Lots of houses. Streets of houses. For rent. For sale. Whatever. Would drive change more effectively than any amount of twittering.

BBC - Travel - Stromatolites: The Earth’s oldest living lifeforms

>> "From a scientific point of view, the microbial thrombolites use sunlight to photosynthesise for energy and to precipitate calcium carbonate (limestone) from the freshwater springs that bubble from the underlying aquifer. Groundwater flow that is low in salinity and nutrients and high in alkalinity is integral to their growth and survival; any alteration challenges their existence." <<

Off the rails: Trump mainlines election conspiracies as Oval Office descends into madness - Axios

>> "Trump's new gang of advisers shared some common traits. They were sycophants who craved an audience with the president. They were hardcore conspiracy theorists. The other striking commonality within this crew was that all of them had, at one point in their lives, done impressive, professional, mainstream work." << Strange absence of self-critical reflection and worrying inability to evaluate the likelihood of arguments?

Rise of the coronavirus cranks - Quillette

>> "...COVID-19 has now killed more than 0.1 percent of the population in 20 countries, including Britain, but that has not stopped COVID sceptics claiming that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is 0.1 percent or lower. This would obviously require more than 100 percent of the population to have had the virus and is a particularly odd claim coming from sceptics who believe that most cases are false positives." << A free-marketeer who has reservations about the May lockdown works through the more extreme ideas that are currently fueling rather sad protests outside a few overstretched hospitals. Judging by the absolute silence here in Brum this morning, close to March 2020 levels, I think most ordinary people outside the bubble are just keeping their heads down and staying at home.

'Rent-a-person who does nothing' in Tokyo receives endless requests, gratitude - The Mainichi

>> "Morimoto got a job with a publisher after finishing a graduate degree, but found it hard to fit in and left. His boss said sarcastically, "It doesn't matter if you're here or not." When he was troubled that he couldn't find anything to do on a long-term basis, he was inspired by a person who did nothing but get treated to meals. Not long after, he set up a Twitter account." << This is the kind of thing that happens when you have limited social bonds and a very low birth rate and no permanent migration. Via the ever bonkers HN

Now that he’s been banned we can say it: Donald Trump was a genius at Twitter - Guardian

>> "Banning Trump from Twitter is a little like banning E coli from your large intestine: even if he never comes back, the memories will be enough." << metaphor resonates

North Wales seaside photos resurface after 40 years - BBC News

Martin Parr's predecessor? The first image of the bus shelter in Llan is *very* newbo

The Polar Vortex now collapsing, is set to release the Arctic Hounds for the United States and Europe, as we head for the second half of Winter 2020/2021

Cold weather in January possible. I like the maps.

Pluralistic: 09 Jan 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Makes a nice point, but very US centric

Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler, an App That Drew Trump Supporters - The New York Times

>> "Amazon Web Services supports a large share of the websites and apps across the internet, while Apple and Google make the operating systems that back nearly all of the world’s smartphones. Now that the companies have made it clear that they will take action against sites and apps that don’t sufficiently police what their users post, it could have significant side effects." << A formerly distributed network has become centrally managed through the (lightly regulated) actions of the market economy. Interesting.

Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research | Hacker News

Top comment on HN suggests coordinating versions of packages used...

[95] Groundhog: Addressing The Threat That R Poses To Reproducible Research - Data Colada

"The problem is that packages are constantly being updated, and sometimes those updates are not backwards compatible. This means that the R code that you write and run today may no longer work in the (near or far) future because one of the packages your code relies on has been updated. But worse, R packages depend on other packages. Your code could break after a package you don't know you are using updates a function you have never even used." Snapshot package repositories and copy to isolated local storage?

Georgia Senate Results: Trump Hurt Republicans - The Atlantic

>> "Democrats worry that their weakness in rural areas hurts them in the battle for control of the House and, especially, the Senate, where Republicans have established a stranglehold over seats in sparsely settled, mostly white and Christian interior states. Many Republicans in turn fear that they are surrendering areas with the most voters and the most jobs: Biden this year won 91 of the country’s 100 largest counties, and though he won only about one-sixth of the nation’s counties overall, his accounted for fully 71 percent of the country’s total economic output, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution." <<

Summary of Przeworski: Democracy and the market -- Adam Brown, BYU Political Science

>> "The key puzzle: Democracy makes winners and losers. Why would the losers choose to comply with the results? The key: democratic institutions help give political actors a "long time horizon. . . They allow them to think about the future rather than being concerned exclusively with present outcomes. . . . Political forces comply with present defeats because they believe that the institutional framework that organizes the democratic competition will permit them to advance their interests in the future"" << Adam Przeworski: "Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections". So what happens if a constituency does not actually care about the future?...

Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art - The Ringer

>> "If Henri Bergson and St. Augustine had collaboratively edited a 1930s issue of Weird Tales, this is the text they might have produced. It’s strange that it was written by anyone. That it was written by the guy who figured out how to cook Pringles is no more startling than any other possibility." << Just has to be on the list later this year (too many books on the go now).

Jane Jacobs Was Right: New Ideas Need Old Buildings

>> "Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings." << It is all about the rent

LibreSSL languishes on Linux [LWN.net]

>> "The LibreSSL project has been developing a fork of the OpenSSL package since 2014; it is supported as part of OpenBSD. Adoption of LibreSSL on the Linux side has been slow from the start, though, and it would appear that the situation is about to get worse. LibreSSL is starting to look like an idea whose time may never come in the Linux world." << One wonders if OpenSSL is getting any paid development to squash the bugs.

In retrospect: Between Pacific Tides | Nature

>> "A number of writers have observed that what made Between Pacific Tides revolutionary was that its organization is ecological rather than taxonomic: it categorizes animals according to habitat, not phylum or family. But the organization is also what you might call subjective or experiential: the order of presentation, and the information the text offers, anticipates exactly what a novice — someone like Hazel, just arriving at the shore — would notice and wonder about." << Copy on order from (of all places) Canada - cheapish copy of the 3rd edition with the Steinbeck forward.

Matlab/Octave - Differential Equation | ShareTechnote

Useful page. Working through each line of the code with the manual to (re)learn octave syntax. I used mathcad years ago.

Letting Go of Nostalgia Urbanism — GS

>> "The city was falling apart and these old buildings were in terrible condition. Lofts of that era were cold water walk ups with leaking roofs and none of the designer touches or investment banker fueled renovations. That all came much later. Judd was willing to live there during the dirty, neglected, crime ridden version of New York, not the fully fluffed New York that gradually surfaced over the decades." << Plenty of (watertight but shabby) old offices and units in the inner ring road in Brum. How do we get the artists and writers (and scientists and computationists) into those? Rents are bonkers because of asset value inflation and the hope that the land underneath can be sold for development. A canal warehouse that used to be artist studios pre-millennium has stood empty for 20 effing years.

Meet the new breed of cabinet minister – too rubbish to fail | Gavin Williamson | The Guardian

>> "Outside cabinet, he has succeeded in driving the supremely pragmatic headteachers’ union into launching a legal action against the government for requiring most primary schools to open this week." << Tory education ministers trying to shame teachers into acting against their interests is nothing new, but the headteacher thing did strike me as being a new level of disharmony. I also expected summer activities (possibly supported by the army of DBS wielding sport science undergraduates and coaching students in our universities and colleges) and even a coordinated approach to online learning. Fat chance.

Adam Kucharski (@AdamJKucharski): "Why a SARS-CoV-2 variant that's 50% more transmissible would in general be a much bigger problem than a variant that's 50% more deadly. A short thread... 1/" | nitter

>> "Why a SARS-CoV-2 variant that's 50% more transmissible would in general be a much bigger problem than a variant that's 50% more deadly. A short thread..." << Deadliness is linear, transmissibility is exponential.

The Deep Story of Trumpism | The Atlantic

>> "You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. “It’s scary to look back,” Hochschild writes. “There are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time.” Now you’re stuck in line, because the economy isn’t working. And worse than stuck, you’re stigmatized; liberals in the media say every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And what’s this? People are cutting in line in front of you! Something is wrong. The old line wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a promise." << We like our narratives as a species. This work by Arlie Russell Hochschild, an academic sociologist, looks to be interesting.

Little Italy in 1920 in six painterly postcards | Ephemeral New York

Photos worked over with pigments, or paintings after a photograph, or autochromes? I've seen similar of UK subjects from early 20thC

ZIRP explains the world - Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

>> "Maybe it's because I was an economics major or a currency trader, but I think of money as a living thing. Not as a sentient, conscious being, but more like one of those prehistoric, single-celled organisms. Or maybe sperm swimming towards an egg. Just millions and trillions of tiny little living things driven solely on biology towards some unforeseen source of nourishment; some instinctual goal." << And a biological system reacts to changes in the environment in complex and difficult to predict ways, and the each system is a part of the environment for other systems...

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

>> "If capitalism is driven by a search for profit, the food delivery business confuses the hell out of me. Every platform loses money. Restaurants feel like they're getting screwed. Delivery drivers are poster children for gig economy problems. Customers get annoyed about delivery fees." << Delivery company quoting below the cost of the actual pizza to drum up business. Pizza baker just orders lots of pizzas for delivery to themselves and sends... dough! Via HN. PS: I'm not convinced that capitalism is about solving problems. I suspect that it is about making money sometime (e.g. when the delivery firm is bought for its network of customers). It was a surprise to me that a delivery service can list a restaurant without the permission of the restaurant owner.

#Brexit and the story of Paddy’s Two Rules | BEERG Brexit Blog

>> “Son, we will be back in there next week, and every other week for the next two years. We will be arguing about what the agreement means. The bosses think it means one thing. The lads another. Always was that way, always will be. I could do with another sandwich. Ask your man to bring us one. And another couple of pints while he’s at it. Might as well call it a day.” << Our future?

Robert Caro writes, and waits, during the COVID-19 outbreak | WBMA

>> "The 84-year-old Caro jokes that he has a long history, like many writers, of social distancing. [...] Spring is usually a prime season in New York for literary events, but all have been canceled and the Caros are staying in their apartment when possible, letting one of their children bring them groceries." << The children being no spring chickens. Business as usual.

Archaeologists uncover ancient street food shop in Pompeii | Reuters

>> "ROME (Reuters) - Archaeologists in Pompeii, the city buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 AD, have made the extraordinary find of a frescoed hot food and drinks shop that served up the ancient equivalent of street food to Roman passersby." << Food mostly meat but little detail on the hot drinks other than soup and wine amphora being found. No espressos!

12-minute Mandelbrot: fractals on a 50 year old IBM 1401 mainframe

>> "When I found out that the Computer History Museum has a working IBM 1401 computer[1], I wondered if it could generate the Mandelbrot fractal. I wrote a fractal program in assembly language and the computer chugged away for 12 minutes to create the Mandelbrot image on its line printer. In the process I learned a bunch of interesting things about the IBM 1401, which I discuss in this article." << Industrial archaeology for modern era.

Learning to Play the Chaos Game - Comfortably Numbered

>> "The theory is the theory of Iterated Function Systems, which is almost exactly what it sounds like. Start with a set of affine functions (affine because that’s what camera-projector-systems do) and repeatedly apply them to a set of points, taking the union at each step. Regardless of where you start, you will soon end up with a fractal structure which is the fixed point of the system. Why fractal? —because the self-similarity comes from the infinitely-nested composition of the affine functions." <<

College Cuts in the Green Mountain State | by Dan Chiasson | The New York Review of Books

>> "“Data” seem to many in higher education to be unassailable: they tend to end the conversation. Yet the question with data is always how their parameters have been set by living, inevitably interested, actual humans, and how they are then, in turn, expressed in narrative form. What comes out depends very much on what was put in." << Speaking as a STEM chappie through and through - I teethed on vero-board - there should perhaps be an idea of the University as a place for learning the whole range of what has transpired.

Is This a Coup? Introducing The Counter - Insight

>> "Today, each faction has its own Walter Cronkites, its own establishment, its own media, and not even objective crises like the pandemic or the climate crisis have the power to make these public spheres intersect. There is no longer any arena in which the two camps can do political battle on equal footing. There can be only dunking." << Maciej Ceglowski's 'counter' tp an essay by Zeynep Tufekci. I like the idea of making space for a counter argument.

Linux Force DHCP Client (dhclient) to Renew IP Address - nixCraft

systemctl restart network.service systemctl status network.service On CentOS 7 these commands flush and renew the IP address from the wifi router for when my wifi card has a wobble

Finger-pointing abounds as states get fewer vaccines than planned | Ars Technica

>> "One reason why government is so easy to criticize is that when your job is serving 100% of the people, many of whom express no interest in your help, it's easy to find our failures. Apple more or less gets to choose which 300 million customers they serve. They can price some out, they can not put stores in their communities, they can simply not make the product you insist you want (clue for the over the top Apple critics - maybe their products are unappealing to you because Apple doesn't want to deal with you). But government gets none of that." <<

Heinz Brandenburg on Twitter: "Unionists like Starmer would really need to start thinking about how to reach young Scottish voters, who are around 70% in favour of independence. And understand why they are in such numbers on that side, which has to do wit

This twitter thread suggests an important point: people under 30 in Scotland have grown up with the Holyrood parliament, and have never seen a Westminster government that represented more than a tiny minority of Scots electorate...

Footing the COVID-19 bill: economic case for tax hike on wealthy

>> "Governments shouldn’t be worried that raising taxes on the rich will harm their economies when deciding on how to pay for COVID-19. Our new research on 18 advanced economies shows that major tax cuts for the rich over the past 50 years have pushed up inequality but have had no significant effects on economic growth or unemployment." <<

How and why I stopped buying new laptops | LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

>> "All this means that there’s no environmental or financial benefit whatsoever to replacing an old laptop with a new one. On the contrary, the only thing a consumer can do to improve their laptop’s ecological and economic sustainability is to use it for as long as possible. This is facilitated by the fact that laptops are now a mature technology and have more than sufficient computational power." << Just about viable on X61s with 4Gb RAM and Gnome/Linux

So Long, Mama Irene | Spitalfields Life

>> "There was this button and buckle factory that stood empty for years, inhabited by Italian squatters, they had no money and no place to stay, and I used to go to wild parties there. They came to London to study circus and on Summer evenings there used to be juggling, fire-eating and rollerskating in the middle of Calvert Avenue." << I want the juggling without the street crime. Cheap places to live for artists and musicians without the gentrification. How do we get there?

How Ad Fraud became a bigger business than credit card fraud

>> "If we look at the situation by ad fraud rates, we see that digital advertising sees fraud rates (conservatively) at 10.5%. This compares to 0.08% credit card fraud, 0.16% insurance fraud and 6% in health care fraud. Put another way, fraud rates in digital advertising are now more than six -times higher than the insurance sector, 1.8 times higher than health care and 13 times higher than the credit card sector." << US figures I think. 1 in 10 Internet ads by value not being actually shown to anyone is sort of not a surprise and actually a bit smaller than I'd thought. Most of the ads on news sites that follow me around are for things I'm not interested in and I just ignore them.

[CentOS-devel] Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About…

>> "This isn't how Free / Open Source projects work. It is not normal for a community that exists precisely to provide a particular feature, is "acquired" by a company that claims to have the community interest at heart, and then leverages this power to replace the product with something that provides value to the company, and does not directly compete with company." <<

Joint Fermilab/CERN statement on recent CentOS changes | News

The CentOS thing. And so it goes...

[CentOS-devel] Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About…

The CentOS thing. Centos-Dev mailing list post provides insight into the effect of no-support subscriptions.

Build Your Own Text Editor

1000 lines of C to make a small basic text editor. Sounds OK. Tempted to add some astro functions to generate daily reports.

TVO - More information on the plant disturbance at Olkiluoto 2

INES 0 events are not usually reported in this level of detail. If we decide to use nuclear power for base-load in UK, then this is the kind of transparency needed. Via HN

The Science of Brute Force | August 2017 | Communications of the ACM

>> "A popularized summary of Ramsey Theory is that "complete chaos is impossible."26 More concretely, Ramsey Theory deals with patterns that occur in well-known sets such as the set of natural numbers or the set of graphs. For example, coloring the natural numbers with finitely many colors will result in a monochromatic Schur triple a + b = c." <<

End-user programming

>> "We'll start by describing three qualities we think are important for end-user programming: embodiment, living systems, and in-place toolchains. We’ll survey the prior art and try to illuminate what has made this problem so immensely difficult. Then we will document the experiments we’ve done at the Ink & Switch research lab in adding automation and customization capabilities to a digital sketchbook application." <<

Where do I go now that CentOS Linux is gone? Check our list | Ars Technica

This post summarises the situation for people (like me) who do not have to worry about supporting software for the best part of a decade...

[CentOS-devel] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

I sometimes wonder about the processes large companies use to make decisions. Do the decision makers - even when technically expert - really understand the base level detail that a given change and the timing of the change will affect?

How Neutral Theory Altered Ideas About Biodiversity | Quanta Magazine

>> "Imagine a population of 10 birds: one red, one green and all the rest brown. These colors aren’t harmful or helpful, so all the birds have the same chance of reproducing. Then a tornado kills six of the brown birds, purely by chance. Now half the population is brown, a quarter is red and a quarter is green. A random event caused a major shift in diversity. That’s genetic drift." << That random variation in small populations thing again...

Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will | Palladium Magazine

>> "Technologist Kevin Kelly has pinned this simulative aspect on technology’s function as a kind of nascent biological entity with its own agency. The “Technium” as he refers to it, is “the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture.” While some would interpret technology to be a driverless, chaotic system made all the more destructive by its attachment to a market economy, Kelly argues that it’s part of a system acting on its own vague accord, interacting with humans as a way to further itself." <<

display - How to enable sub pixel hinting? - Ask Ubuntu

gsettings, subpixel rendering, gconf, gnome set subpixel rendering from the command line, all the keywords

if... then... else... had to be invented | ericfischer/if-then-else · GitHub

Nice historical examination of the if, then, else statement. All this stuff had to be invented, because programs are basically for communicating intent or process to other human beings.

In Search Of ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’ | Spitalfields Life

>> "Watching Sparrows Can’t Sing again recently, I decided to go in search of Cowley Gardens only to discover that it is gone. The street plan has been altered so that where it stood there is not even a road anymore. Just as James Booth’s character returned from sea to find his nineteenth century terrace gone, the twentieth century tower where Barbara Windsor’s character shacked up with the taxi driver has itself also gone, demolished in 1999. Thus, the whole cycle of social and architectural change recorded in this film has been erased." << Cities, as willy the shake famously put it, are scenes on a stage where we act our lives. The scene changes come quick these days.

“A damn stupid thing to do”—the origins of C | Ars Technica

>> "At the computing center, these paper tapes were clipped to a clothesline and executed one after the other during business hours. This line of pending programs became known as the “job queue,” a term that remains in use to describe far more sophisticated means of organizing computing tasks." <<

From codpieces to zeppelins: here's to the best of Brexit | Brexit | The Guardian

>> "Brexit remained a Rorschach blot in which people continued to see what they wanted to see for months and years after they should have known better." << Not sure if this article can be classified as satire as it is essentially true!

The Busy Beaver Game Illuminates the Fundamental Limits of Math | Quanta Magazine

>> "That’s because BB(27) corresponds to the maximum number of steps this 27-rule Turing machine would have to execute in order to halt (if it ever did). If we knew that number, we could run the Turing machine for exactly that many steps. If it halted by that point, we’d know the Goldbach conjecture was false. But if it went that many steps and didn’t halt, we’d know for certain that it never would — thus proving the conjecture true." << BB(27) is incomprehensibly huge of course and completely unknown.

Easy Flatbread Recipe | A Virtual Vegan

Try with the organic white. 300g flour/250g water/45ml olive oil/10ml honey/salt as wanted/spice, herbs as wanted. Mix, knead 3min, leave to rise, split into 6 balls, roll out into 6 breads. Heat skillet, cook each bread 3min one side until golden, flip 3 min other side. Should have bubbles and slight charred bits, generally golden. Wrap in towel to keep warm while rest cooked. Serve with dips etc

How many GNU/Linux users are needed to change a light bulb? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

>> "...5 who say that the burnt bulb is an upstream issue that doesn't belong to the distro. There's an open bug on the bulb's developer mail list...." << Funny and close to home!

Collections - Artvee

Searchable collection of high resolution images of 2d art posters and book illustrations, all copyright cleared.

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Interactive demonstration of the effect of aperture and pinhole size on the image for various arrangements of lens and detector. This interactive page actually does not make the fan come on - low weight!

TK News by Matt Taibbi

Taibbi doing the substack thing.

Where Did Combinators Come From? Hunting the Story of Moses Schönfinkel—Stephen Wolfram Writings

>> "...in 1920 Moses Schönfinkel presented what he called “building blocks of logic”—or what we now call “combinators”—and then proceeded to show that by appropriately combining them one could effectively define any function, or, in modern terms, that they could be used to do universal computation." << And, amazingly... >> "After his death, the rough ordinary people who shared his apartment burned his manuscripts for fuel (WWII was raging). The few Soviet mathematicians around 1940 who had any discussions with Schönfinkel later said that those mss reinvented a great deal of 20th century mathematical logic. Schönfinkel had no way of accessing the work of Turing, Church, and Tarski, but had derived their results for himself." << ...What a 'man in a room' idea for a novel

The Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction of Dec 21, 2020

One hour window just after sunset for closest approach stage, small telescope or binoculars for best effect. A hill looking West is a good idea.

Small Data, Big Implications - Insight

>> "These small studies cannot tell us the proportion of transmission that occurs indoors, but they highlight how it occurs: droplets and aerosols being carried through the air. Clearly, the closer you are to the person, the more likely you are to get hit But equally clearly, air flow and the positioning of people are huge variables, too." << Airflow in two closely studied cases of interior infection

No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report | Daniel Lange's blog

Ooops. Handy commands strings and grep.

Red wall — JL Partners

500 participants in a poll in the (in)famous red wall constituencies. Random sampling error on top level categories ~4% either way so treat with caution.

UK Polling Report | On the importance of the “Red Wall” seats

>> "The whole point of James’ argument was that there were seats that in terms of their make up (class, economy, education, age structure and so on) you would expect to vote Conservative, but that they actually voted Labour because of a cultural, historical and social hostility towards the Tories. These weren’t seats full of horny-handed sons of toil, they were seats that were or had become more affluent but yet not become Tory." << Analysis of the Red Wall - JL Partnerships poll of voters in the so called red wall constituencies. With 500 participants, the random sampling error on broad categories is something like 5% and any kind of cross-tabs are... brave. So much noise.

Arecibo Collapse - both Camera Angles Syncrhonized - YouTube

Coming down... ...57 years of science way beyond the original designed function (radar examination of stratospheric plasmas). Still used for some pulsar timing observations and asteroid radar. The only dish that had a high power transmitter.

Arecibo Observatory Construction Photogallery

Going up...

The road not traveled - Slow Boring

>> "Genetic analysis shows it was this outward flight from New York that seeded the larger national outbreak. But back in late March when people were leaving the city and the epidemic was still largely NYC-centric, all that happened was people were given vague recommendations to self-isolate for 14 days if they went somewhere new." <<

10 Secret Trig Functions Your Math Teachers Never Taught You - Scientific American Blog Network

>> "...the haversine may have been more important in more recent history, when it was used in navigation. The haversine formula is a very accurate way of computing distances between two points on the surface of a sphere using the latitude and longitude of the two points. The haversine formula is a re-formulation of the spherical law of cosines, but the formulation in terms of haversines is more useful for small angles and distances." << Via HN. All about minimising the arithmetic in the days of log tables.

Opinion | Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties Like Mine - POLITICO

>> "Rural people want to share in America’s prosperity, but the economic divide between rural and urban America has widened. Small-business growth has slowed in rural communities since the Great Recession, and it has only worsened with Covid-19. As capital overwhelmingly flows to metro areas, the small-town economy increasingly is dominated by large corporations: low-wage retailers like Dollar General or agribusiness firms that have no connection to the community." << Similar issues in UK with small industrial towns (not food production so much). Perhaps we just don't need small places?

[Article] The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter | Harper's Magazine

>> "But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." << From 1964. Via Daringfireball. Could have been written yesterday.

Dijkstra Was Wrong About 'Radical Novelty': Metaphors in CS Education | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM

>> "It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. This is the situation that is characteristic for the "radical" novelty." <<

The Constitution of Knowledge | National Affairs

>> "Who can be trusted to resolve questions about objective truth? The best answer turns out to be no one in particular. The greatest of human social networks was born centuries ago, in the wake of the chaos and creedal wars that raged across Europe after the invention of the printing press (the original disruptive information technology). In reaction, experimenters and philosophers began entertaining a radical idea. They removed reality-making from the authoritarian control of priests and princes and placed it in the hands of a decentralized, globe-spanning community of critical testers who hunt for each other's errors. In other words, they outsourced objectivity to a social network. Gradually, in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the network's norms and institutions assembled themselves into a system of rules for identifying truth: a constitution of knowledge." <<

Opinion | The Rotting of the Republican Mind - The New York Times

>> "What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree." <<

Roy Wild, Van Boy At The Goodsyard | Spitalfields Life

The artless transparency of Mr Wild's account is refreshing.

When should we create abstractions instead of duplication? – Philosophical Hacker

>> "Psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman won a nobel prize partially because he taught us that expert judgement doesn’t form simply because we’ve been doing something for a long time. For that judgment to form, we need specific feedback loops,5 loops that are often absent for many programmers who have an average job tenure of 18 months or who use tools and languages that change quickly enough to inspire fatigue or who work for companies that undergo radical changes as they grow from tiny startups to large, proper businesses." << There won't be another COBOL in 30 years time (unless it is Java).

Secrets Of The Ice

Glacier chasing archaeologists!

Is probability real? (Part 1) | Aram’s Lair of Mad Science

Kolmogorov complexity and entropy.

Where Is America's Most Influential Journalist, Matt Drudge, Coming From? -- New York Magazine - Nymag [2007]

>> "Drudge’s own influence stems from the fact that he loves news, in a way that great newspeople do, and his news sensibility is extremely sophisticated. When he was a kid, he figured out that though thousands of people get murdered, only a few murders are news. One role model seems to be Rupert Murdoch, whom he praises for understanding that newspapers have to be fun." << So far as I can see, he got there first when the Web took off.

Who Really Runs The Drudge Report? - Tablet Magazine

>> "She believes he no longer runs the site. “It’s a totally different publication,” she told me. What was the biggest sign? I asked. “Oh, every line of the page,” she replied. “It’s just so obvious that he’s not interested, that somebody else is doing it.” This was just one of several theories volunteered by people who had been close to Drudge, though none was forthcoming with proof. Drudge himself did not respond to multiple requests for comment through both the email address listed on The Drudge Report and an intermediary." << Matt doing a runner with the money is entirely in keeping... I took heart from his table based raw html page pulling in millions a decade ago even though my political orientation is somewhat... different.

THE UNIX COMMAND LANGUAGE | The UNIX Command Language

>> "A program is generally exponentially complicated by the number of notions that it invents for itself. To reduce this complication to a minimum, you have to make the number of notions zero or one, which are two numbers that can be raised to any power without disturbing this concept. Since you cannot achieve much with zero notions, it is my belief that you should base systems on a single notion." <<

Peter Foster on Twitter: "Right. What a week in #Brexit. First talk of Barnier pulling the plug; and today a big flap over fish. So where are we as M. Barnier boards the Eurostar for London? Well, you guessed it - still stuck on the fundamentals. Why? Wel

Still talking past each other.

Uses This / Taylor Dow

"If you use Google or Pinterest for your reference photos, your drawings will take on a generic quality, like clip art. If you use Flickr, you will absorb some of the candid dissonance of actual human beings taking photos of their actual dog with the flash turned on. Another way to think about it is that with Pinterest, your references are more likely to be in the current zeitgeist so your art is going to look a bit like everyone else's. Flickr is solidly uncool, which makes it cool." A new and interesting take on the way we (can) form part of an algorithmic feedback loop. A revealing aside from a creative type who obviously is thinking things through a lot.

My list of magic numbers for your turkey day enjoyment

Surprising how many of these deal with duration, time and scheduling. The author kept herds of servers working for various large companies since the Internet became an everyday thing. ping 2130706433 works on Fedora 33 to my endless amusement.

Brexit negotiation delay - is it due to indecision, or is it by design? - Jon Worth Euroblog

>> "Now anyone thinking straight about the actual practical implications of a Deal or not by 1st January will be shaking their heads – for any Deal struck now would be a better one for the UK than one struck under duress in January when the ports are blocked up, supermarkets are missing some products, and companies are in danger of going to the wall – and all in the middle of a pandemic." << Bubble games as it always has been

Poles Apart “The Lightning Field,” by Walter De Maria | NYT

>> "As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled as if stars were perched on them. There were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. The poles were still slender, but they’d acquired bulk, solidity. There were far more of them than we had thought, and it became obvious that they were not scattered randomly but had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it, you could see a dozen more, glowing, like a fence that let everything through—everything being the sunlight and the wind. The sun was sinking fast and everything began to change. The silver poles glowed goldly. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were none, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first." <<

Sue Lowden Stands by Chicken Health Care Barter Plan - CBS News

>> "Bartering with your doctor is not a new concept," said Feldman. "There have been numerous reports as to how negotiating with your doctor is an option and doctors have gone on the record verifying this." << Try that in UK and prepare to forfeit your deposit

Electoral politics on an unfair playing field - Slow Boring

>> "I analyzed the correlation between union membership (available at the metro area level from Hirsch & MacPherson) and shift in vote share between 2016 and 2020. Even after controlling for education (Biden improved on Clinton’s margin in more educated areas), urbanity (suburbs swung to Biden), and race, union density is still correlated with Biden overperformance. If a metro area had 32% unionization (like Colorado Springs) rather than 2% (like McAllen, TX), Biden’s margin over Trump would have increased by about 2 percentage points." << The scatter diagram beneath this quote looks remarkably random to me. Just wondering if this eclectic empiricism is actually verging on p-hacking.

Low interest rates are a curse — we need massive fiscal imprudence - Slow Boring

>> "The deficit exists as a purely abstract political football. Members of Congress who want to object to something can cite the deficit as the reason for their objection. The public might agree with them or they might not, but either way, nothing bad is actually going to happen. And it’s left our politics a bit unglued." << Matthew Yglesias on his blog/mail list on substack

Misfit Tractors a Money Saver for Arkansas Farmer - AgWeb

>> “The problem with modern equipment is depreciation; you can’t get in front. Let’s say I pay $350,000 for a new, major-brand tractor, run it for five years, and then sell for $100,000. How do I come out anywhere near ahead with these commodity prices? What I’m doing now with equipment is getting expenses down on my farm, and that ties directly into the ultimate goal on my operation: Improve my ground and have some extra money to buy more land.” << Real world depreciation with actual numbers

Balancing Epistemic Humility and Prior Knowledge - Insight

>> "Public health people have faced a frustrating conundrum: How do we work, how do we take sensible steps, when every shred of success, every shard of luck, and every improvement becomes a weapon against reality and against sensible precaution? It’s hard." << Zynep Tufeci nailing it again, I'm just staying in!

Monday Master Class: Rapid Note-Taking with the Morse Code Method - Study Hacks - Cal Newport

>> "In the end, your article will be a sequence of dots and dashes (like a Morse Code message!), effectively breaking down the reading into a useful sequence: big idea!, support, support, big idea!, support, support, support…" << Neat idea. The 'processing' section is good too

Andrew Wyeth and the artist's fragile reputation

>> I believe he fits into a larger tradition of modernist creativity that goes beyond the medium of painting, one that’s also found in novels and movies – a tradition of attending to the overlooked. << 'Attending to the overlooked' sounds like a theme of certain kinds of work. The walking writers, and some photographers.

Chris Date and the Relational Model - Simple Talk

>> "So much always depends on happenstance, doesn’t it-the chance, or good luck, of being in the right place at the right time. I’ve explained how I first came across Ted’s ideas in 1970, and I’ve said, or at least implied, that they seemed right to me because of their mathematical foundation. I’ve also talked about how we (my colleague in IBM Hursley and myself) were thinking about how to incorporate Ted’s ideas into PL/I." <<

Retrotechtacular: A Desktop Computer From 1965 | Hackaday

More on the Olivetti Programma 101. Hackaday page has details of the magnetostriction based memory (amazing) and circuits with links to videos including the one with the designer's quote.

Olivetti Programma 101: at the origins of the Personal Computer

>> "I remember that one day I received a call from Roberto Olivetti: "I want to see you for a complex project I'm building". It involved the design not of a box containing mechanisms and stamped circuits, but a personal object, something that had to live with a person, a person with his chair sitting at a table or desktop and that had to start a relationship of comprehension, of interaction, something quite new because before then computers were as big as a wardrobe. With a wardrobe we don't have any relationship: in fact the most beautiful wardrobes disappear in the wall. But this wasn't a wardrobe or a box, this was a machine designed to be part of your personal entourage." << Mario Bellini, architect and designer, 2011 quoted in "Programma 101 - memory of the future". Getting my head around a device that did not support trigonometry or any special functions (c.f. Dartmouth BASIC a decade before). But it was popular and relatively cheap for the time. Discrete silicon transistor logic?

Common Errors in College Math

>> "Some teachers are hostile to questions. That is an error made by teachers. Teachers, you will be more comfortable in your job if you try to do it well, and don't think of your students as the enemy. This means listening to your students and encouraging their questions. A teacher who only lectures, and does not encourage questions, might as well be replaced by a book or a movie. To teach effectively, you have to know when your students have understood something and when they haven't; the most efficient way to discover that is to listen to them and to watch their faces. Perhaps you identify with your brightest students, because they are most able to appreciate the beauty of the ideas you are teaching -- but the other students have greater need of your help, and they have a right to it." << UK: we cover this kind of stuff in initial teacher training. Supervised teaching practice often focuses on questioning methods, knowing the students, and allocation of time to struggling students. It is basic stuff. Link via HN

Election Night with Biden’s Data Guru

>> "But “our stuff was always much, much more pessimistic than the public stuff,” Siegel said, explaining that her department believed public polls were underrepresenting non-college-educated voters and underappreciating a partisan nonresponse effect during the pandemic. Democrats were more likely to be home and to answer the phone." << Again.

The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done : New York Times

>> "To support his emphasis on knowledge-worker autonomy, Drucker introduced the idea of management by objectives, a process in which managers focus on setting out clear targets, but the details of how they’re accomplished are left to individuals. This idea is both extremely consequential and rarely debated. It’s why the modern office worker is inundated with quantified quarterly goals and motivating mission statements, but receives almost no guidance on how to actually organize and manage these efforts." << Which leads to gaming of the objectives. Part of the whole 'perverse incentives' thing

Chef Jerry Corso Gets Cooking with Soffritto | Seattle Magazine

Carrots celery and a red onion cooked in olive oil until a sauce formed (45 min mentioned). Used as base for bean and for tomato sauces.

Why Obama fears for our democracy

>> “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” <<

The great university con: how the British degree lost its value

>> "In 1992, the John Major government made two pivotal decisions. The first was to turn all the UK’s polytechnics into universities, nearly doubling their number. “Polys” had been local teaching institutions that offered both shorter, more practical courses and “degree equivalents”. They existed to offer an alternative to university. Few of their staff did research. But the Major government wanted more university students without having to fund expansion. In one linguistic stroke, they could have them." << In the process we somehow lost a lot of employer involvement in courses, both content and assessment. It was not just renaming, there was a shift in culture.

Boris Johnson has secured a questionable legacy | Financial Times

>> "One is fisheries. Yet “fishing and aquaculture” generate just 0.04 per cent of UK gross value added. Another is the “level playing field” in competition, to which the prime minister committed the country in the “political declaration” agreed with the EU last year. Mr Johnson now argues that the UK should be treated just like Canada, instead. But the EU’s imports of goods from the UK are 10 times those from Canada. Inevitably, the two are not viewed in the same way." << A lot of the shellfish and inshore catch is - believe it or not - exported to the EU and will therefore be subject to tariffs.

public static void whaaaat? – ceos

>> "For those without Facebook access, the question amounts to “What does each part of public static void main(String[] args actually do?”." << BCPL -> C stuff. Decisions made half a century ago echo down the decades...

BetterExplained – Math lessons that click

Need to look at this one closely as tied to the slightly strange US approach to mathematics as a series of topics in silos like 'calculus' and 'trig'. Looks nice though.

Dominic Cummings’s 2020 vision | Robert Hutton | The Critic Magazine

>> "The government can offer estimates of the economic benefit of its trade deal with Japan, for instance, but it has nothing to say about the likely impact of leaving the European single market. This is not because there is no one in the Treasury capable of performing such a calculation, or because there are no economic models for what happens when a country introduces barriers to trade. The only reason that the calculations haven’t been published can be that the government doesn’t want to know the answers." << One assumes that a model for leaving the single market would be much more complex than the one for Japanese trade, simply because our trade with EU is so much larger. A complex model implies wider range of uncertainties. But even so the lack of anything is notable

An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms

This is excellent! Does fourier synthesis of a time dependent waveform really well. Has a go at the complex domain as well.

Dominic Cummings Is Gone. But What Does His Reign Tell Us About Boris Johnson? | HuffPost UK

>> “The weird thing about him as prime minister, as foreign secretary and as mayor is that he has no ideas. He doesn’t really have any plans of what to do with power. There’s no Johnsonism. There’s no creed, there’s no set of convictions. He’s a brilliant wordsmith and his greatest genius is PR, but there really isn’t much else.” << Seems to be a theme about these populists

We need less powerful languages - lukeplant.me.uk

>> "But precisely because of this, it is also the least useful, because it is the least structured. Even search doesn’t work reliably because of typos and alternative ways of expressing the same thing. The longer I do software development involving databases, the more I want to tightly constrain everything as much as possible. When I do so, the data I end up with is massively more useful. I can do powerful things when consuming the data only when I severely limit the power (i.e. the freedom) of the agents putting data into the system." << Structure is great but what if you don't know what the categories are yet? Baby and bathwater with a 'premature concreteness'.

Knowable Magazine

Looks like solid writing that draws from a larger set of publications.

Fact or fantasy? Tales from the linguistic fringe

>> "It’s a really widespread misconception that language is mainly written language. It goes with the idea that written language is better than spoken language, that it’s pure and grammatical, and if you don’t write in fully grammatical prose, it proves that you’re stupid." <<

Prediction: Trump will resign, Pence will pardon him | TheHill

>> "Fourth, Trump will resign from the presidency before his term officially ends, and he will be pardoned by Vice President Pence, when Pence becomes president. A presidential pardon by Pence would not offer protection from cases originating in states, but those cases will be far more manageable if they are not sunk into a morass of federal cases that only a federal pardon can protect him from." << This possibility had occurred to me as well based on the Ford/Nixon thing. I reckon around 11:30 on the last day of the term as a last ditch 'plan b'.

Pedro da Costa Felgueiras, Lacquer & Paint Specialist (Japanner) | Spitalfields Life

>> “My earliest memories are of Sunday church, and of the gold and coloured marble, which I found quite overwhelming. But everybody else wanted new things – because they were surrounded by old things, they wanted plastic.” << That was mid-60s to 70s over here. wood panelling was painted over in bright Dulux white and primary plastic colours with heavily patterned wallpapers was everywhere. Things go round...

Surge in Covid cases tests Sweden’s go-it-alone approach | Financial Times

>> “So far Sweden’s strategy has proven to be a dramatic failure,” said Lena Einhorn, a Swedish virologist and prominent critic of its strategy. “Four days ago we had eight times higher cases per capita than Finland and three and a half times more than Norway. They were supposed to have it worse off than us in the autumn because we were going to have immunity.” << This thing is hard. No easy answers, but might have been better had Europe (in the wide definition) followed Asian countries.

How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet

There is much more to this than I thought there was. Comes back to walking a graph with extra logic as often with software processes.

How Fishers Became Data Scientists to Strengthen Their Marine Protected Area | Hakai Magazine

>> "Enlisting locals also made logistical and economic sense for the researchers. “All fishers know how to drive a boat,” says Markovina, explaining that the savings on charter fees allowed project funds to stay in the community. And, of course, fishers brought a depth of local knowledge—navigation skills and where to find fish, for instance—to the team. Understanding how and where to lay a rock lobster net on the ocean floor translated well to deploying the BRUVs. The fishers were extremely reliable and professional research partners, says Markovina." << Hakai Magazine is some kind of foundation funded publication about coastal waters. Looks OK. Above seems a logical move to me...

Blitzed cities still deprived 75 years after war

>> "Daniel Todman, professor of modern history at Queen Mary, University of London, says this shows a pattern of places that were poor before the war continuing to be poor decades afterwards." << No causal link, simply that poor people tend to end up living in cheaper housing near strategic targets.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC): "There are folks running around on TV blaming progressivism for Dem underperformance. I was curious, so I decided to open the hood on struggling campaigns of candidates who are blaming progressives for their problems. Almo

>> "I was curious, so I decided to open the hood on struggling campaigns of candidates who are blaming progressives for their problems." << Ms Ocasio-Cortez mentions a meager and insufficient budget figure that is way above the maximum that UK candidates for the Westminster parliament are allowed. I am so glad that there are limits to election expenditure in the UK. I know that they are imperfect and that they can be gamed, but at least there is an anchor point.

Philip Pullman Returns to His Fantasy World

>> "Every day from roughly 10 until 1, Pullman sits at his desk in a monkish study at the top of the house and produces three pages, longhand. He has written three pages a day ever since he started writing. Habit, he is fond of saying, has written far more books than talent." << Now is that three pages as printed (1,200 words roughly) or three A4 wide lined (nearer 600). Good quote.

The Linux Commands Handbook

Tour of coreutils plus process monitoring and control and env/xarg. Nicely presented with example outputs. One web page means accessible and printable EXCEPT for the use of images to show the appearance of the terminal in some of the worked examples. No ALT or TITLE or DESC tags.

One Square Inch

>> "One Square Inch of Silence is very possibly the quietest place in the United States. It is an independent research project located in the Hoh Rain Forest of Olympic National Park, which is one of the most pristine, untouched, and ecologically diverse environments in the United States. If nothing is done to preserve and protect this quiet place from human noise intrusions, natural quiet may be non-existent in our world in the next 10 years." <<

Silence Like Scouring Sand One of America’s quietest places, and the valiant effort to keep it that way

>> "Cities drown us in sound. Buses grinding gears and motorcycles grumbling, woofers thudding, endless engines combusting, trucks beeping, and street-corner preachers calling down damnation on it all — what does it do to the human being, whose ears evolved as a warning system?" << One thing I will always remember about March 2020 is the silence in the centre of a large city.

WRITING FOR THE INTERNET ACROSS A HUMAN LIFETIME

Not sure about the plain text format (I reckon that html will be pretty well supported from now in along with pdf). I like the rss generator in shell and will try to adapt that one for an article feed.

Is a billion-dollar worth of server lying on the ground?

>> "Having recently introduced a "please explain to me what how a | is used in a bash shell" question in my interviews, I am surprised by how many people with claimed "DevOps" knowledge can't answer that elementary question given examples and time to think it out (granted, on a ~60 sample size)." << Pipelines combined with shell parameter expansion and avoiding bashisms could get... complex. Author explains how rapid recruitment leads to tendency to use one kind of cloud provider.

Distraction free writing used to be the norm with technology

I loved my alphasmart but left it with the College when I changed job. Only for input, not good for editing. Cheaper to buy an old Thinkpad and run Linux/*BSD with X and a simple editor.

AI Camera Ruins Soccer Game For Fans After Mistaking Referee's Bald Head For Ball

>> "The AI camera appeared to mistake the man's bald head for the ball for a lot of the match, repeatedly swinging back to follow the linesman instead of the actual game. Many viewers complained they missed their team scoring a goal because the camera "kept thinking the Lino bald head was the ball," and some even suggested the club would have to provide the linesman with a toupe or hat." << This article would be a good reference for convincing white van driver tendency people that AI is not a panacea and that auto-everything may bring issues. Illustrates the shallow part of 'greedy, brittle, shallow, opaque' well.

The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

>> "Dijkstra’s major software projects, the ALGOL 60 compiler and the THE multiprogramming system, had given him a sense that programming was an activity with its own rules. He then attempted to discover those rules and present them in a meaningful way. Above all, he strove to transform programming into a mathematical discipline, an endeavor that kept him busy for several years to come. At the time, these were completely uncharted waters. Nobody else seemed to be devoting their attention to such matters." << We need a history of this second industrial revolution. One that puts things into a perspective.

Pretty CSV viewing on the Command Line

Uses perl and column. Might have bash assumptions.

A Neighbourly Solution to the 'X is Deprecated?!' Conundrum

>> "From my own experiences with Xorg internals, I agree completely. A whole lot of the code there is noticably better than corresponding paths in certain Wayland compositors. There is more thought; domain expertise; engineering and pure elbow grease behind it than you might have been led to believe -- if you have only listened in to the collective moans in various discussion groups." << Refactor the old code to make a smaller X server could be good for legacy projects,

Scientists warn of new coronavirus variant spreading across Europe | Free to read | Financial Times

>> "A coronavirus variant that originated in Spanish farm workers has spread rapidly through much of Europe since the summer, and now accounts for the majority of new Covid-19 cases in several countries — and more than 80 per cent in the UK." << Seeding from returning holiday makers (again). Compare with HK, Korea &c

Cover - GNU AWK

Looks OK as an overview.

awk: BEGIN { ... | Jemma Issroff

>> "Awk is useful for data file manipulation. Already, having used it for a few days only, I wish I had invested time in learning it earlier. My usual workflow when encountering a data file is to import it into Google Sheets and use their builtin functions. If those weren’t enough, I would write little code snippets to somewhat awk..wardly get the information I want. Awk is way more powerful than what I was doing before." << Coreutils for the win

Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method | Hacker News

>> "I would guess that most people reading this are not anywhere close to that level, and likely do not need an advanced note-taking system. They would be better off spending time on their work, rather than spending time perfecting their system. This is especially true now that notes are often digital, and can be searched in their entirety in an instant." << Just text files. Shorthand pad and doodles/maps on A4 printing paper offline. Coreutls allow later analysis to be added as needed.

What if Leave and Remain switched sides? - UnHerd

>> "Elsewhere, Britain has been busily securing a trade agreement with Turkey, a deal worth £20billion that will make it easier for Turks entering Britain." << And so it goes. Loving the Turkish coffee in Stirchley.

Hundred year mistakes | Fabulous adventures in coding

>> "There were several hundred kilobytes of existing C source code in the world at the time. SEVERAL HUNDRED KB. What if you made this change to the compiler and failed to update one of the & to &&, and made an existing program wrong via a precedence error? That’s a potentially disastrous breaking change." << Strange how decisions made decades ago (1970s?) live on in code where the electronics has turned over several times already

Only this government could miss the open goal of free school meals | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guardian

>> "[...]Most of their policies have the half-life of a particularly unstable radioactive isotope. It’s explicitly a government of superforecasters who can’t see up to next Friday. Messaging is now so Dadaist that in the same week that they’re fighting Rashford they leak the tale that they’re planning to abolish quarantine for City dealmakers and hedgefunders[...]" << This is a humourous sketch but, yes, there does seem to be a bit of a lack of any overall picture.

Free Linear Algebra textbook: independent study

A scholar and a gentleman has provided a very rich resource on linear algebra. My plan is to work through the first chapters using the pdf then if happy purchase a dead tree copy off Lulu

Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier – Tate Papers | Tate

>> "Unusually among artists of his generation, Matta-Clark was trained as an architect at Cornell University, where he was taught by some of the most eminent architectural theorists of the era and from where he graduated with a BArch in 1968. Recent scholarship reveals him to have been a far from indifferent student." <<

‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study | Society | The Guardian

>> "It concludes that unlike in the US, climate change is not a culture-war issue in the UK. In Britain, it found that 85% of voters believe climate change concerns us all. The most sceptical group were voters described as “disengaged traditionalists”, where the figure was still 76%. Meanwhile, 79% of all voters say gender equality is a sign of progress." <<

My search for novelist Rumer Godden's famed French summer - BBC News

>> "A terrace gave on to a formal garden, and then beyond that to the greengage orchard, the eating of whose fruit by the narrator is an Eden-like entry into the mysteries of adolescence. And then through a blue door you were by the willows and reeds of the river." << Greengages when ripe are... special. I agree.

The government’s free schools meal fiasco reveals the Conservative Party’s greatest weakness | Prospect Magazine

>> "Between January and September 2020, he said, the food bank in his Harlow constituency gave out 118 tonnes of food—nearly double the tonnage of last year—and nationally, 32 per cent of households have experienced a drop in income since late March." << I think we need kitchens in commandeered leisure centres. A warm meal, no questions asked. >> "The government spent £522 million on encouraging people to Eat Out to Help Out, but apparently cannot find a tenth of that to stop children going hungry. It is a choice to spend the money on pensioners and pizza parlours, not the poor." << No hiding place here I think

‘It’s a superpower’: how walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier | Fitness | The Guardian

>> "O’Mara, 53, is in his element striding through urban landscapes – from epic hikes across London’s sprawl to more sedate ambles in Oxford, where he received his DPhil – and waxing lyrical about science, nature, architecture and literature. He favours what he calls a “motor-centric” view of the brain – that it evolved to support movement and, therefore, if we stop moving about, it won’t work as well." << That's it. Keep moving.

I miss Microsoft Encarta - Scott Hanselman's Blog

>> "My kids can't possibly intellectualize the scale that data exists in today. We could barely believe that a whole bookshelf of Encyclopedias was now in our pockets. I spent hours and hours just wandering around random articles in Encarta. The scope of knowledge was overwhelming, but accessible. But it was contained - it was bounded. Today, my kids just assume that the sum of all human knowledge is available with a single search or a "hey Alexa" so the world's mysteries are less mysterious and they become bored by the Paradox of Choice." << The notebook application was good as well. Copy text and images to your notebook (with references and links back to Encarta) and add your own text. Great for projects

Is Anyone Watching Quibi?

>> "“A thing Jeffrey always says is ‘I’m not a child or mother, but I made movies children and mothers loved. I know millennials better than millennials.’ ” Katzenberg had at times been well served by his intuition, and he remained convinced of its acuity. “I say, ‘Where’s your data?,’ ” Whitman says of their contrasting styles. “He says, ‘There is none. You just have to go with your gut.’ ”" << Randomness is important and there is selection bias. Data can contain an image of the assumptions used in its collection.

No Knead Soft Sourdough Rolls – Weekend Bakery

Halve for 6 rolls. A 1:1 poolish then a main ferment then a rise

In & Out The Eagle | Spitalfields Life

The typography on those posters - especially the grotesque faces - is bonkers but ace at the same time. I can just about remember boxing posters like this being pasted up by men with buckets of paste and brooms.

Meet the Excel warriors saving the world from spreadsheet disaster | WIRED UK

>> "The problem is that executives see a false dichotomy when a flawed or potentially risky spreadsheet is spotted. They tend to believe they can either continue using the spreadsheet as is or upgrade to a formal, bespoke software solution, which will be expensive. But there’s another way: mitigating the risks of the spreadsheet. “They should be thinking about how well they can control that, and what controls we should be implementing,” he says." << End user programming needs to happen somehow, best to devise a framework for it

Working out Covid-19 and the political classes – politicalbetting.com

>> "Meanwhile, armed police burst into a gym that remained open in Liverpool to close it down this week. The feeling of injustice is intense. The evidence that gyms spread Covid-19 is, perhaps surprisingly, absent." << I'd have thought that Merseyside's finest had perhaps other pressing duties. Such as organised crime and drugs trafficking and perhaps a bit of attention to the PREVENT agenda?

The Panic Attack of the Power Brokers The city’s “permanent government” has always built its way out of crisis. But what if it can’t?

>> "If that sounds dire, consider for a moment that veterans of the 1970s crisis are saying that this one could be more threatening than the one the city faced in those days. The urban rot of the 1970s was at the margins; this time, it is the core that is hollowing. Even in the depths of 1977, the year of the blackout and the Son of Sam, Manhattan was vibrant — “a luxury fantasyland,” in the words of one contemporary journalistic account." << Suspect that London will bounce back perhaps at a less geared level. But we shall see.

How The Dude Was Duped By Big Tech

>> "A few days after the author of this article presents the case to a Facebook PR person, the problem is solved. Nobody had reported his website for “abusive” material — just like the film revolves around a kidnapping incident that has never taken place. The website has all this time been incorrectly labelled “by our automated tools” as spam, according to the spokesperson. “Our apologies for the inconvenience.”" << Somehow, the cause being a random glitch in an algorithm seems to make this worse than if someone actually complained.

Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing | by probono | Aug, 2020 | Medium

Acorn Archimedes: 2 second boot up from ROMs. Applications all in one bundle. Built in BASIC provided both assembler and a fairly structured interpreted language that allowed you to write GUI applications (!Genesis multimedia?). And !Draw was amazing.

Crown Prosecution Service solicitor accused of targeting judge ex-wife's lover through work computer systems

>> "Ainge denies five charges of unauthorised access to information under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and one count of stalking. The case continues." << Another database misuse prosecution. By the look of it made worse by the physical stalking element, and again no allegation of data being sold or passed on to interested parties. Trial just starting.

Christopher Strachey

>> 'Work out what you want to say before you decide how you want to say it." (Strachey's First Law of Logical Design) << Sort of an insiders outsider (establishment outrider?). Connected but detached.

No One Lasts Long on St. Matthew Island

>> "At other sites of brief occupation, it’s the same. The earth consumes the beams of fallen cabins that seasonal fox trappers erected, likely before the Great Depression. The sea has swept away a hut that visiting scientists built near a beach in the 1950s. When the Coast Guard rescued the Great Bear crew in 1916, they left everything behind. Griffin, the archaeologist, found little but scattered coal when he visited the site of the camp in 2018. Fishers and servicemen may have looted some items, but what was too trashed for salvage—perhaps the gramophone, the cameras, the champagne bottles—seems to have washed away or swum down into the soil. The last of the straggling reindeer, a lone, lame female, disappeared in the 1980s. For a long time, reindeer skulls salted the island. Now, most are gone. The few I see are buried to their antler tips, as if submerged in rising green water." << The edges show us our future in some ways

Shell Scripting Tutorial by Steve Parker

Looks nice. I like the use of sh so portable.

Saturday Comics about bash and commands

Nicely done small pieces of information about bash commands and related stuff.

ARX, Arthur and RISC OS - Paul Fellows

>> "It turned out, it would boot fine if you left it long enough, but if you didn't turn it off for very long then it didn't reset properly, and this was because the fan on the board was still spinning and the back EMF on the fan was enough power to keep the ARM running. And that's why you've got an ARM in your phone today, it would take no power to keep a 3 micron ARM with 25000 transistors would run for 30 seconds off the energy stored in the fan." << Nice physics question there. Half I omega-squared...

Trump’s money troubles: cutting advertising spend in key states points to problems

>> "By contrast, where is the equivalent to ‘build the wall’ or ‘make America great again’? Those were soundbites that were both positive policy or vision, and played into the rest of his election narrative. This time, his messaging has been all over the place and his behaviour even more erratic that usual – which is not how you get the media to put across election-winning campaign highlights." << Populist regimes need to find something positive to *construct* eventually. They can't really keep complaining about things because at some point, they become responsible for the things. If you think X is wrong, well just change X, you are the government sort of argument.

Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus

>> "Apple painted this target on their own back when they decided they’d be the sole distributor of software for the platform." << User saagarjha on good old HN making an important point about Apple's blocking of aspects of the Telegram messaging application specifically in Belarus. The various opposition groups in Belarus are making use of Telegram to organise apparently. CF Teargas and Twitter by Tufecki earlier

Straight through sourdough with local wheat

>> "Davide Longoni, one of my favorite Italian boulangers, once taught me that you have to “talk” with your grain. “The type, the soil, the weather: learn to understand it”. With this attitude I started working with the stone-ground flour of lavett wheat from the Wieringermeer two years ago. No particularly high protein percentage, but the taste is overwhelming." << 390g/246g (65%) with a local wholemeal wheat. Working on UK local wheats where I can, hard to get though.

Swedish minister tells students to 'get a grip'

>> "It is not acceptable that adults act in any other way than by taking responsibility." << In general, I agree with this. But one has to remember that it is difficult to get people to behave in ways that render them unemployed.

Enough With the passion

>> All the second-years sit back and smile triumphantly. “Excuse me, Tanya,” I say, mouth in a frozen grin, “but I must say a little something about the word passion, and I must say it now, before I burst into spontaneous flame.” She looks around, confused, for the corporate culture from which she has just come has taught her to use the word passion to describe her interest in design. << Bingo. In the UK our somewhat corrosive irony prevents widespread use of this kind of vocabulary, but one hears it now and again.

A Meditation on Space (in Four Parts)

>> "Its interior space still dazzles almost two millennia after its construction, channeling the power and the glory of the Olympian gods to seduce every visitor. The messiness of life is all forgotten in spaces like this. Alas, there are very few buildings that work like this one." <<

Disgraced cop, 55, spared prison term after admitting he abused police systems to snoop on his girlfriend's ex

>> "The Powys County Times reported that he had "dishonourably" left the force after being caught "unlawfully accessing information about the ex-partner of a woman he was in a relationship with" at Aberystwyth Police Station in April and May last year." << Computer Misuse Act usually results in non-custodial apparently so nothing special about the community service order. This is part of the grunge data world. The more low quality data about people that seeps into databases, the more temptation there is to trawl what is there, and the wider the range of people with access.

Last Call for Gumshoes

"For nearly 50 years, a tight-knit group of San Francisco private eyes—intellectual, swashbuckling, anti-authority lefties—practiced their craft in the pursuit of truth and, hopefully, justice." Like the coat. Most of the work is probably boring and slightly sordid however.

5 Bakers on the Advantages of an Old Sourdough Starter | Topic

>> "I think it’s beautiful when people have ancestral sourdoughs. It’s an exciting thing. But all the microbial analysis suggests that when you put sourdough starter [you get] from anywhere in your [own] kitchen, it’ll become your flour, your water, your kitchen. Its microbial origin doesn’t stay with it. It’s always evolving into where it is." << I'd worked this one out as well. 11 generations or so for a yeast organism I think.

WBO — Collaborative whiteboard

Very nice. Just want to save the whiteboards as a pdf.

What Is the NFAC, & Who Is Grandmaster Jay? | Complex

>> "The NFAC is a militia comprised of Black members whose core is believed to be largely ex-military. The group, for the most part, is well run (some use an accidental firearm discharge as an example of its lack of organization), with all of its public actions being coordinated with law enforcement and local governments, which has resulted in no known violence." << 10/10 for the name, but I still think all of this stuff with the hardware raises the stakes too high. I prefer the (current) UK way.

Tom Hollander’s A Life in the Day is quite brilliant.

Echoing another twit, I *really* want that baked porridge recipe. Some aspects of this were 'eeeeww' but others strangely comforting.

Hairy Bikers Spelt Sourdough - Gilchesters OrganicsGilchesters Organics

Just found this when I'm half way through a 'straight through' 100% spelt sourdough using Gilchester's wholemeal spelt. I've noticed the extra sugar and the use of a poolish. So I'm expecting a fragrant tasty and nutritious brick. We'll see.

FAQs on Protecting Yourself from COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission

60 pages of information about aerosol transmission of the virus from a group of scientists in america who think that their public health authority is being a bit slow on information about this mode of transfer. Has links to evidence and detailed discussion.

K: The Overlooked Variable That's Driving the Pandemic - The Atlantic

Superspreaders and cluster-busting.

Seeing Theory

Nice interactive and animated presentation at a Maths level higher than Speigalhalter's book. You can download a (not very visual and quite formally presented) pdf textbooklet as well.

anyone using bwbasic under linux? - Google Groups

This ancient Google groups post contains links to the (64 bit) rpm and deb packages for a compiled version of bwbasic. The rpm package is for Centos 7 but installs fine without dependencies on Fedora 32. The post also details the directive OPTION VERSION "DARTMOUTH" to run as Dartmouth basic - that is the one that started it all.

Max Hawkins - Randomized Living

>> "For the past two years I’ve been letting randomized computer programs decide what I do." << Shades of Georges Perec. Except actually Perec used deterministic processes I think (magic squares and a street map).

Last phase of the desktop wars? | Armed and Dangerous

>> "It's this: Microsoft Windows becomes a Proton-like emulation layer over a Linux kernel, with the layer getting thinner over time as more of the support lands in the mainline kernel sources. The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house." << Been thinking about something like this for some years. Why stay in a saturated legacy market?

Jay Van Bavel on Twitter: "Ok, no need to panic. The door won't open and the elevator won't move. But I use the call button to contact the staff from the elevator. They promise to call a repair man from the elevator company to help us escape." / Twitter

The new normal. This would be science fiction to my PhD student self four decades ago to be positive.

9 Famous Geniuses Who Were Also Huge Coffee Addicts | HuffPost UK Food & Drink

>> "He also had 50 different coffee cups, and he would ask his secretary to select one, and give a valid philosophical reason for his choice." << The fact-check link is dead alas. I like the trollish aspect of this. I'd be citing a colour rotation or a shape criterion myself. Not sure if there always is a *philosophical* reason for small everyday choices.

The fuel of philosophers — Illustrated Philosopher

Coffee graphic. >> "Derek Parfit, was so eager to continue his philosophical work, that he would fuel himself with instant coffee mixed with warm water from an ordinary tap rather than waste time boiling a kettle. He was busy, but not so busy that he could neglect his stimulant." << Big cafetiere and a microwave springs to mind as an alternative.

Like a Thames whale, Boris Johnson has got stranded at Westminster | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guardian

>> "Today, British people were invited to enjoy the spectacle of Johnson shutting pubs – for an hour – and the irony of being hectored that they are “in the last chance saloon” by the very people who herded them back to the saloon and bought them half-price lunches there." << Predictable trolling, but this quote does point up the Janus like nature of current policy. You could in principle be fined £10k for talking to some people in your garden whom you see in the pub perfectly legally later on the same day...

LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 10, 2020 [LWN.net]

>> "BigBlueButton worked out well for LPC, but it must be said that this system is not perfect. It's a mixture of highly complex components from different projects glued together under a common interface; its configuration spans literally hundreds of XML files (and some in other formats). It only runs on the ancient Ubuntu 16.04 distribution. Many features are hard to discover, and some are outright footguns: for moderators, the options to exit a meeting (leaving it running) and to end the meeting (thus kicking everybody else out, disposing of the chat session, and more) are adjacent to each other on the menu and look almost identical. Most worryingly, BigBlueButton has a number of built-in scalability limitations." << But they got it to work for a 600 delegate conference. With some server nursing. In my experience, the installation on a small start up in the US in use by one of my employers works OK most of the time but connections can become slow...

2011:07:18:tune-improve-fedora-fonts-typeface-ubuntu-like-sharp-fonts - blog.andreas-haerter.com - IT, web and nerdy stuff

gsettings command lines useful on Fedora 32 for turning on anti aliasing without installing the tweak tool in gnome shell. Steps 2 and 3 are sufficient to get anti-aliasing enabled for my user session. I'm not bothered about the infinity style fonts. LCD subpixel rendering helps on the small screen.

Farmerama Radio Cereal series

Bread advocacy. 6 episodes and, at the risk of being obvious, food for thought.

Bee Wilson · Flour Fixated · LRB 24 September 2020

>> "In 2009, the average human had access to 498 calories a day from wheat compared with 349 calories from oils, 333 calories from rice and 281 calories from sugar and other sweeteners. In some countries, such as Turkey and France, per capita wheat consumption is a great deal higher and in others, such as Cameroon (where maize is the staple food) or the Philippines (rice), much lower. But it’s striking that wheat consumption has been increasing fast since the 1960s, even in traditional rice economies such as China and Japan. The supply of wheat in China rose from fewer than 200 calories per person a day in 1961 to nearly 600 in 2009. Across Asia, the gradual substitution of wheat for rice has been a near universal marker of economic development." << Via HN. Article mostly about 'plain' flour as used in cakes. World figures include pasta I imagine

A Cryptologic Mystery

>> "After copying and verifying a header in the message, the agent would remove the corresponding page from their secret OTP codebook and add each key digit to each corresponding message digit using modulo-10 arithmetic (without carry). The resulting "plaintext" digits are then converted to text with a simple substitution encoding (e.g, A=01, B=02, etc., although other encodings are generally used). That's all there is to it. The security of the system depends entirely on the uniqueness and secrecy of the OTP codebook pad given to each agent." << Remarkably low tech and old school. Recollect issues with a one time pad being repeated by Soviet cryptographers during end of 2nd world war and the US being able to break those signals (all from embassies) some months/years after.

Human Cost of Dyslexia report: All Party Parliamentary Group for Dyslexia

No stats on a quick skim: was expecting at least a comparison of free school meal recipient percentage with a dyslexia assessment compared with whole school population percentage with a dyslexia assessment. Wondering how I get the crosstabs.

The battle over dyslexia

>> "For Elliott, this is not just a matter of scientific accuracy. He also believes that the current system entrenches inequality, because children from poorer backgrounds tend to be less likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia. “Reading difficulties are real. I’ve seen thousands of kids with reading difficulties,” he told me. “You know what? Very few of the ones I saw in the inner cities, in the council estates, get diagnosed with dyslexia.”" << Must be working on different council estates from the ones my students came from. The record for an art school maths class was 12/15 students in the class with some form of dyslexia assessment. At 16 and up it seems to differentiate by vocational subject field. Whatever the label, people need to find strategies to manage text and printed materials.

AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System - YouTube

Got to dig the mullets. Surprising how much this overview still fits command-line unix. Graphical environments not so much. The other thing is the papers everywhere in huge piles. Then the keyboards - crack of doom when typing fast. Finally, Ken T looks like something out of a Hammer Films production. Must have been good times.

Exclusive: The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially Broke

>> "Over the last four decades, Feeney has donated more than $8 billion to charities, universities and foundations worldwide through his foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies. When I first met him in 2012, he estimated he had set aside about $2 million for his and his wife's retirement. In other words, he's given away 375,000% more money than his current net worth. And he gave it away anonymously. While many wealthy philanthropists enlist an army of publicists to trumpet their donations, Feeney went to great lengths to keep his gifts secret. Because of his clandestine, globe-trotting philanthropy campaign, Forbes called him the  James Bond of Philanthropy." << $2 million assets at age 89 is hardy broke but still an excellent adventure.

A new study from Rwanda is the latest evidence for just giving people money

>> "This is called “cash benchmarking.” The idea is that people often know what’s best for them, and by giving them money, they can spend it whatever way best meets their family’s needs. We should introduce other aid programs only when we can demonstrate that they do more good than cash itself. Sometimes they do; often they don’t." <<

network-manager: Please restore removed init script.

And the Debian project senior members wonder why they find it hard to recruit package maintainers?

Ed Miliband revels in making Boris Johnson look like a second-rate conman | Politics | The Guardian

>> "You could have been forgiven for imagining you were lost in a 2019 time warp. The House of Commons debating the Brexit withdrawal bill, nearly a year after that very bill had been passed. A bill that had been negotiated by the prime minister, declared “an oven-ready triumph” by the prime minister and on which he had won an 80-seat majority at the general election after promising a despairing country that he would “Get Brexit Done”." << Deja Vu all over again... This is almost funny if it wasn't so serious

Coronavirus: The story of the big U-turn of the summer

>> "What has baffled school leaders is why, with almost five months between the cancellation of exams and the issuing of calculated grades, there wasn't a more thorough attempt to test the reliability of results in advance, including with real schools. Ofqual's defence to all of this, according to Mr Halfon, could be summed up as: "Not me, guv."" << This failure of any kind of testing baffled me as well after reading one of the worked examples. Monte Carlo style analysis with simulated schools with simulated pupils comes to mind as a possibility. That feature of the debacle that ended up with C grades turning to U grades as a result of the 'stack ranking' aspect of each school's previous performance adjustment would have stuck out like a saw thumb (or iceberg?). The testing that was done was against *known exam results*.

wttr.in weather in command line with curl/wget or in browser

pure genius. I'm playing around with the forecast formats. I'd like a one line pure text format.

Aram Saroyan and the Art of the One-Word Poem

How short can something be and still be writing as opposed to typographic art? Most of these were produced as posters or art books with images. Aphoristic writing might be enough to float free from the typography.

America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral

This article is applicable to a greater or lesser extent to many Western countries. It is noticeable that Asian and African countries with recent experience of pandemics have got the measure of the beast (2 years, radical change in everyday life, test isolate and treat) quickly.

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science Reading Course Introduction - YouTube

What an *excellent* idea. Still no flattops in evidence.

Interview with Will Kurt on his latest book: Bayesian Statistics The Fun Way | by Federico Carrone | This is not a Monad tutorial

>> "The biggest inspiration for this book was E.T. Jaynes’ “Probability Theory: the Logic of Science”. My secret hope is that “Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way” can be a version of that book accessible to everyone. Jaynes’ book is really quite challenging to work through and is presents a pretty radical version of Bayesian statistics. Aubrey Clayton has done an amazing service by putting together a series of lectures on the key chapters of this book" << Jaynes for the common reader is quite an ambition! Flatops rule.

Why Bayesian Stats Needs Monte-Carlo Methods — Count Bayesie

>> " [...] 71% is generally not considered a strong belief in anything. So it is not inconsistent, nor suprising for someone to believe a candidate has 71% chance of success and they still lose. Even when looking at typical p-values, we wait for 95% percent certainty before making claims (and many feel this is a pretty weak belief). But for some reason whenever election polls come up, it seems even very statistically minded people suddenly think that 51% chance is a high probability." << Needs to be written in letters 3ft high in managers' offices! Interesting approach on the page. I need to learn more about this approach.

Netpbm - Wikipedia

Ascii based bitmap graphics format. 8 bit colour available and easy to write to from C

The story of ispc: first benchmark results (part 5)

>> "The idea of keeping the source code secret may seem strange. After all, we all worked at the same company, right? As it turns out, some teams would jealously guard their source code, only making binary releases available to other teams at Intel, and only at well-defined delivery points. It was one defense against the jerks." << Hence all the bugs and exploits...

Infinite Descent – An introductory pure mathematics textbook

University first course: set theory, functions and so on. Free as in beer (downloadable pdf) and spirit (LaTeX markup available on github, which itself provides a learning experience). Just wish that it was on Lulu so I can get a printout. I find thinking easier away from the screen and with a pencil.

Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail

>> "This paper boldly challenges the long established misconception that the catastrophic failure of expensive software projects is detrimental to society. Historical analysis of bureaucracies such as the Australian Tax Office shows that massive software automation has not increased their real efficiency since the 1950s. Any increase in the efficiency of individual workers has simply been consumed by increased bureaucratic complexity, as predicted by Parkinson's law. As the primary net effect of software is to facilitate bureaucratic complexity it is therefor essential that software projects fail if society is to function effectively. In this way the heavy burden of guilt can be lifted from the shoulders of the numerous project managers that have subconsciously devoted their careers to ensuring that projects rarely, if ever, succeed." << Top quality trolling, as with all satire, there is a grain of truth.

nitter

Twitter without the noise!

Linux Upskill Challenge

20 sessions (days) to learn how to set up and administer a server. I can see why the author suggests setting up an aws or digital ocean virtual server - you get to see real log entries and all the noise associated with a live server. I'll probably wimp out and use an old laptop with a static internal IP address.

Massacring C Pointers (2018) (wozniak.ca)

HN discussion of a review/deconstruction of an old book about an important topic in programming. The title of the book reviewed is Mastering C Pointers, and the author of the book is Robert Joseph “Bob” Traister Sr. Looks like Mr Traister died in or about 2007, so the blog author can take heart from the fact that no third edition is likely to be forthcoming. The book author was some kind of hobbyist tinkerer with early DOS based C compilers. This is quite an interesting discussion around issues about standards, editing, authority of information &c. The blog author includes program examples from the book with comments and arrives at the hypothesis that Traister was relying on a specific compiler implementation on a small and primitive target machine - so verifying code to some extent but not testing for portability. Traister's publication history is eclectic to say the least. Google knows of 28 titles. So say 200 pages each, 400 words a page, 28*80000 words or something like 2 million words...

Alexei Fridman

>> "Following the death of Joseph Stalin and the general amnesty,[2] cities with warm climate filled with criminals and the crime rates skyrocketed. Police was failing, and while in high school Alik and many other young men joined "the neighborhood watch" brigades organized by Komsomol and police. He did not miss a single training session in military sambo, and acquired many knife scars from the street action. He was the only one who remained alive from his team of four by the graduation." << A city in Kyrgyzstan from context. What I know of the post war history of the USSR is probably Moscow centric and based around the cold war stuff. I had no idea that there was this level of internal anarchy.

JPL C Coding standards 2015 [HN discussion]

Q. How do you write software for a spacecraft? A. Carefully.

Lex Fridman Podcast

Used to be the AI podcast. Actually videos on youtube but most important thing is the sound track (talking heads)

The Easy Ones – Three Bugs Hiding in the Open

>> "The fix was a few lines of code to stop traversing after twenty navigation nodes, presumably saving a few million dollars in server and power costs. I didn’t find this bug by looking at the monitoring graphs, but anybody who looked at them could have." << "Web scale" servers need careful monitoring apparently. It is the potential electricity saving that interests me.

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?

>> "The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues." << cf Stephen Pyne's books. The answer is probably along the lines of not wanting to be blamed for not preventing the small fires.

AMANDA GHASSAEI

Adobe research lab member. Lots of mathematics and code going on. The recursive universe game of life page springs to mind.

Coronavirus: PM's U-turns create a 'climate of uncertainty', says Conservative

>> "Too often it looks like this government licks its finger and sticks it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. This is not a sustainable way to approach the business of governing and government." << I think that the penny is beginning to drop.

About GNU Readline

>> "I sometimes think of my computer as a very large house. I visit this house every day and know most of the rooms on the ground floor, but there are bedrooms I’ve never been in, closets I haven’t opened, nooks and crannies that I’ve never explored. I feel compelled to learn more about my computer the same way anyone would feel compelled to see a room they had never visited in their own home." << Slackware is something like a cross between a car scrapyard and a really good second hand bookshop. Seriously, a nice essay here.

The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation

>> "...it generates a kind of algorithmic map based on expected land use patterns (businesses will generate more trips than homes) and socio-economic factors (for example, high rates of employment will generate more trips than lower ones). Then it will estimate where people will generally be coming from and going to. The third step is to guess how they will get there, and the fourth is to then plot their actual routes, based mostly on travel time. The end result is a number of how many trips there will be in the project area and how long it will take to get around. Engineers and planners will then add a new highway, transit line, bridge, or other travel infrastructure to the model and see how things change. Or they will change the numbers in the first step to account for expected population or employment growth into the future. Often, these numbers are then used by policymakers to justify a given project, whether it’s a highway expansion or a light rail line." << GIGO applies. Surprised only travel time modelled as choice factor. Why not cost/availability as well?

Bread price may rise after dire UK wheat harvest

>> "Since 85% of the wheat used for flour is grown here in the UK, flour millers will have to make up the shortages caused by this year's dire harvest with imports." << One of the triumphs of UK farming has been the selection of varieties of wheat that allow a high enough protein yield to bake decent bread. This has happened in the past 40 years or so. I can remember the grain elevators in Birkenhead and Liverpool with the grain ships coming over the pond from Halifax loaded with wheat. They have all gone (luxury flats and a huge scrap yard).

Why Johnny Won't Upgrade

>> "And that’s exactly the downside: your software will be more than happy to install a broken, changed, reduced, functionally no longer equivalent, spyware, malware, data loss inducing or outright dangerous piece of software right over the top of the one that you were using happily until today. More often than not automatic updates are not done with the interest of the user in mind. They are abused to the point where many users - me included - would rather forego all updates (let alone automatic ones) simply because we apparently can not trust the party on the other side of this transaction to have our, the users, interests at heart." << Slackware is joyously and pragmatically UN-automated.

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

>> “It is a fairly specific workflow that is a challenge for some newer developers to engage with. As an example, my partner submitted a patch to OpenBSD a few weeks ago, and he had to set up an entirely new mail client which didn’t mangle his email message to HTML-ise or do other things to it, so he could even make that one patch. That’s a barrier to entry that’s pretty high for somebody who may want to be a first-time contributor.” << So using a basic protocol that predates the Internet is considered too high a barrier to participation at a senior level in the project? Interesting.

Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?

>> "What Nicolas Rougier needed was a disk. Not a pocket-sized terabyte hard drive, not a compact disc — an actual floppy disk." << Artists have been dealing with this one for some time, as have the game emulator enthusiasts. Time for skills sharing?

Thonny Python IDE for beginners

The 'xxl' packages come with lots of python modules ready to go. The generic .tar.gz archive installs fine on Slackware 14.1. Main system requirement is glibc later than 2.15. Nice simple clear editor to use.

A/UX

>> "In 1988, Apple released the first version of their Unix-based operating system. It was a complete multi-user Unix kernel with preemptive multitasking and memory protection. It could run regular Unix programs and X-windows1 programs like other Unix boxes, but it could also run Macintosh programs. Practically all existing Macintosh programs could run in a kind of classic environment. But you could write a special kind of program that lived in the Unix environment, had Unix virtual memory and memory protection, and used the Macintosh toolbox to create its user interface." << Sounds like MacOS X but it was five years before that...

A clean start for the web

Lobste.rs comment page on the A Clean Start for the Web article

A clean start for the web

Author is making a case for a division between Documents and Applications, the former having its own protocol and browser. Problem: how to define or limit a 'document'. Would such a Document Web need to reproduce the *appearance* of, say, a music score from the 17th century? or a Maths notebook by someone like Ramanujan? If not, how do you define the standards.

Apple’s Fortnite feud and Microsoft xCloud ban have put the future of iPhone gaming in jeopardy - The Verge

>> "Cloud gaming offers a different vision of game development and distribution than the one Apple offers, or for that matter Sony and Nintendo. Games of the future may not need players to own powerful hardware or even to pay full price for the title itself. Instead, a cloud server far away and a monthly subscription service could, in theory, deliver a Netflix-style buffet of all-you-can-play offerings. All of it would be available on your TV, phone, tablet, or whatever other screen you have handy that can link up with a relatively speedy internet connection." << Which is all cool but what about the metadata when moving off the subscription? Client device records interactions somehow? So much 'user generated content' is being lost when companies tank or 'users' decide to stop paying.

Coronavirus: Teens' anxiety levels dropped during pandemic, study finds - BBC News

>> "In October, 54% of 13 to 14-year-old girls and 26% of boys of the same age said they felt anxious. When surveyed in May - several weeks after schools shut to most pupils and nationwide lockdown restrictions came into force - the proportion dropped to 45% of girls and 18% of boys." << Surprising result: sample was 1000 so 3% ish sample error but still. Could be seasonal variation?

Spenser's Boston: Amazon.co.uk: Parker, Robert B., Kumagai, Kasho: 9781883402501: Books

>> "This was the absolute worst collection of photographs I have ever seen. Nearly all were under lit and poorly composed. Almost none of them were evocative of Boston in any way. Imagine a picture of a car door with a caption of 'Mt. Vernon St.' !!! I do not exaggerate. In the days of film, these are photos that any amateur would have thrown away. I can't believe this book had an editor and was ever published. How the revered and cherished Robert B. Parker got associated with this book I cannot understand." << Sounds like my kind of stuff. Starting with one of the novels though.

UNIX, Bi-Grams, Tri-Grams, and Topic Modeling

Nice use of command line favourites (tr, sed, cut, uniq, sort) to analyse a series of texts

Bibliogram

Front end to Instagram for when I need to look up something someone posted. No Javascript, no tracking, and fast!

A-Levels and GCSEs in 2020

Looks like the Ofqual algo had more edge cases than a thruppenny bit, (that is old money).

GCSE results 2019: The main trends in grades and entries

Turns out that the 'condition of funding' students in FE colleges being forced to retake Maths and English until they turn 18 are skewing the grade profile. Headline pass rate for 16 year old year 11s is 71% ish and the headline pass rate for CoF victims is 20%, and there are getting on for 200k of them. Makes sense as the demographic dip in teenagers works its way through schools...

National percentage figures for GCSE grades

Looks very useful. Above link goes to the M section for GCSE Maths

JUDEA PEARL - COGNITIVE SYSTEMS LABORATORY

The causality man

A-Levels: The Model is not the Student

>> "Let’s start with the model used by Ofqual to predict grades (p85 onwards of their 319 page report). Each school submits a list of their students from worst student to best student (it included teacher suggested grades, but they threw those away for larger cohorts). Ofqual then takes the distribution of grades from the previous year, applies a little magic to update them for 2020, and just assigns the students to the grades in rank order. If Ofqual predicts that 40% of the school is getting an A then that’s exactly what happens, irrespective of what the teachers thought they were going to get. If Ofqual predicts that 3 students are going to get a U then you better hope you’re not one of the three lowest rated students. And so on." << Tom Haines' blog post reinforces my personal view that the issue here is the application of stack ranking to large collections of students. Madness.

A-Level results 2020: How have grades been calculated?

>> "But a central tenet of Ofqual’s “algorithm” seems to be that teachers would be able to reliably rank students. In “normal” circumstances I expect that there would be a strong correlation between teacher assessment and examinations. By “normal”, I mean if both students and teachers were aware that teacher assessment and ranking was going to be used prior to starting studies, if subjects had course work that can be objectively assessed and consistent across all students taking a subject and of course if the full two years had been completed." << Above from a comment by 'John' (this morning at 2:30 am - a lot of teachers are under a lot of pressure on this one). Like 'John' I see the central issue as the allocation of a single unified rank order. Imagine 1000 GCSE Maths students taught by 15 different teachers. The resolution of marks scale for mocks is smaller than the rank range by a large factor. How much confidence are you going to place in the ranks allocated globally? I'd be pushed to rank a class of 30 that I had taught myself let alone manage the merge process. The article is great, I like a worked example with concrete detail when trying to understand a process as convoluted as this.

The growth of command line options, 1979-Present

>> "This table has the number of command line options for various commands for v7 Unix (1979), slackware 3.1 (1996), ubuntu 12 (2015), and ubuntu 17 (2017). Cells are darker and blue-er when they have more options (log scale) and are greyed out if no command was found." << Nice data set there. Function creep abounds.

A-level results: Ofqual 'reviewing' exam appeals guidance

>> "He also called for Ofqual to re-examine extreme cases, such as students downgraded from a teacher-assessed C to a failing U grade. "Young people, after two years on a course, should really not be coming out with a fail when they haven't had the chance to sit the exam," Mr Barton said." << I'm trying to get my head around how a teacher grade of C got ranked so low by the school/college that it translated to a U when 'adjusted'. The school/college in question must have had a really low pass rate. I'd expect that in GCSE Maths in an FE college with thousands of 'condition of funding' retakers and therefore a famously low pass rate. But not A levels! Might need to simulate one of those...

A-levels and GCSEs: Student tells minister 'you've ruined my life'

>> "Because students had not taken any exams, "we took the view there wasn't going to be any new information that could justify rejecting someone to whom we'd made an offer", she said" << Commendable academic logic being displayed there in Oxford. I think the percentage of grade changes larger than 2 must be tiny and one hopes they will be sorted on appeal. My suspicions focus on the ranking process within the school somewhat as well. Trying to put 200+ entries in rank order given the underlying distribution will result in a very small change in 'score' altering the middle ranks considerably.

NYH Hoc

This enhanced version of the Higher Order Calculator compiles fine on Slackware and works well under rlwrap (so I can use the readline editing and up arrow for last command &c). Nice calculator, good for slightly more complex stuff. HOC was originally from Kernighan and Pike 'The Unix Programming Environment'. The first couple of iterations provided me with a flavour of what you can do with a parser generator. Use cc -std=c89 and it all works with the yacc provided by bison in compat mode.

K&R C | B³₂

List of differences between K&R first edition C declarations and -std=c89 and later.

RSS EPAG STATEMENT ON GRADE ADJUSTMENT IN 2020 EXAMINATIONS IN THE UK

>> "Any statistical algorithm embeds a range of judgements and choices; it is not simply a technically obvious and neutral procedure. Calibrating this year's estimated grades to previous years' exam results is one such choice. How to take account of evidence of individual students' prior attainments is another. How to take account of uncertainty is another." << Brings to mind Spiegelhalter's comments on school league tables. Ranking 240 children (8 form entry comprehensive, Maths GCSE so everyone enters exam) will produce uncertainties, especially in the middle ranks, which is where grade boundaries might be falling (actually around 66th percentile on average).

Of Modes and Men Cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWIG desktop publishing—these are just a few of the user interface innovations pioneered by Larry Tesler

>> "He sat her in front of a blank computer screen and gave her a printed page of text that he had marked up with corrections. “See this text?” he asked. “Pretend it’s on the screen. And see these proofreading marks? Your job is to make those changes on the screen. How would you do it?” “Well,” she said, “I have to insert something there, so I would point there, and then I would type what I wanted. And to delete this, I would draw through it.” Tesler took notes as Adams invented, in effect, the modeless user interface for text editing." << Wonder if Ms Adams got a bonus? Still searching for the caret. Bravo had an inverted V pointing to space between letters I gather

Google Books: Fumbling the Future Chapter 9

The editor with the Royal Typewriter basically adopted computer based copy editing when presented something like TextEdit or Leafpad. Wonder how 'track changes' or version control was handled. I read about the use of the caret *between* letters as the visual representation of the text insertion point somewhere as well.

[TUHS] The most surprising Unix programs

>> "Theory, though invisible on the surface, played a crucial role in the majority of these programs: typo, dc, struct, pascal, egrep. In fact much of their surprise lay in the novelty of the application of theory." "Originators of nearly half the list--pascal, struct, parts, eqn--were women, well beyond women's demographic share of computer science." << Doug McIlroy's list. Typo sounds a fun project.

stderr - [TUHS] Graphic Systems C/A/T phototypesetter

>> "One afternoon several of us had the same experience -- typesetting something, feeding the paper through the developer, only to find a single, beautifully typeset line: "cannot open file foobar" The grumbles were loud enough and in the presence of the right people, and a couple of days later the standard error file was born..." << Hilarious that a need for typeset paper documents drove the development of Unix. Next time a local genius starts sounding off about bureaucrats...

Think 'sanctions' will trouble China? Then you're stuck in the politics of the past

>> "Here, after all, was an exciting new business partner: master of a realm in which there were virtually no labour rights or health and safety regulations, no frustrating delays because of squabbles between political parties, no criticism from free media, and no danger of judgment by independent courts. For European and US companies doing manufacture for export, it was a dream come true." << Singapore-On-Thames is a possibility here but mild in comparison.

Interview with Lorinda Cherry

>> "Cherry: No, the graphics is easy. The hard part is getting a language that you can teach to a math typist that will just flow off her fingertips to complicated graphics. I think the language part of that is what was neat about it. It's still what's neat about it. The graphics part of it, I think Tech is still better as far as what EQN does and what Tech does. From a mathematical standpoint I think you'll find Tech better, but I don't think Tech stuff is anywhere near as natural to work with." << Ms Cherry co-wrote eqn, typed a lot of text into a teletype and developed a statistically based dictionaryless spell checking program called 'typo' which I am now trying to find a copy of.

[TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna

>> "Joe sold the (not really existent) UNIX system to the patent department of AT&T, which in turn bought the urgently needed PDP11. Without that there would be no UNIX. Without Joe there would be no UNIX." << Ossanna was some kind of middle manager figure who also wrote serious and complex programs in assembly and later in C for the new machines running this new system. The story about the Echo metalised baloon is good as well.

OpenBSD -current - Frequent asked questions

I've installed a snapshot and there has been a pretty big library update, so waiting until weekend to try installing any packages.

Re: scp host:file* /tmp/nonexistent

>> "So the behaviour cannot be changed! If you read the code, you'll see how it iterates it's copying method over each of the source arguments, to the target. "scp host1:a host2:b c/". This is how it worked *since day one* as rcp, and as a result in scp." << One quote about an obscure case using scp compared with cp shows how the software written today will constrain future choices, and how hard it is to change the way widely used commands work (the accumulated layers of scripting and automation built ontop of the command).

What Is a Japanese Kissaten and How Is It Different From a Café?

>> "(Hint: in the Aichi prefecture, central area of Japan, look in residential areas for a revolving light. Many kissaten in this area have these lights outside the entrance which makes spotting one easier.)" << Love that little detail. The author is talking about a yellow revolving road works light on top of the sign on the pavement outside the shop. Sounds like a kissaten is basically a greasy spoon cafe - older generation and beginning to become rare now.

We Need to Talk About Ventilation

>> "Strikingly, in one database of more than 1,200 super-spreader events, just one incident is classified as outdoor transmission, where a single person was infected outdoors by their jogging partner, and only 39 are classified as outdoor/indoor events, which doesn’t mean that being outdoors played a role, but it couldn’t be ruled out. The rest were all indoor events, and many involved dozens or hundreds of people at once. Other research points to the same result: Super-spreader events occur overwhelmingly in indoor environments where there are a lot of people." <<

How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)

Good heavily referenced summary of the history of Earth's climate through deep time. Some of my geology is out of date (50 years since school geography lessons).

He Found ‘Islands of Fertility’ Beneath Antarctica’s Ice

>> "There’s no sunlight beneath half a mile of ice, so of course there’s no photosynthesis. Instead, we’ve identified a number of microbes called chemolithoautotrophs, which basically eat minerals for a living. They get their energy from the oxidation of inorganic compounds, and they get carbon from carbon dioxide. We also discovered that methane was diffusing upward from the sediments, fueling bacteria that oxidize methane for energy." << Free energy -> life

Do We Need a Theory of Everything?

Dr Hossenfelder doing her thing (and it is a good thing). I think of physics and science generally as giving us explanations of how things work and what (usually opposing) forces interact to make what we know.

Coronavirus: Pubs 'may need to shut' to allow schools to reopen

>> "And so actually, closing some of the other networks, some of the other activities may well be required to enable us to open schools." << We are all nodes in a diverse range of connected graphs. Join one and leave another to try to keep the overall number of infections below some limit. Interesting note on the shift in infection age distribution...

Dragan Novakovic’s Brick Lane

Old negatives scanned and processed - very nice images. Comment about the last image pointing out the change in the skyline and land use over the just under 50 years from these images.

Git foundations

Liking Day 2 but with a comparison and duplication only of changed files somehow to avoid duplication. Perhaps the files that don't change could be symlinks?

Why Cornel West is hopeful (but not optimistic)

>> "I think we have to be jazz men and jazz women. We have to be improvisational. We have to recognize that the abstract has its role to play, the academy has its role to play, but there’s a whole host of other dimensions that have their role to play." <<

My Midlife Crisis as a Russian Sailor

>> "As we quickly discover, Little Oransky is also a wonderland of birds. Gulls and their aggressive cousins, skuas, shriek and cry their own improvisations—birdsong that Andrey will later call “merry and badass jazz.” They wing back and forth along populated cliffs like morning commuters in some vertical city." <<

Tech Insider - Unix - Project Athena

A small cache of industrial history relating to the X Window system developed on top of Unix.

What’s Going on Inside the Fearsome Thunderstorms of Córdoba Province? - The New York Times

>> "As Lenardon explained to Nesbitt, the region was beginning to see ever more storms escalate in both size and intensity. “Before, it was impossible for me to imagine more than one damaging storm a year,” he said. “Now I expect three or four.”" << Heat drives dynamics as a general principle...

Terry Scales, Painter | Spitalfields Life

>> "I dropped in on the Foundation Course and they said, ‘Thank God you’ve turned up because one of the tutors has been taken ill! Can you take the class?’ And afterwards, they said, ‘Can you come back tomorrow?’" << That's how it starts; a casual sessional teaching arrangement. Then you wake up one day with a career that spans three decades...

Installing LyX with existing TeX Live on Ubuntu 16.04 | Ruoxi Wang

You have to set $PATH to texlive manually in Lyx (tools | preferences | paths and look for Path prefix) if you installed texlive from the DVD using install-tl.

symbolic link - how can I symlink my home folder from another drive? - Ask Ubuntu

This looks like a plan for migrating 500Gb to 2Tb drive without trying to resize the home partition: dd the existing drive to front of new drive. Make a partition with rest of space. Use mount --bind to mount home/Pictures etc to corresponding directories in new partition.

[FF 70]How do I get rid ow the "What's New" button? | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support

"Update: It seems I've found the solution. "browser.messaging-system.whatsNewPanel.enabled" in about:config seems to remove that "gift"..." Another one to add to the (steadily increasing) about:config tweaks I have to add when installing Firefox.

Coronavirus updates: Barcelona surge in infections as residents told to stay home - BBC News

>> "UN Secretary-General António Guterres has given a lecture in London warning that Covid-19 is an "X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built”." << UK showing effects of the hollowing out of public services over the last 15 years or so certainly. No stockpiles of protective equipment. No spare intensive care capacity. Care homes left to fend for themselves in a pandemic that affects mainly older people... the list goes on.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK

Just linking to this in case Boris' bunker gang try to make it disappear. Apparently PHE is too thorough in tracking down COVID deaths compared to other UK nations. Ultimately it is excess deaths that matter.

gnome - Taking screenshots of all (or specific) virtual desktops/workspaces (or: windows beyond/larger than current desktop)? - Ask Ubuntu

The script works fine with xwd -root > ~/file$desk.xwd substituted for the maim script originally used. Xdotool is under accessibility in slackbuilds. This is with jwm window manager - does not depend on Gnome or whatever.

macos - Should the .bashrc in the home directory load automatically? - Stack Overflow

This page clarifies the relationship between .bashrc and .profile when you have a mix of login shells and interactive shells working under a graphical session. TDLR: .profile should include .bashrc

NVIDIA DRIVERS Linux Display Driver - x86

This is the blob needed for the T61p according to nvidia's page

Putin, the Potemkin president

>> "How and when tacit, mass support for Putin's rule will shift is still a mystery of collective psychology. The nature of conformism suggests it could be a dramatic one-off event, perhaps triggered by a random, or rather insignificant-seeming, development." << Catastrophe theory springs from my inner Dom

Fix for dmenu 6.2 on Slackware compile fail

Compiling dmenu from source fails on Slackware 14.2 with an error about function parameter not being found. This arises from an older fontconfig on Slackware (Not broken? Don't fix!). Workaround is to add a line to drw.h with "#define FC_COLOR "color"". It is a hack. It does work.

Setting up the st terminal — martijnvos.dev

>> "As you can see this whole process isn’t exactly rocket science. Due to Suckless’ documentation, or the lack thereof, it can take quite some time to figure out though. That doesn’t mean I regret installing st as it taught me the commands diff and patch. It’s also my first foray into the world of C." << Alter config.def.h then recompile as root. The make script then saves a new config.h. I found that the config.h file does not have write access by default.

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software' • The Register

>> "Vignoli got back to us to further clarify the consultation process. The strategy document “has been available to community members for two weeks,” he said, but only for those subscribed to a board-discuss mailing list. “If people are interested – as it looks from their reactions – they should have subscribed to the board-discuss mailing list,” he told us." << Goodbye any chance of getting colleges or adult education centres to use LibreOffice. And this guy is surely not for real?

History of UNIX Manpages - Kristaps Dzonsons

>> "Where do UNIX manpages come from? Who introduced the section-based layout of NAME, SYNOPSIS, and so on? And for manpage authors: where were those economical two- and three-letter instructions developed? The many accounts available on the Internet lack citations and are at times inconsistent. In this article, I reconstruct the history of the UNIX manpage based on source code, manuals, and first-hand accounts." << Kristaps Dzonsons' page on the history of man pages is industrial archaeology for the computer era.

Daring Fireball: On iOS Apps Peeking at Your Clipboard Contents

>> "I think almost all of this is just sloppy programming, not data collection. Even if you really did want to make an app that steals people’s clipboard contents, there’s absolutely no reason you’d check the clipboard contents this frequently. It’s just sloppy programming. But once revealed, a sloppy implementation like LinkedIn’s looks sketchy as hell." << Hanlon's razor in action. This week saw Barclay's bank using a Way Back Machine URL for a javascript library on the bank's display page (not the banking app) and now this. CopyPasta all round, turtles all the way down, one day it will implode.

Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan - Brian Kernighan on the typesetting of "The Go Programming Language" book

"The input was in XML, with a tag set of about 25 items for headings, paragraphs, index terms, program insertion, simple tables, and the like. A Go program converted this either into HTML for rapid viewing on the screen and potentially for an e-book version, or into troff for printing. Using XML was a mild nuisance when writing but the error checking was very helpful." XML -> ms macros -> troff -> ps

McGrath wins Kentucky Senate primary - POLITICO

>> "But McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who was backed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, had a superior organization and massive fundraising advantage that proved too much to overcome. She raised more than $40 million ahead of the primary, significantly outraising Booker and even McConnell. She spent more than $12 million on TV in the race, compared to less than $2 million from Booker, and her campaign won significant margins in the state’s rural counties outside Louisville and Lexington." << Kentucky has a population of 4.4 million. That is about 30% more than the West Midlands combined authority. Someone is making money out of elections hand over fist over there...

GCSE and A-level autumn exams offered in all subjects - BBC News

>> "The watchdog says that following the autumn exam season, exam boards will have to issue replacement certificates for the summer results - "if students request this", meaning students can keep the summer grade if it is higher." << Usual UK muddling through here but probably a sensible idea if logistics can be managed. External exam venues with schools verifying id?

Milton Glaser, Master Designer of ‘I ♥ NY’ Logo, Is Dead at 91 - The New York Times

>> "When Milton was a young boy, an older cousin drew a bird on the side of a paper bag to amuse him. “Suddenly, I almost fainted with the realization that you could create life with a pencil,” he told Inc. magazine in 2014. “And at that moment, I decided that’s how I was going to spend my life.”" << This is how it works

CSS mouseover for text and images without JavaScript

Mouseover to change an image is needed for my new home page

Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes - Overleaf, Online LaTeX Editor

>> "In this guide, we hope to give you your first introduction to LaTeX. The guide does not require you to have any prior knowledge of LaTeX, but by the time you are finished, you will have written your first LaTeX document, and hopefully will have a good knowledge of some of the basic functions provided by LaTeX." << Good reminder of basics! Site also has a section on Tikz

OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation | SogubSystems - Bioreports

>> "Sometimes applications crash, it happens. But it seems to happen a lot more in OpenBSD with X applications. It has happened enough where I’m just used to looking in $HOME for .core files to see if that was the cause." << I just stopped using xfce/mate and went with default wm. No more core dumps. Video driver stuff? Therefore hardware and arch dependent.

The Labour 2019 election review is a blueprint for Starmerism

>> "Expect this to be a theme of the Starmer leadership: social liberalism, tempered with a firmer position on law and order, all the while deflecting from the cultural areas that divide voters, and shifting the conversation onto the firmer economic ground that unites them." << That space on the economically left socially right plot is going to be pretty crowded!

Good luck using generative adversarial networks in real life – they're difficult to train and finicky to fix • The Register

>> ""But with GANs, it's so difficult to tell because it randomly gets worse and then better again and you can't really figure out how or why very easily. There is no really good indication of when you've trained it sufficiently long enough; the best way of assessing your model is to just look at the images themselves."" << Interesting application and the film clips are especially impressive - the stability of the colour over hundreds of frames. Still AI shows its limits...

Charles Jones, Gardener & Photographer | Spitalfields Life

>> "Jones’ grandchildren recall that, in old age, he used his own glass plates as cloches to protect his seedlings against frost – which may explain why no negatives have survived." << Flourishing as a gardener and photographer late 19th C so I'm guessing using a large plate camera and contact printing and toning the prints. This suggests to me that the print was seen as the final product - photo graphy = drawing with light - so perhaps negatives were seen as not needed any more?

Bolton's Book Says Trump Impeachment Inquiry Missed Other Troubling Actions - The New York Times

>> "Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless." << Random walk

Un naufragio personal: OpenBSD in a laptop, part 3

"Summarizing: the 6.6->6.7 upgrade process is smooth, quick and without glitches nor surprises. Again, kudos to OpenBSD people, you are awesome." Time to update the OpenBSD laptop page

Dexamethasone is first life-saving coronavirus drug - BBC News

"UK experts say the low-dose steroid treatment is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus. It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth." So a third phase treatment. Now we just need one for the second phase and the first fever phase and the throughput will drop

Coronavirus News: How Asia’s Densest Slum Chased the Virus - Bloomberg

"Authorities have knocked on 47,500 doors since April to measure temperatures and oxygen levels, screened almost 700,000 people in the slum cluster, and set up fever clinics, official data show. Recognizing the need to isolate residents in the tenement where as many as eighty share a toilet, those with symptoms were shifted to nearby schools and sports clubs converted into quarantine centers." I had thought that we would be doing the 'isolate' bit in the UK. Requisitioned hotels and paramedic health workers triaging cases.

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In - The New York Times

>> "Twenty-four-hour news networks are built for one thing, and that’s 9/11. There are very few events that would justify being covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So in the absence of urgency, they have to create it. You create urgency through conflict." << Jon Stewart. Just limit news programs to 1 hour in the morning and 1 hour in the evening at allow the networks to stagger their programs so the junkies can get their fix.

Walking Is Making a Major Comeback | Outside Online

>> "“There is a lot of research on creativity while walking,” says Jennifer Udler, a therapist in Potomac, Maryland, who practices “walk and talk” therapy with her clients. “Our dopamine, our serotonin, all the feel-good chemicals, are being released when we walk. And that’s not just mood. It’s creativity, it’s de-stressing, it’s lowering cortisol—there’s a lot of chemistry involved in this.”" <<

Boris Johnson is in trouble inside and outside his own party | The Independent

>> "In fact the most stringent measures were taken by Johnson, advised by Dominic Cummings, before the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies was definite about them. Johnson was indeed following the science, but it was the science of opinion research rather than of epidemiology. Public opinion, fearful of the disease and watching other countries lock down, was ahead of the scientists." << And people will decide to reduce social distancing as well. Watch the retail numbers...

The Biggest Psychological Experiment in History Is Running Now - Scientific American

>> "So far, Fancourt says, people are encouraged to follow classic mental health strategies: getting enough sleep, observing a routine, exercising, eating well and maintaining strong social connections. Spending time on projects, even small ones, that provide a sense of purpose also helps." << Really must sort the garden out...

The Hidden Algorithms Underlying Life | Quanta Magazine

"I think there needs to be some kind of minimal computational activity by the learner, and if any learning takes place, it must make the system more effective. Until a decade or two ago, when machine learning began to be something that computers could do impressively, there was no evidence of learning taking place in the universe other than in biological systems." Contextual knowledge is always the issue. Machine learning always seems brittle

Bolton rips Trump: ‘Getting reelected was the only thing that mattered’ - POLITICO

>> "Bolton plans to write that he was “hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision” during his tenure as national security adviser, from April 2018 through September 2019, “that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.”" << What is the point of power unless you have policies?

Pandemic Time: A Distributed Doomsday Clock - NOEMA

>> "The simultaneous dimming of Betelgeuse and the global emergence of COVID-19 were curiously rhyming phenomena: disruptions of familiar, reassuring rhythms, both with latent apocalyptic potential. Had two such events coincided in antiquity, our more astrologically inclined ancestors would have been very worried. If light traveled instantaneously, events would have coincided in an interesting way. Betelgeuse is around 700 light-years away, according to the most recent distance estimates, which means the dimming we observed in February actually occurred somewhere around the time the Black Death was making its way around the world." << Via longform.org

Why Tory MPs are increasingly worried about the government's ability

>> "It’s part of the story as far as the failure to reopen schools is concerned. The major barrier to reopening schools is that government guidance is that they must observe social distancing and that no class should have more than 15 pupils in it, in order to easily contain any new outbreaks. The problem – as you’ll know if you’ve visited a school recently – is that, of course, the average class size is almost double that in size." << Keep banging this point home and one day the penny will drop. The reason Germany, Denmark and other countries can reopen schools is that they spend enough money to have smaller class sizes!

Science and Technology Committee (Commons) - Publications - Committees - UK Parliament

Check here for transcript of Tuesday 9th June hearing around 16th or so

Oral evidence: UK Science, Research and Technology Capability and Influence in Global Disease Outbreaks, HC 136

It transpires that Hansard produce transcripts of oral evidence to select committees around 5 days after the hearings...

Why I broke with Boris Johnson

>> "It took six years for Margaret Thatcher’s governments to begin to stop listening to alternative voices. The same patterns had emerged within six months of Johnson becoming Prime Minister, and within six weeks of his general election victory last December. In her early years the Iron Lady relished argument and intellectual debate – and those internal jousts strengthened her for the public battles with her true opponents. In the starkest of contrasts, the team inside today’s No 10 has often preferred to greet internal dissent with retribution – much of it pre-briefed to favoured journalists. Throughout the Westminster village every Tory had quickly learned the score: do, say and tweet as you are told – or else." <<

Coronavirus: Ministers consider NHS contact-tracing app rethink - BBC News

"An experiment within a stationary train carriage found that when users moved from a distance of 3.5m (11.5ft) to 4m, signals became stronger rather than weaker because of the way metal objects were reflecting the radio waves." Agile programming team rediscovers basic electromagnetic theory.

Coronavirus: enforcing UK lockdown one week earlier 'could have saved 20,000 lives' | World news | The Guardian

>> "Before March, scientists believed the UK had far fewer infections than it actually had. But it later became clear that between 1,500 and 2,00 cases arrived from Italy and Spain in the first two weeks of that month. At the time, the modellers assumed about two-thirds of infected people coming into the UK were not being identified, but Ferguson said a more accurate figure was about 90%." << (90/66)^3 if we take 9 day delay and doubling time of three days. Roughly 2.5x

Scientists turn on Boris Johnson over UK’s coronavirus response – POLITICO

>> “We … made the rather optimistic assumption that somehow — which was policy — that the elderly would be shielded and particularly the most vulnerable would be shielded as the top priority,” Ferguson said. “And that simply failed to happen.” << I wonder if "which was policy" means that the modellers were required to assume effective isolation of care homes as an input. If so then 'guided by the science' means 'guided by the scientific models based on assumptions we mandate' which is a tad different

Coronavirus: UK economy could be among worst hit of leading nations, says OECD - BBC News

"In its latest assessment, the OECD found that the UK's largely service-based economy meant that it had been particularly badly hit by the government's lockdown restrictions." And issues with supplies depending on outsourced supply chains.

Homes to be heated by warm water from flooded mines - BBC News

>> "Plans are also underway at Rugeley in Staffordshire, where a former coal-fired power station will be turned into a village of 2,300 homes heated partly by water from disused shafts." << Sounds very good to me. Will need a trip out to see that. The power station was a huge site

To Coretta Scott | The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute

>> "I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human system it fail victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes." << >> "Bellamy emphasized that the [change?] would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This, it seems to me, is the most sane and ethical way for social change to take place." <<

Fintan O’Toole, ‘Comfort is best found in Seamus Heaney's poems’, in The Irish Times (31 Aug. 2016)

>> "It was what his whole life as a poet had articulated with such astounding eloquence. In a speech at the National Museum in March he put it directly: “We are not simply a credit rating or an economy but a history and a culture, a human population rather than a statistical phenomenon.”" <<

COVID-19 dashboard based on data from PHE

Looks good. Runs on a small server that someone has just put up

Rereading: The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey | Books | The Guardian

>> "Without a proper accounting of loss, these acts are final: not a scratch on our consciousness when the listed building is replaced by a loud nothing, protected by a corrugated fence and a battery of surveillance cameras. No record has been left behind of our shame in failing to resist. And no memorial, in Mabey's direct and effective prose, to the processes of weather, the complex entanglements of predatory humans and indifferent nature." <<

How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance | MIT Technology Review

"Johnson created the Google Doc in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death, but she had been compiling resources since the death of Ahmaud Arbery, whose murder by a father and son in February didn’t lead to arrests until video of the incident was released in May. “I’ve been doing this [sharing links for direct action] since 2014 with my own network of friends and family,” Johnson says. She’d never created a public Google Doc like this, and chose it over Facebook and Twitter because it is so accessible: “Hyperlinks are the most succinct and quickest way to access things, and you can’t do that on Facebook or Twitter. When you say ‘Contact your representative,’ a lot of people don’t know how to do that.” Direct links in the Google Doc make it much easier for people to get involved, she says." Interesting - people need permanence and authoring tools

The Top Doctor Who Aced the Coronavirus Test - The New York Times

"It was while working for the World Health Organization tracing Ebola outbreaks in Uganda that Dr. Henry developed her ideas about how best to respond to public health emergencies. The keys to an effective quarantine, she came to understand, were communication and support, like food and medical follow-up, not punitive measures." It is the medical follow up we need now, for all diagnosed cases of COVID so the possible descent into ARDS can be detected early.

Covid Radar

Another one of these analysis pages. They seem to be using the COVID symptom study so small self-selecting samples in most regions

Non-COVID excess deaths ONS thread

Very informative - I wish they put these on a more permanent Web page. Geographical correlations suggesting many were non-diagnosed COVID. Inquests delayed so expect more stress related mortality as hearings catch up allowing registrations.

Coronavirus: what a second wave might look like

"In the near future, governments will need to delicately balance the needs of the economy and social life with suppressing the spread of the virus. Test, trace and contain and local responses are key elements of the strategy. Epidemiological models and concepts like R can help in establishing where, how, when and for how long, the government needs to intervene to prevent the second wave." Test, trace and ISOLATE.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey pilot Statistical bulletins - Office for National Statistics

Thursday is sample day...

After Reopening Schools, Israel Orders Them To Shut If COVID-19 Cases Are Discovered : Coronavirus Live Updates : NPR

>> "Dr. Arnon Afek, who is helping manage Israel's coronavirus response, played down the outbreak, saying a spike in cases was expected when schools reopened. "It wasn't a surprise," he said. "It happened also in South Korea and Singapore."" << September, when the school system will start to fully open, is going to be interesting

'We were packed like sardines': evidence grows of mass-event dangers early in pandemic | World news | The Guardian

>> “Very few people actually go to these events” as a proportion of the population. The events are outside, and “you don’t actually come into contact with that many people. So the total number of contacts made in these situations compared with every day in a pub for instance, is really negligible.” << The model of attending a footy match or race meeting that the SAGEes seem to be using differs from the intense day-long immersion including travelling on crowded trains, queuing in crowded bars, and shouting yourself hoarse that many will recognise. Not to mention the state of surfaces and catering hygiene.

The Spy Who Came Home | The New Yorker

>> "He compared his situation to that of Voltaire’s Candide, who, after enduring a litany of absurd horrors in a society plagued by fanaticism and incompetence, concludes that the only truly worthwhile activity is tending his garden. “Except my garden is the Third Precinct,” Skinner said." <<

Rage, fear, and confusion - dj patil - Medium

>> "There was a young data scientist that pulled me aside before a meeting on how data and technology might be able to help on community policing. He showed me data that he had cobbled together from multiple systems where he showed the rate over time of how police stopped white vs blacks and it was about equal. And then he showed me the search rates after they were stopped and they were staggering. It showed how much more likely you were to be searched if you were black. As we dug in, he showed how you could tell which officers contributed to doing the most searches and matching it to those that had the most complaints. When I showed his results to the other police chiefs they all asked how they could get that kind of data so get those officers off the streets. The chiefs didn’t have the basic data systems to know which officers were a problem." << When you manage a process you need metrics

Coronavirus: Scientist who advises government warns lockdown being eased too soon | Science & Tech News | Sky News

>> "Although the government has focused on the reproduction number, which measures the speed of the spread of the virus, the number of cases is an equally important factor in determining the number of deaths." << Higher starting point for exponential growth if R goes (much) above 1

Dominic Cummings, the Nostradamus of north London, has done it again | Financial Times

"At Monday’s press conference, Mr Cummings played the Nostradamus of north London: “Only last year I wrote explicitly about the danger of coronaviruses.” Turns out it was a bit more complicated than that. Instead, last month, on Mr Cummings’ first day back at work after his Durham trip, one of his blogs from March 2019 was edited to add an express reference to coronavirus. History will be kind to Mr Cummings, for he intends to rewrite it." This strange incident was what stuck in my mind as well. Straight after the return from the family estate, after a two week absence from affairs of State, our hero decides to make minor alterations to an ancient blog post to mention the latest virus.

UK public still staying home to huge degree and even getting used to lockdown life, new data reveals | Ipsos MORI

"76% say it would be acceptable to force bars and restaurants to continue social distancing over the very long term, versus 17% who disagree. 38% would find it acceptable if restaurants and bars were allowed to choose whether or not to enforce social distancing." Wonder what happens if the government decides to open up completely in Summer. Stampede? or Crickets...?

COVID Underdogs: Mongolia - Indi Samarajiva - Medium

"Countries are used to giving aid to places like Mongolia, to sending advisors. It simply does not compute that they should have been getting advice from Mongolia the whole time."

The truth about why Cummings hasn't gone: Johnson is too terrified to sack him | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guardian

"Part of what’s disturbing was the vignette of a Britain Cummings himself did much to foment: grimly polarised, reflexively aggressive and running with an undercurrent of menace. His crowning triumph – the successful campaign to leave the EU – was a masterclass of stoking and exploiting divisions, unpleasantly emotive half-truths or untruths, and evidently considered itself above the law."

Cummings’ contempt for lockdown rules makes the public feel like fools | Fintan O’Toole | Opinion | The Guardian

>> "So why does his odyssey during lockdown produce a whole different kind of emotion? Because it reaches into the innermost experiences of millions of people. It cuts right through to the pain of a loved one dying alone, of grandchildren growing distant, of precious human bonds being forcibly severed. It grabs hold of that torment and it squeezes the meaning out of it." <<

Public Policy and the Past: All the damage they can do

"But consent comes from the ‘bottom’, allied to co-operation and contract from the ‘top’ (or what passes for the top these days). Take a hammer to that sense of community – to honesty, believability, transparency – and you are gambling with the whole edifice of compliance." This bit worries me

barney | Origin and meaning of barney by Online Etymology Dictionary

>> "And adds that "Come, come, that's a Barna' Cassell," is "a reproof to an exaggerator, or liar."" << Seems about right

What Xi knew: pressure builds on China’s leader | Free to read | Financial Times

>> "“The small infection numbers outside Hubei are related to low testing rates,” says one Chinese doctor who asked not to be named. “We did not have many test sites outside Hubei. If we want to figure out the real infection rate, we need to conduct large-scale antibody testing to see how many people used to be infected.”" << Antibody testing

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Wear and tear. The fate of Dominic Cummings

"In this case, though, not merely a media story. There are literally tens of thousands of people out there who can say, and are saying, "My spouse or my parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle died in a care home because the government failed to protect care homes, and died frightened and alone because I obeyed the rules. Now I learn that you disregarded the rules, and the PM is happy with that because of who you are." I would think almost everyone in the country is within two degrees of separation of someone who can say that." Just had a think, and, yes it is 2 degrees of separation although I did not know the family directly...

Thread by @RussInCheshire: The week in Tory: 1. Clapped for health workers 2: Then increased the fees paid immigrant health workers to access the life-saving service t…

"And there are 12 hours of the week to go." A week is a long....

Why are Africa's coronavirus successes being overlooked? | Afua Hirsch | Opinion | The Guardian

>> "Ghana, with a population of 30 million, has a similar death toll to Senegal, partly because of an extensive system of contact tracing, utilising a large number of community health workers and volunteers, and other innovative techniques such as “pool testing”, in which multiple blood samples are tested and then followed up as individual tests only if a positive result is found. The advantages in this approach are now being studied by the World Health Organization." << Two level approach - presumably the pools are households or streets?

Human trials of British coronavirus vaccine to reach 10,000 - Reuters

>> "Researchers are mainly looking for healthcare staff and other public-facing workers to join the trial as in order to get a clear signal on the vaccine’s efficacy, they need a minimum number to catch the coronavirus in their everyday lives. An initial trial that started on April 23 has already seen more than 1,000 volunteers aged 18-55 receive the injection and Oxford said phases II and III will add people aged 56 and older as well as children of 5 to 12 years." << These people are doing us all a great service as well as increasing their own safety. Hope no major side effects come up

UK's first coronavirus contact-tracing group warns of difficulties | World news | The Guardian

>> "Dr Bing Jones, a retired Sheffield GP, helped start the group a month ago out of frustration that contact tracing had been abandoned in England. “We sat down and thought: this is a major omission – a schoolboy error. We have got one of the biggest crises you can possibly imagine and one of the major building blocks of the public health management of an epidemic is not being done,” he said." << May 22: Science and Technology committee chair keeps asking why official test and trace abandoned, and was getting few answers in the evidence session this morning.

How much difference would an earlier shutdown have made? - The Post

"The word ‘model’ can describe many things, from an all-singing, all-dancing climate model which simulates the action of the entire atmosphere and ocean system down to cubic-kilometre units, to a simple statistical curve which says ‘if X goes up by 1, Y will go up by 2’. The Annan model is very much at the latter end."

Guile Reference Manual

"When you quit your Guile session by evaluating (quit) or pressing Ctrl-D, the history will be saved to the file .guile_history and read in when you start Guile for the next time. Thus you can start a new Guile session and still have the (probably long-winded) definition expressions available." Great news for bottom up programming kind of. You can scroll through history using up arrow but definitions not loaded. Might have to invoke guile with definitions filtered out and loaded like this... cat .guile_history | grep '('define | uniq > .guile_defs guile -l .guile_defs I wonder which version this feature was added in? Not in 2.0 but in 2.2 up

When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery | The Obscuritory

"He was interested in the idea of “agent-based modeling,” a way of simulating complicated behavior from the bottom-up. The way he explained it in a lecture at George Washington University in 1995, he used the example of writing a computer program that simulates a flock of birds. We could come up with a complicated formula to control an entire flock of birds flying around. Or instead, we could make each of the birds “think” for themselves, and when they’re all together, we can see larger patterns of behavior emerge." Bottom up modelling

Coronavirus: Can schools double classes with no extra rooms? - BBC News

"These small groups will have one teacher and will learn, play and eat separately, arriving and leaving school at a different time from other small groups of pupils - each group staying two metres apart from any other." Space and staff? Not to mention the detail of these staggered start and end times

Reopening schools is a question of logistics, not of risks

"There is no central government record of the number of unused rooms in the average school because this hasn’t, up until now, been particularly useful information and most school leaders I spoke to did not know for that reason. However, two happened to have copies of their timetable planning from the last academic year, and, at any given time, 95 per cent of their classrooms were in use." Nice to see a journalist actually doing some research. FE Colleges have room utilisation targets of course and often timetable up to 100% on paper

Parliamentlive.tv - Science and Technology Committee : Should primary children go back to school?

"The decision to open primary schools or not is a political one, it is not a scientific decision" Less of the 'driven by science' stuff perhaps

Parliamentlive.tv - Science and Technology Committee : Corona virus R number

This section just goes over the R number and the way it condenses down to care homes &c

The co-morbidity question | The Actuary

>> "This conclusion is consistent with our discussions with two critical care consultants, who have confirmed that COVID-19 ICU patients are broadly representative of general hospital patients (albeit with the most and least healthy tails of the distribution removed) and that “COVID-19 patients admitted to our ICU are generally healthier than our normal patient population, but despite this, have a high mortality. People are dying in middle age, with many years ahead of them.”" << If you are over 50, avoid catching corona virus.

What We Know About Your Chances of Catching the Virus Outdoors - The New York Times

"The good news: Interviews show a growing consensus among experts that, if Americans are going to leave their homes, it’s safer to be outside than in the office or the mall. With fresh air and more space between people, the risk goes down." Downside: watch outdoor eating and shared surfaces e.g. loos

DfE's chief scientific adviser hasn't assessed school reopening guidance

>> "When asked what evidence the department has considered in relation to this, Rahman said: “I don’t know, I don’t think I was necessary at the PPE meeting. You’ll have to ask SAGE that.” Greg Clark, chair of the committee, replied: “But you’re the chief scientific adviser to the DfE.” Rahman responded: “I am. I’m not sure when they discussed PPE, it was a general PPE discussion.”" << Interesting approach

texlive - How to install TeX Live offline on Ubuntu? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange

Installing texlive 2018 (my standard) on Linux by mounting the iso image thus avoiding optical disks and disk drive errors

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » 28 Weeks Later: The Coronavirus Aftermath for the NHS and its Political Implications

>> "My own hunch is that rather than a large second wave that the virus situation will shift from a pandemic pattern to an endemic one. I suspect significant ongoing numbers of new cases for many months to come, perhaps around 100 Covid-19 inpatients per million population for the rest of the year. Even if the numbers are less than this there will be a need to have such reserve capacity as to be able to cope with a second wave, should one occur." << Sobering

He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19. - The New York Times

>> "Every year, he said, there are probably 600 or 700 people who die from coronavirus infections in France and thousands more from other respiratory illnesses. “The fact that people have died from a coronavirus in China, I don’t feel like it means much of anything for me,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe people don’t have anything to do, so they’ve gone looking in China for something to be scared about.”" << Got that one wrong didn't he? Always suspicious of shouty profs who put their name on papers that they have not contributed to. The planned independent large scale drug trials will find any success. In which case, one up for the prof.

Software exoskeletons

"Programmers need to understand that sometimes a program really only needs to run once, on one set of input, with expert supervision. Scientists need to understand that prototype code may need a complete rewrite before it can be used in production." And once it has run, it will need to be changed...

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Joe Biden’s VP pick – the case for 40/1 Iraq war veteran Tammy - Page 3 — politicalbetting

"I saw some of the original code, via a friend. I have seen a lot worse. It's code as scripting, really. One long file of functions." Another data point on the Ferguson/Imperial College model original code fandango. Can't see why the professor does not just release the original file. This is two IT specialists (Carmack being famous) that think the actual program itself was workmanlike if not production quality

Covid data display from ONS figures and a bit of theory

"Real-time tracking of an epidemic, as data accumulate over time, is an essential component of a public health response to a new outbreak. A team of statistical modellers at the MRC Biostatistics Unit (BSU), University of Cambridge, are working with Public Health England (PHE) to regularly nowcast and forecast COVID-19 infections and deaths. This information feeds directly to the SAGE sub-group, Scientific Pandemic Influenza sub-group on Modelling (SPI-M), and to regional PHE teams." Calculates Re values for today broken down by region WITH CONFIDENCE INTERVALS

What are the risks of COVID? And what is meant by ‘the risks of COVID’?

"As COVID-19 changes from being seen as a societal threat to a problem in risk management, it is essential that we get a handle on the magnitudes of the risk we face, and try to work out ways to communicate these appropriately. Note that I am only covering the lethal risks, not the potentially important consequences of illness or treatment." Spiegelhalter's latest. Its a goodie.

We should be very wary of the R value - UnHerd

>> "There’s an interesting statistical anomaly called Simpson’s paradox. It is that you can find a trend going one way in lots of individual datasets, but that when you combine those datasets, it can make the trend look like it’s going the other way." << Yay! Let's hear it for Eddy. >> "Simpson’s paradox is a specific case of a wider class of problem known as the “ecological fallacy”, which says that you can’t always draw conclusions about individuals by looking at group data. A topical example: local authorities with above-average numbers of over-65s actually have a lower rate of death from Covid-19 than those with below-average numbers. But we know that older people are individually at greater risk. What’s going on seems to be that younger areas tend also to be denser, poorer, and more ethnically diverse, all of which drive risk up." << Which, of course, means if you happen to be a mature gentleman living in a hip and cool neighbourhood because you prefer it to the straight places, you had better be careful.

Rate of infection spread in Denmark 'higher since schools opening' - The Local

"According to a new analysis from Denmark's infectious diseases agency SSI, the so-called reproduction rate has increased from 0.6 to 0.9, still below the crucial figure of 1, which means that each infected person on average infects on average one other over the course of their illness." Hard to disentangle other changes but some evidence. If the confidence interval on our current composite R in the UK is up to 0.9 already then opening schools could tip us over the 1.0.

Pensioners 34 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than working age Brits, data shows | UK news | The Guardian

>> “For example, taxi and bus drivers (who have contact with the public) have very high Covid-19 death rates, whereas heavy truck drivers (who mostly don’t have public contact) don’t have high rates.” << Seal the drivers into their cabs and make prepayment for bus rides mandatory?

Amid the Coronavirus Crisis, a Regimen for Reëntry | The New Yorker

"The four pillars of our strategy—hygiene, distancing, screening, and masks—will not return us to normal life, but, when signs indicate that the virus is under control, they could get people out of their homes and moving again. As I think about how my workplace’s regimen could be transferred to life outside the hospital, however, I have come to realize that there is a fifth element to success: culture. It’s one thing to know what we should be doing; it’s another to do it, rigorously and thoroughly." The new normal

“We saw the virus coming and failed to respond”

>> "You asked me about the WHO, and of it being accused of showing bias towards the Chinese. It may have looked like that to some, but maybe they were just trying to draw lessons from the Chinese. In general, I think, we failed: we saw it coming and we failed. Each nation looked at the last one to be affected and said, “What did they do wrong?” rather than, “What can we learn from them?”" <<

As States Rush to Reopen, Scientists Fear a Coronavirus Comeback - The New York Times

>> "By contrast, he said, Sweden is trying to achieve “herd immunity” by letting young, healthy people become infected at what they hope will be slow, steady rates. Primary schools are open, higher ones are closed, everyone is asked to be careful in public and older adults are asked to stay home." << I suspect this is where we will end up in UK. 40% single person households in Sweden, 28% in uk. That is a 1.4x ratio...

Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models | MIT Technology Review

>> "One company that supplies sauces and condiments to retailers in India needed help fixing its automated inventory management system when bulk orders broke its predictive algorithms. The system's sales forecasts that the company relied on to reorder stock no longer matched up with what was actually selling. “It was never trained on a spike like this, so the system was out of whack,” says Sharma." << Isn't this just GIGO for the 21st century? A reminder that deep learning is greedy, brittle, opaque, and shallow. This is the brittle one I think...

Opinion | The Coronavirus Quagmire - The New York Times

"Meanwhile, ordinary Americans have basically behaved responsibly, social distancing before it was required, accepting an unprecedented lockdown with only marginal protests (notwithstanding Twitter coverage), and going out gingerly rather than recklessly as lockdown orders have been eased." People lead the lockdown and will probably determine the speed of the opening up after the first wave and before the second wave arrives in the winter period. "Maybe it’s justified as a judgment on our hollowed-out industrial capacities, our loss of what Bloomberg’s Dan Wang calls the “process knowledge” required to suddenly shift from making semiconductors to making swabs or masks. Leadership and industrial capacity can’t just be willed into existence; certain kinds of sclerosis can’t be easily escaped." I think there are issues for UK here. And within England we don't have local or regional governments with agency so Westminster need to get it right this time.

Rupert Beale · Short Cuts: How to Block Spike · LRB 21 May 2020

>> "We need a vaccine. The good news is that the virus is not mutating in such a way as to make immunisation especially difficult. One extremely crude vaccine consists of killed virus. This induces very decent immunity in experimental models. More sophisticated vaccines may well be better, and there are more than ninety in various stages of development. Vaccines that induce neutralising antibodies to the virus are strongly predicted to work: maybe not perfectly, and maybe not without complications, but I don’t know a single immunologist or virologist who thinks a vaccine is impossible." << Positive, along with the intense work on treatments for the worse effects of the virus for those who end up in hospital.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey pilot - Office for National Statistics

The one to watch. See how the confidence intervals move in as they test more. This is the "how many people have it right now" test. I'm waiting for the "how many people we think have already had it" (antibody) test. That tells you about the iceberg

Scotland Coronavirus Tracker

Nicely presented data. There is a country comparison table/multiple bar chart towards the bottom of the page

PM address to the nation on coronavirus: 10 May 2020 - GOV.UK

>> "And last, we must make sure that any measures we take do not force the reproduction rate of the disease - the R - back up over one, so that we have the kind of exponential growth we were facing a few weeks ago." << This is new - linking changes to the value of R (presumably the UK average)

Opinion | The World Is Taking Pity on Us - The New York Times

>> "America has a failed federal government, laughed at and pitied the world over. But America is not a failed state. It will be saved by its scientists and doctors, its hospitals and universities, its nimble and creative companies, and leaders in the statehouses who act more decisively than the family of frauds in the White House." << Over in the UK, we have Boris. With hollowed out local authorities, cash starved health services and mixed messages. Some hope on testing, no apparent plan for trace and isolate.

Coronavirus: Boris Johnson to launch Covid-19 alert system - BBC News

>> "Prof Leitch reiterated what First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said earlier this week - that the key message for Scotland "remains 'stay at home'" - and added: "I think the messaging is really important.... the best protection for this virus is your front door. There isn't any question about that."" <<

Coronavirus: How Boris Johnson Sided With "Doves" Over "Hawks" To Slow The UK's Exit From Lockdown

>> "Serology data gathered in the last two weeks has also concerned government experts. While chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance said back in March that he expected around 60% of the population to eventually contract the virus, achieving “herd immunity”, it is currently believed that the percentage of those who have had it is in the low teens or high single figures. This also raises the possibility of an extremely deadly second wave." << First few weeks of the ONS random longitudinal survey coming out on Thursday.

Jenny Odell on nature, art, and burnout in quarantine - Vox

"And it is striking that when we had to sit down and classify essential workers, it was caregiving. It wasn’t the heads of high-frequency trading firms. Now we have all these essential workers and we call them heroes, but, in most cases, we pay them like shit. They’re often not being given proper protective gear. So we’re praising these people as essential and treating them as disposable. There’s just such an unbelievable disconnect between our revealed reality here and our economic system."

Countries beating Covid-19 — EndCoronavirus.org

Looks to be a clear summary. Another multiple graph. Vertical axis is estimated number of cases scaled to uniform height.

[PD] 64bit runtime error 'couldn't read file "/usr/tcl//pd-gui.tcl"'

Puredata on Slackware 14.1 has hard coded directories in the source code which don't match the /usr/lib64/ scheme used by slackware

Americans Didn’t Wait For Their Governors To Tell Them To Stay Home Because Of COVID-19 | FiveThirtyEight

"The Cuebiq data suggests that behavioral changes were largely driven by people making a voluntary choice to stay home rather than being forced to do so by a state-sanctioned stay-at-home order." Mobile phone location data showing the same kind of story as the OpenTable data and the Apple Maps query data. People started socially isolating before they were told to. Nice example of multiple graphics array to show state trends

When Will It Be Safe to End Coronavirus Lockdowns? | The New Yorker

>> "The argument that we should be discussing how to reopen the economy is really important. But that statement that we have flattened the curve is wrong. In about a third of the states it’s flat. In some of them it’s going down, which is even better, and, in about one-third of them, like in Texas, it is rising. So there is not any consistent picture." << They are trying to use county level data to estimate R for each state and track that as different states do their different things. Will be interesting to see how that unfolds...

Sounds Of Silence In Spitalfields | Spitalfields Life

>> "[...] there is the chorus of birds – the cooing of the doves amusing themselves on the flat roof of our neighbour’s house, the drilling of the robin that visits our garden, the sweet twittering of blackbirds, the squadron of high pitched blue tits, the chattering magpies, the marauding gang of seagulls that took a wrong turn somewhere a week ago and barked at the cat, and the ka-ka-ka-wing of crows. This symphony grows from morning to a final crescendo at evening." <<

Can we escape from information overload? | 1843

>> "Winston went into the dark for a month in a bid to escape the digital bell-chimes, the bouncing icons, the bulletins and info-blasts – our exhausting daily scroll. “But when you go into the dark for a long time,” Winston admitted to me, recently, “you’re not going into a void. You’re going into yourself. And good luck finding blissful empty quiet there.” There was nothing to compete with the loud, incessant inner monologue or drown it out. I wondered, then, whether we’d created and refined all our sparkly informational distractions because on some level we knew the relentlessness of the subconscious had the real power to overload." << Interesting, but, like Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, not something I'd want to try for myself. One of the worlds most influentual religions has a lot to say about stilling the mind...

Opinion | Can Rocky Mountain Laboratories Find a Coronavirus Cure? - The New York Times

>> "[...]It appeared the virus was targeting a specific receptor on cells called ACE2, the same receptor targeted by both SARS and the virus that causes the common cold. “The alarm bells went off then because it suggested that it could be both very prevalent and very contagious,” Dr. de Wit said. The lab immediately made plans to be fully prepared as soon as researchers could get the live virus." << The US has these tremendous facilities and very talented people who are watching developments all the time. And yet...

How Canned Food Revolutionized The Way We Eat - HISTORY

"Running a bustling lab and factory, Appert soon progressed from champagne bottles to wide-necked glass containers. In 1803 his preserved foods (which came to include vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy and fish) were sent out for sea trials with the French navy. By 1804, his factory had begun to experiment with meat packed in tin cans, which he soldered shut and then observed for months for signs of swelling. Those that didn’t swell were deemed safe for sale and long-term storage." The solder would have contained lead in those days and possibly an acid flux. Lead ingress into the contents of the tin may have figured in the loss of Franklin's arctic expedition - noone is really sure on that one but recovered corpses had large lead concentrations. Could have stuck to the bottles!

Boris and Cummings' words are coming back to bite | The Spectator

>> "But then I think Cummings an interesting man with some interesting things to say. And I think he is sometimes right, too, not least when he argues that 'Systems are fragile and vulnerable to nonlinear shocks: ‘big things come from small beginnings’ and problems cascade; ‘they come not single spies/But in battalions’. Prediction is extremely hard even for small timescales. Effective action and (even loose) control are very hard and most endeavours fail'." <<

League tables just don't add up | New Scientist

"To illustrate the impact of ignoring the effect of sample size, Goldstein took A-level performance figures for 10 schools in one local authority and used standard statistical theory to calculate "confidence intervals", a type of error bar, for each figure. It emerged that the confidence intervals on each school's performance were so large that they encompassed those of every other school--making it impossible to rank them with any confidence." Small sample errors...

Handwashing only ‘soap tabs’ could help halt spread of COVID-19 in developing world | LSHTM

"It is also environmentally friendly and makes handwashing easier than other settings, because rather than go to where there is a facility with soap and water, you can take the soap with you, in a pocket or a purse. This also means there is no reliance on others providing handwash facilities as in public places." Could do with some of those for when public transport reopens!

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine | LSHTM

The other group that has modelling activity that informs UK government policy decisions. The broad agreement of these groups - using independent implementations - tends to bolster confidence.

John Carmack's impressions of the Imperial College covid modelling software

"Before the GitHub team started working on the code it was a single 15k line C file that had been worked on for a decade, and some of the functions looked like they were machine translated from Fortran. There are some tropes about academic code that have grains of truth, but it turned out that it fared a lot better going through the gauntlet of code analysis tools I hit it with than a lot of more modern code. There is something to be said for straightforward C code. Bugs were found and fixed, but generally in paths that weren't enabled or hit." Sounds OK from the programming point of view. At least it isn't some AI black box with no transparency

Imperial College model: basic conceptual structure

The satellite view of the model that got us into lockdown. The original was '15000 lines of C' but this is an enhanced version that takes advantage of modern computers and that allows modelling of different countries.

Estimating the number of infections and the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in 14 European countries - Imperial College London

Imperial College model web page

What we know, and what we don’t, about the true coronavirus death toll - Full Fact

"In countries with low levels of testing, spikes in overall mortality may be the first sign that a large outbreak is happening. In others, the lack of such a spike may provide a degree of reassurance that authorities are not missing a hidden epidemic. The New York Times, the Economist and the Financial Times now publish updated figures for excess deaths in multiple countries. The New York Times and the Economist show Jakarta, Indonesia with only 84 confirmed Covid-19 deaths in March, but 1,000 total excess burial licences (according to the New York Times) or 1,543 (according to the Economist)." The excess mortality puzzle: data sources

UK launches large-scale coronavirus app test – POLITICO

"But Gould said there was no “minimum percentage” for the U.K. to be satisfied. He said even if 20 percent of the population downloads the app it will still offer insights into the virus, and from 40 percent takeup upward it can begin to make a big difference to the track-and-trace system." Depends on if there is a difference between the subset of the population who download and successfully use vs the rest?

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal • The Register

"We cannot state it plainer: on iPhones, apps cannot send out their IDs via Bluetooth when the software is in the background, and on newer Android builds, IDs cannot be transmitted after a few minutes in the background. And Apple and Google have refused to allow the tracing app to send out IDs in the background." I'll see how the Isle of Wight trial goes before buying an Android phone to replace my trusty Blackberry specifically to support this app. I can understand the desire for public health bods to get the full contact graph, but then there is a lot to be said for just running with the default api that Apple and Google are providing

The Life-and-Death Divide Between Flushing and Corona

>> "“If you see differences in the spread of infectious disease among different populations, that’s highlighting the differences in social dynamics. If everyone were mixing with each other homogeneously and equally, then you should see relatively comparable infection rates and we’re not seeing that,” Lee said." << The micro-detail of physical interaction graphs might be culturally determined. Plus learning lessons from those countries that have experienced corona virus pandemics

COVID-19 with Chris Whitty - YouTube

Gresham College's Professor of Physic being calm and clear

To mask or not to mask: Modeling the potential for face mask use by the general public to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic - ScienceDirect

"Model simulations, using data relevant to COVID-19 dynamics in the US states of New York and Washington, suggest that broad adoption of even relatively ineffective face masks may meaningfully reduce community transmission of COVID-19 and decrease peak hospitalizations and deaths. Moreover, mask use decreases the effective transmission rate in nearly linear proportion to the product of mask effectiveness (as a fraction of potentially infectious contacts blocked) and coverage rate (as a fraction of the general population), while the impact on epidemiologic outcomes (death, hospitalizations) is highly nonlinear, indicating masks could synergize with other non-pharmaceutical measures." Every little helps. Depends on density of course and NY has a very high density. At present in Brum centre density very low outside and on nearly empty buses, but after end of may could become higher especially on trains metro and buses. You can get some idea of what the modellers are up to by looking at the table of parameters. Huge probable ranges, with multiply coupled differential equations...

The Cancer in the Camera Lens | The New Republic

Sinclarian quality satire here, via daringfireball It looks to me as if most people in the US are looking to their state governments for guidance and to set public health rules. I gather that state govenors are linking up in clusters to coordinate their response based on local data. So the presidential circus becomes a distraction rather than a help?

Floating Power Plants Are Taking to the High Seas – gCaptain

"Karpowership has the biggest fleet of the vessels. Starting from the first ship for Iraq, which took three years to build in 2010, it now operates 25 such ships in 11 countries from Mozambique to Cuba to Indonesia. Coronavirus hasn’t slowed work, opening some opportunities for new markets instead." "The company converts existing dry bulk vessels, buys engines in bulk and builds them “one after another, almost like a production line,” Harezi said."

The Ecological Vision That Will Save Us - Issue 84: Outbreak - Nautilus

>> “Our social system has become so disconnected from nature that we no longer understand we still are a part of it. Breathable air, potable water, productive fields, a stable environment—these all come about because we’re part of this elaborate system, the biosphere. Now we’re suffering environmental consequences like climate change and the loss of food security and viral outbreaks because we’ve forgotten how to integrate our endeavors with nature.” <<

Coronavirus deaths: how does Britain compare with other countries? | David Spiegelhalter | Opinion | The Guardian

"You would think it would be easy for a bean-counting statistician to count deaths – the one certain thing (apart from taxes). But it is remarkably difficult. I have stopped taking much notice of the number given out at the daily press conferences, as it is only based on reports from hospitals, oscillates wildly around weekends, and recently included deaths that occurred a month ago. And this week the number of UK deaths jumped up by nearly 5,000 to 26,097 in one day – rather close to Starmer’s count – by retrospectively including non-hospital deaths that had tested positive for the virus." Probably going to have to be excess deaths compared to 5-year running average per month or something

xkcd: Tags

It took me a few seconds...

At The Solidarity Britannia Food Bank | Spitalfields Life

"They are the people who clean our offices and homes, they drive taxis, they cook and serve food to us in restaurants and cafes, they deliver our parcels, and wash our cars. With them, we have a functioning city but, without them, the city comes to a standstill. We are all co-dependent upon each other, and in these times of the pandemic, such people are not only falling through the gaps, but they are falling fast and hard." Perhaps more so in London and the large cities. Informal renting means little control on evictions I suppose.

The Design Squiggle

"The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design." Via daringfireball The left hand part is the labour intensive and expensive bit that people don't like paying for. Hence all the templated designs you see.

Coronavirus deaths mapped: Every region now at least 25 per cent below peak | News | Health Service Journal

"HSJ’s unique analysis shows the spread of hospital deaths confirmed as coronavirus cases to date, by trust and area, as well as the regional growth trends." Which is heartening, but the action now is excess deaths from all causes perhaps?

Why Georgia Is Reopening Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic - The Atlantic

>> "Canavaggio has spent days crunching the numbers to figure out whether reopening his bar is worth the safety risk, or even feasible in the first place, given how persistent safety concerns could crater demand for a leisurely indoor happy hour. “We can’t figure out a way to make the numbers work to sustain business and pay rent and pay everybody to go back and risk their lives,” he told me. “If we tried to open on Monday, we’d be closed in two weeks, probably for good and with more debt on our hands.”" << Mr Weatherspoon thinks he can make it work here from around June. I won't be first in the queue for a veggie brek

The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

"Don’t trust all-purpose glue." This chap knows..

Washing Ziplocs, eating bread crusts: Americans are discovering frugality - Vox

"She helps clients, before and now, work through how to persevere, to trust that there will be enough. Birchall’s own household found itself down to one roll of toilet paper (“because I do not hoard”) but, just as she tells her clients, the universe provided and she was able to buy more before it became a problem. She says an important guideline is that everything in your home be able to have a permanent place — i.e., if there’s no place for your collection of 20 glass bottles, you cannot have 20 glass bottles." We are keeping 14 days worth of food and consumables in case we need to self-isolate. Apart from that it is just turning over the stock now so spending on groceries about normalish, just all in one go each week instead of spread out here and there

Government's top scientist explains why the covid-19 death toll is higher than official figures show - Birmingham Live

“We are confident that the great majority of the population have not had Covid, in your area and in every other area of the UK. Therefore, the ability for this to take off again in a really serious second wave, if we are not careful, is absolutely identical.” No regional differences in deconfinement

Downtown is for People (Fortune Classic, 1958)

"What will the projects look like? They will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery."

In Italy, 'Suspended Shopping' Helps Those Facing Economic Hardship During Pandemic : Coronavirus Live Updates : NPR

"On a recent morning, a shopper asks that 10 euros ($10.83) be added to her bill for what's called la spesa sospesa, "suspended shopping." The concept derives from the century-old Neapolitan tradition of "suspended coffee" — when a customer in a cafe pays in advance for someone who can't afford it." Sounds quite an idea

Top Aide to Boris Johnson Pushed Scientists to Back Lockdown

"With the government coming under criticism in the U.K. for not locking down earlier, the accounts suggest Johnson’s most senior adviser understood the severity of the crisis and was pressing for action to be taken more quickly. Some on the panel clearly agreed. The advisers were heading toward recommending a lockdown soon anyway, one of the people said." Intervention may have made things better than they could have been.

Avoiding the worst – Le blog de Thomas Piketty

"This is what we should be concerned about: the epidemic could rise to record numbers in the poor countries where the health systems are not able to cope with the shock particularly as they have been subjected to austerity policies imposed by the prevailing ideology in recent decades. Confinement implemented in fragile ecosystems may moreover prove to be totally inappropriate. In the absence of a minimum income scheme, the poorest will rapidly have to go out to seek work which will re-launch the epidemic."

Jonathan Raban: ‘I felt pretty happy that I was still alive’ | Books | The Guardian

>> “Trump may well turn out to be more of a danger for the rest of the world than for the dis-United States. But whatever happens is going to be a bloody, bloody mess.” << Well, he got that one more or less bang on

Google's mobility data summary up to April 17th

Will be interesting to see how this changes after Bank Holiday

Apple's COVID Mobility Data - kieranhealy.org

"Apple recently released a batch of mobility data in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is aggregated from requests for directions in Apple Maps and is provided at the level of whole countries and also for a selection of large cities around the world. I folded the dataset into the covdata package for R that I’ve been updating, as I plan to use it this Fall in a course I’ll be teaching. Here I’ll take a quick look at some of the data. Along the way—as it turns out—I end up reminding myself of a lesson I’ve learned before about making sure you understand your measure before you think you understand what it is showing." Via daringfireball. Fire up RStudio and play, but read the cautions!

Social Distancing With My Mother | Spitalfields Life

"There is something thrilling about walking down the middle of the road. It is not the risk of getting knocked over as much as knowing you are doing what you are not supposed to do, a small yet exhilarating rebellion. I shall be disappointed to return to walking on pavements again once lockdown is lifted." I walked down the middle of a 6 lane dual carriageway yesterday for a bit. The silence was profound. This is on a road that would usually be rammed full of cars. Perhaps we need a couple of no car Sundays when 'normality' returns. (The kicker is in the end of the linked page)

'Khichuri': An Ancient Indian Comfort Dish With A Global Influence : The Salt : NPR

"To make this flavorful, mushy, one-pot dish, my mother would dry roast moong dal (yellow split mung beans), then throw it in a pressure cooker, with some rice, a couple of veggies and some spices. Lo and behold, 15-20 minutes later, we had hot, steaming khichuri. Ma would serve it with a dollop of ghee (clarified butter) on top, and some spicy mango pickle and sweet potato fries (my favorite!) on the side. Sometimes, my father would make deem bhaja (a simple omelet with onions and green chilies) to go with the meal. And occasionally, if we were lucky, there would be a hot, crispy piece of fried fish." Looking for a non-pressure cooker recipe

My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? - The New York Times

"[...]Ashley started assembling 30 boxes of survival-food kits for the staff. She packed Ziploc bags of nuts, rice, pasta, cans of curry paste and cartons of eggs, while music played from her cellphone tucked into a plastic quart container — an old line-cook trick for amplifying sound. I texted a clip of her mini-operation to José Andrés, who called immediately with encouragement: We will win this together! We feed the world one plate at a time!" Mr Andres is needed in UK and possibly the UN "After a couple of weeks of watching the daily sales dwindle — a $12,141 Saturday to a $4,188 Monday to a $2,093 Thursday — it was a relief to decide to pull the parachute cord. I didn’t want to have waited too long, didn’t want to crash into the trees." As with the OpenTable data set, ordinary people started locking down before the officials published the orders. That means that ordinary people will decide when to come out of their houses...

RAPID ASSISTANCE IN MODELLING THE PANDEMIC: RAMP

"(e) Any individual who is strongly committed to working on COVID-19 pandemic modelling, and who is not assigned to a task before the end of April, is invited to educate themselves via the Isaac Newton Institute resources such as those at https://www.newton.ac.uk/event/idd (overview + links to reports) and at https://www.newton.ac.uk/event/idd/seminars (seminar listings with recordings and pdf slides) and then join in the RAMP discussion forums when these are launched. In general we anticipate a greater need for scrutinizing and prioritizing the emerging literature on COVID-19 than for adding to it." Reached point where critical analysis more important than new papers. Sort of encouraging,

How to make good no knead artisan bread with Indian Atta flour | TRFL the home of LoafNest

>> "[...]While it is whole wheat flour made from hard wheat, it is different to normal whole bread flour in the various ways. Atta flour is very smooth and fine in its texture. Even though it is whole wheat, the texture of the flour is more close to unbleached white flour. It is made with a special way of stone milling as opposed to the roller milling used for bread flours. The milling breaks down the starch in the wheat more. Atta has about 15% starch damage compared to 4-5% starch damage in bread flour. This makes the flour and breads taste somewhat sweeter. Atta has relatively high level of ash (burnt starch) at about 1% which gives the flour a unique flavor and a slightly darker color. Because of the high starch break down, the flour can absorb significantly more water than a bread flour. Atta has high gluten that holds the dough together even when rolled into very thin breads." << Implications: more water than strong bread flour and suggestions from other pages to add some acid to the water. Plenty of chapati flour around at present because of Ramadan having started. I bought a small bag of mixed grain attar to experiment with (and to actually make chapatis for curry).

Margaret Burbidge obituary | Science | The Guardian

>> "The British-American astronomer Margaret Burbidge, who has died aged 100, was the principal author of a watershed scientific paper in 1957 that set out the evidence for chemical elements having been formed inside stars. In essence, the work of her and her collaborators proved that the iron in our blood, the oxygen in our lungs, the calcium in our bones, even the carbon in our DNA was made in the hearts of massive stars and then exploded back into space billions of years ago." <<

Trump wants to reopen the economy. The restaurant and airline collapse shows that’s not easy. - Vox

"This table shows, day by day, how much reservations and seated walk-ins fell from the day one year before in a range of domestic and global cities. And it demonstrates clearly that bookings were tumbling in all kinds of places before mayors and governors ordered their restaurants closed." OpenTable data set. Format is a bit back handed (dates in reverse order, and percentages are lost bookings not percentage of covers booked). Will need to mark each line in the table with the date of lockdown in that city.

Exclusive: deaths of NHS staff from covid-19 analysed | News | Health Service Journal

>> "It may be that this rigour is protecting staff better than some fear and the results can be considered cautiously reassuring. However, this finding is not a reason to slacken off on the appropriately rigorous use of PPE, but rather to wonder why others, who are likely involved in what are generally considered to be lower risk activities, are becoming infected and consider whether wider use of rigorous PPE is indicated." << No NHS staff fatalities (yet) among intensive care staff or those considered at highest risk. So we need to tighten protective equipment for those in less hazardous kinds of care, not loosen them?

How COVID-19 Is Wreaking Havoc On Our Ability To Make Things — Including Vaccines | FiveThirtyEight

>> "Other expected supply chain issues with vaccines are shaped by years of international trade patterns. For example, doses of vaccines are delivered in glass vials, and there’s been a global shortage of glass stretching back to at least 2015. The medical glass industry was just beginning to catch up with increased demand, Robinson said, and now, novel coronavirus vaccines will create additional pressure. Even if the vaccine is loaded into 10-dose vials, that’s still hundreds of millions of vials that will be needed, he told me. Janssen, a division of Johnson & Johnson, is developing a novel coronavirus vaccine that Robinson regards as one of the most promising. “[Janssen has] already preordered 250 million vials, and that might be all that’s out there,” he told me. “We’re trying to procure another 200 million.”" << Connections many layers deep

Addressing the strain the coronavirus has put on America's food supply chain with José Andrés - 60 Minutes - CBS News

"José Andrés: From now on, we gonna be giving the respect they deserve to the delivery pizza guys, to the women sitting on the supermarket, feeding entire families in the neighborhood only by being there and putting her life at risk. All of the sudden, that immigrant that you thought that maybe you didn't like is the one that has been helping feed your community. All of a sudden we are gonna be more respectful to everyday Americans because now those everyday Americans, in my eyes, they are the heroes that kept America going, that kept America fed."

David Spiegelhalter on Twitter: "New @ONS data: 18,516 deaths registered in the week ending April 10th, 7,996 more than usual. 6,213 COVID, so 22% of this excess did not have COVID-19 mentioned (was 41% last week). More readiness to put COVID on certifica

"New @ONS data: 18,516 deaths registered in the week ending April 10th, 7,996 more than usual. 6,213 COVID, so 22% of this excess did not have COVID-19 mentioned (was 41% last week). More readiness to put COVID on certificate?" So virus deaths now showing up in national stats quite clearly. Answers Hector Drummond's points based on earlier data.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Index Case. Dealing with Covid-19 inside our care homes

"The index case (colloquially, ‘patient zero’, but more accurately, the first documented patient in a disease outbreak within a particular population), was a patient recently discharged directly from hospital, into the care home." Is there no other way of looking after discharged residents? Can temporary wards not be used for basic care while patients still infectious?

Boris Johnson skipped five virus briefings in early days of pandemic - Axios

>> "“The interesting thing for me is, I’ve worked with Singapore in 2003 and 2009 and basically they copied the U.K. pandemic preparedness plan. But the difference is they actually implemented it," Hibberd told the Sunday Times." << Summary of the Sunday Times thing. I don't think this is down to individuals...

Forecasting s-curves is hard – Constance Crozier

"This is not to say that it is impossible to model or predict s-curves. Only that, contextual information about the system you are modelling is likely required. For biological systems, are there physical parameters which govern the initial growth rate? For technological changes, can the final level-off be reasonably estimated? This information is application specific. In other words, data enthusiasts (such as myself) should leave the modelling up to the professionals." Sounds like a plan. The video of progressive fits as the data set unfolds is great

Coronavirus: Predicted grades leave 'many questions unanswered' - BBC News

>> “Some of my friends have been predicted three or four A stars, so what if the teachers have a limit on the number of A grades they can award? "If they put us in rank order, I could be disadvantaged on the basis that my school year happens to be a really strong one academically.” << This child will go far. She has demonstrated a good understanding of the difference between norm referencing and criteria referenced assessment, and has shown implicit understandng the difficulty of aggregating ranked positions between institutions. Still a really tough situation though.

Capitalists or Cronyists? | No Mercy / No Malice

>> "In Depression-era Scotland, my dad was physically abused by his father. His mother spent the money he sent home from the Royal Navy on whiskey and cigarettes. He took a huge risk and came to America. My mom took a similar risk, leaving her two youngest siblings in an orphanage (her mom and dad had both died in their early fifties), and bought a ticket on a steamship. She had a small suitcase and 110 quid that she hid in both socks. Why? Because they wanted to work their asses off and be rewarded for the risks they were willing to take. This is capitalism, a beacon of hope for people who are smart, hard working, and comfortable with risk, promising a greater share of the spoils than those who are not." << Via daringfireball. I'm guessing Glasgow. In Liverpool, people were hopping over the ocean to work unregistered in New York in the 30s as a regular thing.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » China Crisis

>> "For as with banking in 2008, it turns out that this is another area where profits are privatised and risks are socialised. Producers who used stretched supply lines across continents were able to win contracts on price against those who kept supply lines short, taking advantage of the lower wages paid further afield. The risk that those stretched supply lines might be broken by very rare events has been borne by the rest of us. We just didn’t realise it." <<

Estimating the number of infections and the impact of nonpharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in 14 European countries - Imperial College London

Imperial's COVID-19 model (given that all models are wrong)

How the first cable was laid across the Atlantic | WIRED UK

"[President Buchanan's] verbose message will have caused headaches for the operators. The reception across the cable was terrible, and it took an average of two minutes and five seconds to transmit a single character. The first message took 17 hours and 40 minutes to transmit." Some serious self-capacitance there

The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable Was a Bold, Beautiful Failure - IEEE Spectrum

"Public sentiment toward the cable quickly cooled, however. By the end of 1858, rumors abounded that this was all an elaborate hoax or a fraudulent stock scheme aimed at fleecing unsuspecting investors. Similar to today’s conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe that the Apollo moon landing was real, the cable doubters were not convinced by souvenirs, messages from heads of state, or effusive press coverage." 1857 here by the way...

Birmingham wander - the lost byway

"Birmingham is a Ruin Porn Paradise of which I only caught a glimpse. With every corner of London being magicked into luxury buy-to-leave apartments for offshore oligarchs to dump their ill-gotten gains, it was uplifting to see large parts of a city seemingly left to its own devices. Birmingham offers hope, for now at least, although god knows what effect HS2 will have." Well, we are getting the 30 story skyscraper that will put most of the 'art deco' ruins in shadow at various times of day. Then we have the conversion of old factories into 'luxury appartments'. But not too bad yet.

Whither England? - Travel - TLS

"It seems now to be a rite of passage for the middle-class, middle-aged Englishman to go off on a long walk and then to write a book about it. Psychogeography has become a field sport. The generally accepted rules of the Great English Walkabout are these: you must be alone; ideally you should be suffering from some personal loss or great anxiety; along the way you are required to make rather obvious yet nonetheless vaguely interesting remarks about the landscape and about English history; and if possible you should at all times adopt a mysterious, mellifluous and melancholy tone." Personally, I can't wait to get back to walks as conviviality.

Why One Expert Is Still Making COVID-19 Models, Despite The Uncertainty | FiveThirtyEight

"So, even though models are for making ideas clear, the path to making one isn’t always so clear. Yet for all their imprecisions, they’re still better than nothing. Either we can use models, trying to stay cautious about how much they’re really telling us, or we can rely on conjecture, gut reactions and expert opinion alone. Only the first path is a transparent one with a built-in mechanism for self-correction." Bayes versus the baying of tabloids and conspiracy people?

Bill Withers: The Soul Man Who Walked Away – Rolling Stone

>> “What else do I need to buy?” he says. “I’m just so fortunate. I’ve got a nice wife, man, who treats me like gold. I don’t deserve her. My wife dotes on me. I’m very pleased with my life how it is. This business came to me in my thirties. I was socialized as a regular guy. I never felt like I owned it or it owned me.” << Grown man does not feel need to overachieve

In Convalescence With My Mother | Spitalfields Life

"Like everyone else, I want life to go back to normal. At the same time, it was that ‘normality’ which delivered the pandemic. That normality was also the cause of climate change, deforestation, wars, streams of refugees, scarcity of resources and excessive consumption. So I wonder, what is the normality without all of the devastation and how do we get there?" I like stories where people recover after a few days of illness. Something to hold onto amid the grim toll of death. Many will be asking what the new normal is, not sure there are any answers yet

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting* - Forge

"Until then, get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying." Cynical perhaps but probably accurate. By some unconfirmed insider accounts in the UK people have taken the lockdown more seriously than the government expected... and perhaps they will be slower to come out than expected.

Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows - The Verge

>> “I think it’s a sign of the benign neglect of the systems that serve people in poverty,” said Tracey Patterson, Code for America’s senior director for social safety nets. << Universal Credit is brand new, but has parameters that delay payments built in as a policy. Might not always be the technology. Ultimately this is about political choices

US Stimulus Being Slowed by Ancient Computer Language COBOL - Bloomberg

"The way old COBOL code was written also makes it hard to update. Modern computing languages break programs into chunks, each with a specific purpose. COBOL programmers often weaved everything together, which means code changes can damage or disable other parts of the program. This phenomenon, known as spaghetti code, is more of an issue than any inherent difficulty in learning the language. But it makes the work hard and time-consuming." Also the 'magic numbers' taken from business procedure manuals and used in switch/case style blocks. So Case 89 means something specific relating to the July 1965 procedure document - and you try finding a copy.

Poll shows most Americans won’t immediately venture out when social distancing ends - Vox

"According to the polling data, just 20 percent of Americans would immediately return to normal activity once state restrictions are lifted, while 71 percent would wait to see whether the change in guidelines led to increased confirmed Covid-19 cases before deciding what to do. And 10 percent would continue limiting social contact regardless of developments." Early adopters, late adopters and laggards again I suppose.

Communicating the coronavirus crisis | plus.maths.org

>> "One of the problems here is scientific disagreement, which always exists and, through social media, is much more public now than it used to be. There can be disagreement for various reasons: people might disagree about values, or they might have access to different information. They can even have the same information and come to different interpretations. It is difficult to play this out in public because most people don't realise just how much disagreement there is in science. The media still present an idea of science as a monolithic body of "facts". This is complete nonsense because scientists argue all the time. Though there are of course some things they don't argue about, where there is an agreed body of knowledge." << David Spiegelhalter's take from last month. The other issue is that when politicians say that decisions are 'driven by the science' they have of course defined the range of responses that are possible based on political grounds.

Obituary: Simon Norton - The Jewish Chronicle

>> "When Cambridge refused to renew his contract, family finances enabled him to rent out two flats in his large house while he lived in its “rampantly chaotic” basement, according to Masters, who became his tenant. But Norton was generous to a fault; he was the only Cambridge landlord to reduce his rent when Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax was introduced." << Another one gone power 2. One wonders what the Cambridge managers would have made of Grothendieck

Flowers and plants can teach us about surviving the coronavirus pandemic - Vox

>> "Next, Armbruster wanted to know if he could recreate this, artificially. What he saw could have been a fluke So he found a new trigger plant and tied it down, and photographed its flowers every six hours. “Within a day or so the flowers were back in the right orientation,” he says." << Chalk one up for whole-organism field biology

Education was never the sole focus of schools. The coronavirus pandemic has proved it | Education | The Guardian

"Headteachers went from running an ordinary school to organising a virtual school, a childcare centre and a food delivery service. They had two days to turn it around. Education was never the sole focus of schools, and it’s a shame it has taken a pandemic to prove it." Throw in safeguarding and the protect agenda and you have a local resource that manages interactions with the state. Community?

Restaurants will never be the same after coronavirus – but that may be a good thing | Jonathan Nunn | Opinion | The Guardian

>> "As for restaurants themselves, chef Asma Khan tells me the biggest issue is unionisation. “After this,” she says, “our priority should be to create a powerful union that is the voice of the workers, not the owners and investors.” Pressure groups such as Jonathan Downey’s Hospitality Union, made up of restaurant owners and industry figureheads, are doing vital work in pushing for rent holidays and debt moratoriums while trying not to scare nervous landlords by saying “rent strike”. But this is fighting a problem caused by rampant capitalism on its own terms. Now is the time to start having honest conversations about food prices and supply chains, high rents and civic space, about who restaurants – or at least the ones that get coverage – really benefit." << Union Cafes. Locally sourced seasonal food at economic prices. In lower rent premises outside the centre. Livable wage plus profit share,

John Horton Conway: the world’s most charismatic mathematician | Siobhan Roberts | Science | The Guardian

"For the last quarter century Conway has held the position of Princeton’s John von Neumann distinguished professor in applied and computational mathematics, now emeritus. Before that, he spent three decades at Cambridge, where in the 1970s, he dived deep into the vast ocean of mathematical symmetry. He discovered a 24-dimensional symmetry group that came to bear his name, and, with his colleague Simon Norton, he illuminated the 196,883-dimensional Monster group with a paper titled “Monstrous Moonshine”. Conway also discovered a new class of numbers, infinitely large and infinitesimally small, which are now known as “surreal numbers”. Those achievements earned him a spot as a fellow of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the oldest scientific society in the world. Conway likes to mention that when he was elected in 1981, he signed the big book of fellows at the induction ceremony and was pleased to see on previous pages the names Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, and Bertrand Russell." Another one gone

British bakers reintroduce World War II bread in coronavirus fight

>> “If standing in supermarket lines during this crisis prompts people to think more deeply and critically about the inequalities and unhealthiness inherent in our food system, all the better,” he added. << 85% brown flour was readily available in Sainsbury's and Tesco a few weeks ago! Roll on flour's return. The National Loaf is quite tasty if you cut the salt in half and add a few rosemary seeds.

The Hermit Who Inadvertently Shaped Climate-Change Science - The Atlantic

"Inouye has included Barr’s records in several studies, and collectively his work has become some of the most significant indication that climate change is rearranging mountain ecosystems more dramatically and quickly than anyone imagined. In his work with wildflowers Inouye understood that first flowering came about a month earlier now than when he’d begun the project 40 years ago."

Mierle Laderman Ukeles - Wikipedia

>> "The manifesto is formed into two major parts. In part I, under the rubric 'Ideas' she makes a distinction between the two basic systems of 'Development' and 'Maintenance', where the former is associated with 'pure individual creation', 'the new', 'change' and the latter is tasked with 'keep the dust off the pure individual creation, preserve the new, sustain the change'. She asks, "after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?"” <<

Official Website: Gordon Hempton, The Sound Tracker®

I'm thinking intensely local sound samples while the lockdown is on so much less in the way of mechanical sound than usual

how to do nothing - Jenny Odell - Medium

"A more recent project that acts in a similar spirit is Scott Polach’s Applause Encouraged, which happened at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. Forty-five minutes before the sunset, a greeter checked the guests in to this cordoned-off area. They were ushered to their seats and reminded not to take photos. When the sunset finished, they applauded, and refreshments were offered afterward." My kind of thing for after the lockdown

New York’s Inequalities Are Fueling COVID-19 | FiveThirtyEight

>> “I have no doubt that the most dangerous means of transmitting disease was the subway. … Many a man who was sick must have felt that he had to go to work.” << Dr Royal Copeland, public health manager in New York during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

How to Increase Happiness, According to Research - The Atlantic

"Indeed, one of the survival traits of human beings is psychological homeostasis, or the tendency to get used to circumstances quickly, both good and bad. This is the main reason money doesn’t buy happiness: We get used to what it buys very rapidly and then go back to our happiness set point. And for those of us lucky enough to avoid illness, even the unhappiness from the COVID-19 crisis will be in the rearview mirror before very long."

Dr. Fauci Has Been Dreading A Pandemic Like COVID-19 For Years | FiveThirtyEight

“...the thing I’m most concerned about as an infectious disease physician and as a public health person is the emergence of a new virus that the body doesn’t have any background experience with, that is very transmissible, highly transmissible from person to person, and has a high degree of morbidity and mortality." Dr. Anthony Fauci in a routine interview in 2019. The quote never made it to the final article as it was not on topic. This is a 'known unknown' or grey swan event.

Why this crisis is a turning point in history

"The once formidable British state is being rapidly reinvented, and on a scale not seen before. Acting with emergency powers authorised by parliament, the government has tossed economic orthodoxy to the winds. Savaged by years of imbecilic austerity, the NHS – like the armed forces, police, prisons, fire service, care workers and cleaners – has its back to the wall. But with the noble dedication of its workers, the virus will be held at bay. Our political system will survive intact. Not many countries will be so fortunate. Governments everywhere are struggling through the narrow passage between suppressing the virus and crashing the economy. Many will stumble and fall." The article covers all the bases I can think of. The hollowing out of state resources is going to have to change.

Coronavirus: Thousands apply for fruit and veg grower jobs - BBC News

>> "Totaljobs says it has seen 50,000 searches for farming jobs in the past week alone. Steve Warnham of Totaljobs said workers “who have been temporarily displaced due to Covid-19 are now looking for roles in other sectors”. The UK faces a shortage of fruit and vegetable pickers because of travel restrictions on overseas workers." << Given transport - basically a car - this seems sensible. Easy to keep isolation, protective work gear, outdoors. Hope people get a taste for it. We need a benefit system that can deal with seasonal work though.

Coronavirus: Flour mills working 'round the clock' to meet demand - BBC News

>> "It was the most delicious bread I've ever had so we're hooked," says Zoe, who is now on her fifth loaf. "I managed to find the last bag of flour on the shelf last week so I'm hoping I'll be able to find more on my next shop - otherwise my bread journey might be over!" << Could be good if a lot of people get into it. But I'm down to my last couple of Kg now.

Idle Containership Fleet Appears Set to Hit All-Time Record – gCaptain

"In addition to the main Asia-Europe and transpacific trades, carriers have also reduced capacity on the transatlantic, Latin America, Middle-East, Indian sub-continent, Africa and Oceania routes, as up to a quarter of the world’s population is in lockdown and non-essential retailers shuttered." Staggering in the recovery due to different timescales for the peak in each country might allow phased build up of the flow of stock?

Coronavirus: What is the risk to men over 50? - BBC News

"Nearly 10% of people aged over 80 will die in the next year, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, at the University of Cambridge, points out, and the risk of them dying if infected with coronavirus is almost exactly the same." Absolute proportion as per Spiegelhalter's book! Chapter 1.

Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics

Source of the raw (provisional) data for the Hector Drummond blog post below. Turns out that there is a delay in adding virus related deaths in arising from registration need. The daily virus figures are released without waiting for registration. Still, tracking this over a few weeks should show a rise at some point. Also I'm thinking regional breakdowns for West Mids and London will be ahead a bit

Week 13 ONS graphs, still nothing – Hector Drummond

"Firstly, here’s a graph of the latest all-death numbers in England and Wales, up to 27 March (end of week 13). Bit of an uptick in week 13 after a downward turn the week before. Still no World War 3 though." We'll see if the author updates this in a couple of weeks for the story after 27th March. This chap is a critic of the lock-down and he makes the point that economic depressions have a certain and well documented effect on mortality statistics. I shall keep an eye on the data and the corrections that the ONS publishes as stats change with late notifications from non-hospital cases &c. I am STILL very much keeping to lockdown and following government policies while checking data based skeptics. We can track the analysis over subsequent weeks quite easily.

Worried About Coronavirus? 10 Tips To Help Manage Anxiety | Every Mind Matters | One You

"You might also want to consider limiting the time you spend watching, reading or listening to coverage of the outbreak, including on social media, and think about turning off breaking-news alerts on your phone." Cut the firehose

A beginners guide to self-isolation… – Slugger O'Toole

"Let yourself be a bit slower. Getting your mind to slow down is probably a big adjustment and that will happen gradually, over time. Try not to fight it or resist it, accepting that we are all in this together might be helpful."

In Self-Isolation With My Mother | Spitalfields Life

"Every inch, every doorknob, hinge, every gap, crack and blemish is a prompt, recalling constellations of memories that span epochs of our family life. These stories criss-cross, beginning here and ending over there, their contours no longer precise or clear. Details, chronologies, who actually said what and why, cease to matter as much as that they happened here."

After The Coronavirus Passes, Your World Will Not Go Back To Normal

>> “In terms of the way in which we use technology for information and entertainment, it's going to be a big jump forward,” Thompson said. “To believe that once we're given the go-ahead to go outside that everything is going to go back to normal, I think that's an incorrect assumption.” << Normal will change (and the change will be uneven as per Gibson's "the future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed")

Conservationism You Can Believe In - Sir Roger Scruton

"Conservatives who agree that environmental problems are real and serious, including Scruton himself, see the large-scale approach as dangerous. For him, the place to start is with “oikophilia,” love of the home. Drawing on the insights of Edmund Burke, Scruton sees the “little platoon” of local society as the best place to act on our concern for the environment. We love elements of the natural world that are familiar to us from personal experience. These are the places in which our families live, and to which we are most likely to give, voluntarily, of our time and energy."

Food goes to waste amid coronavirus crisis - POLITICO

"The problem isn’t a shortage of food and commodities. If anything, food waste is becoming a bigger issue as traditionally big, bulk buyers — like college dorms and restaurant chains — suddenly stop receiving deliveries. As a result, millions of gallons of milk are being dumped, and farmers have no alternative but to turn fresh vegetables into mulch." I'm still thinking of those College kitchens. Meals on wheels? Central cooking and distribute to local neihbourhood? Local disaster planning providing a nutritional safety net? I'm in Roger Scruton territory here almost, but unpicking that just in time supply chain is certainly worth looking at

Why is the act of urban walking so revolutionary?

"The reality of the street is what we need to confront, as increasing proportions of the public realm are quietly transferred to private ownership. Whereas there was a long and hard-fought battle to establish the right to roam over private land in the countryside, a fellow urban rambler, Andrew Stevens, remarked to me recently that there is no comparable right to roam in the city. Take Mais’s and Maxwell’s advice to “constantly trespass” and you’ll soon find yourself pursued by members of the expanding army of private security guards." The Management reserve the right to refuse entry...

Coronavirus: Does my grandfather’s 1940 infectious disease advice still hold true? - BBC News

>> "On the landing outside (the quarantined person's room)," it continues, "will be placed the customary bath filled with disinfectant solution; the traditional 'carbolised' sheet may be hung outside the door." Carbolised? I've had to look that one up as well. Apparently it's an obsolete term referring to the use of carbolic acid as a disinfectant to kill germs. "The bath… is intended for the soaking of linen which has been removed from the sick room." << I can remember carbolic soap. It came in big (like six inches) blocks and you used it with a scrubbing brush and bucket to clean floors and stuff. Smelly.

Coronavirus Case Counts Are Meaningless* | FiveThirtyEight

"...interventions such as social distancing are being undertaken to bring down R, although actions can vary from location to location. The goal, though, is to get R below 1, which means that a disease begins to die out in a population. (It will die out gradually if R is close to 1 and quickly if it’s close to zero, say, 0.2.) Finally, if a disease has spread very widely throughout the population, R may eventually fall because of herd immunity. In other words, enough people are immune to a disease because they’ve already had it, it will not continue to spread as fast."

Opinion | There Is No Way Out but Through - The New York Times

"The world that emerges from this cannot resemble the old. If this plague that cares not a whit for the class or status of its victims cannot teach solidarity over individualistic excess, nothing will. If this continent-hopping pathogen cannot demonstrate the precarious interconnectedness of the planet, nothing will. Unlike 9/11, the assault is universal."

This Brooklyn Landlord Just Canceled Rent for Hundreds of Tenants - The New York Times

"The trickle-down effect could be swift and devastating, according to landlords, leaving them scrambling to find ways to pay their own bills, such as water, sewer and taxes at their buildings." I'm guessing that Mr Salerno has managed to build the flats without a lot of debt to service. Still has to pay water/sewage though. More heavily leveraged landlords should start to fail in a couple of months?

Why it’s not too late for baby boomers to open up about their postwar memories

"In terms of what I’ve so far produced, going up to 1962, I think I’ve succeeded, but only to an extent. Putting aside some obvious lacunae – for instance, in my regional treatment, or in my treatment of rural life – where I think I’ve fallen short is in what I might call the emotional-cum-psychological domain: that whole area of feeling, so often largely unspoken and therefore hard for others to retrieve or chart, as the emotionally driven and arguably irrational political earthquakes of 2016 revealed in abundance." Journal keepers and diary writers need to publish their raw material I guess to provide the research base

MHS | Moonscope Lunar watercolours by Rebecca Hind

Russell and Rebecca Hind: paintings/pastels of the Moon

Rebecca Hind » Scintilla: the glittering speck

"Numbers, 31:23 everything that may abide the fire, you shall make to go through the fire, and it shall be clean; nevertheless it shall be purified with the water for impurity: and all that doesn’t withstand the fire you shall make to go through the water."

Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model  | FiveThirtyEight

"Using a mathematical model to predict the future is valuable for experts, even if there are vast gulfs between possible outcomes. But it’s not always easy to make sense of the results and how they change over time, and that confusion can hurt both your brain and your heart. That’s why we want to talk about what goes into a model of a pandemic. Hopefully, understanding the uncertainty can help you get the most out of all the numbers flying around." Exponential functions with time lags and parameters subject to wide intervals of uncertainty?

Review: ‘In Praise of Wasting Time’ Speaks Ominously of a Digital ‘Grid’ - The New York Times

"The vast majority of knowledge is acquired the old-fashioned way: hard, focused acquisition of increasing expertise. Although there is clearly value to unfocused activity — what Professor Lightman calls the free-grazing mind — to get unstuck, there is no evidence that for most people it makes sense to dedicate anything like half our waking hours to such musing." Yup. Don't underestimate the hard slog, the processing of what is already known and the thorough immersion in a process or field of knowledge. Innovation, the real kind where new things come into being, depends on connections between existing knowledge in often disparate fields however. The 'mathematical walk' (c.f. Hadamard, Poincare) gets important at that stage.

The Coronavirus Is Changing Who We Are - The Atlantic

"As a result, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which not a minute is to be wasted. The precious 24 hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced to 10-minute units of efficiency. We become agitated and angry in the waiting room of a doctor’s office if we’ve been standing by for 10 minutes or more. We grow impatient if our laser printers don’t spit out at least five pages a minute. We cannot sit quietly in a chair for 10 minutes. And we must be connected to the grid at all times. We take our smartphones and laptops with us on vacation. We go through our email at restaurants, or our online bank accounts while walking in the park. We have become slaves to our “urgent” appointments and to-do lists and addiction to nonstop stimulation by the external world. A momentous but little discussed study by the University of Hertfordshire in collaboration with the British Council found that the walking speed of pedestrians in 34 cities around the world increased by 10 percent just in the 10-year period from 1995 to 2005. And all of this has happened invisibly. Little by little, the noise and speed of the world have increased, so that we can hardly remember an era of slowness and quiet, when we could let our minds wander and think about what they wanted to think about, when we had time to consider where we were going and what we believed in." Via nextdraft mail list

Coronavirus: How to understand the death toll - BBC News

"Nearly 10% of people aged over 80 will die in the next year, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, at the University of Cambridge, points out, and the risk of them dying if infected with coronavirus is almost exactly the same." Spiegelhalter doing his relative risk thing. Probably correct!

Opinion | Covid-19 Brings Out All the Usual Zombies - The New York Times

"First, when you have a political movement almost entirely built around assertions that any expert can tell you are false, you have to cultivate an attitude of disdain toward expertise, one that spills over into everything. Once you dismiss people who look at evidence on the effects of tax cuts and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, you’re already primed to dismiss people who look at evidence on disease transmission." As the facts change so must our opinions. It is not 'a U-turn' to change policy when the data shows a clearer signal. Science is Baysian, politics is not so incremental

How are food supply networks coping with coronavirus? - BBC News

>> "There is an old military saying that while "amateurs talk about tactics, professional soldiers study logistics". Meanwhile, the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu wrote that “the line between disorder and order lies in logistics”." << We need a National Hoard. Seriously, three months worth of dry food for the whole nation stored in a system of warehouses. Rotate stock in and out again. Trigger supply when something like this happens.

How Coronavirus Tests Actually Work | FiveThirtyEight

>> "Just like DNA can identify a person, RNA can identify the virus that causes COVID-19. Isolating it requires a series of steps — adding different chemicals and repeatedly spinning the sample in a centrifuge — that aim to separate the sample into layers like a fancy cocktail shot, with the layer containing the RNA floating on the top. Then the RNA has to be further purified. There’s more than one way to separate out RNA, and companies sell kits that include the chemicals you need to make it work (called reagents, because they’re used to induce a chemical reaction)." "From there, the RNA is mixed with short segments of DNA called primers. The primers and RNA get combined with loose building blocks of DNA, enzymes that work like genetic construction crews, and more reagents. Mix it all up, and your RNA turns into DNA." "Finally, the new DNA needs to be replicated until you have enough of it to actually study. That’s another chemistry kit — more primers, building blocks and reagents — doing what basically amounts to biological copy-paste, over and over. This is called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the primers used here are especially important. These replication primers are basically fragments of the virus you’re looking for, Smith said, that will bind to the genetic material of that specific virus and nothing else If there’s no COVID-19 in the sample, then COVID-19 primers won’t replicate any DNA." <<

Opinion | I’m a Doctor in Britain. We’re Heading Into the Abyss. - The New York Times

"Though I experienced neither fever nor breathlessness, I was told to self-isolate for 14 days. That’s where I am now, in self-isolation. And I’m not the only one from my hospital. After just one patient with Covid-19, a quarter of our junior staff are off with coughs and sniffles we would normally work through. A single case of the coronavirus has wreaked havoc in our hospital." Can we get a factory making protective equipment up and running FAST?

UK backs away from “herd immunity” coronavirus proposal amid blowback - Vox

>> “Is it ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of an uncertain future benefit?” he wrote. << If there is no acquired immunity, then we get this every year?

How Trump Designed His White House to Fail - The Atlantic

"One factor that is hard to understand if you haven’t worked in a White House is how senior officials—and, particularly, the president—can choose to be soothed by a constant stream of praise. You’re in a powerful position. When people meet with you, they’re generally nicer than usual. They tell you you’re doing a wonderful job. They tell you how great you are. Walking around those hallways, decorated with portraits of people like Lincoln and Washington, it’s possible for a president to fall into the trap of thinking that he’s as great as people tell him, or as great as those images hanging on the walls." Just hoping our more critical political process continues and is effective.

BSI open letter to Government on SARS-CoV-2 outbreak response | British Society for Immunology

"The UK leads the world for the quality of our immunology research. Given our current lack of knowledge on SARS-CoV-2, our community of immunologists have two asks. Firstly, we feel more needs to be done to ensure social distancing to limit the number of COVID-19 cases in the short term, especially for vulnerable members of our communities. This will enable us to buy time until we understand the virus better and can begin to develop therapeutics. Secondly, to aid efforts, we call on the government to release their modelling data to allow scrutiny from the scientific community to better predict the course of this outbreak." The British Society of Immunology open letter perhaps carries more weight than some of the others we have seen.

Worldometers: UK coronavirus numbers

Show me the numbers

Coronavirus: UK measures defended amid criticism - BBC News

>> "He also said the new coronavirus is likely to become "an annual seasonal infection"" << Herd immunity not enough? Or is it shift mutation of the virus?

Slowing down the covid-19 outbreak: changing behaviour by understanding it - The BMJ

"Changing behaviour is not easy. However, there are many strategies to help people change behaviour that focus on increasing motivation, capability and/or opportunity to perform the behaviours. [3,4] Here we focus on strategies that improve motivation or capability."

How to Edit – Rands in Repose

"Print it out and read the thing again, but do not edit as you read. Start at the beginning and read to the end. Leave your red editing pen alone. You want to best approximate the first reading experience by someone else. Okay. Red pen time. Now edit harshly. How does the story sound in your head? Slash anything that detracts from the narrative harmony."

Watch again: Boris Johnson makes coronavirus announcement after COBRA meeting - YouTube

I really hope these guys are right

British government wants UK to acquire coronavirus 'herd immunity', writes Robert Peston - ITV News

"The strategy of the British government in minimising the impact of Covid-19 is to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed so that those who suffer the most acute symptoms are able to receive the medical support they need, and such that the health service is not overwhelmed and crushed by the sheer number of cases it has to treat at any one time." Hope that iceberg has a really long submerged bit

How to fight the Covid-19 coronavirus with soap and water. And why it works so well. - Vox

"Now, lucky for us, coronaviruses are a bit like the oil mentioned in the above example: bits of genetic information — encoded by RNA — surrounded by a coat of fat and protein. Thordarson likes to call viruses “nano-sized grease balls.” And grease balls, no matter the size, are the exact type of thing soap loves to annihilate." We like soap

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) - Our World in Data

Our World in Data page on the famous virus

Uses This/Katherine Cox-Buday

"They would not need to own what we colloquially consider a "computer", nor a screen. Instead they would use augmented reality glasses that displayed windows from a remote session running on the appliance (John Gage's "the network is the computer" idiom). Let's throw some haptic gloves in there as a hand-wavey (literally) way of performing input." Clipboard on which I can write text, mathematics and doodles. Then wave to and have the resulting pdf file rendered in perfect publication ready copy. Document structure derived from a mind map.

The Rise and Fall of WeWork | The New Yorker

>> “It’s bright and bustling,” she went on. “People are chatting in small groups, or having coffee and working on a laptop. You’re convinced that they are busy and doing things well. It’s interesting, because that’s what they were selling: this energy, this magnetic, productive buzz.” << Perhaps I'm just an old cynic but I find that cranking out stuff is one thing and having coffee and a chat is another. I tend to avoid meetings (the ones with agendas, action points and a time limit) unless there is an actual problem to solve.

Abdu Sharkawy - I'm a doctor and an Infectious Diseases... | Facebook

"I am scared that our hospitals will be overwhelmed with anyone who thinks they " probably don't have it but may as well get checked out no matter what because you just never know..." and those with heart failure, emphysema, pneumonia and strokes will pay the price for overfilled ER waiting rooms with only so many doctors and nurses to assess." Seems about right to me. I like the contain -> delay -> mitigate approach. Thinking mainly about barriers to infection and very moderate social distancing right now. "I implore you all. Temper fear with reason, panic with patience and uncertainty with education. We have an opportunity to learn a great deal about health hygiene and limiting the spread of innumerable transmissible diseases in our society. " Could be side benefits on increased basic hygiene. Openable windows on trains would be good!

Welsh cakes recipe - BBC Food

In honour of St David's day. Will pluck up courage to make some this month...

BitClub Network Was "Too Big to Fail," but Cost Investors $722 Million | Westword

>> "It’s ironic, of course, that something as supposedly inviolable as Bitcoin, a digital currency untethered from the corporate banking system and subject to meticulous, independent verification of each transaction, should become such rich ground for scams and frauds. But ever since the “genesis” block of Bitcoin was first mined eleven years ago, there have been convoluted efforts to game the system, along with cryptocurrency empires that were too big to fail but did." << Perhaps the whole thing is a massive troll?

Crispin Tickell: Gaia and the human impact: Earth system science.

"Looking back it is strange how uncongenial the observation was to the practitioners of the conventional wisdom when it was put forward in its present form over a quarter century ago. Unfamiliar ways of looking at the familiar, or any rearrangement of the intellectual furniture, tend to arouse emotional opposition far beyond rational argument: thus opposition to the idea of evolution by natural selection, of continental drift and tectonic plate movement, and more recently of cometary or asteroid impacts from space." This is the chap who convinced Mrs T that she had to speak about climate change in the 1980s

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries • The Register

"I don't want a 10,000-year lifetime for a clock, but I'd like a smartwatch that has a chance of being loved and used when I've been dead for two centuries. How would it be powered? What logic circuits would it use, given that complex SoCs today become unobtainable and irreplaceable after a few years at most? What display has centuries-long MTBF? And what software architecture, let alone communications, will combine beauty, utility, reliability and long-term durability?" My film camera was manufactured around 1970s and is still going strong, does not need a service yet. Right now, I'd like a 20 year laptop (to match my old coat)

Roman Spelt Slipper Bread | Bread | Recipes | Doves Farm

Spelt yeast recipe

Baking Tips & Tricks | Baking Mad | Baking Mad

15g of this is 7g of quick easy bake, so double amounts.

Sourdough bread recipe for beginners - it is very easy - Foodgeek

This is a white flour recipe with some wholemeal added for taste

Wholemeal Sourdough Recipe | The Sourdough School

Emmanuel Hadjiandreou’s straight through 100% wholemeal sourdough recipe to try. Uses a tiny amount of starter, 76% hydration, and a series of short kneads early in the bulk ferment. Looks OK so far with Tesco's Stoneground Wholemeal bread flour (the low rent end of artisan baking)

Can Farming Make Space for Nature? | The New Yorker

>> "He believes that farmers in the twenty-first century must cultivate as much as they can on their land—fungi for the soil, grasses for the pollinators, weeds for the insects, insects for the birds, pasture for the livestock—for the long-term goals of carbon capture and food production. “How do we feed the nine billion?” Fiennes said. “We feed them through functioning ecosystems.”" <<

More satisfying minimalism from McDonald's

"Joining these are a new series of posters from Leo Burnett for McDonald’s UK, which abandon photographs of juicy burgers or crisp fries and instead simply opt for words. Surely an ad creative’s delight to work on, the posters prove that we need no more than text to get us feeling peckish. The campaign was created in collaboration with renowned typographer David Schwen, and clearly hark back to Schwen’s earlier series titled Type Sandwiches." No relation. Via daringfireball

We Fixed An Issue With How Our Primary Forecast Was Calculating Candidates’ Demographic Strengths | FiveThirtyEight

"(If you want to get very technical, when programming in Stata, please remember that local macros aren’t stored in the program’s memory when you execute another do-file from within the shell of a master do-file.)" Environment sanitised when a new shell started?

Sourdough, 100% rye (100% rågsurdegsbröd)

Apparently you can use a wheat based sourdough for this loaf

xfce4-power-manager issues | The FreeBSD Forums

The quest for a core dump free desktop continues

An Unsettling New Theory: There Is No Swing Voter - POLITICO

>> "And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”" << At a tactical level I hope Bitecofer has if correct. At a more strategic level, there needs to be a way of building some consensus over changes that have long lead times (decarbonisation &C).

Electric or Not, Big SUVs Are Inherently Selfish - VICE

"The electrification of the Hummer is not a signal of climate progress. It is a declaration that it’s still OK to be an asshole." Electric big car. Mostly recyclable metal. Not spraying PM24 in my lungs. Sounds OK if you are into that kind of thing

Iowa has already won the worst IT rollout award of 2020: Rap for crap caucus app chaps in vote zap flap • The Register

"So all they had to do was find a smartphone, find the download instructions, download it, figure out how to log in, navigate a new interface, and figure out how to input the right numbers in the right boxes. And read the email instructions. Which include the fact that the test PIN they had been sent to try it out wouldn’t work on the day of voting. For security reasons, they’d get a new one. No one was given any training. And no one was on hand to set it up or answer questions."

Kneading wet dough by hand | King Arthur Flour

"The second batch of ciabatta will be mixed and kneaded entirely by hand. Our ciabatta recipe has a hydration level of 80% (the weight of the water compared to the weight of the flour). These hand-kneading techniques work quite well in the 67% to 80% range — as long as you don't mind getting a little messy." Doing a Handelman Ciabatta recipe with 70% hydration and giving this a go.

The Ghost Hunter — The Atavist Magazine

"He told me that the Oregon coastline around the town of Manzanita was dotted with bits of beeswax and broken porcelain, the purported remnants of a galleon wreck. Native people once made arrowheads out of shards of china."

A way can be found between the EU rock and the GB hard place. But will Boris Johnson let us take it? – Slugger O'Toole

"The way Irish unity will be achieved is 'bottom up', via the incremental integration of economies, infrastructure, standards, business mergers, cross-border trade volumes, people from north working in the south and vice versa." Rob Dowling in the comments section. I think this comment highlights the importance of 'permeable borders' to nations. Part of my general feelings about the unreality of nation states.

The changing industrial landscape of Britain - BBC News

"John Davies is an influential British landscape photographer who has been photographing Britain's industrial heritage since the early 1980s." 81/19 looks like an essential purchase

SIMON WECKERT

"99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic." Good spoof. Via daringfireball

Brexit is done: Now for the hard part

"Unlike every FTA the EU has negotiated, this is about adding trade barriers, not taking them away." This is what I have a real problem with in this whole Brexit project. What must it be like walking into a negotiation with the objective of making things worse?

Brexit is a culture war with economics as collateral damage

>> Orwell’s words from 1946 sum up Brexit: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” <<

Britain after Brexit will not be alone, but it will be lonelier

>> "The direct influence of British political choices on those of the neighbours will also vanish. British politicians will press their noses against the EU windows as decisions that affect them are made. Those decisions will determine the evolution of the single market and EU trade and climate policies. Without the UK, the EU will still have 450 million people and produce 18 per cent of world output. It will also remain the UK’s most important trading partner. The UK’s self-exclusion will matter." << The truth of the 'take back control' slogan will perhaps emerge over the next months and years

Britain after Brexit will not be alone, but it will be lonelier

"Britain after Brexit will not be alone, but it will be lonelier British politicians will press their noses against the EU windows as decisions that affect them are made" The truth of the 'take back control' slogan will perhaps emerge over the next months and years

“Britain has not left Europe; it has just stepped into another room” – Slugger O'Toole

"And when I think about what it means to me to be European, as well as profoundly English, I inevitably end up not with the EU flag or the day-to-day business of the Brussels institutions [...] but a gut sense acquired in childhood that foreign isn’t frightening, and lives opened up to the world will be more exciting than ones shut away from it." Growing up in a sea port you get used to people who look different to you and who speak other languages. Just one of those things I guess.

Stephen Joyce, last direct descendant of James Joyce, dies aged 87 | Books | The Guardian

>> "Stephen was the son of Giorgio Joyce, the son of James and Nora Joyce. His birth in February 1932 was marked by the Ulysses author with the poem Ecce Puer, which also mourns the death of Joyce’s father. “Of the dark past / A child is born; / With joy and grief / My heart is torn,” wrote Joyce. “A child is sleeping: / An old man gone. / O, father forsaken, / Forgive your son!”" <<

James Joyce’s grandson and the death of the stubborn literary executor | The Outline

"In a 2006 article for the New Yorker, the journalist D.T. Max chronicled some of his actions in defense of his family’s privacy: denying “nearly every request to quote from unpublished letters”; suing scholars attempting to publish new editions of Ulysses; suing the Irish government for staging Bloomsday readings; and threatening one performance artist with a lawsuit for having “‘already infringed’ on the estate’s copyright,” presumably by having memorized a passage from Finnegans Wake." This strikes me as a really good strategy for making sure that the author's work is not read or appreciated by a new generation. Criticism needs to be written to justify careers after all. I still have a sneaking admiration for the man

Google’s silent Chrome experiment crashes thousands of browsers and angers IT admins - The Verge

"After complaints, Google was forced to reveal it had launched an “experiment” on stable versions of Chrome that had changed the browser’s behavior. The experiment was made silently, without IT admins or users being warned about Google’s changes. Google had simply flipped the switch on a flag to enable a new WebContents Occlusion feature that’s designed to suspend Chrome tabs when you move other apps on top of them and reduce resource usage when the browser isn’t in use." A laudable change to increase battery life on smaller devices leads to unforseen problem especially with virtualised or thin-client systems. Many thousands of admin-hours wasted on trying to find out what the problem was in corporate helpdesk systems. Perhaps an 'enterprise' channel for Chrome?

What I learned watching Bernie and Biden for hours on end - POLITICO

"While in Washington, I watched Sanders struggle to generate excitement among his Senate colleagues, in Iowa I watched Biden, the candidate with the most Senate endorsements, struggle to generate enthusiasm among a small group of voters in Council Bluffs, on the Nebraska border." We could end up with "4 more years of *this*" to quote Gil Scott-Heron.

Will Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ ever be finished? | The Spectator

"His task became longer and harder as he got closer to the studied reality, as he collected more complex questions — and realised there existed more complex answers." Strikes me as fractal: each level of detail hides another set of levels

Maslin recipe

"This does make a very large loaf, so it’s useful if you have a quite a few mouths to feed. Russell made toast with it the day after and it was still fine, but beyond that it goes stale quickly." Halve the quantities to make a 700g ish loaf. The historical demonstrator didn't measure the flours. Must be working from volume by eye?

Historic Mixed Grain Bread | Savoring the Past

"Wheat became the largest export crop for the Mid-Atlantic colonies in the 1700s. When George Washington decided to diversify away from tobacco, he chose to cultivate wheat. Consumer goods that were imported into the colonies were often paid for in wheat flour." Liverpool and Birkenhead late 1970s / early 80s. The grain elevator demolished and the flour mill mostly demolished with the old building turned into 'luxury flats'. The grain ships from Canada stopped coming as UK farmers used cross bread grains to increase protein yield. I wonder if we will see the grain ships back...

Suma Wholefoods Three Seed Maslin Bread | Suma Wholefoods

Maslin loaf recipe scaled to 500g flour total but omits the barley. Could substitute 50g of rye for the barley.

Maslin Bread - OAKDEN

"An authentic Medieval bread would have been round and domed shaped with a flat bottom, (from having been allowed to rise before baking) and be baked on a bakestone or the flat floor of a bread oven without it being in a tin – each loaf would have commonly been made by using around 4lb of flour (1.9kg)." One day, I'm going to bake a full size maslin loaf on a stone. For now, this 1Kg loaf will do.

Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes | The Fresh Loaf

"Simply put, the intended reader of this book is the professional baker. Here and there Hamelman makes a nod to the home baker, but it doesn't take long for the amateur baker to realize that Hamelman is not all that interested in his or her plight. The continual references to steam injectors and oven vents, proper posture when lifting 75 pounds of dough, and potential injury from improperly holding 7 to 8 foot long peels while unloading dozens of loaves of bread quickly make the amateur realize this book was not intended for him." Personally, my lower vertebrae welcome a healthy regard for motions and weight. But, yes, a copy on order from Amazon.

Pain Rustique from Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman

50% sponge and autolyse before adding yeast and salt to the dough. Very little shaping. Just under 70% hydration. My doughs always spread a bit so we'll have to see...

Cardiff's Fitzalan High class all receive A* GCSE grade - BBC News

>> "We call him the maths whisperer, he instils the belief that they have practised the hardest maths that they have to ever to face so why be scared of an exam?" << Good for them

Draw all roads in a city at once

Very nicely done. The SVG files will open fine in Inkscape.

How to make a basic loaf of bread | Bread, Cakes And Ale

"A good rule of thumb is 750g of water to 1000g (1kg) of flour. This makes a slightly sticky dough. If that scares you, just reduce the water to about 70% – ie 700g water to 1000g flour." Quite a lot of water. Sponge based recipe so I might try this one

In the red corner, Big Red, and in the blue corner... the rest of the tech industry • The Register

"The irony, of course, is that open computing has produced the most fevered upsurge in new technology since the Industrial Revolution. The richest companies in the world are the tech giants - Apple, Google, Microsoft itself - all borne aloft ultimately on open hardware, open software and most critically, open networking. The common language that defines the Internet is its APIs. They are how everything plugs together."

[PDF] Biological homeostasis of the global environment: the parable of Daisyworld | Semantic Scholar

The original daisyworld paper - downloadable as pdf for once

Daisyworld: A review - Wood - 2008 - Reviews of Geophysics - Wiley Online Library

Nice paper with some differential equations and discussions of stability for the original model and for the extended models.

Daisy World – cellular automata style | Excel is my passion

"This seemingly simple model, merely thought experiment, brought interesting insights on global ecosystems. Idea that remarkably simple feedback responses can have impact on global variables was very interesting. Fact that two seemingly competing species can be actually in some kind of symbiosis increasing survival chance for both of them was just incredible." Wondering if I can do this without the macros...

Telex and telegrams are still big business for Dorset company | Bournemouth Echo

>> "The arrival of email and file transfer sites did not destroy the market for telexes. Unlike emails or faxes, telex has ‘legal document status’ in every country of the world, and each successfully transmitted telex counts as proof of receipt as well as sending." "Certain industries – including banking, aviation and maritime – still rely on it, as do secure users such as embassies, governments, post offices and military organisations." << Bills of Lading now electronic I think but interesting...

Liberal England: A 1937 film on the dangers of pollution from burning coal

"Smog was the deadly downside of Britain's industrial might, as this powerful and revealing documentary spells out. In 1937, coal was Britain's lifeblood; it fuelled her industry and heated most homes." Grandad was hospitalised around end of Jan most years as the greeny-yellow fogs descended...

Stumbling and Mumbling: Two conservatisms

"Scruton defined conservatism as the “instinct to hold on to what we love, to protect it from degradation and violence and to build our lives around it.” The creative destruction of the free market economy, however, often endangers what we love. It is always threatening to destroy traditional communities and industries. Coal miners and steel workers in the 80s, protesting against pit and plant closures, were conservatives on Scruton’s definition but certainly not Thatcherites. And Patrick Minford’s vision of a post-Brexit economy in which manufacturing disappears is surely alien to the Scrutonian love of tradition." Thatcherism has always struck me as revolutionary, or at least radical.

Stumbling and Mumbling: Inequality under New Labour

"So, yes, Blairites are right: New Labour did greatly slow down the increase in equality we saw under Thatcher. But – in hindsight – it did not do enough to tackle the inequalities that most matter." Moral: Always drill down one level (at least) below an aggregated indicator.

Schools warned against 'gaming' exam league tables - BBC News

"The stopping of national curriculum tests, often known as Sats, in science had meant schools had put more focus on English and maths, to the detriment of science, said the report." Well of course. Once you go down the route of published metrics that collapse a process as complex as education down to a few numbers inevitably the schools are going to maximise the numbers.

How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy - Vox

>> "UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff calls this the “framing effect.” As Lakoff puts it, if you say “don’t think of an elephant,” you can’t help but think of an elephant. In other words, even if you reject an argument, merely repeating it cements the frame in people’s minds. Debunking it is still useful, of course, but there’s a cost to dignifying it in the first place." << Lets all just chill out and not follow the idiot stream. Just for one month. >> "I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”" << This page comes up first for Bannon's notorious giveaway of the strategy

Crowds and Technology

"What is new and interesting is how social media has transformed age-old crowd behaviors. In the past decade, we’ve built tools that have reconfigured the traditional, centuries-old relationship between crowds and power, transforming what used to be sporadic, spontaneous, and transient phenomena into permanent features of the social landscape. The most important thing about digitally transformed crowds is this: unlike IRL crowds, they can persist indefinitely. And this changes everything."

The Internet of Beefs

>> "A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage." << I really think some people like being angry.

Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips are offering Labour a miracle diet — it won't work | inews

"There are a couple of problems here: the Labour Party did not lose touch with towns. It lost support among elderly voters and socially conservative voters everywhere – but because these voters are more likely to live in towns, their defection only cost Labour seats in towns. But the same types of voters saw Labour losing support in Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North constituency, just as it lost support in Wakefield and Redcar." Ebbing tide lowers all boats and might ground a couple

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Infrastructure: the Conservatives’ necessary but misplaced priority

>> "The manufacturers of Bird’s Custard, a food product, who have been in the city for a great many years, were quoted as an example. The motor industry, on the other hand, is a cyclical industry and whilst Birmingham is very prosperous, it and the Midlands, to the extent of dependence on the motor industry, are living dangerously in their prosperity. Therefore, it hurts these areas the more when industrial and commercial employment of a non-cyclical kind leave the area. Such a movement can prove a great future potential loss to the city and surrounding area.” << A previous attempt to even out geographical differences

Brexit: Price rises warning after chancellor vows EU rules divergence - BBC News

"Sajid Javid told the Financial Times the UK would not be a "ruletaker" after Brexit, urging businesses to "adjust"." Er - I think we will be taking rules. Possibly from USA, possibly from EU and possibly from China. Lets face it they are the three silos in the world.

The Smartphone Has Ruined Space - The Atlantic

"The disquiet associated with these activities is usually theorized as labor swelling to fill what was once private time. I’ve previously used the term hyperemployment for the endless jobs everyone has, over and above the job they may get paid to do. My colleague Derek Thompson has called Americans’ almost religious devotion to their jobs workism. But hyperemployment and workism are also partly consequences of the built environment becoming more super-spatial. It’s not just that the work comes home with you, but that the office does as well. Infinitely portable, the smartphone turns every space it enters into a workplace. Once Salesforce is launched, whatever room you occupy is a conference room." Georges Perec once thought of having parts of a house in different neighbourhoods of a city. The bedroom in one place, the kitchen in another near the market, and the sitting room handy for conversations. Looks like it is happening the other way round, like a geometrical involute

How the Netherlands got universal health insurance with a private market - Vox

"Gijs van Loef is a proponent of this view. He argues that managed competition is an oxymoron — that market competition and social collaboration are fundamentally at odds. He cites those rising costs and the Netherlands’ middling performance on life expectancy compared to its European peers. Is this what people are paying for?" The GP triage before access to outpatient minor emergency ward is good. Shared costs and inequality bad.

Voter Migration 2019

"In terms of voter migration, the main story is that voters left Labour. Nine out of 41 voters left. They left for different reasons and went to different places, but they left. That partial collapse of the Labour vote is the most important fact of the 2019 election and explains why Labour did so badly. By comparison, the Conservatives were relatively stable and gained seats because Labour weakened." Each pictogram is 300k votes

Samuel Beckett letters offer insight into his inner thoughts and personal life

“Nothing of interest to tell. Writing at an end. Tired of it all” Sammy signs off

Ballytrain departure – Frank McNally on the polite capture of a Monaghan RIC barracks

“I wandered for months through the small lakes and little hills of Monaghan. I saw sieges of heron in the reeds and waited for bat-tailed otters near Carrickmacross where they are said to pass through when going from one lake to another. I was able to disprove the lines: ‘From Carrickmacross to Crossmaglen/You meet more rogues than honest men’.”

Harry McGee: It looks like advantage Fianna Fáil and the Greens

"The world has changed a lot since George Gallup popularised polls almost a century ago. Then everybody was willing to participate. Now in the US people don’t bother, especially from the most marginalised sections, and pollsters have to make assumptions about how some demographics vote. That’s guessing in other words." I am seriously considering a subscription to the Irish Times. Sanity from a small country

Ofsted seeks judgement-free approach to 'stuck schools' - BBC News

>> "It said the 410 "stuck" schools in isolated areas of England needed extra support, not to be inundated with unsuccessful improvement schemes. Chief inspector of schools Amanda Spielman said a new non-judgemental approach was needed, offering the schools tailored support." << About time they realised. Can we dismantle the 'improvement' industry please? Save some change.

The Future of Politics Is Bots Drowning Out Humans - The Atlantic

"One of the biggest threats on the horizon: Artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: artificial-intelligence-driven text generation and social-media chatbots. These computer-generated “people” will drown out actual human discussions on the internet." At which point, I retire to a small cabin in the woods on a planet where it always rains, feed the cat, and await the spaceships

Russia's Cyberwar on Ukraine Is a Blueprint for What's to Come | WIRED

"Instead, the intruders had exploited the company’s IT helpdesk tool to take direct control of the mouse movements of the stations’ operators. They’d locked the operators out of their own user interface. And before their eyes, phantom hands had clicked through dozens of breakers—each serving power to a different swath of the region—and one by one by one, turned them cold." I wonder what would have happened if the technicians had pulled the power lead out of the PC? Default on or default off?

Meet Cliff Stoll, the Mad Scientist Who Invented the Art of Hunting Hackers | WIRED

"In 1986, Cliff Stoll’s boss at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs tasked him with getting to the bottom of a 75-cent accounting discrepancy in the lab’s computer network, which was rented out to remote users by the minute. Stoll, 36, investigated the source of that minuscule anomaly, pulling on it like a loose thread until it led to a shocking culprit: a hacker in the system." Stoll's book is cheap on Amazon and an interesting read (I Oxfamed my copy a couple of years ago). The geezer does Klein bottle hats now... and that home-made robot he uses to pick the parcels is totally ace

Chrome OS has stalled out

"Certainly, Linux environment support is great for enthusiasts and developers, but there are very few commonly-used commercial applications available on Linux, with no sign that will change in the near future. It's another dead end." Up to a point, Lord Copper. If they added anti-aliasing to the linux Xorg support then I could do all of my 5% tasks from a side loaded Ubuntu installation. ChromeOS can do the other 95%.

The Art at the End of the World - The New York Times

"We did not panic. Instead we rejoiced. The natural obstacles on and around which the jetty was built, along with Smithson’s prolific writings, suggest he designed the jetty to be both difficult to reach and difficult to see. He constructed it during a drought in 1970; he knew the water would someday rise."

There are serious ideas in Dominic Cummings' work – but I'm not sure he's serious about them

>> "The big problem is that if you’re looking to hire IT specialists, “weirdos”, economists and top-notch project managers, you’re already looking at a tiny field. That’s outside of your control. Eliminate everyone in that small field who doesn’t want to work for a government that is pro-Brexit and/or on the right, and you have a yet smaller one. That, again, is outside your control. But anything you do that which winnows the field further after that is in your control and, the more you do it, the harder it is for a fair-minded observer to conclude that you’re serious about reforming the machinery of government." <<

How Harvard’s vast collection of glass plates still shapes astronomy | Astronomy.com

"The story of the people behind the plates is told beautifully in Dava Sobel’s new book The Glass Universe. The book ends around World War II, but the collection certainly doesn’t, with plates made until 1989. Astronomers are still using the collection, and even finding new ways to keep it scientifically useful. “I don’t think anybody has ever made a list of what the discoveries were from the plate stacks because they were used in a lot of other ways,” said Owen Gingerich, an astronomer and historian of science at Harvard.." Cartes Du Ciel?

Astronomy archaeology – finding 120-year-old observations – Niels Bohr Institute - University of Copenhagen

"A glass plate from 1919 is something special. It shows a solar eclipse that was recorded in Sorbal in Brazil by the English astronomer Arthur Eddington." And here's me thinking that particular plate would be safely in an archival storage box somewhere...

The Death and Life of a Great American Building | by Jeremiah Moss | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

>> "“This neighborhood has changed and adapted many times over the generations,” said Berman. “It was a fashionable district, then a honky-tonk entertainment area, and then a center for the art world. It has seen many lives, but most of those changes relied on the adaptive reuse of the existing buildings and moved at a moderate pace of change. The type of change we’re seeing now is unprecedented in the neighborhood’s history, and would erase all the layers that have accumulated over the generations.”" <<

Timothy Morton - Wikipedia

"Within the mesh, even the strangeness of strange strangers relating coexistentially is strange, meaning that the more we know about an entity, the stranger it becomes." I'm going to have to read this stuff slowly. A touch of the Hofstadters with the multiple recursion

Climate Change and the attention economy: Pause, breathe, reclaim time and take care of the earth – Slugger O'Toole

"Attention is that to which we attend. William James once observed in his book The Principles of Psychology that what we attend to is reality. Alan Wallace adds that our very perception of reality is tied closely to where we focus our attention. Only what we pay attention to seems real to us, while what we ignore seems to fade into insignificance until we are blindsided and events suddenly call out for attention, such as climate change." People get absorbed by twitter stuff and neglect their localities. Coops again?

The St Petersburg vegans cooking up a revolution - BBC News

"Once a month, the eight people who work at the Horizontal takeaway hold a meeting in which they air any grievances, discuss updates to the menu, and vote on any changes they may want to make. The front of their restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall that serves vegan burgers, hot dogs and nuggets to go, is covered with stickers promoting anti-fascism, anarchism, and other vegan outlets in the city." Cooperatives a way of pointing to future you want rather than negativity all the time?

Spiderman Hacker Daniel Kaye Took Down Liberia’s Internet - Bloomberg

>> "On it they found WhatsApp messages between Kaye and his hacker friends, discussions on an encrypted chat app with Marziano, a photograph of the type of security camera used in the Liberia botnet, and a video showing someone using the Telnet internet protocol to control a large botnet." << Telnet? 1980 wants its protocol back. Really underlines needs for some standards on 'internet of things'. Stuff like security cameras have a lifetime measured in years to decades.

An Artificially Created Universe | Institute for Advanced Study

>> "The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the same." << Von Neumann's engineers had a fair amount to do with the 'delivery' as well as the programmers (lead by Mrs Neumann)

Chernobyl: The end of a three-decade experiment - BBC News

>> ""This place is more than half of my life," says Gennady Laptev. The broad-shouldered Ukrainian scientist is smiling wistfully as we stand on the now dry ground of what was Chernobyl nuclear power plant's cooling pond." << "I was only 25 when I started my work here as a liquidator. Now, I'm almost 60."

An Alternative Lunar Ephemeris Model - slunar.pdf

"An examination of the frequencies in the terms of theAstronomical Almanacmodelof Eqs. (1–3) and of the new model of Eqs. (17–19) gives some interesting insights intothe lunar motion. The frequencies in theAstronomical Almanacmodel are all computedas functions of the mean anomalies and mean longitudes of the Sun and Moon,16whilethe frequencies in the model given by Eqs. (17–19) are determined entirely by a curvefit." Exceptionally clever method allows direct computation of the rectangular coordinates of the Moon in ecliptic J2000.0. Errors about 3 times worse than the D46 formulas for longitude and latitude from Astronomical Ephemeris, so around two-thirds of lunar disc width most of the time with two lunar disc widths worst case.

1993JBAA..103..289J Page 289: Arthur Philip Norton (1876-1955): the man and his star atlas

Arthur Philip Norton (1876-1955): the man and his star atlas Originals the lot of 'em

A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani Over Bloody Marys

So sad. I can remember the aftermath of 9/11 and how Giuliani provided hope and leadership

Michigan Central and the rebirth of Detroit

>> "So what prompted him to take the risk? “We're on a major artery, Michigan Avenue,” he says. “It's close to downtown Detroit. I just thought it had to come back. And we're so close to the heart of the city that it would come our way. And thank goodness it did.”" << Cities always come back because of the connections? Or because whatever level of economic activity there is will increase as the economy lifts?

The most important question about new Conservative MPs: how much do they care about debt?

"The Conservatives were elected on a manifesto that made up for what it lacked in length with incredible specificity: it’s just that the specific pledges cannot be reconciled with one another. Boris Johnson has committed both to increase public spending and to keep income tax, national insurance and value-added tax flat or falling – while also reducing debt as a proportion of the United Kingdom’s GDP over the course of the parliament." The end of Sound Money as a conservative policy I guess

The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History | WIRED

"All across Maersk headquarters, the full scale of the crisis was starting to become clear. Within half an hour, Maersk employees were running down hallways, yelling to their colleagues to turn off computers or disconnect them from Maersk’s network before the malicious software could infect them, as it dawned on them that every minute could mean dozens or hundreds more corrupted PCs. Tech workers ran into conference rooms and unplugged machines in the middle of meetings. Soon staffers were hurdling over locked key-card gates, which had been paralyzed by the still-mysterious malware, to spread the warning to other sections of the building."

Things don't only get better: why the working class fell out of love with Labour

"The political consensus around economics in the past 30… but I would say… 70 years has assumed that almost anything other than work generates economic value. I have been assured that capital generates value, that technology generates value, that state planning generates value, that universities generate value, that friendship generates value. But significant though all these things are, if work, if labour, is ignored then a constitutive and decisive feature of value is ignored. That is one of the reasons why a universal income, severed from work and vocation is a blind alley for Labour." Old time religion

Severance – Slugger O'Toole

"I grew up in an Irish Unionism which viewed Irishness and Britishness as not just compatible but complementary. From one viewpoint, this was a principled line drawn against the extremes of both British and Irish nationalisms; from another a nightmare of cognitive dissonance and sheared loyalties. Partition was both a tragedy and a necessity; London simultaneously a faithful protector and feckless betrayer. Loyalty and dissent entangled in quantum indecision. To be and not to be." John Stewart Bell grew up in the province...

The Beginning of the End of the United Kingdom – Slugger O'Toole

"In 1918 the United Kingdom as it had existed was blown apart by a trifecta of landslides; a Tory landslide in Great Britain driven by a three-way split in the centre-left vote; a Sinn Féin landslide in most of Ireland; and an Ulster Unionist landslide in what would soon become Northern Ireland."

In a devastating election, is Northern Ireland the crack where the light gets in? – Slugger O'Toole

"This is not a Pollyanna hot take on why it’ll all be ok. Nothing is ok, and there will probably be chaos. But it is a statement of fact that the politics of the past here cannot hold. Those who rely on it cannot ultimately succeed. Those who tried new things in this election were rewarded. We need to come to a deep and profound realisation that – because of England’s Brexit – nothing in Northern Ireland can ever be the same again." Parties standing aside to allow a two way vote

Rory Stewart: 'This general election feels like American politics' | British GQ

>> "It’s very, very striking, because what it suggests is that British politics is beginning to feel more and more like American and European politics – in other words, this new style of campaigning where you have this very simple, three-word slogan and you just drive it home again and again and again. You don’t talk about the details or the “how”. It’s an extraordinary strategy. The problem with it is it’s a very difficult way of running something. It’s not an ideal way of sorting out practical problems. It gives you the big headline and it gets you the votes, but it doesn’t tell anybody how things are going to work." << Rory (the still Tory) gets it

Daring Fireball: Time's 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg

>> “We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow,” she says, tugging on the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt. “That is all we are saying.” << And >> "Thunberg really riles up conservatives. “Why are we listening to a child?”, they ask, when they’re not frothing at their mouths over her celebrity and prominence. “Why are we doing nothing while global calamity grows ever more imminent?” is the response. They really seem to go after her in a viciously personal way — proof to me that she’s somehow really touched a nerve." << Famous Mrs Thatcher quote springs to mind

Derek Raymond - Wikipedia

>> “I’ve watched people like Kingsley Amis, struggling to get on the up escalator, while I had the down escalator all to myself.” << This page has class

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

Trend lines based on opinion polls up to morning of GE2019. Individual result spreads give a sense of confidence intervals (opinion polls are not random samples)

McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners ❧ Current Affairs

"McKinsey is capitalism distilled. It is global, mobile, flexible, and unabashedly pro-market and pro-management. The firm has an enormous stake in things continuing more or less as they are. Working for all sides, McKinsey’s only allegiance is to capital. As capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know."

The Smartest Guys in the Clubhouse | The New Republic

>> "He reliably kept outsiders—a group that included, for years of his tenure, even the players in his employ—on a need-to-know basis when it came to the work that he and a “decision sciences” team were doing as they collected and parsed every available bead of data that the game could provide. He was so devoted to efficiency that he engaged consultants from McKinsey to audit the organization (and, inevitably, to disrupt the org chart) every year. The collective mission was to ensure that the Astros brand of Moneyball would stay artfully (yet efficiently!) poised on the bleeding edge of managerially minded innovation." << So constant churn preventing any form of accountability - nice

This Impeachment Is Different—and More Dangerous - POLITICO

"But as information channels have multiplied, real “broadcast democracy”—the shared and broad engagement with a common set of facts —has disappeared. An abundance of choice means fewer focus on the news, and those who do are more engaged politically, and more partisan. No doubt, there is more published today about impeachment across a wide range of media than before, but it lives within different and smaller niches." Lessig on echo chambers

The Ladder Up | VQR Online

"For many years, my Puerto Rican homeland was not the island but the fried chicken and Chinese takeout joint on 156th and Broadway, merengue on the boombox where men played dominoes and women sold mangoes on sticks peeled and cut to look like roses. My grandmother has lived in the same apartment on this corner for sixty-four years now."

Climate change: Greta Thunberg mobbed at UN climate talks - BBC News

"Even within developed countries the poorest are the most affected whenever there are climate disasters or impacts, but they are not the ones who consume more and contribute the most to the causes of climate change." Sounds about right to me. Last Wednesday: huge tailback from Church Road to Vale in Edgbaston, so got off the bus and walked ahead of the cars for a mile or so. One person in each car. Being an affluent neighbourhood, mostly big cars...

How good have climate models been at truly predicting the future? « RealClimate

"In an upcoming paper in Geophysical Research Letters, Zeke Hausfather, Henri Drake, Tristan Abbott and I took a look at how well climate models have actually been able to accurately project warming in the years after they were published. This is an extension of the comparisons we have been making on RealClimate for many years, but with a broader scope and a deeper analysis. We gathered all the climate models published between 1970 and the mid-2000s that gave projections of both future warming and future concentrations of CO2 and other climate forcings – from Manabe (1970) and Mitchell (1970) through to CMIP3 in IPCC 2007." Notes and refs available but not actual paper with the force function corrections (unless in notes)

Climate change: From the beginning, models have been remarkably accurate - Vox

"It turns out that even those crude early models were fairly accurate, which is remarkable given the sophistication of the science and the available computing power. None of the models the authors analyzed got it badly wrong." Pity the paper is closed access.

Climate change: animation shows US leading the world in carbon emissions - Vox

"While atmospheric carbon is gradually absorbed by the ocean and plants, a large fraction, about 20 percent, lingers for millennia. That means a big chunk of the greenhouse gases emitted at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution is still heating up our planet today. If we were to magically cease emitting all greenhouse gases at once, the planet would likely continue warming for a period of time. This leads to the next point." single integration time constant or (I imagine more likely) a cascade of leads/lags from different sources? Lumped system model would be good

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Thoughts from a Big Beast

"In answer to a question on the steps needed to combat climate change, he made two points. First, while it was now high on the agenda, the talk was still of setting targets and changing dates by when steps would be taken and not on the actual steps which needed to be taken. Second, those steps (and as an example, he named raising two taxes he had introduced as Chancellor) would be individually extremely unpopular. If parties only ever worried about short-term popularity, what went down well with focus groups and opinion polls, nothing would ever get done. That was why sensible governments worked out what their priorities were, did them as soon as they were elected, explained what they were about and why, made sure they worked properly, eased off the closer it came to an election and awaited the judgment of voters on the whole after a 4/5 year term rather than obsessing about the immediate ratings. If the measures had been properly explained and worked, then voters would be more willing to accept them; if they didn’t work you were stuffed anyway. But to achieve effective change you needed to be willing to endure unpopularity. That, of course, presupposed that parties knew what they wanted to do and had a plan for getting there." Takeaway: the likes of Dom will get you a 'win', but won't necessarily guarantee that the 'win' is actually viable. Develop a plan and stick to it...

Why the Walkman, DVDs and “dumb phones” have enduring allure - Vox

>> "The kind of ritualistic interaction with a physical object that Paulus describes contrasts with the seamlessness of digital life. The physical objects themselves are also unique; they deviate from the monotony of the sleek aesthetic that’s come to dominate the world. “I think a lot of people are maybe bored with the sameness of everything,” Marks, of Collectors’ Weekly, said. “The culture’s becoming more monochromatic in some respects. So I think that the advantage for people who are weary of that is that these objects are messier and a little more difficult to deal with.”" <<

Pisa rankings: Why Estonian pupils shine in global tests - BBC News

"Estonia has made high quality early years education a priority." Kindergarten from 3, school from 7. Sounds like a plan. Build the house from the foundations instead of trying to build it roof down

Ivan Rogers on Brexit: the worst is yet to come | Prospect Magazine

>> "I fear it all points to a repetition next year of exactly the syndrome we have suffered for the last three. And a repetition of the myopia on which ultimately lands us with a poor and deteriorating relationship on multiple things that really matter, economically and strategically. I am just stating the likelihood—I personally frankly think near-certainty right now—that the incentives on both players now play out this way." << Section C, the ghost of Christmas future, is the kicker.

The Plan to End Boomers' Political Dominance - The Atlantic

>> "After the 2007 financial crash, though, he noticed something alarming. He was regularly visited by young couples—the man might be a nurse, his partner might be a cashier at the local supermarket—who worked hard and lived frugally, yet found themselves “camping in the spare room of his parents’ house, with a baby in a box at the bottom of the bed, and they couldn’t see how they would ever get anywhere to live.” Often, Willetts would give them whatever help he could—very little—and then head over to a local residents’ association meeting, where he would talk to “completely decent people” in their 50s and 60s who owned their own home but wanted no further houses to be built in their neighborhood." << Link any form of central government support for local council to house building target. You can vote NIMBY but you'll pay for it.

Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”: the story behind the Thanksgiving staple - Vox

>> "And Guthrie was, in fact, disqualified from the draft because of his arrest record. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he told NPR in 2005. “And so I turned it into a song. It took about a year to put together, and I’ve been telling it ever since just about.”" <<

This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful - POLITICO

"So I began calling friends who’d had senior roles in state and federal government, and then sought out some on the long list of people who had spent a portion of their careers working on the project. No one had ever traced the full sweep of the efforts to remake the station, and why they always failed. Trying to make sense of the swirl, I built a timeline on a spreadsheet, which grew to nearly 600 entries. After years of research, a picture began to emerge—one that, beyond the scope of any given anecdote, told a dispiriting story about the futility of present-day American government, and reshaped my view of progressive politics." Cities are hard to reshape

Carr: Fog, Fog, Fog...and Fatigue – gCaptain

"I pulled back the throttle and put my boat in neutral. I made a Securite call. “Securite…adrift in position…standing by for any concerned traffic…” No calls came back. I had no idea what time it was, sometime in the middle of the night. The fog was even thicker than before. I shut down my boat’s Westerbeke engine. So quiet, not a sound. Floating in a big ocean with nothing in sight. I lay down on the cockpit bench, covered in layers of thermal clothing and foul weather gear."

‘Take it from me. Dying is a full-time business. No time for a lap of honour’ - The Jewish Chronicle

>> "Opera entered his life in the 1970s when the conductor Roger Norrington, who lived in the same artists’ colony around Camden Town, asked if he’d take a look at a Mozart score. Jonathan said, “I don’t read music.” That’s all right, said Roger, “I do.”" <<

How Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series developed its cult following - Vox

>> "All seven of French’s books are set in Dublin (French, who was born in the US, went to Trinity College, and settled in Dublin in 1990), and six of them form the loosely connected Dublin Murder Squad series. Because French’s first novel came out in 2007, and her most recent in 2018, they form a portrait of Ireland during its Celtic Tiger boom, the ensuing crash, and its long, bleak aftermath. That’s perhaps part of why in these books, murder is usually about real estate, which is so precarious, and the detectives never stop thinking about class." << Which seems a bit of a corner case from a statistical point of view.

Principles for Purposeful Business | The British Academy

"The Future of the Corporation programme is one of the largest and most ambitious ever conducted by the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It lies at the heart at the heart of the future of capitalism, the future of humanity and the future of our planet. This second report builds on the November 2018 report, “Reforming business for the 21st century”. It revisits the case for change and highlights that climate change, the urgency of delivering on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), technological developments, the increasing dominance of companies without significant tangible assets, and negative perceptions of business make this agenda particularly urgent. It identifies how change can and should be achieved. It sets out a series of principles to guide lawmakers and business leaders in any jurisdiction towards the policies and practices that can release the potential of business to profitably solve the problems of people and planet, and to prevent business from profiting from harm." 44 pages less some full page pictures

BBC - BBC Food blog: The ale-barm method: Worthy of revival or just barmy bread?

"In England noblemen's bread, manchet was always made with the barm method, whereas the commoners' bread maslin was a sourdough. Barm bread survived until World War Two and even later in the North of England largely as barm cakes. Curiously, the old method of making a sponge, or thick batter of flour and water with the barm was still used with the new industrially produced yeast, and was re-introduced to Europe from Vienna where the first yeast factories were established. This became popular in France as a 'poolish', the favoured method of making crusty bread such as a baguette" Am I seriously thinking of brewing some beer to make a wort to bake some bread? Well, it is a project

Against Economics | by David Graeber | The New York Review of Books

>> "Ever since Hume, economists have distinguished between the short-run and the long-run effects of economic change, including the effects of policy interventions. The distinction has served to protect the theory of equilibrium, by enabling it to be stated in a form which took some account of reality. In economics, the short-run now typically stands for the period during which a market (or an economy of markets) temporarily deviates from its long-term equilibrium position under the impact of some “shock,” like a pendulum temporarily dislodged from a position of rest." << Skidelsky quoted by Graeber. What if there is no equilibrium? (Sort of similar to Lorenz's famous question about climate)

Money creation in the modern economy | Bank of England

"This article explains how the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans. Money creation in practice differs from some popular misconceptions — banks do not act simply as intermediaries, lending out deposits that savers place with them, and nor do they ‘multiply up’ central bank money to create new loans and deposits. The amount of money created in the economy ultimately depends on the monetary policy of the central bank. In normal times, this is carried out by setting interest rates. The central bank can also affect the amount of money directly through purchasing assets or ‘quantitative easing’." Data available in spreadsheet and report as pdf, from 2014

The Jungle Prince of Delhi - The New York Times

>> “Have you noticed that a factual error appearing in respected printed form tends to be copied by other researchers in the same field, until, inevitably, it competes with the truth for credibility?” it read. “The writers who perpetuate these mistakes rarely do so from evil motive: They have no axe to grind, they simply do not have time to check and double-check each fact, so they rely on the scholarship of their predecessors.” << New Statesman, just about pre-mainstream Web.

Cryptoqueen: How this woman scammed the world, then vanished - BBC News

"The reason so many people are excited by Bitcoin is that it solves that problem. It depends upon a special type of database called a blockchain, which is like a huge book - one that Bitcoin owners have independent but identical copies of. Every time a Bitcoin is sent from me to someone else, a record of that transaction goes into everyone's book. Nobody - not banks, not governments, or the person who invents it - is in charge or can change. There is some very clever maths behind all this, but this means that Bitcoins can't be faked, they can't be hacked and can't be double-spent." That'll do but I'd add a sentence about proof of work because that bit uses so much electricity

Earth on Nautilus: The Deep Time of Walden Pond

"Their other candidate was the early 1960s, when the world was most heavily contaminated with fallout from the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear weapons during the Cold War. The cesium-137 peak in lake deposits is so widespread that scientists already use it as a timemarker in sediment cores, as we did at Walden."

Wail: The Life of Bud Powell

"Walker says: “You had to pick up things from Thelonious—he didn’t show them. He experimented a lot with quarter-tones and half-tones. Bent notes. You could learn a lot from him if you really listened. But he didn’t show you.” Monk’s refusal to show followed from his maxim, that if a musician couldn’t hear what Monk was doing, how was he going to play it? Monk had no interest in explaining to those who’d demonstrated they hadn’t been listening (or couldn’t hear)." A certain logic in that

Abstractions on Nautilus: Mathematicians Calculate How Randomness Creeps In

"Next, shift the tiles so that the empty space moves one square in any of four possible directions: up, down, left or right. (For the sake of mathematical elegance, Chu and Hough considered a board whose sides wrap around and meet each other, so that tiles are never stuck in corners.) Make the choice at random. The board will now be in a new configuration — no longer exactly in order, but not that far off either. Repeat this process. As you continue sliding the empty square around, the board will depart further from the original ordered arrangement." Wrap-around strikes again.

Eric Tucker: Exhibition fulfils 'unseen' artist's final wish - BBC News

Reminds me of that painter that did biblical stories in some red-brick town near london

GitHub - MimiOnuoha/On-Algorithmic-Violence: Attempts at fleshing out the concept of algorithmic violence.

"Along similar lines, it seems we're overdue for a term that allows us to easily (if imperfectly) articulate some realities of the moment we find ourselves in today. Specifically, we need a phrase that addresses newer, often digital and data-driven forms of inequity. I want to posit the phrase algorithmic violence as a first step at articulating these negotiations.2 Algorithmic violence refers to the violence that an algorithm or automated decision-making system inflicts by preventing people from meeting their basic needs. It results from and is amplified by exploitative social, political, and economic systems, but can also be intimately connected to spatially and physically borne effects."

GitHub - cfenollosa/bashblog: A single Bash script to create blogs. Download, run, write, done!

A bash based and fairly readable script to publish a blog. Still a bit fussy. I want a script that will simply take all the markdown files in a directory and format them to a notes page. Might try to cherry pick functions out of this script

Garry Winogrand’s Stunning Scenes at the Brooklyn Museum - The Atlantic

>> “Sometimes I feel like … the world is a place I bought a ticket to,” Winogrand once said. “It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.” <<

‘Thin to win’: How Democrats are building the case against Trump - POLITICO

>> “The biggest insight I’ve had in trying complex cases is that you want to be the one telling the simple story, and you want the other side to be telling the complicated story,” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor in the Northern District of Illinois. “Whichever side telling the simple story wins, and it’s simply because of the way the human brain works.” << Might be how the brain is wired to allow quick decisions to avoid the raptors, but reality is not similarly bound.

Trump’s Populism Has Nothing to Offer the Populace - The Atlantic

"Poland, like the United States, is divided between young, educated, urban, internationalist cultural liberals and older, rural, nationalist, and nativist cultural conservatives. But unlike the United States, Poland isn’t equally divided between parties of the left and the right; Law and Justice is politically dominant. That dominance may stem in part from the party’s growing control of the press. But there’s more to it than that. The single biggest reason for Law and Justice’s popularity, Aleks Szczerbiak, an expert on Polish politics at the University of Sussex, argued in a blog post last year, is that “the government has delivered on several of the high-profile social spending pledges” it made when first elected, including an initiative that offers every family a monthly subsidy of roughly $125 a child. This program has helped cut Poland’s rate of extreme child poverty from almost 12 percent to less than 3 percent. Law and Justice has also increased payments to the elderly and pledged to hike the minimum wage. Business groups have grumbled, but as the Times notes, Duda’s government has “built a floor under low- and middle-income families” that is “wildly popular.” It has established a political majority by doing what Trump has not: going right on culture but left on economics." Tories will make the promises but we will see if they deliver.

CfEM blog: What do this year’s GCSE maths result tell us? - The Education and Training Foundation

"This is a ‘tough gig’ and it’s never going to be easy. Colleges are working with a cohort of students who have not yet achieved grade 4 despite years of maths classes and all the interventions and coaching which secondary schools provide." Total waste of time and money. Design a qualification based on a real world need-to-understand curriculum reflecting the importance of statistics, percentages and measures. Make the assessment flexible and situated. Leave 'school maths' behind.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The People Will Speak

"The reality is that Britain will be taking back control from an imperfect system as a member of an organisation and giving it up for the rigidity and permanence of treaty obligations, with the added bonus of being subject to foreign courts, some of them with little interest in transparency (ISDS tribunals anyone?)" This post crystallises my vague feelings of concern. We are leaving a trans-national body that we can influence and replacing that with treaties.

‘Can Any of These People Beat Trump?’ - POLITICO Magazine

"The instincts that guide Bennet—being pragmatic, deliberative, restrained—are what many Americans say are precisely what’s needed to run the White House. But now, perhaps more than ever, those instincts are the opposite of what’s needed to win the White House." We have reached the era of Zaphod a couple of centuries early.

How To Set Write Permission On ext4 Partition In Ubuntu Linux - It's FOSS

Using ext4 formatted USB external hard drive you have to do (from root) chgrp users /dev/sdb1 chmod g+w /run/media/keith/MUSIC to be able to back up the music

PG&E Power Outage: Alone in the Dark - The Atlantic

"When the power went out at homes and apartment complexes and businesses and schools, the richest region of the richest country on earth went dark. It was a mess. The elderly were stranded in upper-floor housing units, their elevators out of service. People who use wheelchairs, sleep-apnea machines, hearing aids, and respirators—as well as electric cars and e-bikes and computers and cellphones, and on and on—struggled to find portable generators or to move to places unaffected by the outages. Mothers sent around spreadsheets of neighbors who were ready and willing to store breast milk in their freezers." Battery in each house that can store three days worth of power. Would smooth out the daily demand cycle so no need for fast spin-up gas fired power stations any more and could be used to store wind/wave/solar as produced, and would provide a 'civil emergency' safety cushion.

Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” | Ars Technica

"Imagine no more. We asked three cracking experts to attack the same list Anderson targeted and recount the results in all their color and technical detail Iron Chef style. The results, to say the least, were eye opening because they show how quickly even long passwords with letters, numbers, and symbols can be discovered." Looks like you have to do a two step process Step 1: find a text Step 2: apply a sampling method that destroys the dictionary words

Choosing Secure Passwords - Schneier on Security

"A typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. The root isn't necessarily a dictionary word, but it's usually something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90% of the time) or a prefix (10% of the time). One cracking program I saw started with a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like "letmein," "temp," "123456," and so on. Then it tested them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: "1," "4u," "69," "abc," "!," and so on. It recovered about a quarter of all passwords with just these 100,000 combinations." So use some method to scramble the characters in a phrase - so you can remember your phrase and apply the method on scrap paper and then discard. Nothing permanently stored but avoids dictionary words.

Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated: Old eight-char password is finally cracked • The Register

Article and associated comments explore practical password management issues.

Break before make, abstractions, and sleazy ISPs

"This is why I say some of this stuff is entirely too complicated. We've brought this upon ourselves: building breathtakingly high stacks of ridiculous systems where few (if any) people can keep the whole thing in their head. Just like code, configs also have to "run" on people first in order to be written and reviewed honestly, and if you can't know the stack, there's no way to know what will really happen." Perhaps we are really on a huge disk being held up by flying turtles?

MAIB: Watch Officer Was Watching Videos on Phone Before Grounding – gCaptain

"According to the MAIB, for about 2 hours prior to the accident, the officer of the watch had been unaware that Priscilla was drifting away from the planned passage. Once noticing that the vessel was off track, the officer chose an alternative route that resulted in the vessel heading directly into the Pentland Skerries." There are situations where people should not really be watching tubies

Life in the City

'Evolution in an urbanizing world' Results and observations on urban wildlife, via the Wired article

How Cities Reshape the Evolutionary Path of Urban Wildlife | WIRED

>> "He was now enamored with the idea that urban cauldrons of noise, heat, and filth are not only as authentically “natural” as any other habitat but also the perfect venues in which to observe evolution at its fastest and most inventive. A bearded and slightly cherubic man, Munshi-South speaks engagingly about his epiphany despite the notable softness of his voice. “For most organisms, cities are incredibly stressful,” he says. “So you'd expect that the evolutionary responses would have to be pretty strong for them to exist in that environment.”" <<

College Students Don’t Want Fancy Libraries - The Atlantic

>> "Yet much of the glitz may be just that—glitz. Survey data and experts suggest that students generally appreciate libraries most for their simple, traditional offerings: a quiet place to study or collaborate on a group project, the ability to print research papers, and access to books. Notably, many students say they like relying on librarians to help them track down hard-to-find texts or navigate scholarly journal databases. “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers,” as the writer Neil Gaiman once said. “A librarian can bring you back the right one.”" << Big rooms. Shelves. Plenty of tables and chairs. Not hard really. Could even use surplus office space downtown.

How to use the Windows Disk Error Checking feature on an external drive | Seagate Support UK

Clear instructions from non-spammy site. One of my ntfs formatted usb hard drives is playing up and fsck isn't up to the task for this format

Tips For Manipulating The Sourness Of Your Sourdough

Yeast farming. Mine always come out vinegary

Bread with character: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipes for sourdough | Life and style | The Guardian

"If you're going to bake bread every day or two, maintain your starter in this way, keeping it at room temperature, feeding it daily, and taking some of it out whenever you need to. However, if you want to keep it for longer between bakings, add enough flour to turn it into a stiff dough, then it won't need another feed for four or so days. You'll just need to add more water when you come to make the "sponge" (see below). Alternatively, lull your starter into dormancy by cooling it down – it will keep for a week in the fridge without needing to be fed. You'll then need to bring it back to room temperature and probably give it a fresh feed to get it bubbling and active again. Combine these two approaches – keep your starter as a stiff dough in the fridge – and you can leave it for two weeks before it will need your attention again. If you know you won't be baking for a while, you can even freeze the starter; it will reactivate on thawing." Big feed after a bake. The starter is doing quite well at present.

The Coming Boeing Bailout?

>> "Unlike Boeing, McDonnell Douglas was run by financiers rather than engineers. And though Boeing was the buyer, McDonnell Douglas executives somehow took power in what analysts started calling a “reverse takeover.” The joke in Seattle was, "McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money."" << Via Daringfireball

Coming on strong: choosing the best flour – danlepard.com

"Strong white flour usually contains high levels of a type of protein called glutenin, causing the dough made from it to be able to hold its shape rather better than stretching easily. Where dough made from an Italian 00 flour or French T55 can be pulled and lengthened easily, dough made from strong white flour needs to be coaxed gently into performing a similar act otherwise it will tear. Though strong white flour will contain gliadin, the stretchy protein, don’t expect the same extensibility with dough made from it." Lidl strong white is cool

Zero Dollar Laptop Manifesto

"You may ask, "Why isn't someone doing something to roll out the zero dollar laptop?" In developed-world economies and cultures we're familiar with centralised solutions. We're less familiar with localised, decentralised, do-it-yourself solutions. In this case, that "someone" is you." An oldie but a goodie

Hovis as it used to taste - The Bread Kitchen

"Both wheatgerm and blackstrap molasses can usually be bought from health food stores. Some major supermarket chains also stock these ingredients." Add 10% wheat germ to white flour and add molasses to the water.

Quarter of secondary pupils 'get private tuition' - BBC News

"The social-mobility charity is calling for financial support for disadvantaged families to have access to tutoring." Should we perhaps improve teacher-student ratios in schools in poorer areas first so as to eliminate the need for tutoring?

The Wun Show: Douglas Crockford has been sniffing JavaScript's bad parts again • The Register

"This is quite annoying and distracting, but no more so than an economy-class, transatlantic flight in a cramped, middle-aisle seat in front of a poorly disciplined ADD boy-child whose seatback kicks are Poisson-distributed with Lambda around 4.7 per minute." Classic

The Early English Bread Project | Bread as a cultural force in early England

"The association between women and bread stretches back through the Middle Ages to prehistory. Women did not just make the bread that was vital to survival; the transformation of grain to flour was also women’s domain, and the labour required for this dwarfed the effort of making the bread itself. Indeed, grinding grain probably took more of women’s time than any single other household activity, and the evolution of this task is the story of women’s lives in the early Middle Ages."

Composers as Gardeners | Edge.org

"My topic is the shift from 'architect' to 'gardener', where 'architect' stands for 'someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made', to 'gardener' standing for 'someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up'. I will argue that today's composer are more frequently 'gardeners' than 'architects' and, further, that the 'composer as architect' metaphor was a transitory historical blip."

Pitch_In-C_Change.pmd - Pitch_In-C_Change.pdf

Contains notated form of the 53 themes In C.

Terry Riley's "In C"

"When I hit "play," I was surrounded by a cloud of music that seemed to contradict itself at every turn — as if it was in a state of suspended animation, but it kept changing all the time. It was filled with energy and forward motion, yet it was somehow calming. It was highly repetitive but organic. It was rhythmically intricate but it grooved. It was often hard to pin down, but it didn't seem very complicated." Multi-story Car Park orchestra and Birmingham Conservatoire performance this Friday.

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly • The Register

"Telegraphy had its innovations, some less welcome than others. Over 16-17 December 1903, The Times sent 88,847 telegrams soliciting purchases of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, VM Dunford, deputy controller of CTO, explained in an article he wrote in March 1915." Spam!

How to Back Up Your Linux Device to Amazon S3

Would rather just use rsync but looks feasible for documents (less than 10Gb)

Rsync – To Slash or Not To Slash? – Rants & Raves – The Blog!

Trailing slash on *source* copies top level directory

HOWTO: Backup using Rsync to NTFS

rsync command line: no trailing slash on target folder

Linux man pages

Handy searchable reference when bash prompt not to hand

Bad Spad And Dangerous To Know: How Dominic Cummings Could Shape Both Brexit And The Snap Election | HuffPost UK

>> "One of Cummings’ big successes, however, was the creation of specialist sixth form maths schools, in London and in Exeter. Within a few years, they have already outperformed most private schools in their results and university placements, while taking in a diverse mix of students. A history graduate himself, Cummings hired a maths tutor to get him up to postgraduate level in the subject, and wanted to create a UK version of the Kolmogorov Physics and Mathematics School in Moscow." << Perhaps he should have stuck to the Maths education project, getting funding from a range of sponsors and building something.

How to insert a superscript in Sway? - Microsoft Community

Colleague really likes sway on Windows 10. Only way to do maths formulas is to do them in Word and then import the Word file. Years ago on MacOS there was a TeX based application where you could type the code and copy the formula into preview...

Almost one-fifth of Britons 'do not use internet' - BBC News

"40% of those earning less than £12,500 do not go online 70% of all respondents "uncomfortable" with targeted advertising and data tracking" Basic 2Mb/s connection for all through wifi from street lamps? Configurable advert and tracker blocking nudged to on by default?

The Conservatives are failing to make headway in the Brexit supporting North and Midlands – Slugger O'Toole

"In the West Midlands, both Labour and the Conservatives are down 14%, the Lib Dems are up 12% and the Brexit Party are up 12% on Ukip’s 2017 performance. Given that they are basically static in terms of the Labour vs. Tory contest, the Conservatives would be unlikely to make much of a dent in Labour’s 24 MPs, other than in ultra-marginal seats such as Newcastle-under-Lyme (Labour majority: 30).The Lib Dems aren’t really in contention anywhere here."

Beto O’Rourke Says the El Paso Shooting Changed Him - The Atlantic

"In the hospital rooms and memorial services in El Paso, O’Rourke thinks he’s found his real reason to run. On his trip to New Hampshire, I watched him try to express his new mind-set during his speech at the state convention in Manchester. In front of waves of black-and-white BETO signs, he tried to explain the shooting’s root causes, linking it to a larger legacy of injustice and hate—arguing that with so much trouble in America’s history, “sooner or later it was going to find us.” He concluded with a call for an overhaul of the immigration system, reparations for African Americans, and mandatory government buybacks of assault weapons. Many in the crowd seemed to lock in as he was speaking." Just trying to get my head around a country where I could by an assault rifle as easily as I can buy a strimmer here...

Robert Frank's Unforgettable Rolling Stones Documentary - The Atlantic

>> "“There are too many images, too many cameras now,” Frank once told Vanity Fair. “We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art anymore. Maybe it never was.”" << RIP Robert Frank. I'm going back to Polaroids sometime soon I think, so each image counts.

The Italian Ritual of "fare la scarpetta" | ITALY Magazine

"In his book about medieval eating habits, Fabrizio Vanni proposes that the act took place following the introduction of tomatoes to the Italian diet back in the late 16th century. Before this time sauces tended to be thicker and more robust; with the introduction of the tomato, sauces became lighter and therefore required mopping up. Another suggestion regarding the origin of la scarpetta is that back in a time when wasting food was frowned upon, the bread merely became a tool to be used much like cutlery." In a family owned Italian restaurant I was handed some bread at the end of the meal as a scarpetta. It was a nice sauce as well!

Y Y Zhu College Lecturer in Politics @PembrokeOxford & IR DPhil @NuffieldCollege @UniOfOxford. Erstwhile political hack. Sic transit gloria Twitter.

Yuanyi Zu posts on twitter about parliament

'My dad invented crop circles' - BBC News

"The pair travelled the countryside at night using a plank and a piece of rope to make the curious shapes, which appeared throughout Wiltshire and Hampshire." Locii revision activity?

The Computer That Predicted U.S. Would Win the Vietnam War - The Atlantic

>> "In practice, this meant creating vast amounts of data, which had to be sent to computing centers and entered on punch cards. One massive program was the Hamlet Evaluation System, which sought to quantify how the American program of “pacification” was proceeding by surveying 12,000 villages in the Vietnamese countryside. “Every month, the HES produced approximately 90,000 pages of data and reports,” a RAND report found. “This means that over the course of just four of the years in which the system was fully functional, it produced more than 4.3 million pages of information.”" << Most of the input data was massaged to support the positions taken by the general of the day (c.f. Bright shining lie and Hastings' history)

We have become a land of permanent crisis. This suits the blustering liars of Brexit | Nick Cohen | Opinion | The Guardian

>> "A determination to get Brexit over the line drives it. Nowhere are the inadequacies of its macho politicians more evident than in their delusion that there is “a line” and once over it we can move on. Brexit isn’t just for Halloween. It is for life. It is a never-ending diversion from our real problems because we cannot cut ourselves off from our nearest neighbours and largest trading partner." << Fish swimming in water don't see the water.

Dominic Cummings: 'System failure’ how Vote Leave's guru wants to redesign the UK's future | UK | News | Express.co.uk

"He suggests the latest policy decisions should be shaped by evidence drawn from quantitative models and experiments, just as the latest aircraft designs are honed in the laboratory by data drawn from wind tunnels." An aircraft wing operates in a region that is not chaotic (Reynolds and Prandtl parameters). Good luck with getting data that does not reflect the bias of those collecting it, and with developing models that avoid chaotic dynamics. Personally, I'll stick to the meat sacks and their political instincts on Kahneman grounds.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Fingering the index. A proposed technical change that is hugely important

"Candidly, it is now showing its age. There are substantial problems with the way in which it is compiled, but perhaps its most fundamental flaw is mathematical. You and I think of producing an average by totting up a total and then dividing it by the number of items you added up. This is called the arithmetic mean and this is how RPI is produced. Unfortunately, when you are calculating an average rate of inflation, this method will, all other things being equal, overstate the underlying rate of increase, because people will tend to buy cheaper goods instead of paying for the more expensive item. In these circumstances, the generally accepted better method is to use what is known as the geometric mean. You can’t do this in your head. You multiply all the different numbers together and then take the nth root of the product, where n is the number of items." I'm presuming that the geometric mean is less affected by substitution of lower priced items than the arithmetic mean? Will need to model that one out.

Donating to Slackware - Page 54

"They may not like the public eye, they do their best work 'behind' something - whether that be a camera, a canvas, a musical instrument, a fourth wall or a computer screen. The medium acts as a divider between themselves and the world through which they can interpret it in the context of their own skills and experience." Shades of The Craftsman

Ivan Rogers: the realities of a no-deal Brexit | Coffee House

"We face the most explosive political week for years, perhaps decades. But remarkably little of the debate is about our real options. We should be thinking 10 to 20 years ahead, not 10 weeks."

politicalbetting.com

"Third and last, trying to bypass Parliament has achieved the extraordinary feat of making Jeremy Corbyn look reasonable. Many of his past associations, and plenty of his basic ideas, are anathema to a majority of voters (though quite a few of his actual policies are pretty popular). But who can object to an Opposition leader who calls for more debate, more deliberation, more votes? Keeping the doors of the House of Commons open is hardly a radical demand from the Far Left." Hold your nose and look at the *policies*

History of the punch card - Reference from WhatIs.com

"Despite this and the fact that he never actually built an analytical engine, Babbage's proposed use of cards played a crucial role in later years, providing a precedent that prevented Hollerith's company from claiming patent rights on the very idea of storing data on punched cards."

Shortchanged: Why British Life Expectancy Is Falling - The New York Times

>> "Underlying many of the problems, they say, is the government’s austerity program, which was instituted after the 2008 financial crisis and has eaten away at funding for social programs, transportation and other things that might counter the negative trends. Things have probably not been helped by the chaos in Parliament over Brexit, which has forestalled efforts to come to grips with the growing problems." <<

Is Brexit A Rerun of the 1930s? [Slugger O'Toole ]

"If Brexit goes wrong, it is precisely the young and clever who will be the big losers. It is this group also which was most heavily opposed to Brexit in the first place. These too are the people whose standards of living had already since the late 1990s departed most dramatically from those their parents took for granted, with poor job security and startling declines in home ownership, now at levels among the under 40s well below that before Margaret Thatcher began her council house sales programme. People with property are much less likely to rock the boat than those without. This is a profoundly underappreciated reality." And so McDonnell's policies make some sense on the generational split of the state's resources

The Brexit endgame begins

"Now, the decisive phase of the Brexit story will take place with an almost exclusive focus on process and little attention to the underlying arguments. It completes the professionalisation of our politics, the conversion of voters into speculators and tacticians, co-conspirators in a procedural game. YouGov has already polled voters on their approval of prorogation as a strategic device – an odd thing for voters to have to think about." The flattening thing. Not everything is a game or puzzle. What actually matters is our future relationship with the mainland, through which most of our imports and exports flow, and from which we populate our public services.

Dominic Cummings is no chicken - UnHerd

"I know that Cummings is a fan, because he regularly quotes them. His blogroll includes links to LessWrong, Slate Star Codex and Eliezer Yudkowsky, three of the key parts of the Rationalsphere. His blog posts – like those of Scott Alexander, author of Slate Star Codex – are immensely long, although Alexander’s are clear and funny and designed to hold the reader’s hand through a complex argument, while Cummings’s tend to be a grab-bag of talking points thrown together with no discernible – to me, at least – structure. But a lot of the material, and the names mentioned, are similar." These people need to go out and learn about dynamical systems. They could get us all killed.

This isn’t a coup. We should still be concerned and angry. – Slugger O'Toole

"When Parliament is prorogued, all business stops. As Jayne McCormack has pointed out, there are now question marks over the Domestic Abuse Bill for Northern Ireland and legislation for historical abuse survivors." Collateral damage part 1

Slackware is creating a secure, full featured, bloat-free Linux-based operating system | Patreon

"Slackware is free, open source software that gives you everything you need to recompile the entire operating system and make any changes you like. The package system is constructed from shell scripts using standard utilities, and easily modified scripts are used throughout so that users may customize their operating system without having to recompile anything. Included software is changed very little (usually not at all) from the way the upstream developers intended. Einstein once said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" -- and when it comes to an operating system, trying to make things "easy" does not always achieve that goal." Patreon account takes place of the old Slackware store. Nudge theory in action.

Leaked documents reveal Tories' dramatic plans for schools | Education | The Guardian

>> "The document advises against going public with this line, warning “it would undermine the ‘hearts and minds’ aspect of the announcement with the numerous audiences we know value TAs – parents, teachers, heads and SEND lobby. This needs to be handled very sensitively if we are to protect the positivity of the announcement.”" << Its about class sizes and the expectation that students with challenging behaviour be integrated. Try 35 students with a couple of challenging behaviour students and a handful of students with dyslexic tendencies and see how you get on. Smaller class sizes could be a way forward. Expensive.

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong

"For a blogger like me — whose opinions are both expected immediately and googlable indefinitely — this question actually matters. Err in one direction, and I’ll forever be known as the hidebound reactionary who failed to recognize some 21st-century Ramanujan. Err in the other direction, and I’ll spend my whole life proofreading the work of crackpots." The days of writing in BLOCK CAPITALS in purple biro on pages torn from an exercise book have gone by the look of it.

Index of /MONALISA/download/java - legacy Oracle jdk

I'm assuming these are license compliant as they stop at version 8. I need jdk v7 for legacy reasons (cest la vie)

[SOLVED] Connect Internet (Simple Question) Beginner

Using a command line session to connect to the Internet without network manager in Slackware. Assumes wpa2 wifi connection and compares ifconfig and ip commands.

The War at Home: Remembering Foster and Laurie | City of New York

"1971 was not a good year to be a cop in New York. The city was dying, everyone agreed, and not from natural causes." Not your average institutional writing

Paying Attention | The New Yorker

"I want to forget the surreal months spent at Fresh Kills, where we fought with seagulls for scraps of body parts and watched the most glorious violet-and-orange-gold sunsets over the Statue of Liberty and the Harbor. During the night shifts, it didn’t look like the city there; it didn’t look like anything on the planet. We wore white Tyvek suits, goggles, and masks, and scavenged for bones and teeth amid the twisted metal and shattered concrete of the debris fields, dodging the excavators, earthmovers, and other behemoth machines that lumbered and crushed heedlessly past." Edward Conlon writes about his police work in a literary way - might try one of the books

Cop Diary - The Sun Magazine

" [...] Every week or so, I still run into George on the street, and we say hello. I like him, as far as it goes. The feeling is as mutual as it can be, I think, between two people who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot each other. As he’s a hit man and I’m a cop, the odds of such an occurrence happening are less remote than they would be otherwise." The stuff on procedure is exhaustive.

Gone — The California Sunday Magazine

>> "I left the ridge and headed deeper into the woodlands of California, clutching a remarkable book called Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests, written in 2001 by wildlife biologist George Gruell, that documents the ecological changes to the mountain range since Chauncey Wright discovered his rock of gold. The photos date back as far as 1849 and depict great swaths of the Sierra with only a scattering of trees. The forest looks strangely forlorn. More than a century and a half later, these same locations reveal an entirely different Sierra. What was once sparse is now densely packed with pine, fir, cedar, and manzanita. A forest that supported 64 trees an acre in pre-settlement times now boasted 160 trees an acre. The modern eye sees this mountain-to-mountain vegetation as proof of the forest’s good health. Like the border-to-border almond trees in the valley below, vigor would appear to be nature at its most eloquent. But that is not what nature intended. “The landscapes of today may look attractively lush,” Gruell writes, “but the thickening forest threatens us with several problems.” " << cf Stephen Pyne's work on the role of fire in ecology. Commercial clear cutting reduces the diversity in cover and gaps in the canopy.

FAIR

'Fairness and accuracy in reporting' is one of those American non-profits that campaigns about the quality of journalism.

Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection

"Apple and Mozilla have tracking protection enabled, by default, today. And Apple is already testing privacy-preserving ad measurement. Meanwhile, Google is talking about a multi-year process for a watered-down form of privacy protection. And even that is uncertain—advertising platforms dragged out the Do Not Track standardization process for over six years, without any meaningful output. If history is any indication, launching a standards process is an effective way for Google to appear to be doing something on web privacy, but without actually delivering." Known as kicking the can down the road in the UK

Scientists Find Stardust Buried in Antarctic Snow - The Atlantic

"When the scientists analyzed the ash, they found something unusual: a radioactive form of iron. The isotope, known as iron-60, is rare on Earth. But it is produced in abundance in space, when a star, having exhausted the fuel that makes it shine, explodes." Just a reminder about where all the elements heavier than Helium come from...

Buying a Chromebook? Don't forget to check that best-before date • The Register

"Here is a tip. Open up your Chromebook, and Chrome, and go to chrome://version. Check the Platform section, at the end of which is a code name. For example, an HP 14-ca050na has "stable channel snappy". Then head here, look up the codename, and note that it matches HP Chromebook 14 G5. This is listed in Google's table with an AUE date of November 2023." 6 years but from when the 'platform' was released, i.e. the model introduced.

Politics Is Still Downstream of Culture

>> "Andrew Breitbart, the late ever-controversial right-wing gonzo journalist (not to be confused with the dreary Trump-propaganda organ that now bears his name) used to have a saying that “politics is downstream of culture.” Meaning that: 1. People’s political opinions are mostly not thought-out or analytical so much as an expression of what they think is valuable, cool, scary, smart, stupid, impressive to their friends. 2. People generally put more of their hearts and free time into cultural pursuits – from mass media and video game consumption to churches, schools, museums, gun clubs, bowling leagues, etc. – than political ones, so the attitudes that pervade the the larger spaces of their lives affect the smaller ones, not just in what they believe but who they know and trust. 3. Young people in particular are much more into getting their values and their “facts” from cultural rather than explicitly political sources." << Trying to find the source of the Andrew Breitbart quote is proving to be like spelunking the echo chamber of right wing web sites. This reference gives a bit of context but still no source quote

“Bicycle for the Mind” - Learning By Shipping

"4/ The article is from March 1973 of Scientific American. A detailed look at the history of the bicycle. The chart that was so fascinating is here. You can see just how efficient a human on a bicycle is. No condor though :-)" Essay on the computer as bicycle for the mind quite by Jobs/Kay. Nice early video stuff. Interesting correlation chart...

Bruce Schneier: The security mirage - YouTube

For future watching...

Ditch cars to meet climate change targets, say MPs - BBC News

>> "But there’s a warning that more research is needed on the environmental impact of the batteries of electric vehicles. The report warns: “Hydrogen technology may prove to be cheaper and less environmentally damaging than battery-powered electric vehicles. The government should not rely on a single technology.”" << Hydrogen should be developed anyway because the UK happens to be good at it with hydrogen fuel cell research happening in several centres

Will Trump Fatigue Bite Him in 2020? - POLITICO Magazine

"Never before has the late Andrew Breitbart’s axiom that “politics is downstream of culture” seemed more apt. The culture of celebrity, reality television, cable-TV food fights, and Twitter now defines national politics at its highest level." Seems about right.

Neither rogue nor wily fixer, Varadkar confounds British

"Where the UK see a plot, designed in Brussels and executed via Dublin, to kill any success Brexit might have, Ireland and the EU27 see the EU doing its job. There is a misalignment in how the bloc and its institutions are perceived. In Dublin, the purpose of the EU is seen, through solidarity and a single market, to amplify the voice and maximise the power of otherwise small countries." Sometimes, I wish we were in a small country. The Black Country Social Democratic Republic. Peaky Blinder Republic. Sounds ok.

We talked to aging experts about the 2020 field. Here’s what they told us. - POLITICO

>> "Biden’s former brain surgeon, Kassell, went a step further: “I am going to vote for the candidate who I am absolutely certain has a brain that is functioning. And that narrows it down exactly to one.”" << Well, it is a view!

Why we lie about being retired - BBC News

>> "Sometimes we talk about grey riots or silver riots taking place. If you raise the retirement age then people who expected to retire in one, two, three or four years, [then suddenly] they're not able to - because you've just changed the age at which they collect their pension. "We've seen it in a lot of countries, especially in Europe, I think it could get worse," says Prof Bloom. << Modest universal income and significant voluntary sector sharpish I think. The key as always is housing, ease of downsizing in this case.

slackware.no

Unofficial slackware still builds the 32bit iso for current each morning

Tuscan Bread (Pane Toscano) | King Arthur Flour

Sponge based recipe that can be cooked on a pizza stone

Carr: LORAN Overboard – gCaptain

"Here we were sailing to Norfolk from Bermuda, shooting stars every day at morning and evening twilight, and the sun throughout the day, including my favorite, Local Apparent Noon (LAN), when you can obtain both latitude and longitude with a single line of position (LOP). This is done by timing your LAN shot and computing longitude using the shots Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)." As an armchair navigator I'm going to have to read up on LAN. I do not however condone or approve of the vandalisation of ship's equipment.

KDE Plasma5 for Slackware, introducing Qt 5.13 in the July’19 update | Alien Pastures

The most recent slacklive iso for Plasma5 has a really useful range of applications - LibreOffice, VLC, Digikam and Kdenlive to name just a few, along with the usual KDE suspects (Kate and Kile)

Mission Jurassic: Searching for dinosaur bones

"In a circular way, part of the answer lies in the fact that they were so big. If you want to derive as much calorific value as possible from so impoverished a feedstock, you employ a giant fermentation tank. That's essentially what sauropods were: colossal fermentation tanks on legs. And with their long necks they would rake vegetation from their surroundings for perhaps 16-20 hours a day. They can't have had much time for sleep."

Why Are Stock Buybacks So Popular? - The Atlantic

>> "The rise of the stock buyback began during the heyday of corporate raiders. In the early 1980s, an economist named Michael C. Jensen presented a paper titled “Reflections on the Corporation as a Social Invention.” It attacked the conception of corporations that had prevailed since roughly the 1920s—that they existed to serve a variety of constituencies, including employees, customers, stockholders, and even the public interest. Instead, Jensen asserted a new ideology that would become known as “shareholder value.” Corporate managers had one job, and one job alone: to increase the short-term share price of the firm." << Gaming one variable again without any consideration of 'externalities'

Exxon Eyes Exit from UK North Sea After 50 Years -Reuters – gCaptain

"Assigning a value to oil and gas assets in the North Sea is complicated because many fields and infrastructure are nearing the end of their lives and require dismantling, or decommissioning, an expensive process which can offset years of production revenue." Running from de-commissioning operations and towards new shale deposits. Makes perfect sense but I wonder which countries will end up being saddled with the cleanup costs?

Idling LNG Tankers Hint at Increasing Appeal of Floating Storage – gCaptain

"The use of floating storage is a risky business because anticipated heating demand may be softer, as happened last winter, and charter rates may shoot up to new records, as already forecast by the shipowners." Ships full of liquefied methane standing off waiting for the prices to go up!

Baloo - ArchWiki

160Gb of music handouts and photos. 2Gb index, about 3 hours to complete indexing but UI responsive most of the time. But search works! Balooctl status is the command to use to check progress.

500-Year-Old Shipwreck Discovered in Baltic Sea Looks 'Like it Sank Yesterday' – gCaptain

>> “It’s almost like it sank yesterday – masts in place and hull intact. Still on the main deck is an incredibly rare find – the tender boat, used to ferry crew to and from the ship, leaning against the main mast. It’s a truly astonishing sight,” he added.<< Nice images.

WeWork isn’t a tech company; it’s a soap opera - The Verge

"In that article, an anonymous Silicon Valley partner calls SoftBank a “big stack bully,” which is a poker expression for someone who has so many chips that no one else will bet. [...] The investments made by SoftBank are huge — and often push the companies SoftBank has invested in past their competition in both valuation and scale." This thing where companies don't need to make a profit to get investments that are large enough to crush competition (Amazon in the early days?) is a bit like nationalising industries to subsidise them. But not as widely criticised.

Ful Mudammas - Ancient Vegetarian Middle Eastern Recipe

Using small favas with the skins on and cooked onions and garlic. I'm going for skinned larger beans cooked from dry but keeping the rest of the recipe the same.

In game of Brexit chicken, Boris Johnson driving a Mini, Brussels is driving a bus

"The root of the problem is well-known to political scientists. It’s a voting cycle. Option A is beaten by B. Option B is beaten by C. But then option C is beaten by A. And so the cycle continues. Every option is opposed by a majority. Simply putting things to a vote, no matter how many times, can’t solve this." Sort of like non-transitive dice?

Swap, swap, swap, and bad places to work

"I stand by my original position: have some swap. Not a lot. Just a little. Linux boxes just plain act weirdly without it." I have seen this one myself puggling around with desktop installs. Nice to have my suspicions confirmed by a professional sysadmin

Primo Levi's CARBON - YouTube

The element that causes all the trouble, reflections by a master chemist.

The science and magic of breadmaking | Science | The Guardian

"Making bread was surely one of the first chemistry experiments. Finding that ground grain (a dry, loose, hard and bland substance) mixed into a rough porridge with water could be transformed into a flavourful, puffy, moist mass that was crisp on the outside, simply by placing it near a fire, was an extraordinary discovery. These flat breads can still be found in the world as the Middle Eastern lavash, the Greek pita, the American tortilla and the Indian chapatti."

Deep Dive with Lewis Porter: The Inspiration(s) Behind John Coltrane's "Impressions" | WBGO

>> "That all these people made use of Gould's theme without anyone — Gould included — expressing any disapproval shows how differently people treated “intellectual property” back then. Ideas flowed from one person to another. As Coltrane said to Frank Kofsky: “It's a big reservoir that we all dip out of.”" << Of course they did, it was 'the music' and everything was in the performance, the scales and notes just the platform

The Three Mother Preferments And How To Use Them | Stella Culinary

"For every 17°F/9°C your room temperature raises or drops, the yeast activity will be doubled or cut in half, taking the yeast half the time or twice the time respectively to achieve the same amount of fermentation." A remarkably useful factoid.

Baking Updates | Lallemand Baking

All about yeast and enzymes from a yeast brewer.

Cauliflower shortages as extreme weather kills crops - BBC News

>> "We've been paying between £1.50 and £2.00 per head of cauliflower, it would normally be about 50 or 60 pence each." << They have often been two for a pound on the food market, but none seen recently. Looks like spinach...

The polarisation of party supporters since 2015 and the problem of the 'empty centre' – in maps | British Politics and Policy at LSE

"The first is an economic dimension about whether you prefer pro-free market economic policies on the one hand, or redistribution of wealth and a greater role of the state in the economy on the other. The second is a cultural dimension, which I referred to as communitarian-cosmopolitan, but which other commentators have described as “open versus closed”. It concerns the relationship of your community with the outside world, draws on issues such as EU membership and immigration, and, to coin David Goodhart’s terms, is about whether you are “from Anywhere” or “from Somewhere”. Since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump won the US elections last year, both political analysts and journalists have been discussing this dimension. Immediately after Brexit, the Economist published a leader entitled “The new political divide” in which the editors suggested that the “open against closed” now divide matters more than that between left and right."

The Brexit Blog: Government by cult

"Instead, it simply ignores, or denies the existence of, this problem, as if no-deal can make it disappear. More generally, advocating no-deal Brexit is a throwing-up of hands into the air and saying Brexit is all too complicated, fantasising that by doing so the complexities dissolve. They don’t, they just re-appear the day after no deal but in more acute and urgent form." I suspect that Professor Grey is no fan of Brexit. He definitely has a point here - a rapid transition to third country status seems to resolve little. Can anyone explain again what is so wrong with staying in a customs union?

Inside the mind of Boris Johnson’s right-hand man – POLITICO

>> "He describes himself as “not a Tory, libertarian, ‘populist’ or anything else” and in a January 2017 essay outlined his reasoning for joining the Brexit campaign. “I thought very strongly that 1) a return to 1930s protectionism would be disastrous, 2) the fastest route to this is continuing with no democratic control over immigration or human rights policies for terrorists and other serious criminals, therefore 3) the best practical policy is to reduce (for a while) unskilled immigration and increase high skills immigration ... 4) this requires getting out of the EU, 5) hopefully it will prod the rest of Europe to limit immigration and therefore limit the extremist forces that otherwise will try to rip down free trade.”" << Sounds like rejoining later down the road. But the path integral over UK economy's history during the isolation period will be significant and result in loss of wages and even lower savings rate than currently. Risky?

Brexit: Email slip-up reveals no-deal fishing patrol 'uncertainty' - BBC News

>> "At this stage, there is a lot of uncertainty about the sufficiency of enforcement in a no-deal because we have 12 vessels that need to monitor a space three times the size of the surface area of the UK." << Smuggling springs to mind. Quiet coves on North East, disruption to police cooperation with countries in Europe, thin sea patrols, big tariff differences, economic distress in localities.

UK power cut: National Grid promises to learn lessons from blackout - BBC News

"It said it could take enforcement action, including a fine, after train passengers were stranded, traffic lights failed to work and thousands of homes were plunged into darkness during the blackout." Just mandating some more resilience in the system might be better? And perhaps a fallback for underground trains as used to be the case.

How to Use Free Pallets to Build a BBQ Restaurant: 10 Steps (with Pictures)

"This Instructable will walk you through the process of designing and building a BBQ themed restaurant with a VERY small budget. We relied on our own ingenuity, our scrounging ability and our creativity to make a restaurant that looked like we had spent a fortune, when in fact we did not. The secondary goal of this project was to keep as much out of landfill as possible, as construction is one of the leading producers of landfill waste, we re-used, re-purposed, recycled and bartered our way through this project." Hipster interior the hard way

How Conservatives Can Save America - The Atlantic

>> "It is no secret that liberal democracy is most secure when individual freedom and diversity are pursued in a relatively orderly fashion, in a well-established institutional framework, under responsible leadership, within the bounds set by entrenched and consensually accepted "rules of the game." Such "stable diversity" should be acceptable to conservatives but abhorrent to authoritarians (perhaps a diversity that is entrenched and unchallenged is actually the worst kind of all). On the other hand, the prospect of some wholesale overthrow of the system in pursuit of greater unity should be appealing, even exciting, to authoritarians, but appalling to conservatives. Liberal democracy would seem least secure when conservatives cannot be persuaded that freedom and diversity are authoritatively supported and institutionally constrained, and when authoritarians can be persuaded that greater sameness and oneness––the "one right way" for the "one true people"––lie just at the other end of the "shining path."" << You need to read the definitions - not common sense ones .

London's Falling, and a U.S. Trade Deal Won't Save It - The Atlantic

>> "Paradoxically, though, “some of the things [the U.S. is] asking for make a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland more probable,” Sam Lowe, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform in London, told me. He noted that even if Britain were willing to acquiesce to U.S. demands for different standards on agricultural goods, the same cannot be said for the rest of the EU." << That Venn diagram is getting more crowded

Xbox daddy bakes bread with 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast • The Register

"The yeast woke up right away. I was totally surprised. Usually, when you collect a wild yeast sample, you get a horrible, black, gross muck for a few days, and then you start to get the yeast taking over and amplifying, when you get a higher statistical percentage of yeast than other stuff you don't want. In this case, a lot of stuff grew – some stinky stuff – but I could tell there was a ton of yeast growing right away. It was kind of remarkable. On the second day it was bubbling like a real starter. I kept feeding it for the rest of the week because I wanted to be sure that we were only seeing stuff that ate Einkorn. It was a huge pain in the ass. You have to sterilize the flour for a couple of days, make sure that no modern yeast gets into the samples while you're feeding them. Even then, there is a bunch of modern stuff in that sample." Awaiting the DNA tests. I sympathise with the stinky stuff, my sourdough always goes into pure acetone after a couple of bakes.

Starters and Ferments - How to Bake | Shipton Mill - Home of Organic Flour

"A “Sponge” is faster than a poolish because all or most of the yeast is added to the sponge itself. Often used in whole-grain or rich breads to improve flavour and digestibility but in less time than a poolish. The front-loading of the yeast into the sponge means that the final mixing can often be done approximately an hour after the sponge is made." I'm going with a poolish rather than a sponge based on this definition.

Is the government bluffing about a no-deal Brexit? - inews.co.uk

"One of our shared failings as a species is a tendency to overvalue secret information at the expense of information that is freely available. We saw that recently in the row over the leaked diplomatic cables in which the US Ambassador, Kim Darroch, made a series of observations about the workings of Donald Trump’s White House, at great expense to the taxpayer. These same opinions could very easily have been obtained by purchasing a subscription to the Washington Post." Good writing as always.

A Look Inside: Debunking Myths - Modernist Bread

The baloons on the flasks look hilarious but having the myth of water type debunked is good.

Talk about unintended consequences: GDPR is an identity thief's dream ticket to Europeans' data • The Register

"Of the responses, 24 per cent simply accepted an email address and phone number as proof of identity and sent over any files they had on his fiancée. A further 16 per cent requested easily forged ID information and 3 per cent took the rather extreme step of simply deleting her accounts." Presumably the email address and phone number associated with the account? But still a bit random. "First off, lawmakers need to set a standard for what is a legitimate form of ID for GDPR requests. One rail company was happy to send out personal information, accepting a used envelope addressed to the fiancée as proof of identity." A standard is a good idea.

A GUIDE TO USING YOUR LOAF | The Independent

"So how do you slow down a dough? Use less yeast than a recipe specifies. Use colder water. Let the dough rise in a cooler place, perhaps start it in the fridge, and leave it overnight. Extreme cold slows down, even halts, yeast action, but doesn't kill it. Extreme heat does." Not too little though...

Baking Guide: Food author Tom Jaine on his passion for breadmaking | Food | The Guardian

"The bread gave rhythm to our morning's work and became essential to our culinary identity. Neither the recipe nor the materials were special, but it was properly worked and there were no shortcuts or additives. It tasted of itself."

Turkish flatbread with za'atar (Zahterli pide) - A kitchen in Istanbul

"Pide is perhaps best known as Turkish pizza, shaped a little like a ship. But it is also the name of a simpler variety, made from the same dough but without any toppings and served alongside meze or other food such as kebabs. Today is all about the latter variety, though on this occasion I’ve subsituted the more traditional sprinkling of sesame seeds or nigella seeds with za’atar, the Middle Eastern herb mix." Works well with 30% wholemeal for a bit of taste. Just oil and rosemary for minimal topping.

The ancient Egyptian yeasts being used to bake modern bread - BBC News

>> The ancient grains are more difficult to bake with, because they contain very little gluten, but Mr Blackley says the yeast "loved" them: "They created a nice structure and a cake-like crumb - very soft." << I can do cake crumb without using ancient yeasts!

The Man in Seat Sixty-One - site map

Reading these travel suggestions

Deal with disadvantage before unity, argues Senator Mark Daly – Slugger O'Toole

>> "Openness about the past should be matched by honest planning for the future, suggests Mark. “One lesson of Brexit in relation to the issue of holding referendums is that you do not hold a referendum and then try to figure out the future. That work needs to be done now, because if you don’t do that work now you are adding fuel to a tense situation and then all it needs is a spark.”" << Not so sure about the integration of housing and schools - imposed? By whom? Would we be happy with that in Birmingham right now? If not, why would it be OK for NI? I certainly agree with the paragraph quoted above.

James Meek · The Two Jacobs: The Faragist Future · LRB 1 August 2019

"Eventually the economic dimension of politics will reassert itself, and the Faragists will have to negotiate the reality of Britain’s place in the world: 2 per cent of the global economy, less than 1 per cent of the world’s population, curating 18 per cent of the world’s international bank liabilities." Oops... quite a lot of debt.

The Iraq War Was a Failure—War With Iran Would Be Worse - The Atlantic

"Inside the Bush administration, we thought we were ready to remake Iraq for the better—but we were not. We were ignorant, arrogant, and unprepared, and we unleashed human suffering that did no good for anyone: not for Americans, not for Iraqis, not for the region. Almost two decades later, the damage to America’s standing in the world from the Iraq War has still not been repaired, let alone that war’s economic and human costs to the United States and the Middle East." David Frum telling it as he sees it

The enduring value of the political heretic | Nick Cohen | Standpoint

"I always listen to heretics. Their inside knowledge of the movements they have left means that it is worth taking the time to talk to them, as long as you remember they don’t have a sacred status. Minorities can be as wrong as majorities, and just because their former allies revile them does not mean they are right. But come now, look around—in our times heretics are the best guides we have through the mire."

Ian Bogost’s new book explains what it means to play.

"Another compelling part of Bogost’s argument is that successful play happens when we take the mundane—work, chores, the daily commute, a typical book review—and “defamiliarize” it by willing ourselves to see the potential for meaningfulness and engagement that we hadn’t noticed before. Bogost describes the process of defamiliarization as creating a playground." Doing that with clearing the back bit of the yard. Seems to be working.

Yahoo Mail’s Plan to Fix Email: Make Computers Read It - The Atlantic

"That’s because email is the last gasp of information technology not under a single corporation’s close control. Ian McCarthy, whose team runs Yahoo’s email grocery feature, sees email as the ultimate open marketplace, where people connect with organizations because they choose to do so. On email, people have greater control over their identities and relationships than they do on social media or messaging apps. Maybe more than anywhere else online."

The Navy’s USS Gabrielle Giffords and the Future of Work - The Atlantic

"And he discovered another correlation in his test: The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.” To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things." When the going gets weird... A disposable ship by the sound of it

The Scottish independence fight is only going to get messier | Coffee House

"[...] Scotland has the highest drug fatality rates in Europe, Edinburgh’s new sick children’s hospital can’t open because of safety concerns, and NHS Scotland last met its urgent cancer referral target in December 2012. These are things that matter but nationalism distorts priorities into background noise as it elevates symbols and sentiment above the material facts of life. Dissenters may cry ‘misdirection’ but the voters know they are being deceived and, on some level, they want it. Its political rivals put mere bread on the table but nationalism gives the people something to believe in." Planks and moats. I'm a bread on the table kind of guy and in the West Midlands (same size population as Scotland) we need housing and jobs sorting.

Assume that Johnson is set on no deal—how do MPs stop him? | Prospect Magazine

Try assigning Bayesian priors to this set of outcomes.

Why every small-plates restaurant has the same playlist - Vox

>> "Background music in “hip” establishments can have a deleterious effect by signaling who does and does not belong in the venue regardless of a neighborhood’s historical makeup." << Turkish cafe/bar in Stirchley was playing Joni Mitchell, Mark E Smith and various guitar instrumentals the other day while I was having my hummus. Seems relatively inclusive?

Possibly timely items from my reliability list

"Leap seconds are a thing, and so days can change lengths in systems that many humans use for civil timekeeping. The planet's rotation has been slowing down which has been giving us positive leap seconds for a few decades, but who's to say it might not go the other way some day?" Lunar tidal drag means that the Earth day is (very gradually) getting longer. I'll have to check stuff like the Chandler wobble to see if we would ever need to subtract a second but I doubt it.

The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music

Downloadable recordings from the dawn of recorded music. Cylinders and 78s. Plus analysis and research.

Savings ratio UK | Economics Help

>> "A very low savings ratio can indicate: Unbalanced economy with over-reliance on consumer spending. Build up of personal debt. Current account deficit, (with imports greater than exports.)" << Saving rate off a cliff currently.

15 Percent Is Not A Magic Number For Primary Delegates | FiveThirtyEight

"How many delegates is harder to say; it depends on how much variation there is from district to district. But for some rough guidance, I looked back at candidates who finished with between 10 and 20 percent of the vote in the Republican primaries in 20162 in states that allocated some of their delegates by congressional district.3 In the average district, there was about a 3-point gap between a candidate’s statewide vote share and that candidate’s districtwide vote share." Averaging over a complex geographical distribution smooths over some dis-continuous dynamics. 'Branching histories'

You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off! - YouTube

This is basically where we are. Proportionality is key, and Halloween is only the start, not the landing point.

Fast Software, the Best Software — by Craig Mod

"A typewriter is an excellent tool because, even though it’s slow in a relative sense, every aspect of the machine itself operates as quickly as the user can move. It is focused. There are no delays when making a new line or slamming a key into the paper. Yes, you have to put a new sheet of paper into the machine at the end of a page, but that action becomes part of the flow of using the machine, and the accumulation of paper a visual indication of work completed. It is not wasted work. There are no fundamental mechanical delays in using the machine. The best software inches ever closer to the physical directness of something like a typewriter. (The machine may break down, of course, ribbons need to be changed — but this is maintenance and separate from the use of the tool." Typewriters are not programmable in general - no extensibility.

[T]today it's worth remembering the striking difference in the way the EU and UK see the backstop

As others see us

How to Extend/Reduce LVM's (Logical Volume Management) in Linux - Part II

This works fine for the root lvm but you have to resize the swap lvm partition by using # swapoff /dev/cryptvg/swap # mkswap /dev/cryptvg/swap # swapon /dev/cryptvg/swap That took a little googling. I want hibernate to disk available so I can save the work setup while needing a kernel reboot (and passphrase) to resume just in case I leave the laptop on the bus

Sam Sweeney: The Unfinished Violin (Album Review) | Folk Radio UK

"It was when Sweeney began investigating the history of his instrument that he learned that Richard Howard had been a music hall performer. Called up in 1916, Howard died at the Battle of Messines on 7th June 1917 while fighting for the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment. This knowledge led to the development of the Made in the Great War show and now The Unfinished Violin album."

The Berlin Celebration Concert - Beethoven, Symphony No 9 Bernstein 1989 - YouTube

The CD of this, with the modified lyrics in the 3rd movement, is wonderful. Bernstein's background as an opera conductor adds to the music.

Daring Fireball

"Once we allowed email clients to act as de facto web browsers, loading remote content from servers when messages are viewed, we opened up not just a can of worms but an entire case of canned worms. Every privacy exploit for a web browser is now a privacy exploit for email. But it’s worse, because people naturally assume that email is completely private." I usually use an offline email client. This branch of surveillance had not occurred to me before now.

Scottish word of the day: Guddle - The Scotsman

"Less well known, perhaps, is the word ‘guddle’ which has the added appeal of describing not only the mess typical of a teenager’s bedroom but also any confusing or complex situation." Definitely a guddle at the moment

1 school exam grade in 4 is wrong. Does this matter? - HEPI

"You might expect that the reliability of school exam grades should be at, or close to, 100% for all subjects. As the chart shows, this is (almost) the case for (all varieties of) mathematics, at 96% (expressed on the horizontal axis as a probability of 0.96), but increasingly less so for other subjects – for economics, for example, the reliability is about 74%; for history, about 56%." Writing subjects have subjective and hard to reproduce marking shock! Who'd have thought it?

Richard Thompson’s The Cold Blue Film Score | Folk Radio UK

>> "Of Thompson’s score, Nelson stated, “I’ve known Richard Thompson for close to 40 years, and I should have learned by now never to take him — or his work — for granted. I was stunned at how deep he dove into the nuances of The Cold Blue, to create a whole original score that both speaks to the time of the events depicted, and to our times today. I can’t imagine any other artist capturing the essence of this project in quite the same way, with quite the same articulation and clarity of purpose. And, oh yeah, he DOES know his way around World War Two airplanes.”" <<

England's seaside towns where young people might disappear - BBC News

"The biggest decline in the number of under-30s could be in the north of England, where every local authority with a coastline, except Liverpool, might see a fall in the number of young people" The 'except Liverpool' might just include the Wirral side as well. New Brighton has large Victorian terraced houses going for 70 to 80K and good schools with parks. You have to pay the tunnel tax though...

[SOLVED] disabling D-Bus

Like giant hogweed. Disabling dbus, consolekit, avahi and all the other stuff for giggles.

What is wrong with us?

"Third, you need to be ambitious. You should aim to plant not 11 million trees but 110 million trees; build not a million homes in five years, but two million and build them with government money, and make them beautiful." Could do that if we wanted

Your biz won't be hacked by a super-leet exploit. It'll be Bob in sales opening a dodgy email • The Register

"One of the most common methods used to introduce malware remains, still, the faithful email attachment. According to a 2018 survey from Verizon, this was the chosen method for 94 per cent of all attacks, with Office and PDF documents the favorite delivery vehicles." A lot to be said for plain text emails only plus scanned file-sharing

Tony Connelly

This is one geezer who provides a triangulation point from outside the bubble.

Labour peer says no-deal Brexit 'almost inconceivable'

"The Labour peer said that nobody born in this century had voted in the referendum of 2016. He also said he believed that business leaders and trade unions would be much more involved in a second campaign." Yes, around 700,000 join the electorate each year and, sadly, 1.8 million have left (quick google on death rate) in the way we all eventually leave the electorate. Democracy is not a snapshot.

10 things that stopped Brexit happening - BBC News

>> ""I thought, 'Oh my God, they haven't got a plan…they haven't got a plan… it's like Lance Corporal Jones'. It was, 'Don't panic, don't panic,' running around like idiots."" << Thanks to Dave and George

Education publisher Pearson to phase out print textbooks - BBC News

"Pearson said students would only be able to rent physical textbooks from now on, and they would be updated much less frequently." The digital books will have DRM on them, so you have to keep paying for access now to basic information. Makes projects like OpenStacks more important.

New leak claims Trump scrapped Iran nuclear deal 'to spite Obama' - BBC News

>> "Moreover, they can't articulate any 'day-after' strategy; and contacts with State Department this morning suggest no sort of plan for reaching out to partners and allies, whether in Europe or the region." << BBC quoting the Mail on Sunday quoting a diplomat's confidential email to the foreign secretary. Absence of 'day-after' strategy seems to be fairly common these days...

James O’Brien and the lost journalistic art of asking decent questions… – Slugger O'Toole

>> "Sound familiar? I’m not sure I go with all of O’Brien’s solutions, but creating “an environment in which politicians will be too frightened to drawl out yet another deceitful soundbite, secure in the knowledge that it will be forgotten by teatime” is certainly in my top five." << Book ordered

Tom Crewe · The Confidence Trick · LRB 4 July 2019

>> "As a gospel, ‘confidence’ – and the imperative to protect and project it – is inclusive, easily comprehended and, crucially, flexible, because it will always favour the status quo, even as the status quo changes. By equating political and economic stability, and both with the wellbeing and security of the entire populace, it provides a broad, apparently public-spirited justification for existing social hierarchies and for shibboleths like the constitution, the Union and the monarchy. It also has the benefit, if articulated by a skilled politician, of sounding commonsensical, even non-ideological." <<

How an ace-hole AI bot built by Facebook, CMU boffins whipped a table of human poker pros • The Register

>> "After each simulated hand between the gang in an iteration, the code reviews how well the traverser played, and whether it could have have done any better against its virtual opponents, given their known individual strategies. The algorithm calculates the traverser's counterfactual regret, or in other words, how much the traverser regretted not making a move that would have turned out to be beneficial. At the end of the iteration, this counterfactual regret is used to update the traverser's strategy so that there is a higher probability of it in future making an action that it previously regretted not making. And then it's on to the next iteration and another traverser is picked." << Rules of the game provide a success criterion so doesn't need training data &c

Sam Shepard - Interview Magazine

>> "SHEPARD: It was also a bit scary. I mean, people talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn’t feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon." <<

Playwriting Class - November 6, 2006

>> "Well, culture itself is always gonna be poverty-stricken. We don’t live in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia or Greece. We live in a destroyed culture. There is no culture here. It’s shreds of stuff . We’re amongst shrapnel. So if you’re looking for culture to support your attention, then you’re out of luck. The question to ask is “What is attention? Do we even understand the first thing about what attention is?” I mean, they’re these definitions that don’t define anything. We don’t understand what attention is because we’ve been hammered by non-attention. The thing to do is to try and discover what attention is, what is the substance of it. It’s a tool that’s also true of actors. We work with material that is constantly moving."<<

Sam Shepard: 'America is on its way out as a culture' | Stage | The Guardian

>> "The situation, he believes, is irredeemable. "We're on our way out," he says of America. "Anybody that doesn't realise that is looking like it's Christmas or something. We're on our way out, as a culture. America doesn't make anything anymore! The Chinese make it! Detroit's a great example. All of those cities that used to be something. If you go to a truck stop in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, you'll probably see the face of America. How desperate we are. Really desperate. Just raw."" <<

The Weird Stenographer: Sam Shepard on His Long Writing Life | Literary Hub

"It was splendid, really; I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. I don’t mean to make it sound like hallucination, but there were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves, and it seemed like the natural place to do it was on a stage."

Articles by Jack Shafer | POLITICO Journalist | Muck Rack

Tracking Jack...

Carr: Tropical Storm Barry - Where do we go from here? – gCaptain

"We watched clouds roll in, the barometer drop, and winds increase. Wind force increases fourfold for every doubling of wind speed. When winds reach 60 knots the force is four times what it was at 30 knots. Soon we could not talk, we had to yell to communicate. Rain was coming at use horizontally. We kept two crew in the cockpit for an hour at a time. They were harnessed to welded padeyes, and wore diving masks. We used the engine to take the strain off the anchors, engaging the engine RPMS to just keep us headed into the wind. In the dark of night this could only be down by staring at the lighted compass." Riding out a storm.

On Generative Algorithms: Introduction · inconvergent

"I've always been fascinated with patterns. It doesn't really matter what kind of patterns; I've played with networks, leaves and leaf venation, branches, lightning, flocking, tracing outlines of shapes, river formation, rock sediments, landscapes, slime mold, lichens, reaction-diffusion, cellular automaton, some fractals, and a few other things. I think what I enjoy the most is how complex and intricate results you can get from a set of simple rules."

UN Report: The Full Picture of Poverty in the UK is Obvious to Anyone who Opens their Eyes – Slugger O'Toole

"His report followed an almost two-week trip around the country last November, holding consultations in ten cities including London, Newcastle, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Belfast. It is also based on the testimony and interview with groups and individuals he met (including Jobcentre staff, food-bank volunteers, government representatives, and politicians from all major parties). In addition, his team received almost 300 submissions from our various national human rights institutions, NGOs, groups and individuals."

A Better Measure of Health Than Body Weight - The Atlantic

"Except in extreme cases, no single number gives a good idea of whether a person is functionally healthy or not. The common numbers are not directly or easily changeable. As these numbers continue to dominate health care, however, an emerging body of evidence is finding useful and cheap numbers that anyone can track. If these new numbers aren’t being taken seriously, it may be because they seem too obvious." I suspect these proxy measures are based on cultural correlations in behaviour. Thinking back to my youth half a century ago family members were labourers in various ways - fit as a fiddle and very strong but by no means a healthy lifestyle by today's standards.

Give us our daily artisan bread: How did we gain a passion for seeded sourdoughs and hand-crafted ryes? | The Independent

Scroll down for Bertinet's recipe. Looks quick.

How to make the perfect focaccia | Food | The Guardian

"Your choice of flour depends very much on what kind of focaccia you’re after. Using plain flour, as in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, or even finer “tipo 00” flour as in The River Cafe Classic Italian Cookbook, will give you a softer, more tender crumb; while Richard Bertinet’s mixture of strong bread flour and coarse semolina in his book Dough creates a more robust, chewy texture." Experiment: Scale this down to 500g flour and cut the salt in the dough itself...

Does TV Makes You Dumber and More Populist? - The Atlantic

"The effect persisted throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with regions that were exposed to Mediaset earlier than others voting for Berlusconi in greater numbers. To verify that Mediaset was the relevant factor, the authors compared towns and villages that were able to get good reception with neighboring ones that initially had a poor signal due to physical obstacles, such as a mountain range. Amazingly, Italians who had good access to Mediaset for random geographical reasons voted for populists in greater numbers than their neighbors who did not." I wonder what the fcbk echo chambers on a smart phone does to participants (on all sides).

[1605.08081] Bell's Universe: A Personal Recollection - Reinhold Bertlmann

The sock-wearer's personal memoire of John Bell and work at CERN.

BERTLMANN'S SOCKS AND THE NATURE OF REALITY - document

How to explain entanglement to people in the pub / class full of teenagers.

John Bell - Indeterminism and Nonlocality (1990) - YouTube

Video from CERN

The passions blowing Boris Johnson into No 10 could yet bring him down | Nick Cohen | Opinion | The Guardian

"Vote Leave offered no programme at all. In their complacent belief that a Remain victory was guaranteed, Cameron, parliament and the media did not insist that we must define what Brexit meant before voting on it. The referendum therefore didn’t produce a mandate but a blank cheque, which fanatics have scribbled on ever since."

Sapped by Brexit, it’s little wonder we dream of doing a Nick Clegg | Nick Cohen | Opinion | The Guardian

"Rob Ford, Manchester University’s professor of political science, ran the numbers for me. First past the post is a “non-linear” system or, as others might put it, a dazzlingly stupid way to organise a modern democracy." Non-linear systems can exhibit 'structural stability', providing a steady state for large ranges of variables. Linear systems just move back and forth as the forces wax and wane. I can see a need for a bit of non-linearity in the electoral system. Perhaps a system like the Scottish parliament where a fraction of seats are awarded on a proportional representation system, and others have FPTP?

G. B. National Grid status

Tells you about current mix of electricity sources being used in UK grid. Nice dashboard layout (for larger screens)

Six constitutional questions raised by the election of the new Conservative leader | The Constitution Unit Blog

"This is the first time that party members will potentially directly elect a new Prime Minister, and this innovation is happening at a time not only of minority government, but with the governing party severely divided. Some senior Conservatives have signalled that they might go so far as to vote no confidence in a new leader who sought to deliver a ‘no deal’ Brexit, while some candidates in the race suggested a possibility of proroguing parliament to avoid MPs blocking a ‘no deal’. In this post we address six of the most burning constitutional questions raised by these controversies."

Joanne Bartley: Has our Party gone mad? No Deal Brexiteers are acting like pro-Corbyn extremists. | Conservative Home

"A 16 year old member and I dared to mention our support for Rory Stewart. We voiced our agreement with his message of compromise and we admired the realism in his Brexit plans. It became clear very quickly that we held the ‘wrong’ view. Our brand of moderate, pragmatic conservatitism was seen as a threat to our Party. It is natural to disagree about who should be leader, but I left the meeting feeling my Party is moving away from me." Hollowing out. Is this just a generational change or something more challenging?

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures - Downloads

Jonathan Sumption's Reith Lectures 2019...

Our illiberal empire of rights - UnHerd

>> “The problem about the legal model is that it marginalises the political process. When a judge identifies something as a constitutional, or a human, or a fundamental right, he is saying that it derives from a higher law than the ordinary decision-making processes of the state. He is declaring that its existence and extent are not to be determined by political choice. Yet, very many judicial decisions about fundamental rights are themselves political choices only made by a smaller and unrepresentative body of people.” << Jonathan Sumption’s Reith lectures: quoted by another lawyer.

Calculate distance and bearing between two Latitude/Longitude points using haversine formula in JavaScript

Haversine is one I've not used for quite a few decades!

Jeremy Hunt: the last Cameroon

>> He returned to the all-consuming issue of Brexit one last time, adding: “I passionately believe our future as a democracy is at stake. Faced with the risks of Brexit and the risks of damage to our democracy, I would say you have to deliver Brexit and make a success of it. You have to accept Brexit, accept the reality and you have to move on.” << Even if there is actually no longer a majority for this thing (which has still not been defined)? Even if we have had an election or two since with unclear results? Do these people actually have any *theory*?

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Brexit: Some Inconvenient Facts that the Tories need to face

"In Continental Europe, the following two days are All Saints and All Souls. From April Fools to the Day of the Dead. Someone in Brussels had a dark sense of humour when the date was chosen." I'm hoping some kind of common sense prevails. But I'm not too hopeful.

History will wonder how we trusted Boris with Britain | The Spectator

"We spent an idyllic two days walking the streets of Ravenna; contemplating Byzantine mosaics; basking in Italy. Here is a country in a state of chronic political paralysis, of which the inhabitants contrive acceptable lives. Perhaps this is our own destiny — to be ruled by weak governments incapable of addressing education, welfare, NHS funding, productivity, infrastructure, control of non-EU immigration, credible defence policies — yet amid which most British people will meander onward, not noticing themselves becoming relatively poorer." Quite high unemployment in Italy, although I appreciate the point being made (life goes on, government is not actually that important everyday as long as basic processes function). Policies do matter though.

This is a note

Tim Shipman's view of the second Tory leadership debate

Classic.

Tory leadership race: the inside story of how Boris Johnson nailed it... down to final vote | London Evening Standard

"He started by re-reading Robert Caro’s great biography of Lyndon B Johnson, which describes how the 36th US president amassed influence by predicting Senate divisions through meticulous research, rigorous cross-checking and multiple sources." LBJ didn't have no spreadsheet - he had pieces of card with 90-something names on them. Just don't mention Precinct 13

Maersk Signs Up H&M for Carbon-Neutral Biofuel Trial – gCaptain

"Maersk says the biofuel in the pilot project is the same blend of used cooking oil and heavy which has been tested and successfully validated in a trial driven in collaboration with the Dutch Sustainability Growth Coalition (DSGC), and Shell his year. It is also certified as a sustainable fuel by the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) body." If you burn oil you get carbon. I assume that the carbon liberated by burning this fuel is compensated by carbon being bound somewhere else? Perhaps the carbon bound / carbon liberated ratio will need to be 1.05 soon so not 'neutral'?

Theresa May - strategic mistakes and the Irish question

Useful summary. Has the main points plus view from RoI perspective.

The Conservative leadership debate showed the true scale of the party’s identity crisis

"In Howard Brenton’s 1980 play A Short Sharp Shock, patrician Tories watch aghast as their party is suddenly populated with used car salesmen and white Rhodesian mercenaries. The play captured the nastiness of early Thatcherism so well, and so cruelly, that there were calls for it to be banned." I can remember those times: 'businessmen' put in charge of newly-formed hospital trusts on the basis that they had run a central heating company or similar. Interviews with Mrs T.

Re: Using ISO image of installer DVD as repository - How?

This sources.list entry allows apt to treat a loop mounted iso image of a dvd as a local repository... deb [trusted=yes check-valid-until=no] \ file:///home/richard/dvdmount \ stretch main contrib ...wondering if I can adapt this to the blue-ray image for offline installation?

PyRoom — distraction free writing

The tarball extracts and installs fine on Slackware current with Python 2.7x. Works fine even though no apparent updates for 10 years. Lets hear it for scripting languages.

The Real Foods Guide to Pulses, Beans and Peas

Useful table with suggested soaking and cooking times.

The New Wilderness (Idle Words)

"For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition." Digital rights management of (for instance) an ebook takes away our unregulated right to lend our book to someone else. Universal surveillance leads to the recording of the minutae of our (mostly somewhat boring) lives. Hence a need for a new kind of protection -or simply a forgetting of the trivia after a few days/weeks/months

Rory Stewart is a reminder of what Boris Johnson used to be | Coffee House

>> "None of that means what Stewart has done during the Conservative leadership election is irrelevant or unimportant. He, like Matt Hancock, has run towards conversations about difficult and important things like social care when many of their colleagues have run away. When (if) the Conservatives ever decide to start taking the business of actually governing seriously again, they may just appreciate that sort of courage and seriousness." << How many years will that be? 5? 10?

Listeria outbreak: Health secretary orders NHS food review - BBC News

>> "Staff, patients and families deserve so much better - our NHS should be at the forefront of supporting people to make healthy choices. "I have instructed the NHS to conduct a root and branch review of hospital food." << Insource food preparation? Hire cooks, set up kitchens, subject to hygiene inspections like other restaurants? Perhaps employ local people and pay living wage?

The Empty Promise of Boris Johnson | The New Yorker

>> "When Johnson returned to London, he confessed to an editorial writer at the Telegraph that he had no political opinions. “You must have some,” the colleague reassured him. “Well, I’m against Europe and against capital punishment,” Johnson said. “I’m sure you’ll make something out of that,” came the reply." << Where do they get them from?

What my focus groups of wavering Tory voters said about the leadership race - Lord Ashcroft Polls

>> "Most had not heard of Rory Stewart until he entered the race. Our participants’ overall reaction was gently positive. “He was talking about traveling across, was it Africa or somewhere, with no shoes on. He had quite an interesting youth;” “He looks after prisons, doesn’t he? He’s trying to do some good work there;” “He wants to fulfil the people’s choice to leave. He sees it as a bit of a tricky one but he’s going to make it happen;” “I think he’s quite trustworthy actually. The problem is, he’s another Old Etonian, and do we need another one of those?” The two words most frequently uttered in response to his campaign video were “sweet” and “interesting” – but while many liked what he had to say, few could see him in the top job: “It’s very romantic, isn’t it;” “He’s an interesting bloke but he doesn’t look the part, unfortunately;” “Is he for real? Where does he come from? It sounds like he wrote a song;” “Sweet, but do we want him running the country?” “Not a strong figurehead who’s going to lead us through. Could be a good number two;” “If you whacked him with a cold salmon he’d fall over;” “I look at him and I can’t take him serious. He’s making some fair points but I wouldn’t want him to be the face of the country.”" << 'Sweet' and susceptible to cold salmon bashing are not ways I would choose to describe an ex-MI6 officer with combat experience myself, but then looks can be deceptive. This whole page is hilarious and a salutary reminder of what most people think about what is in the news. >> "But one consistent theme was that people were interested first and foremost in the candidates’ apparent character and competence – they had simply given up listening to policies or plans, whether on Brexit or anything else: “They’ll say one thing to your face and then get in the car and say ‘ha, they bought that one, didn’t they’;” “Whenever I read about them, the underlying thing that I just can’t seem to get past is that they’ll do whatever it takes just to be leader and then change their mind;” “I’ve heard it and heard it and heard it and now I’m exhausted with listening to all their twaddle.”" << How do we get away from the popularity contest and back onto policies? There was research on centre-right voters going on rhetoric and centre-left voters going on policy.

Which Countries Become Tax Havens?

Tax havens are small wealth countries with effective administrations. Extra income from businesses coming in must not be offset by loss of tax revenue.

Eastern Germany on the brink of demographic collapse | Financial Times

>> "His community is lively and his churches well-attended, but a simple ratio gives him pause for thought. For every baptism he celebrates, Mr Grosser presides over five funerals. He knows what this mismatch means for the future of his parish, but does not want locals to lose heart: “You cannot allow demography to sap your courage,” he said. “This place is worth living in and loving, even if there are dark demographic clouds on the horizon.” " << Japan is well down this road.

Easy Soft Flatbread Recipe (No Yeast) | RecipeTin Eats

Basic milk based recipe - pan fried bread. Try with daal.

Polish Rye Bread Recipe - The Bread Kitchen

50:50 rye / wheat flour with 62% water/milk plus honey. Plenty of rising time (3h + 2h) given the yeast (2 tsp 'dried', so 1.5 tsp quick).

Boris Johnson supporters want no-deal Brexit and less talk of climate change – new survey of party members reveals

"Members of political parties are, generally speaking, more zealous than members of the public. Some argue that it might be better to leave the choice of the country’s PM up to MPs. They, at least, have a direct mandate from voters. And, since governments in parliamentary systems must retain the confidence of the legislature in order to stay in office, allowing MPs to choose would at least guarantee a chain of democratic accountability from executive to electorate. That is bypassed completely when party members alone make the decision." That paragraph applies to all the party leaders of course.

Tory leadership contest: Rory Stewart warns over 'electoral bribes' - BBC News

"On Tuesday, Mr Stewart will say his party's reputation for economic prudence is at risk and, while a negotiated Brexit deal will create some "headroom" for extra spending, any money available should be spent on technical education and digital infrastructure." I'm not so sure about that 'headroom' but I like the technical education idea.

Poorest Communities Fear Loss Of £2bn EU Funding After Brexit | HuffPost UK

"Very little is known about how the government plans to replace EU structural funding worth £2.1 billion (€2.4 billion) a year after Brexit. The government has pledged to set up a UK Shared Prosperity Fund, but it has yet to publish details of how much money will be allocated and how it will be distributed. A final decision on the design is expected after the Spending Review, which has been delayed beyond autumn because of the Conservative leadership election."

"Candidates are supposed to pay attention to the voters' backstory, not the other way round": my E2 Summit speech - Lord Ashcroft Polls

"Since stepping down from the role I’ve continued with the research, since it struck me that while commentators were always blessed with an abundance of opinion, real evidence was in rather shorter supply. Another reason was that pointing out the difference between what voters think and what politicians and pundits think they think is an appealing way to create a certain amount of mischief." Later "The political atmosphere is only heightening this sense of unease. The relentless pace of politics, and the constant barrage of news, information and misinformation, brings its own angst. People are finding their political views becoming stronger as they react to events and respond to what they hear from the other side. At the same time, many feel they are having to become more guarded about what they actually say, with people ever more ready or even eager to take offence. All of this adds to the sense of division that people are constantly being told is the hallmark of national life in both our countries." Methodology uses demographic data about constituencies and focus groups.

The UK will probably never be as ready for no deal as it was in March | The Institute for Government

"Some point out that stock piling ahead of October will be harder than it was in the spring – warehouses are booked up in preparation for Christmas. Some doubt that no deal will really happen, while others will be unsure what key date to work towards. Will it be 31 October? Or a couple of weeks into November? Could there be a 'technical extension' to the end of the year? That may not matter to the Tory leadership contenders – but it is a critical piece of planning information." Hadn't thought about the Xmas retail ramp up.

Housing and populism: West European Politics: Vol 0, No 0

"This paper bridges the economic and values-based approaches to populism by arguing that the geography of wealth inequality offers a convincing explanation for the pattern of populist vote share. Drawing on fine-grained house price data in the UK and France, it is shown that the pattern of house prices ‒ even within small districts ‒ plays a major part in shaping support for Brexit and Marine Le Pen. The findings illustrate how longstanding variation in local wealth shapes the geography of discontent and drives populist appeal. Populism, the article concludes, is primarily a politics of place, and place is a product, in part, of the housing market." Housing again. I'm going with Dominic Cummings branching histories myself.

High rents 'make young people less mobile' - BBC News

>> "Rising rents mean young people are less likely to move to UK cities where average salaries are higher, a report indicates. The number of young people in private rented accommodation who moved for a new job has almost halved in 20 years. Despite the higher wages available, financial incentives for moving are lower, say researchers." << Almost everything comes back to the cost of housing.

Shut down issue in 6.5 - DaemonForums

Mystery solved

Britain is horribly divided – but that’s also the fault of remainers | John Harris | Opinion | The Guardian

>> "The kind of free-market capitalism this country was forced to embrace 30-odd years ago always sweeps the past away; now, of all the countries of Europe, we are surely the most weightless. In the absence of any instinctive popular understanding of our national past, the Brexiteers can tell their absurd tales of splendid isolation, the glories of the second world war and the wonders of empire, as well as averting their eyes from the island of Ireland. But history-blindness is there on the remain side as well, in the continuing denial of the great mess of stuff that sat behind the Brexit vote, and how tin-eared many pro-Europeans seem when they sound off." << Interesting take, and, yes, there is more of a sameness now than I remember.

In fearless pursuit of absurdity - the hunt for NF Simpson - Telegraph

>> To everyone's delight, the young audience at the reading laughed uproariously. "In the 1950s," Wally observes, "the actors had difficulty with the elephants and absurdity, but now they understand it because today the world is perceived as absurd. We realise what a chaotic mess we have made of the planet." << Canal boats fine but damp.

Trump Undermines the U.K. and Bullies Theresa May - The Atlantic

"Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer have made it clear that the U.K., if it wants a free-trade deal, will have to choose America’s regulatory framework over the European one, putting the U.K. in a position of being unable to conclude a trade deal with the EU 27, its largest trading partner. Such a deal would include provisions on chicken and access to the National Health Service that would almost certainly not make it through the House of Commons." Not just chicken, it is food standards generally, and potentially major threat to UK agriculture (and ROI exports). Also what of the NI-ROI border?

Rory Stewart on the stump

Remarkably sensible for a Tory

A Latter-day Lawrence of Arabia Shakes Up Britain’s Tories - The New York Times

>> "Under the hashtag “Where’s Rory?” they have posted photoshopped photographs of Mr. Stewart at Niagara Falls, onstage with the Spice Girls and striding between the Egyptian pyramids. One of them wrote: “You’re being chased by Rory Stewart. He wants to debate you. You jump in a taxi and escape. You breathe a sigh of relief. The driver turns around. It’s Rory Stewart."" << I actually find this refreshing. Hasn't a hope in hades of course but hope he finds a role

Boris Johnson Is Back. Thank Donald Trump and Nigel Farage - Bloomberg

>> "If he wins, Johnson could find he can do nothing with the prize he has long coveted. The EU is almost certain to refuse to renegotiate May’s withdrawal agreement. More likely, the price for another extension would be high, if it was on offer at all. Nor does there seem the remotest possibility that this parliament will accept a no-deal Brexit, as House of Commons Speaker John Bercow noted in the U.S. this week." <<

Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart makes me cringe, but at least he listens | Nesrine Malik | Opinion | The Guardian

"Stewart is a Tory MP straight out of central casting: Eton, PPE at Oxford, the Foreign Office, OBE, FRSL, FRSGS, ETC. PP. A strong hint of MI6 pervades his career before becoming a member of parliament. But here he was, peering with earnest concentration into his phone camera as he camped in coffee shops and, at one point, near a McDonald’s." He should come up to Brownhills. He could sell tickets.

And as the last count stumbles to a halt, it’s thanks to everyone… – Slugger O'Toole

"For wicked problems like Northern Ireland there may be no ‘stopping rule’, but on Slugger, to borrow from my Swedish friend and colleague John Kellden “understanding is the stopping rule.” In other words, we try to push hard as is necessary for understanding, but not harder." There is no stopping rule for politics of course. It is a non-periodic chaotic system.

How Michael Gove's reforms drove me out of teaching | Education | The Guardian

"According to all the different criteria against which I have been judged, despite the constant shifting of goalposts, I have been outstanding. I worked hard; I delivered engaging yet academically challenging lessons – despite us all being told that these two concepts were mutually exclusive; I assessed pupils in rigorous detail against ever-changing marking schemes; I completed fatuous administrative tasks within all deadlines. I was at the top of my game. I should have been seeking promotion opportunities. Instead I found myself, along with my pupils, becoming increasingly insignificant. Now the school to which I gave my twenties is haemorrhaging good and outstanding teachers." 2014 vintage but still relevant as the ghost of Gove still works its way through the blob like a zombie. Truly "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed". Just teach stuff and tell them to stuff the paperwork.

Andrea Dunbar: The teenage Bradford 'genius' who told it like it was - BBC News

>> "There was never a golden age when working class people were being listened to and elevated. There are outliers and I think Andrea was very much an outlier. She had the skill but there was a little bit of luck as well involved. But that's true for every writer." "The thing that has changed, she believes, is the time and resources schools have to nurture talent. The numbers of students taking GCSE and A-Level drama have dropped by a third in the last decade." << Perhaps less OFSTED, paperwork, target setting, progress monitoring and more listening?

How Rory Stewart can save the Tories | Coffee House

"I was right about Stewart’s low tolerance for bureaucratic abstractions and managerial verbiage. The unfolding months saw a calm, determined but very focused coup that deposed dissembling mandarins and ensured direct ministerial control in an effort to try to restore order and control on prison landings. The ‘hands off’ ministerial conventions that sustained mediocrity and under-performance in our criminal justice system were ditched in place of polite but relentless questioning." Nationalise prisons. Then minimise the number of people sent to prison. Ken Clarke had the right ideas as home secretary before the weirdo took over. Stewart is an unusual politician. One to watch.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Johnson now evens to succeed TMay as PM

>> "Over the past three years, very little of the inner May has been let out. She has stood at that sodding lectern how many times and repeated that "nothing has changed". She has mouthed platitudinous slogans like "Brexit means Brexit", which means nothing. It is remarkable how we still don't really know this person whose every act has been microscopically examined over and over again." << @El_Capitano on Political Betting comments. I have wondered about this myself. But according to my reading I have the terrible suspicion that there is actually nothing there. As one No 10 insider who was quoted on the BBC live feed today said (paraphrase) 'as things got more difficult, the circle got narrower'. I think 'how sad', then I remember Windrush and the language schools...

Playdate: Edge Article Excerpt

>> And the surprises keep coming. For all its retro trappings, this is a thoroughly modern bit of hardware. The 2.7-inch black-and-white screen has a resolution of 400 × 240 – around four times the pixels of the Game Boy’s screen. Much like the E-ink screen you’d find on a Kindle, it’s not backlit – the difference is that it’s tremendously reflective, the visuals wonderfully sharp and clear in the California sunshine. The in-built speaker looks minuscule, but is so powerful that we have to hurriedly hunt for the volume controls, lest any passers-by be alerted to the existence of this bizarre little gizmo. << Someone is going to root this and have a Linux on it within hours of release. And I can think of about 30 uses for it.

Japanese macaque, snow monkey (Macaca fuscata), shouting, displaying Stock Photo: 2940437 - Alamy

Dominic Cummings' 'flying monkeys' about to be released from their cages to elect a leader.

EU 'failed' over UK's Brexit vote, says Juncker - BBC News

>> "When asked if the EU should have "interfered" more in the UK referendum on EU membership he said "yes"." << Not the best choice of words there. Interfere implies underhand puppet string stuff to my ear. Perhaps 'transparent upfront clearly branded EU statement and comment' would have been better.

Students 'may have been unfairly deported' over English test cheat claims - BBC News

"The service used voice recognition technology to try to find out who had cheated by having someone else sit their test." That will be based on a statistical likelihood. Like any statistical test there will be type I errors and type II errors. Wonder why the type II (false positive) errors were ignored. Would it not simply have been easier for a police officer or other official to interview the suspected student and ask them to describe their studies, their hopes for the future and their impressions of the UK? One can gauge basic English level quite quickly that way.

The problem with levels- gaps in basic numeracy skills identified by rigorous diagnostic testing – Great Maths Teaching Ideas

>> "We must not fall into the trap of confusing instantaneous performance for retention and transfer – learning. I have written about this extensively before. Learning must not be seen as a checklist of visit-once objectives. Even the highest attaining students need to occassionally revisit some of these elementary topics for which their “fluency fitness” has fallen. A green cell in a spreadsheet indicating that they can do a skill today should not be taken as a proxy that they will be equally as fluent in this skill in six months’ time." <<

Raj Chetty’s plan to change how Harvard teaches economics - Vox

>> "Because Chetty and his co-authors (Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren and Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Patrick Kline) posted all their data online — thus enabling others to run their own analysis and see what factors predict economic mobility — it quickly reoriented the debate about equality of opportunity in think tanks on both the right and left. Conservatives argued it showed that single parents hurt mobility; the Center for American Progress used the data to argue that unions improve mobility." <<

Turkey shows Britain that a customs union can hurt – POLITICO

"Ankara hopes that Brexit could shift the balance: The prospect of the U.K. also joining a customs union with the EU is "seen as an opportunity," said Carnegie's Ülgen. That would be a chance to link up with London to force the EU to grant the customs union partners a greater say. "The economic weight of the U.K. will make this question much more politically expedient to resolve," Ülgen said."

Candidates Who Explain Progressive Policies via Conservative Principles Could Be Uniquely Persuasive - Pacific Standard

>> "Importantly, "there was no backlash to conservative framing among liberal participants," the researchers add. Thus the most successful approach "advocated for progressive policies in terms of conservative value concerns."" << Conservatives heart, liberals head?

Most parents reject nearest school - BBC News

>> "A more successful system, he argues, could have a lower proportion getting their first pick, as it would show more people trying to get into the "best schools"." "At present, because most entry is based on how close people live to schools, he says families often "do not bother applying" to the highest-achieving schools because they have no realistic prospect of getting a place." << Tricky one. Sorting by perceived quality of local school and self-estimated likelihood of achieving a place at another school.

Polling and the Conservative Loss of Political Ascendancy - WPI Economics

Exhibit 5 is especially interesting.

James Kanagasooriam: The left-right age gap is even worse for the Conservatives than you think | Conservative Home

"Good businesses start with their customers and repeatedly refine the proposition until they get product-market fit. They don’t start with the product and then try and find an appropriate market." Is this not the problem? product-market fit coupled with segmented channels using social media resulted in (for instance) a vote for 'Leave' that was actually about 6 mutually incompatible leaves.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Food for thought for would-be defectors to the Brexit Party

"For it is not a party, but a company controlled by Nigel Farage. He appoints the board. There are no members." Red flag here. I wonder at the need for such tight control. Does Nigel not trust the movement? Contrast with Corbyn's Labour: trade union route, NEC independent, membership structure. Appeals process including legal action if needed. Transparent funding.

The Brexit Party look set to dominate at the European Elections in Great Britain as the Conservatives collapse – Slugger O'Toole

"I ran the forecast model again, except I merged the forecast votes for the Remain supporting parties into a single “Remain List”. The results are striking. Whilst the Brexit Party might still have still been the largest party, it would have been a close run contest, and the combined list would have favoured in 26 seats, in comparison to the 20 seats they are favoured currently." Labels and names

How Angela Merkel Keeps Power in a Man's World - The Atlantic

"Another lesson from the Merkel manual is to out-prepare the man across the negotiating table. She lets men (it’s still usually men) bluster uninterrupted until they run out of steam. When her turn comes, her calm command of facts reduces their grandiloquence to its simplest components. Merkel does not counter bombast with bombast, but with deflation." OFSTED inspectors (gender independent)

The Pivot | Asymco

"Companies sell objects or activities that they can make or engage in but customers buy solutions to problems. It’s easy to be fooled that these are interchangeable" I think people buy stuff and 'experiences' just for fun as well.

Mark the Ballot: Why I am troubled by the polls

"As I see it, the latest set of opinion polls are fairly improbable. They look under-dispersed compared with what I would expect from the central limit theorem. My grandmother would have bought a lottery ticket if she encountered something this unlikely." Could this be an example of a fat tailed distribution?

BBC World Service - 13 Minutes to the Moon

Podcasts about Apollo missions. Strange not on actual radio any more.

Fishing quotas in Europe: Who gets the right to fish? | EUROPP

"Whether it is the disappearance of fishing communities around the coast, the controversy over larger and larger factory trawlers, or the alarm over the privatisation of a public resource, many of the concerns about contemporary fisheries management are about how the resource is divided, not just the total amount. The systems in place vary significantly. For example, while fishers in Belgium and the Netherlands fish many of the same species in the same waters, the government-rationed quotas of the former, and market for ownership rights in the latter, are worlds apart in management approach. These are designed with different priorities in mind and lead to very different socio-economic outcomes for the fishing industry, fishing communities, and wider society." I didn't know that UK policy is to sell a large chunk of our quota to non-UK companies. So fate of fishing communities on the coast is actually determined by the Westminster government within the national quota.

Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds

"This is the story of an accidental network of hundreds of people all (sort of) working toward a vague common goal on a ridiculous project that did not exist two weeks ago." I'm sure I pinned this in 2014...

Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry | WIRED Paul Ford

>> "When I was a boy, if you’d come up behind me (in a nonthreatening way) and whispered that I could have a few thousand Cray supercomputers in my pocket, that everyone would have them, that we would carry the sum of human ingenuity next to our skin, jangling in concert with our coins, wallets, and keys? And that this Lilliputian mainframe would have eyes to see, a sense of touch, a voice to speak, a keen sense of direction, and an urgent desire to count my actual footsteps and everything I read and said as I traipsed through the noosphere? Well, I would have just burst, burst. I would have stood up and given the techno­barbaric yawp of a child whose voice has yet to change. Who wants jet packs when you can have 256 friggabytes (because in 2019 we measure things in friggin’ gigabytes) resting upon your mind and body at all times? Billions of transistors, attached to green plastic, soldered by robots into a microscopic Kowloon Walled City of absolute technology that we call a phone, even though it is to the rotary phone as humans are to amoebas­. It falls out of my hand at night as I drift to sleep, and when I wake up it is nestled into my back, alarm vibrating, small and warm like a twitching baby possum." << How's that for a paragraph? I'm a decade ahead of Ford, but still amazed. I feel like a traction engine driver confronting a Tesla sometimes...

Germany’s AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial | Environment | The Guardian

"The Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) is expected to launch its biggest attack yet on mainstream climate science at a symposium in parliament on Tuesday supported by a prominent climate change denial body linked by researchers to prominent conservative groups in the US." Here we go...

British Steel seeks government loan for 'Brexit issues' - BBC News

"It paid a nominal £1 fee for the assets, but pledged to plough up to £400m into the business, which it rebranded British Steel. Workers had to take pay cuts and reductions in their pensions in return, and the company recently returned to profit." So presumably the employees get first shares of these new profits? Not holding my breath

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » It is now an 91% chance that TMay will be out this year - Page 2 — politicalbetting

Montecarlo analysis to estimate the effects of different percentages on likely numbers of seats in the forthcoming EU elections. Smaller vote percentages have a disproportionally large effect.

Inequality driving 'deaths of despair' - BBC News

>> "He warned of the dangers of disillusionment if people did not feel fairly rewarded for their work - and that extreme wealth seemed to be gained by "taking rather than making"." << Not just extreme wealth. Someone who bought a house in the South East in the 1970s/80s is now sitting on wealth that outstrips any normal wage that could be earned over the decades. That is a disincentive, although unlikely to be repeated.

One-time-pad

"In fact, you can produce any desired word or phrase from any one-time pad -encrypted message, as long as you use the 'right' wrong key. There is no way to verify if a solution is the right one." Sounds like a novel plot

Canadian Embassy

"Communicators received telegrams from the various divisions, typed them into the communications format and simply transmitted them on the appropriate circuits. Key generators did the encryption and decryption automatically. These machines provided an added level of security in that they fed a continual stream of characters down the circuits whether or not there was any traffic. Thus any would-be interceptor was unable to tell when a message began or ended, or even whether a message was actually being transmitted." Is this still a one time pad system? Or pseudo-random deterministic?

HF Propagation Conditions In Detail

Love stuff like this

Musings on Markets: Uber's Coming out Party: Personal Mobility Pioneer or Car Service on Steroids?

"In June 2017, I presented a different approach to valuing companies like Uber, that derive their value from users, subcribers or members. In that approach, I began by valuing an existing user (rider), by looking at the revenues and cash flows that Uber would generate over the user’s lifetime and then extended the approach to valuing a new user, where the cost of user acquisition has to be netted out against the user value." He calls this a bottom up valuation. It produces a wide range of possible valuations based on assumptions.

How Powerful Is Mark Zuckerberg? - The Atlantic

"Facebook gets people to use its products, and it uses the actions that people take to manufacture more useful data about their tendencies, as Shoshana Zuboff has laid out in her book Surveillance Capitalism. That is to say, all the things we control about interactions with the empire—the friends we have, the photos we post, the text we write—are not the information that Facebook is after. These are the raw material for the machine-learning processes that generate Facebook’s real power: their ability to forecast what you’ll do when faced with a set of choices."

SNP election launch hit by leaflet fiasco | HeraldScotland

"One party insider said there appeared to have been “spreadsheet” problems, with small errors rippling across thousands of names and addresses. The source said younger voters would probably brush off the problem, but the party was worried that older voters - those most likely to vote - would be annoyed. " I think 'younger voters' should get up off their arses and change the demographic participation assumptions that people make pretty quickly. Plus spreadsheets.

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism | Open Culture

>> While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism," he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features," writes the novelist and semiotician, "cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” <<

The Use of Knowledge in Society

F. A. Hayek's essay on information completeness.

Financial Risk Forecasting

"The book concludes by focussing on the forecasting of risk in very large and uncommon events with extreme value theory and considering the underlying assumptions behind almost every risk model in practical use – that risk is exogenous – and what happens when those assumptions are violated." One for Taleb's views

Which numerical computing language is best: Julia, MATLAB, Python or R? | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

"Data is often read from and written to a number of formats, including text files, CSV files, Excel, SQL databases, noSQL databases and proprietary data formats, either local or remote. This is where R absolutely shines. It was designed for scientific data, and it shows. It can handle complicated data structures with a variety of formats and origins, with many packages that provide a variety of ways to access and process the data. It can handle data sets that are much bigger than what can fit into memory." I want to learn one of the big four, so R looks like the Swiss army knife. "Heavy computations often get outsourced to either high performance computing clusters or the cloud. We can rent a 72-core machine on Amazon Cloud for $1.16 an hour, making that 20 times faster than most desktops." Interesting...

"Which countries in the world do not belong to any trade blocks beyond WTO? The Holy See, Mauritania, Monaco, Palau, Timor-Leste, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Western Sahara. After no deal Brexit, Britain is set to join them."

Isle of Man - Wikipedia

"The Isle of Man is neither part of the European Union, nor has a special status, and thus did not take part in the 2016 referendum on the UK's EU membership. However, Protocol 3 of the UK's Act of Accession to the Treaty of Rome included the Isle of Man within the EU's customs area, allowing for trade in Manx goods without tariffs throughout the EU.[49] As it is not part of the EU's internal market, there are still limitations on the movement of capital, services and labour." Food for thought

globalinequality: Shadows and lights of globalization

"Today’s globalization represents a rebalancing of the world, where Asian incomes, not as in the past, only in a few countries like Japan, South Korea or Taiwan, but in the giants such as China, India, and Indonesia, as well as in populous countries like Vietnam and Thailand, are catching up with Western incomes." A re-post of a published article. Just thinking aloud: the graph coincides with the drop in fertility in Chine/India around 1980s/90s. Demographic transition?

globalinequality: Democracy or dictatorship: which works better?

"Formally speaking, American companies were organized like the Communist Party. In both cases, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht, the leadership selected their employees, or their citizens. In one case the dictatorship was in the social sphere, in another in the work sphere." Hilarious. I think.

Stumbling and Mumbling: Against solipsistic politics

"It’s not just about what you want, but about what others want too. The very essence of politics is about how we manage conflicts between different attitudes, and how we might change those attitudes – the latter being a job not just for politicians but for everybody" No hear must feel as they say in my local social club. Underneath the attitudes and opinions are the realities of geography, economics and logistics.

Robert Halfon: Does May's selfish machine care at all about the Party's future – or the thousand plus councillors who lost their seats? | Conservative Home

"Second, it is true that Corbyn lost seats, but he also did badly in local elections in the run up to the 2017 election. If Labour sorts out its position on Brexit, then its voters in the North could return to the Labour fold. If Corbyn goes and is replaced by someone like Angela Rayner, that is likely to bring its voters back home. Their message on austerity still resonates with working-class voters struggling with the cost of living and fatigued with cutbacks in local government and public services." Straight from the horse's mouth. Services, jobs (that pay), houses. It isn't hard.

‘Massively unfair’ gulf in bus fares between London and rest of England | UK news | The Guardian

"The fragmented system was introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, when the Conservative government deregulated the bus industry across Britain, except in London. Department for Transport (DfT) statistics show that the number of passenger journeys in England have dropped by 4.2% outside London since March 2005 and soared by 23.5% in the capital over the same period." Congestion charging? Rest of article useful information. Birmingham's Stagecoach tentacle caps fares at something like £2.60. Day pass £4.50 or something.

Great Yarmouth school a 'fourth emergency service' - BBC News

>> "When people have got nowhere else to turn, they turn to us," she says. "We've uncovered more and more need. The more you ask, the more you find out - there's a level of hidden poverty that you would not be aware of." << The modern way.

java - How to make FreeMind render fonts smooth again? - Ask Ubuntu

"use the following solution (assumed that you use the regularly installed Freemind startup script written in bash) Make a config file for FreeMind ~/freemind/freemindrc and copy the option below into it. _JAVA_OPTIONS='-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on -Dswing.aatext=true'

I talked to my Leave-voting constituents about Brexit. This is what I learnt

>> "[...] If Labour doesn’t identify the concerns of those who voted against the status quo and take steps to address the discontent and disaffection that lay behind their decision to do so, there is a risk it will not govern for a long time. I represent a Labour seat where nearly 70 per cent of people voted Leave and I wanted to understand why so many did. I spoke to seven people from my Ashfield constituency who opted to exit the EU – one person from each age group between twenties and seventies. I wanted to hear the stories behind the statistics and identify some common themes that might help Labour reconnect with our natural base." <<

Most depressed English communities 'in north and Midlands' | UK news | The Guardian

"In Bidston, in Birkenhead, Merseyside, which has the second highest prevalence of depression in England (20.2%), more than half of children live in poverty." Real shame, but I need to point out that the photo at the top of the article is actually New Brighton looking towards the Liverpool dockside. Bidston's estate has no such open sky view.

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Media Release: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’ | IPBES

"Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities." Only the executive summary is available at present. The full report comes later. Strange that this organisation has to use Dropbox to disseminate the deliverables!

Brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities | JRF

"In more technical terms we also find a significant ‘interaction effect’ between a person’s level of education and the educational profile of the area where they live. The level of support for Leave among graduates varied much more than among those with low levels of education across different types of areas and different parts of the country. For example, whereas the level of support for Brexit among people with GCSE or below qualifications was 16 percentage points lower in high-skilled areas than low-skilled areas, it was over 30 percentage points lower among people with A Levels or a University degree." Locality matters. We are so dependent on others.

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid - UnHerd

"As the National Centre for Social Research points out, the average level of support for leaving the EU among degree-holders was just 26%. This compares to 50% among those with A-levels, 61% among those with O-levels or GCSEs, and a striking 78% among those with no qualifications. Almost every study of the Brexit vote since has confirmed that low formal educational attainment is a major predictor of whether or not somebody backs Brexit, just as it is a major predictor of whether or not people vote for populist, nationalist or Eurosceptic parties elsewhere in the world."

The decline of homeownership among young adults - Institute For Fiscal Studies - IFS

"The key reason for the decline is the sharp rise in house prices relative to incomes. Mean house prices were 152% higher in 2015–16 than in 1995–96 after adjusting for inflation. By contrast, the real net family incomes of those aged 25–34 grew by only 22% over the same twenty years. As a result, the average (median) ratio between the average house price in the region where a young adult lives and their annual net family income doubled from 4 to 8, with all of the increase occurring by 2007–08." Goalposts not moving, they are dancing a samba

Housing Crisis: Renters Are Driving British Voters to Labour - Bloomberg

>> "New analysis shows that Britain's long-festering housing shortages contributed to the 2017 election that cost the Conservatives their majority. While Brexit divisions cut across party lines, Britain's housing problems overwhelmingly benefit Labour. Now, it seems the government may finally be grasping the extent of the problem. “Young people without family wealth are ‘right to be angry’ at not being able to buy a home,” said Prime Minister Theresa May Monday in a speech focused on housing." <<

Could a rentquake topple Trump? - UnHerd

"US Republicans and UK Conservatives alike should be terrified that so many people feel they’ve been permanently excluded from the dream of a property owning democracy – especially given that this bloc now includes workers on salaries that were once sufficient to secure a place on the housing ladder." Build houses. For rent. In a protected market so as not to pauperise the mortgage payers.

Are these the last gasps of our old political order? - UnHerd

"They are probably renting or, if they are not, then heavy mortgage payments and few savings mean that their family is one crisis away from financial disaster. And they lean instinctively against Brexit, or if they voted for it then they have concluded that it is being managed disastrously. The Tories are losing them." Build houses. Not hard.

"Presse" Hell

Pre-ww2 version of twitter! HELLSCHREIBER system of low-tech facsimile transmission specialised to typewritten text

Rockex Cryptosystem

"The real problem in any one-time system like Rockex was the production (and distribution) of vast quantities of genuinely random keystream tape. Rockex twin master tapes ( and machines) were produced at Hanslope from 1944 to 1947. Then Rockex and key tape production was moved to the Palace of Industry at Wembley for a year and in early 1949, it all moved again to Borehamwood [3] where production continued until the MK5 Rockex became obsolete during the late 1960's." They used actual noise with gates apparently - so genuine entropy

UK local elections: what we learnt | Financial Times

"Its performance in areas such as Sunderland — a city that voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum but that provided three Lib Dem pick-ups on Thursday — highlighted the possibility that its success was due to non-Brexit issues, or sheer voter anger at the two big parties." Basically uniform success across leave/remain areas.

A cry to ‘get on with Brexit’ or a Remain backlash? In fact, neither side triumphed in the local elections | The Independent

"Meanwhile many people will have voted for whoever they thought would make sure their bins were emptied or prevent a new building in their back yard." That would be me if I had a vote (Unlike the honourable member for Uxbridge, I noticed the lack of a polling card)

Liberal Democrats and Greens surge to victory as Conservatives suffer landslide defeat

"In our system, the first aim of the Green party is to act as the political equivalent of the carbon tax, forcing the big two parties to pay an electoral price if they continue to put forward inadequate solutions to the climate crisis. This is the first result in which we can genuinely say they look able to do that, and not merely act as a irritant on Labour’s left flank in a handful of urban areas."

Forecasting Local Election Net Seat Gains/Losses 2019 | Elections Etc

Forecast between 200 and 990 Labour gains. Actual, 80 odd Labour losses. The council seats up on May 2nd tallied 56% leave against 44% remain in the referendum.

Stanford quantifies the privacy-stripping power of metadata | TechCrunch

"The UK government appointed independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson, noted in his review of investigatory powers last year that “the distinction between “content data” and metadata …is rapidly fading away in modern network environment” — quoting that conclusion from a prior EU-funded Surveille Report."

Facebook is trying to make the word “private” meaningless | The Outline

"But what his presentation elided was the fact that Facebook does not need to see the content of what people are saying in order to advertise to them. The metadata — who, or what (as in a business), you’re talking to, and even where you are or what time the conversation is taking place as it comes together with other pieces of information — provides more than enough information to make a very educated guess about what you’re interested in, to the point that knowing specifically what you are saying adds almost nothing." Traffic analysis?

While Brexit is ongoing, climate change will never get the attention that it desperately needs

"Climate change is what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls a “hyper-object”: an issue so vast that we struggle to comprehend it most of the time. A crystallising event – unseasonable weather, a diverting statement from a former party leader – can briefly bring it into focus but we can’t consistently hold it in our minds." Research the idea...

Theresa May and Gavin Williamson's reputations should both be destroyed by his sacking

"But the manner and the mood music around it, in which condemnation of the fact of the leak vastly outweighed discussion of its contents, is a familiar and depressing story." Make a fuss to distract attention?

Elizabeth Warren’s Agenda May Prevail But Her Candidacy May Flame Out - POLITICO Magazine

"There have been a lot of “ideas” candidates over the years, staking out high-profile policies and charting new territory for their parties. And they tend to lose." Perhaps she does not care? Just forcing the front-runners to take positions may push the policies home. We could do with affordable housing here in UK.

State of the Nation report: Social mobility in UK 'virtually stagnant' - BBC News

>> "There's still a big shift - if you want to be socially mobile - towards London," she told BBC Radio Four's Today programme. "I think you're three times more likely to move to London if you're from a professional background than if you're from a working class background." << How do we spread the opportunity around? Or London just eats everything

Notes on the Mueller Report: A Reading Diary - Lawfare

Detailed with references. Arguing a case from the contents of the report.

Towards an Information Operations Kill Chain - Schneier on Security

7 steps to counteract destabilisation from outside organisations

MICHAEL WOLF PHOTOGRAPHY

Alas, dead at 64. Nice body of work. Most of us will be living in cities very soon

The Lo-Fi Voices That Speak for America

"...They include a sheep farmer who reports on the agricultural industry for a vast rural audience; an icon of inner-city Baltimore who inspired a character on “The Wire”; and one of the only on-air personalities who broadcasts in the Navajo language. Some are conservative, some are liberal, some avoid politics altogether. In these photos, by Politico’s M. Scott Mahaskey, we glimpse what is being lost when AM radio stations disappear: not just call signs, but places where community is built." Specifically long distance AM radio stations allow for continental audience with (relatively) low transmission power.

The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

"Spatial boundaries have long served a functional role at multiple levels of analysis, helping people make sense of their environment by modularizing it, clarifying who is watching and who is not, who has information and who does not, who belongs and who does not, who controls what and who does not, to whom one answers and to whom one does not."

Fort Wayne Makes Its Own Luck - The Atlantic

"If a city is unlucky—or shortsighted, which often turns out to be the same thing—it bulldozes its architectural heritage of the past decades or centuries, for whatever is the fad of the moment." Sounds like a city I know well... you get high rents in the centre and the same old same old.

AirPods Are a Survival Tool for Open-Plan Offices - The Atlantic

"In a 2018 study, Bernstein and his team found that open offices decrease face-to-face interaction among co-workers by as much as 70 percent, in stark contrast to the designers’ stated goal of collaborative teamwork." There has to be an optimum number of people in an office. And grouping by function probably helps

Council elections: 'Not enough' women and minorities stand - BBC News

Some nice statistics and a story from a student councillor

Manchet Bread Recipe - OAKDEN

Trying to locate a supplier of barm.

UK government under new pressure from MPs to move on NI abortion law reform – Slugger O'Toole

"To be in the UK, they must accept fundamental UK rights." Sounds ok. If you want union, you get the whole union.

This book ranks the top 100 solutions to climate change. The results are surprising. - Vox

"You can’t achieve drawdown unless you sequester [carbon], but right now the only way we know how to do it in a reliable way is photosynthesis. I mean, there are science experiments going on, but it’s not commercial and it’s not practical."

The biggest climate change story in the world this week is quietly playing out in Rwanda - Vox

"In recent months, after extensive discussions with President Barack Obama, Indian leader Narendra Modi has come around to the view that the world needs an "ambitious phasedown schedule" of HFCs under the Montreal Protocol. But he also points out that replacing HFCs with cleaner alternatives could cost India between $15 billion and $38 billion through 2050. So he’s asked for aid from richer countries to help make that transition. Other developing nations, such as Brazil and Pakistan, have made similar arguments." Spread over 30 years and the entire industrial world that looks like a good deal.

Silvopasture | Drawdown

"Silvopasture is an ancient practice that integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock. Research suggests silvopasture far outpaces any grassland technique for counteracting the methane emissions of livestock and sequestering carbon under-hoof. Pastures strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless, storing it in both biomass and soil." I've seen this in action from a train in the Highlands, unless the cows had just escaped.

Carbon reduction: Summary of Solutions by Overall Rank | Drawdown

Nice clear table. Would like a column that indicates 'degree of relative autonomy' or something, so you can decide which ones to do personally, per neighbourhood, per town, per country &c

School funding per pupil falls faster in England than in Wales - Institute For Fiscal Studies - IFS

>> "In 2017–18 total school spending per pupil in England was about £5,870 which was just 2% – or £100 per pupil – above the £5,760 seen in Wales (both in 2018–19 prices). This is a modest difference, which will include funding for higher teacher salaries in London." <<

Our schools are beyond breaking point – where is the outrage? | John Harris | Opinion | The Guardian

>> “I can’t even imagine four or five years’ time. I’m not looking ahead at all. And I don’t believe it can carry on like this. Something has to be done, otherwise the education system’s going to implode.” << Last time (late 70s/early 80s) it just sort of ground to a halt and the quality slowly dropped.

Theresa May to face grassroots no-confidence challenge - BBC News

>> "She told the BBC: "I'm afraid the prime minister is conducting negotiations in such a way that the party does not approve."" << I thought the Prime Minister was negotiating for the United Kingdom myself. Governments do have to work for the country as a whole don't they?

The Cult of Death – Slugger O'Toole

"On Saturday a republican splinter group with no electoral mandate marched down O’Connell Street, to the outrage of the entire country. Not 24 hours later that same entire country commemorated and celebrated the armed rebellion of a republican splinter group with no electoral mandate." Interesting piece of writing and a challenge.

Ukraine election: Comedian Zelensky wins presidency by landslide - BBC News

"Throughout the election campaign, he avoided serious interviews and discussions about policy - preferring instead to post light-hearted videos to social media." Perhaps there are no policies? I gather that there is a millionaire in the background so possibly same old same old.

Jonathan Freedland: The Wilson plot was our Watergate | Opinion | The Guardian

"As Peter Wright confirmed in his book Spycatcher, Wilson was the victim of a protracted, illegal campaign of destabilisation by a rogue element in the security services. Prompted by CIA fears that Wilson was a Soviet agent - put in place after the KGB had, the spooks believed, poisoned Hugh Gaitskell, the previous Labour leader - these MI5 men burgled the homes of the prime minister's aides, bugged their phones and spread black, anti-Wilson propaganda throughout the media. They tried to pin all kinds of nonsense on him: that his devoted political secretary, Marcia Williams, posed a threat to national security; that he was a closet IRA sympathiser." I can remember the resignation on telly.

Paul Foot reviews ‘Molehunt’ by Nigel West · LRB 23 April 1987

"Caution was thrown aside in March 1974 after a minority Labour administration was elected in the middle of an unstoppable miners’ strike. In the interregnum between the two elections of that year, and in the months following Labour’s second victory in October, the Wright faction used all their information and their skills, not just to disorientate the Labour Government, but also to ensure that a new, ‘more resolute’ leadership was established over the Conservative Party. At its mildest, this campaign took the form of leaks to the media, ‘catching out’ ministers in lies which were prepared for them, feeding foreign journalists with fantastic notions of the ‘extremism’ of Labour ministers, leaking secret government plans so that they could be ‘neutralised’ before they were announced. It involved burglaries and break-ins at the homes of senior ministers (even the Prime Minister) and their staffs, and even, as has recently been revealed, inspiring ‘disorientating events’, the most important of which was the Protestant Workers’ strike in Northern Ireland in April 1974." This is cited a a source in a Wikipedia article that talks about the failure of the Sunningdale Agreement. Would like to check how credible it seems now.

Decoding the Baltic Dry Index

>> "“Compared to other indices, the BDI is difficult to be influenced by governments, associations or speculators. It is driven by clear forces of demand for commodities and the supply of ships,” says Capt. Amrit Singh, a shipping analyst at Refinitiv." << and >> "“The BDI is now biased towards the larger sectors in order to create more volatility for traders, so it’s not the best way to look at how the market is doing,” says Peter Sand, Chief Shipping Analyst at BIMCO Shipping Association." << Would that be the re-weighting that removed the 10% handy-size traffic component?

WTO Data

This looks comprehensive and detailed and difficult. Will have to actually read the manual.

Home - Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc.

Nice range of maps. Fairly large scans available

Baltic Dry - It’s That Time of Year. Again. [2019 Version] | Smartkarma

Advert from Daily Post, 1744, for a very hipster sounding coffee shop. "This is to give notice that the House, late the Virginia and Maryland Coffee-house in Threadneedle Street, near the Royal Exchange, is now open'd by the Name of the Virginia & Baltick Coffee-house, where all Foreign and Domestick News are taken in ; and all Letters or Parcels, directed to Merchants or Captains in the Virginia or Baltick Trade will be carefully deliver'd according as directed, and the best Attendance given, by Reynallds and Winboult. Note, Punch made in any Quantity, in the greatest Perfection, without Adulteration, which is seldom found in any of the most noted Houses ; also Brandy, Rum, and Arrack (neat as imported) are sold in the Vaults under the Coffee-House, at the lowest Prices; where all Customers, we have had the Favour of serving at our late Warehouse in Leadenhall Street, we hope will continue to send their Orders as above. We have receiv'd Advice, that Several Bags of Letters and Parcels are coming which are directed to be left at the above Coffee-House"

What should Kitack Lim tell the Extinction Rebellion kids? :: Lloyd's List

"For a long time, the maritime industry seemed to shrug off its environmental responsibilities, endlessly reciting the mantra that while 90% of everything goes by sea, shipping accounted for just 2.3% of the carbon pumped into the atmosphere each year. That’s way less per tonne-mile than our counterparts in trucking, rail or aviation, so we can just sit back and polish our green and clean halos, right?" Send it by sea? They are reducing bunker use (basically sooty crude).

Baltic Exchange Dry Index | 2019 | Data | Chart | Calendar | Forecast | News

The infamous BDI

Shanghai Shipping Exchange

Index of cost of a TEU from China to various territories. This kind of information existed in the heads of about three people in Liverpool 45 years ago. Telexes and phone lines.

Birmingham Clean Air Zone - map, charges and is your car compliant? - Birmingham Live

"One element that has not been funded is a plan for controlled parking zones just outside the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) area which would have allowed for a free parking permit scheme for residents to park outside their homes and reduce the knock-on impact from other drivers seeking to park and walk to avoid the charges. Coun Zaffar said he was determined to find other means to ensure that scheme went ahead anyway." So we are going to have idiots jamming the local streets (on the route to a major hospital). Genius move.

Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies | Mosaic

>> “Now, that trend [the almost doubling of the suicide rate since 1998] is wholly out of line with what happens everywhere else,” says Tomlinson. He describes a presentation he gave at Stormont, the parliament buildings of Northern Ireland, that includes graphs of the trends in suicide in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. “Of all the presentations I’ve done in my career,” he says, “there’s an audible gasp from the audience every time I’ve done that [one].” << Factor of two increase since GFA

Lyra McKee embodied the patient promises of the Belfast Agreement – Slugger O'Toole

"She was, as the papers say, a rising star of investigative journalism, but not, as so many are in these days of too easy digital contagion, driven by anger or personal disappointment. She had a genuine itch to understand what others (often much better rewarded than she ever was) failed to adequately explain." Back to the future feel about this

A Conversation With Outgoing French Ambassador Gérard Araud - The Atlantic

"Araud: The guy in front of us was negotiating in good faith, Brian Hook. But the problem is that this bureaucracy is so dysfunctional. Obviously there is only one person who can commit the United States, and it’s Donald Trump." Except he changes his mind next week

San Francisco, the City That Apps Built, or Destroyed - The Atlantic

"The city now sits atop a geyser of cash created from what the scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus”—the natural resource created from your behavior, which is to say your mind." Could we nationalise the behavioral surplus or would that be too creepy?

15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook

>> "Heated emails flew back and forth between Switzerland and Menlo Park. Solutions were proposed and shot down. It was a classic Facebook dilemma. The company’s algorithms embraid choices so complex and interdependent that it’s hard for any human to get a handle on it all. "If you explain some of what is happening, people get confused. They also tend to obsess over tiny factors in huge equations. So in this case, as in so many others over the years, Facebook chose opacity. Nothing would be revealed in Davos, and nothing would be revealed afterward. The media execs would walk away unsatisfied."" << Machine learning is brittle and the internal weightings don't provide a causal model - they are just entries in some huge matrix.

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but this seems like an interesting part on page 18 of the PDF that I haven't seen other people point out, where Mueller says his conclusions could conceivably be different if not for witnesses lying, invoking privilege, et

Good heavens...

Look, Tories, no one is falling for your “no magic money tree” argument so give it up

"The other is the housing market, where people who spent a few thousand pounds on a house back in the early 1980s have found that they are now magically in possession of a pile worth half a million. At no point did they do anything to earn this money – yet there it is, conjured up from nowhere." This is the issue. I dread the correction of prices.

Teachers 'paying for resources out of own money' - BBC News

>> "But children's minister Nadhim Zahawi said there was "more money going into our schools than ever before"." << and >> "There have been repeated concerns from schools about funding shortages, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies showing in July last year that per pupil spending had fallen in real terms by 8% since 2010." << So where is the money going? More pupils? Higher employment costs (training levy, NI and employer's pension contributions)?

Don’t buy a 5G smartphone—at least, not for a while | Ars Technica

"With so many issues to overcome, mmWave sounds like a terrible chunk of spectrum to build a mobile network in until you consider two key points: the higher-frequency means mmWave has plenty of bandwidth and low latency if you can get it, and most of all, the spectrum is available. MmWave isn't being used for much right now because it is such a pain in the butt to work with. So if you can figure out all the implementation problems, you suddenly have a vast amount of airspace to work with." I sometimes dream of internet connections by wifi from every lamp post - with a choice of service providers &c and monthly payments...

In conversation with Sir Ivan Rogers | The Institute for Government

This one is about the future

Ivan Rogers’ Brexit bombshell, digested | Martha Gill | Opinion | The Guardian

A summary of Roger's lecture

Full speech: Sir Ivan Rogers on Brexit - News - University of Liverpool

You can pay £5.95 for a nicely printed mini-book of this speech. Or you can just read it here...

Riley Jake Jackson death: Are halogen light bulbs safe? - BBC News

I'm all for LED based bulbs (assuming that the switched psower supplies included in the plastic globe are safe). However, switching over to LED based bulbs cost me around £50.

Our data | CPR Survey

This is publically funded research - why the limitations and need for licence agreements?

Four out of 10 teachers plan to quit, survey suggests - BBC News

"Where do you see yourself in five years' time? No longer working in education, 40% of UK teachers surveyed by a teachers' union replied." Oops. Perhaps teaching could be a developmental phase?

From Ruth Glass to Spike Lee: 50 years of gentrification | Cities | The Guardian

>> "Collecting his 2014 gold medal awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects last month, the historian and theorist Joseph Rykwert argued that "the price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life."" << This is why I keep banging on about rents being too high...

Building and Dwelling by Richard Sennett review – how to build people-friendly cities | Books | The Guardian

>> "According to the Dutch architect Reinier de Graaf, the people – planners, utopian environmentalists, sociologists, quango soldiers, free-range urbanists, demographic strategists, “place makers”, soi-disant visionaries, soothsayers and, of course, architects – who attend portentously entitled, quasi-academic conferences on, say, The Final Favela, The Shapes of Sprawl to Come or Agglomerative Control Theory are “united through the frank admission that we do not have a clue”." << I often suspected this. Big sentence for start of an article though

La charpente | Notre Dame de Paris

Makes you wonder about fire safety in historic buildings.

The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is dead. Here’s why. - Vox

"Americans understand that there are certain things you can push the Israelis to do and not do because of their own domestic political pressures. But when it comes to the Palestinians, the tendency is to treat them as if they don’t have politics, as if they don’t have a political opposition that they have to answer to, or a public opinion. It’s not only that they don’t understand the nuances of Palestinian politics. It’s that they treat them as though they don’t have politics at all." Regional brokers?

The Ecological Importance of Dams

"When Jensen and I walk out onto the deck above the turbine, a tempest of whitewater flows into the river below us. With the laconic practicality of a government engineer, he explains what the course of his year looks like. Spring, which comes with a rush of snowmelt that needs regulating, is when things are busiest, because he’s trying to balance runoff with downstream water needs and with filling the reservoir for the upcoming summer and fall. He says the reservoir is usually at its highest around July 4, and he thinks they’ll fill it up this year. After an unusually dry winter, the spring has been wet and cold, and it’s been raining more than normal. He says they’re pushing 1,550 cubic feet per second out of the turbine right now. If the reservoir gets too high and they need to dump water, they can let out as much as 6,500 cubic feet per second through bypasses that flow around the turbine. If they release more than that, they start to flood out the fields around Green River. “We have to control it slowly,” he says." Lumped systems model with time constants? Forcing function being the snowfall up the river?

Foxconn is confusing the hell out of Wisconsin - The Verge

"The ground floor consisted of glass-walled conference rooms. They were never occupied when I passed by over the next two days. Their whiteboards remained immaculate; a lone green Ethernet cable coiled on a table never moved." Sounds bad for the local people. Mind you, I once used a classroom once a week for a short lesson where an ethernet cable and, for some reason, a usb mouse remained on the windowsill for the whole academic year. I think someone just left them.

Fintan O'Toole: Are the English ready for self-government?

"It has merely marked out in bright red ink the fault-lines that have long been less vividly present – the drifting apart of England and Scotland; the economic and cultural divide between what Anthony Barnett calls “England-without-London” and the rest of the UK (Wales being the obvious anomaly); the social and geographic rifts between the winners and losers of the long Thatcherite revolution. Brexit, in a worst-of-all-worlds moment, brings all of these divisions to a head while doing absolutely nothing to address them. It reveals a polity that cannot create consensus because it lacks a foundation in social consent."

Birmingham clean air charge: What you need to know - BBC News

"The proposals are to bring in fees for older vehicles, which release high levels of toxic emissions, that are driven within the city's ring road from January 2020. Birmingham City Council has faced pressure from the government to reduce pollution by setting up a clean air zone." Nice for shoppers and those living in the centre. Those just outside ring road could experience worse air quality of course.

Brexit is just one front in Europe’s battle for its soul | Timothy Garton Ash | Opinion | The Guardian

"In a kind of sadomasochistic self-fulfilling prophecy, the Brexiteers have reduced Britain to the very condition of vassalage from which they claim to be freeing it." Taking back control?

Boeing 737 MAX crash and the rejection of ridiculous data – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

"But to have avoided killing everyone on board, the software would not have needed a “how fast is this changing?” capability. It would simply have needed a few extra characters in an IF statement. Had the systems engineers and programmers checked Wikipedia, for example, (or maybe even their own web site) they would have learned that “The critical or stalling angle of attack is typically around 15° – 20° for many airfoils.” Beyond 25 degrees, therefore, it is either sensor error or the plane is stalling/spinning and something more than a slow trim is going to be required." Software, sensors and systems with very short time constants. The saga continues.

8 reasons to turn down the transmit power of your Wi-Fi - Metis.fi

"By default almost all WiFi access points transmit at full power (100mW on 2.4GHz). This gives maximum coverage and users see a good signal (“full bars”). However, there are good reasons to turn down the transmit power to a fraction of the maximum." A data point!

Standards of Fundamental Astronomy - Home

C routines for most astronomical calculations plus or minus 3000 years from present and with OK accuracy. Why not use these instead of messing about with Meeus and colleagues? At least a common base line

The Incredible Shrinking Fox News - POLITICO Magazine

>> "Fox’s minimal influence is easily explained. While it’s the most popular cable news network, it still draws only a niche audience. Socolow provides the numbers: On an average night, about 2.4 million prime-time viewers tune in, which is about 0.7 percent of the total U.S. population. “With numbers like these,” Socolow writes, “it’s no surprise that Fox News often chases its viewers rather than leading them. In other words: It’s more likely that Fox News caters to the preexisting partisanship of its small but loyal audience than that Fox News actually changes anybody’s mind.” " << Puts the infamous Clarkson quote into some kind of perspective.

The mystery of Star Wars and Tunisia's rundown Brutalist hotel - BBC News

>> "Mr Torkar says Brutalist buildings tended to obey three basic rules - "expose the materials, expose the structure, and make it a unique, memorable design"." << I'd go for the Muirhead Tower myself

Nassim Taleb’s Case Against Nate Silver Is Bad Math

"In the 1930s, the Italian statistician and actuary Bruno de Finetti noticed something interesting about these kinds of bets: In order to avoid arbitrage, the prices must obey the same equations as the mathematical rules of probability, meaning such relationships as Price[A] + Price[NOT A] = 1, and so on."

The Efficient Universe COS 345, Spring 2006: Is this course for me?

Looks like my kind of thing. Dr Wigderson looks like a proper mathematician as well.

Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Rare Glimpse Into The Personal Struggles Developers Face

"Part of this reaction appears to be fueled by negative feedback that was received in response to the recent logo and website redesign. Lefebvre writes that it caused the team to feel doubtful and uncertain about their direction." Bikeshedding

I was a strong Brexiteer. Now we must swallow our pride and think again | openDemocracy

"Easy access to Europe was the most important reason why so many important foreign companies chose to invest in this country over the past three or four decades. Investment has come in the shape of both manufacturing and services. The Brexit debate about the customs union vs the single market has revealed how blurred and narrow the distinction between the two has become. They are both massive sources of inward investment and job creation." Dawning realisation that this is all real. Hope springs eternal.

“Birmingham isn’t a big city at peak times”: How poor public transport explains the UK’s productivity puzzle | CityMetric

"For a year now, the Open Data Institute Leeds has been tracking most of the buses and trams in the West Midlands, the UK city region centred on Birmingham. We do it by polling the live departure screens that you see at bus stops, even at stops where they aren’t installed." Excellent data set

DIY Tuscan Bread - Pane Toscano recipe | Visit Tuscany

"Apparently the reason for this is the bitter 12th century dispute between Pisa and Florence when the coastal Republic of Pisa placed a blockade on the trade of salt to inland areas. In response to this, Florence resolved to bake bread without using salt. According to another tradition, salt was just too expensive for the Florentines, so they continued making it saltless since bread was simply too important to do without. Essential to real tuscan bread is its baking method - tuscan bread must bake in a wood burning oven." Skip the wood burning oven!

Pass the salt, please! Why Tuscan bread has no salt

Try a whole grain version

Bread Survey - Action on Salt

UK target is 1g of salt per 100g of cooked bread. That corresponds to about 1 tsp (7g or so) in 500g of flour in my recipes. Using 1 tsp of SoLo (KCl/NaCl) gives me 0.5g NaCl per 100g roughly. A bit trickier to get a good rise...

Calcium Chloride | Baking Ingredients | BAKERpedia

"Calcium chloride can be used to replace salt in the production of reduced-sodium bread. Calcium salt can be replaced up to 32% of sodium for brown bread without adversely affecting palatability or product quality." Now to find small quantities....

From Disco to Techno, He’s Seen It on Sugar Hill’s Dance Floor - The New York Times

"Freeman, born outside of Kinston, N.C., said that he left for New York in 1957 on a Trailways bus with $40 and a box of chicken. The son of sharecroppers, he left behind a segregated rural community." Could anyone do that now? Could anyone go to London and get a job and make something?

Buy Yourself a F*^king Latte - The Big Picture

"For some perspective, 40 years ago the median house cost about $62,000 (its over $317,400 today); median income was under $20,000 (its $61,372 today). In 2060, you should expect $300,000 to be about $80-100k today." So house to pay ratio has worsened from 3.1 to 5.2ish in 40 years?

UK productivity continues lost decade - BBC News

>> "He added: "It is also probable that many companies took on labour rather than committing to costly investment, given the highly uncertain economic and political outlook. The low cost of labour relative to capital has certainly supported employment over investment."" << Perhaps it is just the high cost of money and the perceived flexibility of low wage labour?

Potassium Chloride as a Salt Substitute in Bread - viewcontent.cgi

"Unfortunately, salt plays a significant role in the baking process, so it cannot be completely removed. One option for reducing the sodium chloride content in bread products is by partial replacement with potassiumchloride. One study found that replacing 50% or less of sodium chloride with potassium chloridehad no adverse effects on dough rheology, although it did have a slightly bitter or metallic aftertaste. This taste became more noticeable as the percentage of potassium chloride was increased in the product.25,26 Another study performed by Wyatt and Ronan did not find any significant differences between the control product (100% sodium chloride) and the 50:50 ratio breads. The bread found to have the highest acceptability among panelists was one with 75:25% sodium chloride/potassium chloride ratio." The UK 'standard' of 1g of salt per 100g of final loaf (500g flour = 800g loaf) results in 1 tsp per 500g of flour. According to this pdf, using So-Lo (50% KCl/NaCl) looks ok from the dough development angle.

Holmdel Horn Antenna – Holmdel, New Jersey - Atlas Obscura

"With its high sensitivity and horn shape, which allowed for precise pointing, the antenna was ideal for conducting radio astronomy observations. This fact was immediately recognized by Penzias and Wilson, who began using the telescope to study emissions from the Milky Way. During their tenure at the facility in the early 1960s, the astronomers became bogged down by a mysterious background noise that was present wherever the instrument was pointed."

Enginnering a safer world

>> "Old Assumption - Most accidents are caused by operator error. Rewarding safe behaviour and punishing unsafe behaviours will eliminate or reduce accidents significantly. New Assumption - Operator error is a product of the environment in which it occurs. To reduce operator "error" we must change the environment in which the operator works." << Via HN. OpenAccess pdf available.

Jeremy Corbyn target practice film 'totally unacceptable' - BBC News

"It is believed the clip first circulated on Snapchat before being posted on Twitter." Treat all social media the same as standing in New Street with a megaphone. The moment stuff gets into the digital domain, it gets shared...

25 Years Later: Interview with Linus Torvalds | Linux Journal

"I could imagine that we'd have some "framework" language for generating drivers or similar, and we internally actually have our own simplified "language" just for doing configuration, and we do use a few other languages for the build process, so it's not like C is the only language we use. But it's the bulk of it by far, and it's what the "kernel proper" is written in." I wonder what that simplified language for doing configuration is?

Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires | Aeon Ideas

"But the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation."

Linux Journal at 25 | Linux Journal

>>"Our first publisher was Bob Young, who quickly left to leverage his on-the-job learnings into a Linux startup he called Red Hat. When I first met Bob, years later, I told him Phil said, "I taught Bob how to spell Linux." To my surprise, Bob replied, "That's true!""<<

Teardown Of A 50 Year Old Modem | Hackaday

"It’s a wooden modem, and I don’t think anyone I know respects exactly how cool that is. It’s on objet d’art, and it’s useful to store various sundries. I have considered repairing or refurbishing this modem, however there are a few things that make this impractical." The first modem I used was in 1976. 19 inch rack with accoustic coupler on one half and a dial for phoning the number on the other half. The modem was connected to a teletypewriter. We used to dial into a mainframe about 20 miles away and run BASIC. Yes, I have seen line noise (thunder storm) when running my little BASIC program.

Politicians must compromise on Brexit at some point, like it or not - Institute For Fiscal Studies - IFS

"Last week the government published its latest figures on inequality and poverty. A small rise in the poverty numbers got some publicity. Much more striking was the fact that these figures showed zero income growth for households in 2017-18. Zero. That is not normal. In the past 30 years, that or worse has happened only during the 1990 recession and in two years that followed the 2009 crisis."

Violent crime: Police cannot 'arrest' the issue away - May - BBC News

>>"If teachers were to face sanctions over spotting those at risk, she says it would create a "culture of defensive reporting", in which the police and social services would be swamped by referrals." << Yup, I suspect that every FE college in the country would have a 'violent crime referral officer' post appointed as part of the safeguarding team, and that boxes would be ticked pronto and stored in a relational database ready for instant reporting.

Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? | Boston Review

"Asset managers have consolidated to the point that even where competition appears to exist among firms, in fact, the same small set of shareholders runs all the firms in an industry, in such a way that the shareholders benefit from weak competition. Several papers document this for airlines and banking and also show that common shareholders tend to reward the executives at the firm they own on the basis of industry-wide profits, not firm-specific ones." Interesting...

Minimum wage: How high could the lowest salaries go? - BBC News

"More than six out of 10 people on the minimum wage work part-time. A similar number are women, and almost nine out of 10 work in the private sector." 9 out of 10 in private sector because public sector organisations have had to outsource functions like canteen, cleaning, and because most care homes and nurseries now 'private' in the sense of belonging to companies but still being paid at a standardised rate.

Brexit: Home truths - no deal and the Irish border

>> "The precedent value or risk of anything like this is not to be underestimated," says the official. "The EU is an institution of rules, so precedents are something that have to be weighed up carefully." << Here we go...

Brexit at a Belfast School Gate – Slugger O'Toole

"One fifth of all UK food-bank parcels were given in Northern Ireland last year. 20% of food parcels for 3% of the population. Is it a nationalist food bank or a unionist food bank? Asks nobody, ever." And yet... benefit levels much higher in NI. What is going on?

Led by donkeys

"We're taking the historic Brexit pronouncements of our political leaders, turning them into tweets and slapping them up on massive billboards across the nation. See thread for scores of pictures of the project so far (we're 100% crowdfunded - see url link)" Seen these - excellent

“Phony pollster posters prompt palaver” #ImagineBelfast – Slugger O'Toole

"Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics admitted on Friday that it was behind the poster campaign which provoked widespread reaction – mostly positive, some negative – and disappointingly little accurate speculation about its source. Led By Donkeys took some of the blame, Dylan Quinn’s We Deserve Better campaign, along with comedian Shane Todd and many pointing fingers at the Alliance Party." Excellent!

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » No Deal remains imminent and likely

"If you ever want to predict what May will do just imagine what she thinks will get her the most favourable headline in The Telegraph the next day. No deal is less of a short term hit for the tories than revoke so that's what she'd do." I have a nasty feeling that there is a grain of truth in this comment.

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation | HeraldScotland

"I grew up believing, with my dad and his friends, that doctors, teachers and Labour politicians were the noblest works of God - doctors worked to reduce pain, teachers to spread knowledge, Labour politicians to reduce poverty and increase social equality. I was born in 1934 Riddrie which, with Knightswood, was the best scheme built by Glasgow Corporation (now called Glasgow City Council) being the earliest built under the Wheatley Act. This, the only Socialist Act of the first brief Labour Government after world war I, let local councils start improving the British workers' rotten rented homes by building public housing schemes. These were added to a Glasgow whose pure water supply, plumbing, roads, street lighting, public transport and schools had been municipalised by the former Liberal Party that had also introduced old age pensions, labour exchanges and doles, paying for them by taxing more highly the owners of richer properties. In this way Glasgow resembled London, Birmingham and many big industrial towns."

Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices • The Register

>> "Rob Pritchard of the Cyber Security Expert told The Register: "I think this presents the UK government with an interesting dilemma - the HCSEC was set up essentially because of concerns about threats from the Chinese state to UK CNI (critical national infrastructure). Finding general issues is a good thing, but other vendors are not subject to this level of scrutiny. We have no real (at least not this in depth) assurance that products from rival vendors are more secure."" << Perhaps we should have more code auditing for the basic plumbing from all suppliers?

How do you solve a quadratic equation? G.E. Forsythe (1966) - CS-TR-66-40.pdf

"The moral of the story is that users of computers for mathematical problems require some knowledge of numerical mathematics. It is not sufficient to learn some programming language, and then simply translate formulas from a textbook of pure mathematics into the language of a computer.The formulas and algorithms to be found in most mathematics texts were devised for the exact arithmetic of the real number system. Few authors have given any attention to the robustness of the formulas--that is, to the behavior of the formulas when used with the approximate arithmetic of computers. Until attention is given to robustness in mathematics textbooks, the would-be scientific computer must consult people and writings specifically concerned with machine computation."

Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few – The Economist

Nice material for a lesson

Sum-of-Three-Cubes Problem Solved for ‘Stubborn’ Number 33 | Quanta Magazine

>> "Diophantine equations are polynomial equations whose unknown variables must take integer values. Their basic properties can stymie number theorists. For instance, no mathematical method exists that can reliably tell whether any given Diophantine equation has solutions. According to Booker, the sum-of-three-cubes problem “is one of the simplest” of these thorny Diophantine equations. “It’s right at the frontier of what we can handle,” Browning added." <<

End-user programming

Three elements for an end-user programming system: embodiment, live system and inbuilt toolchain

A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge | WIRED

Steven Levy piece reprinted from 1984 "[...] They encourage businesses to keep track of things that were previously unquantified or altogether overlooked. Executives no longer have to be satisfied with quarterly updates, for it is now an easy matter to compile monthly, weekly, even daily updates. People use spreadsheets to make daily inventory checks, to find out who has paid their bills, to chart the performance of truck drivers over a period of weeks or months. How-to manuals for spreadsheets often use as an example a performance chart for salespeople — the model breaks down how many items they sell week by week and instantly calculates commissions and even bonuses due. If word comes down that a belt-tightening is in order, a few keystrokes will create a sheet that clearly identifies the worst performers." Already the demand for more data! More often!

conflict - Engineer refusing to file/disclose patents - The Workplace Stack Exchange

"The company has recently decided to dial back the benefits for this program, to a simple $100 "finder's fee" for a patent submission, and an additional $900 for a "good" patent. Since employees write these in their spare time, it doesn't surprise me that the number of applications has dropped from 2 per week to maybe 3 per quarter." Well, there is an innovative and forward looking outfit. Via HN.

Stages, Structures, and the Work of Being Yourself | L.M. Sacasas

"The main idea that emerged for me was this: in our contemporary, digitally augmented society the mounting pressure we experience is not the pressure of conforming to the rigid demands of piety and moral probity, rather it is the pressure of unremitting impression management, identity work, and self-consciousness. Moreover, there is no carnival. Or, better, what presents itself as a carnival experience is, in reality, just another version of the disciplinary experience." No carnivals. On the old Web you did sometimes come across odd little sites that were exhibits of some kind, something to interact with where you had to work out the 'rules of engagement'.

Always On — Real Life

"To borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s terminology, broadcasting on social media amounts to a substantial expansion of what he called our “front stage,” where we are consciously and continually involved in the work of impression management. In his metaphor of social life as theater, Goffman presumed the existence of a backstage, where we can let down our guard, but the open-ended communication in time and space on social media expands our front stage, divorcing it from any particular place that we could choose to leave." Goffman's ideas dusted off and applied to the glowing rectangles

For Sale: This Massive, Obsessive and (Probably) Obsolete VHS Boxing Archive - The New York Times

"It was the life’s work of Bela Szilagyi, a classical pianist and passionate fight enthusiast, who started the collection in 1979 when he taped a featherweight title match on a Quasar videocassette recorder. Mr. Szilagyi died in 2012 at 78 years old and his wife, a soft-spoken piano teacher, became the collection’s archivist." Never understood collectors. I have too many books, but I do cull them now and again...

enumerate - Exercise sheet with two enumerated columns - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange

TeX worksheet layouts

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » As we approach the slightly later than planned day of reckoning

"First of all, we should note that it wasn’t inevitable that there would be a decision point now. No attempt was made by anyone to forge a consensus that would have allowed a mainstream way forward to be identified. The Prime Minister made no attempt to reach out to other parties, she made no attempt to include strands from the defeated campaign in the thinking of what Brexit would look like, she made no serious attempt to engage the EU in this process." This. The vote, a narrow majority, then silence and jockeying for power in a party that has basically no vision at all. The home owning shareholding policy is dead: noone under 30 can afford to buy a house without taxpayer help and the shares got bought by operators.

FortranForTheIBM704.pdf

A scan of the complete 54 page manual

fortran automatic coding system for the ibm 704

Strange blog title but nice picture of the Fortran manual

The first iPhone prototype: an exclusive look at Apple’s red M68 - The Verge

"To achieve that level of secrecy, Apple created special prototype development boards that contained nearly all of the iPhone’s parts, spread out across a large circuit board. The Verge has obtained exclusive access to the original iPhone M68 prototype board from 2006 / 2007, thanks to Red M Sixty, a source that asked to remain anonymous. It’s the first time this board has been pictured publicly, and it provides a rare historical look at an important part of computing history, showing how Apple developed the original iPhone." Perhaps they just needed easy access to the parts for testing and tweaking?

Orbit of the Moon - Wikipedia

"The rotational axis of the Moon is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, so the lunar equator is not in the plane of its orbit, but is inclined to it by a constant value of 6.688° (this is the obliquity). As was discovered by Jacques Cassini in 1722, the rotational axis of the Moon precesses with the same rate as its orbital plane, but is 180° out of phase (see Cassini's Laws). Therefore, the angle between the ecliptic and the lunar equator is always 1.543°, even though the rotational axis of the Moon is not fixed with respect to the stars." Well, wow

Paris Review - W. S. Merwin, The Art of Poetry No. 38

"The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about. It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. I find it as I go. In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You’re always beginning again."

Linux Magazine | November 1999 | FEATURES | The Joy of Unix

>> "LM: So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says? BJ: No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow. 9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore. The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens. So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line. It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore -- unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24 kilobytes." << Just in case link gets lost

Convert between Unix and Windows text files

:1,$s/^M//g Works, you have to enter the ^M new line character with Ctrl-V and Enter

Busybox vi tutorial - Krzysztof Adamski

Looks like a useful sub-set of Vim to me

Can I undo multiple times in nvi and/or the original vi? - Vi and Vim Stack Exchange

"The closest thing the original vi has to multiple undo (aside from U which can revert multiple changes within a single line) is the numbered registers, which hold the nine most recent changes or deletions."

What the Hell is Going On? — David Perell

"Television equalized culture. The rich and poor consumed the same entertainment at the same time. In the 1950s, 70 percent of American television sets sometimes tuned into I Love Lucy. Millions of Americans were in sync. They watched the same shows at the same time." Coronation Street theme music heard from each window in turn while walking down the street early evening in late 1970s. All gone now. Good thing?

Free Mag 7 Star Charts - Observing Skills - Articles - Articles - Cloudy Nights

"This project is my attempt to produce a free, downloadable set of high-quality star charts -- the Mag-7 Star Atlas -- capable of being printed at reasonable resolutions on the average home printer. The Mag-7 Star Atlas plots stars down to Magnitude 7.25, with double / multiple stars indicated by a thin horizontal bar. Plotted DSO's (Deep Sky Objects) include all objects on the Messier list, the RASC's finest NGC list, and the Herschell 400 list --- more than 550 DSO's in total." Very nice and handsome

Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds - Issue 70: Variables - Nautilus

>> "In 2013, James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist and computational scientist, launched a study to see if science forged a bridge across the political divide. Did conservatives and liberals at least agree on biology and physics and economics? Short answer: No. “We found more polarization than we expected,” Evans told me recently. People were even more polarized over science than sports teams. At the outset, Evans said, “I was hoping to find that science was like a Switzerland. When we have problems, we can appeal to science as a neutral arbiter to produce a solution, or pathway to a solution. That wasn’t the case at all.”" <<

The Man Who Invented Pi | History Today

"Though Jones ended his life as part of the mathematical establishment, his origins were modest. He was born on a small farm on Anglesey in about 1675. His only formal education was at the local charity school where he showed mathematical aptitude and it was arranged for him to work in a merchant's counting house in London. Later he sailed to the West Indies and became interested in navigation; he then went on to be a mathematics master on a man-of-war." Navigation was the new technology of 17th century.

A (Partial) Defense of Debian | The Changelog

"People that have been sysadmins for a long period of time will instantly recognize the value of this kind of stability. Change is expensive and difficult, and often causes outages and incidents as bugs are discovered when software is adapted to a new environment. Being able to keep up-to-date with security patches while also expecting little or no breaking changes is a huge win. Maintaining backwards compatibility for old software is also important." Strange that people have to actually spell things like this out.

Mozilla allow encrypted file transfers up to 1Gb

Looks interesting, will need to try it out

The Mad Genius Mystery | Psychology Today

"Alexander Grothendieck altered mathematics with a velocity that is hard to articulate, so abstruse is his work. He used commutative algebra to solve complex geometrical problems and laid the groundwork for solutions to the Weil conjectures and to Fermat's last theorem. He innovated in pure mathematics, but his work has applications in cryptography and coding theory. Using tools from algebraic geometry, category theory, and topology, he created an entirely new paradigm." Do not go gentle?

How random can you be? | Lineae ex punctis

Nice. Via HN

APL – A Glimpse of Heaven (2006) | Hacker News

"J (and APL) really seemed to be an extension of what computing could've been. As a computer scientist and programmer, any language and OS work for me. I want something, I make it. I can write an app in C or C++ or Java or Lisp or Erlang or... because I have the background for all of that. For most other users, they have to find a program that accomplishes their need, or maybe they do it in Excel or Google Sheets. But in the past we had an idea of interactive languages that were the main interface for the user. The user could then produce the things they needed to meet their needs. They didn't need me, the CS guy, they could produce at least a functional prototype that met the need for the day. Then over the years they'd tweak it, add more, grow it into something comprehensive, or it reached a natural limit (due to complexity or meeting requirements)." We lost something after the early days of mandatory end user programming. Of course, we gained a tremendous increase in accessibility for routine tasks - immense, impossible to overestimate that - but I'm increasingly wondering if it was necessarily at the cost of the loss...

24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed

"I was also interested in what motivated high-rate digital audio advocacy. Responses indicate that few people understand basic signal theory or the sampling theorem, which is hardly surprising. Misunderstandings of the mathematics, technology, and physiology arose in most of the conversations, often asserted by professionals who otherwise possessed significant audio expertise. Some even argued that the sampling theorem doesn't really explain how digital audio actually works." This one is going to run and run

Turning disused buildings into artist studios - BBC News

"Rising rents are seeing artists priced out of major cities, but now landlords are turning to them to help protect commercial properties from squatters." Sensible move - but then we could just build council housing...

The 19th century moral panic over paper technology.

"The real price of books plummeted by more than 60 percent between 1460 and 1500: A book composed of 500 folio pages could sell for as much as 30 florins in 1422 in Austria—a huge amount of money at the time—but by the 1470s, a 500-folio book would fetch something in the neighborhood of 10 florins. There were even books on the market that sold for as little as 2 or 3 florins. In 1498, a Bible composed of over 2,000 folio pages sold for 6 florins. Costs continued to decline, albeit at a much slower rate, over the next three centuries. As a result, books were no longer reserved only for the clergy or for kings: Owning a printed Bible or book of hours became a coveted status symbol for the emerging class of moderately wealthy merchants and magnates." 19th century price fell off a cliff because of rotary press and machine production of wood pulp paper

xkcd: Plotting XKCD graphs - xkcd-intro.pdf

It turns out from the inevitable HN disucssion that there is a whole sub genre of rough plotting using algorithms out there

XKCD-style plots in Matplotlib | Pythonic Perambulations

Truly, we live in wonderous times. I must have a look at iPython

Computing planetary positions - a tutorial with worked examples

Spreadsheets under construction

Workplace OS History: IBM’s $2 Billion Microkernel of Failure

The Taligent thing

Elijah Cummings Saved the Michael Cohen Hearing - The Atlantic

"Let me tell you the picture that really, really pained me. You were leaving the prison, you were leaving the courthouse, and, I guess it’s your daughter, had braces or something on. Man that thing, man that thing hurt me. As a father of two daughters, it hurt me. And I can imagine how it must feel for you. But I’m just saying to you—I want to first of all thank you. I know that this has been hard. I know that you’ve faced a lot. I know that you are worried about your family. But this is a part of your destiny. And hopefully this portion of your destiny will lead to a better, a better, a better Michael Cohen, a better Donald Trump, a better United States of America, and a better world. And I mean that from the depths of my heart." I think we need Representative Elijah Cummings over here for a bit perhaps in a month or so...

‘They Created an Underground’: Inside the Chaotic Early Days of Trump’s Foreign Policy - POLITICO Magazine

>> “These [executive orders] were, like, written in crayon, like The Heritage Foundation intern just came up with them. They just weren’t very good. … It wasn’t just bad policy. It was bad policy poorly executed. I could have done it better.” << Hope things have calmed down a bit

Geoff Greer's site: Oldest Viable Laptop

"This is a ThinkPad X61s. Despite being made in 2007, it’s been fine for work. Yes, everything about it is worse than my MacBook. It’s slower and heavier. It lacks a trackpad. The screen is a mere 1024x768, causing some websites to show their mobile layout.1 Still, the experience has been significantly better than I predicted. The only major hardware drawback is the lack of video camera. The main sources of frustration have been software." Pop Xubuntu 2018 or Slackware --current on there and you're golden. I sometimes still use a T42.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Birds of a Feather

"And so we get to the Stab in the Back Myth– if the project, whatever it is, fails it cannot ever be because it was wrong or badly implemented or irrelevant to people’s real needs or because its inherent contradictions could not be reconciled or because it promised the undeliverable or because the leader passively enabled the wickedness of others. No, it can only be because others undermined the party, the manifesto, the government, the leader. Someone else is always at fault."

Chernobyl Today | Travel + Leisure

>> "Don't worry," he said, "Soviet radiation is the best in the world. It makes hair thicker and men more potent." <<

The Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Dangerous Radioactive Material Was a Selfie - Atlas Obscura

"Of the five corium creations, only Cherobyl’s has escaped its containment. With no water to cool the mass, the radioactive sludge moved through the unit over the course a week following the meltdown, taking on molten concrete and sand to go along with the uranium (fuel) and zirconium (cladding) molecules. This poisonous lava flowed downhill, eventually burning through the floor of the building. When nuclear inspectors finally accessed the area several months after the initial explosion, they found that 11 tons of it had settled into a three meter wide grey mass at the corner of a steam distribution corridor below. This, they dubbed the Elephant’s Foot. Over the years, the Elephant’s Foot cooled and cracked. Even today, though, it’s still estimated to be slightly above the ambient temperature as the radioactive material decomposes."

Patent exhaustion and open source [LWN.net]

"At FOSDEM 2019, US lawyer Van Lindberg argued that several US court decisions related to exhaustion, most of them recent but some less so, could come together to have surprising beneficial effects for free software." Summary of the idea of patent exhaustion in the US and its beneficial implications for open source/libre software

Ian Austin quits Labour blaming Jeremy Corbyn's leadership - BBC News

>> "Mr Watson, who recently said he "no longer recognises" the party he was elected deputy leader of in 2015, said he was "deeply saddened" by his close friend's decision to leave. "I didn't want him to go, not just because he is a friend but because Labour needs people of his experience, calibre and passion if we are to win," he added." << Will we ever get rid of the Tories? Is there an electable alternative to austerity and cuts?

The Surprising Tale of One of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings - The New York Times

"If you think about things, basically it’s Picasso, Matisse and Miró — that’s one side of the coin; and the other side is Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich."

Seven MPs leave Labour Party in protest at Jeremy Corbyn's leadership - BBC News

>> Labour had to "broaden out" and become more tolerant, he said, adding: "I love this party. But sometimes I no longer recognise it, that is why I do not regard those who have resigned today as traitors." << Tom Watson on damage control. With the Torys in zombie mode walking towards a cliff, why is the Labour party so determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Can anyone explain?

DeathHacks – The Message – Medium

"Bradbury’s personal house was demolished intentionally in some sort of final irony. My dad’s retirement home was not quite so high tech but it was designed to provide a certain level of creature comforts with minimal inputs from him. Set it and forget it. An X-10 system turned most of the lights on and off on a schedule. Some of this was pretty straightforward “Turn on the porch lights after dark.” and some was a bit more esoteric “Turn off the office lights at 10 pm so that I’ll know it’s time for bed.” He knew the ruleset. I did not. I’d be working on an article or reading a book and suddenly be plunged into total darkness. I’d poke at some wall switches that would sometimes turn the lights back on." Tom West was the geezer in Kidder's Soul of the New Machine. Personally, I'm more for manual controls as I get older.

Brutalist Web Design

"By default, a website that uses HTML as intended and has no custom styling will be readable on all screens and devices. Only the act of design can make the content less readable, though it can certainly make it more. For example, this website does not use default styles, yet, it is readable on any size screen."

How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters)

"Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking." I hate scrolling. I like accelerator keys (Alt-F and so on) and tab to next field

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Language That Made Computers Personal | Time

I'm looking for the source code for a BASIC interpreter that supports Dartmouth BASIC including the MAT statements. Line numbers. No Graphics. Portable code. Chipmunk BASIC is the closest so far but no source apparently available.

Engagements - Hansard - JC asking TM his 6 questions about Seabourne Freight a ferry company with no ships

Classic of the genre

The Observation Deck » Reflecting on The Soul of a New Machine

>> "the engineer who, frustrated with a nanosecond-scale timing problem in the ALU that he designed, moved to a commune in Vermont, claiming a desire to deal with “no unit of time shorter than a season"" << I know just what he means... ... seriously the sagas of computing need retelling to a new generation. I hope to see open/libre hardware for retail at sane prices soon

“Catastrophic” hack on email provider destroys almost two decades of data | Ars Technica

>> The damage, Romero reported, extended to VFEmail’s “entire infrastructure,” including mail hosts, virtual machine hosts, and a SQL server cluster. The extent of the damage, he suggested, required the hacker to have multiple passwords. “That’s the scary part.” << Perhaps time to set up incremental backups with a rotating pattern

BBC - Travel - Macau’s rare fusion cuisine

"There is an educational restaurant in Macau where they train the next generation of chefs,” Palmer said. “We have shared many recipes with them as we want Macanese food to continue. We don’t feel the need to keep our recipes a secret. Whoever asks us for them, we share it." Food as the thing that defines a culture after the language goes.

Superstar freshman Dems replace Pelosi as GOP targets - POLITICO

>> "It speaks to a fear-based strategy that they utilize in order to kind of create political support, instead of actually painting a positive vision," Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview. << There is a lot of fear-mongering around

CERN day 1

"The project is to rebuilding the very first web browser, aptly called WorldWideWeb (though shortly thereafter being renamed to Nexus, since…the whole world wide web thing being a bigger deal). This browser was written by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 and the project marks the 30th anniversary of the web." Internet Archaeology is apparently a thing

How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past | Quanta Magazine

"They came up with equations to describe how the brain might in theory encode time indirectly. In their scheme, as sensory neurons fire in response to an unfolding event, the brain maps the temporal component of that activity to some intermediate representation of the experience — a Laplace transform, in mathematical terms. That representation allows the brain to preserve information about the event as a function of some variable it can encode rather than as a function of time (which it can’t). The brain can then map the intermediate representation back into other activity for a temporal experience — an inverse Laplace transform — to reconstruct a compressed record of what happened when."

Backreaction: Maybe I’m crazy

"Those who, a decade ago, made confident predictions that the Large Hadron Collider should have seen new particles can now not be bothered to comment. They are busy making “predictions” for new particles that the next larger collider should see. We risk spending $20 billion dollars on more null-results that will not move us forward. Am I crazy for saying that’s a dumb idea? Maybe."

Freshly Squeezed: The Truth About Orange Juice in Boxes | Civil Eats

"In the 1980s Tropicana coined the phrase “not from concentrate” to distinguish its pasteurized orange juice from the cheaper reconstituted “from concentrate” juice that began appearing alongside it in the refrigerator section of supermarkets. The idea was to convince consumers that pasteurized orange juice is a fresher, overall better product and therefore worth the higher price. It worked. Over the next five years sales of Tropicana’s pasteurized juice doubled and profits almost tripled." TD;LR buy oranges and squeeze them. Seriously, in UK at present they are 8 for the £1 on the food market.

Dual Monitor - use as new workspace / Desktop / Xfce Forums

Try screen 0 on left monitor and screen 1 on right monitor in xrandr. Can we copy/paste between the screens however?

The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight — Blog of the Long Now

"While I may never totally understand the inner motivations of the monument’s designer, I did want to understand it on a technical level. How did Hansen create a celestial clock face frozen in time that we can interpret and understand as the date of the dam’s completion? The earth’s axial precession is a rather obscure piece of astronomy, and our understanding of it through history has been spotty at best. That this major engineering feat was celebrated through this monument to the axial precession still held great interest to me, and I wanted to understand it better." Procession of the equinoxes in stone. I love those 1920s and 1930s designs.

Stalin’s Scheherazade

"These pronouncements must have intrigued Stalin. He was pondering whether ideology alone could bring cohesion to the Soviet Union. He was starting to have doubts about the mobilizational potential of proletarian internationalism for inspiring the masses to defend the country. The emotionally resonant concept of “motherland,” which had gone out of fashion with the October revolution, now intrigued him." Re-reading Quiet Flows the Don

CNN - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos

Text links no animations or modal dialogs. Nice

The perils of using Internet Explorer as your default browser - Microsoft Tech Community - 331732

"Fast forward, as Internet Explorer standards mode supported more and more standards, we decided not to just update the mode we called standards mode because, when we did, we risked breaking applications written for an older interpretation of the standards. So, with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), we added IE8 standards, but also kept Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) standards. That meant, for sites in the Internet zone, it would default to IE8 standards, but, for sites in the local intranet zone, it would default to IE7 standards." Classic

Decagonal and Quasicrystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture | peterlu.org

Decagonal and Quasicrystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture

Traffic Ghost Hunting - Issue 16: Nothingness - Nautilus

"To answer this question mathematicians, physicists, and traffic engineers have devised many types of traffic models. For instance, microscopic models resolve the paths of the individual vehicles, and are good at describing vehicle–vehicle interactions. In contrast, macroscopic models describe traffic as a fluid, in which cars are interpreted as fluid particles. They are effective at capturing large-scale phenomena that involve many vehicles. Finally, cellular models divide the road into segments and prescribe rules by which cars move from cell to cell, providing a framework for capturing the uncertainty that is inherent in real traffic." I want a spreadsheet simulation of a atomic, fluid and cellular model. Railways lend themselves to cellular because stations.

Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile - Issue 69: Patterns - Nautilus

"Penrose made several versions of his aperiodic tile sets. One of his most famous is known as the “kite” and the “dart.” The kite looks like the kids’ toy of the same name, and the dart looks like a simplified outline of a stealth bomber. Both divide cleanly along axes of symmetry and each has two simple, symmetrical arcs on their surface. Penrose established one placing rule: for a “legal” tile placement these arcs must match up, creating contiguous curves. Without this rule, kites and darts can be placed together in repeating patterns. With this rule, repetition never comes. The kite and the dart tile forever, dancing around their five axes, creating starbursts and decagons, winding curves, butterflies and flowers. Shapes recur but new variations keep creeping in."

HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points

"Whether front or backend, many of us without a computer science background are here because of the ease of starting to write HTML and CSS. The magic of seeing our code do stuff on a real live webpage! We have already lost many of the entry points that we had. We don’t have the forums of parents teaching each other HTML and CSS, in order to make a family album. Those people now use Facebook, or perhaps run a blog on wordpress.com or SquareSpace with a standard template. We don’t have people customising their MySpace profile, or learning HTML via Neopets. We don’t have the people, usually women, entering the industry because they needed to learn HTML during that period when an organisation’s website was deemed part of the duties of the administrator." Same with endpoint hardware. The days of Ubuntu on an old laptop are receding. Proprietary tablets with UN-replacable batteries is the first platform for many.

Australia's Heard Island: A mysterious land of fire and ice - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Looks nice in the photos but I imagine it is brutal in the winter and pretty parky in the summer.

The Sum-Product Problem Shows How Addition and Multiplication Constrain Each Other | Quanta Magazine

"Yet if you use numbers from an arithmetic progression to generate a grid, the number of distinct sums is always small. And that means that if you’re handed numbers whose sum grid has few distinct entries, it’s a good bet those numbers are closely related to an arithmetic progression."

Computer Graphics from Scratch the book - Table of contents - Gabriel Gambetta

Interesting overview

Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by its Own Navy

"A young officer scribbled algebraic equations in a notebook to figure out how to right the listing vessel. The crew bailed out the ship with buckets after pumps failed. As the Fitzgerald struggled to return to port, its navigational displays failed and backup batteries ran out. The ship’s navigator used a handheld commercial GPS unit and paper charts to guide the ship home." Free surface effect? Moments??

UK to Ease Customs Checks on EU Goods in Event of 'No Deal' Brexit – gCaptain

"LONDON, Feb 4 (Reuters) – Most goods arriving from the European Union will be allowed into Britain without full customs checks for at least three months if it leaves the bloc without an exit deal, the British government said on Monday." Seems like a sensible move

These Sketches Will Take You Into the Artistic Mind of Edward Hopper | Travel | Smithsonian

>> "Hopper didn’t like to talk about the meaning of his paintings, but he did provide one interesting clue soon after the Walker acquired Office at Night in 1948. In a letter to the museum’s director, he wrote, “The picture was probably first suggested by many rides on the ‘L’ train in New York after dark, and glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind.”" << Elevated railways: Glasgow, London, early childhood memories of the dock side railway in Liverpool, York for a couple of stations. Limited stretches of the Reditch to Lichfield line in Brum. Put blinds up if you live near one!

Tom Brady Is Drowning In His Own Pseudoscience | FiveThirtyEight

“Just because you’re a bird doesn’t mean you’re an ornithologist.” Classic

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The January 29th 2019 amendments and the extension rumours

And so it goes. Useful summary,

How do I create a CloudReady USB installer on Linux? – CloudReady

basically, unzip and use dd. How to make the simple complex does not bode well for this little experiment

The Soviet license plate game and Kolmogorov complexity

"His game was to apply high school math operators to the numbers on both side of the dash so that the dash could be replaced by an equal sign." Worksheet in production...

Lenovo Thinkpad L440 - Features & Exceptions - Google Slides

Thinkpad L440 supported by neverware build of Chromeos that supports crostini. So chance to try before I buy a pixelbook

Jonathan Schuppe, Journalist

>> Newark Police Director Anthony Ambrose, a former homicide detective, has paged through the book countless times. What strikes him is how the victims’ ethnicity changed with the city, but many of the homicide hot spots - Prince Street, Springfield Avenue, Grafton Avenue, for example - keep showing up. “It’s amazing how the names have changed but the places stay the same,” Ambrose said. << Psycho-geography: shades of Sinclair (or just confirmation that violent crime happens mostly in poor neighbourhoods). On a path from a Cory Booker biog.

Tools & Craft - Episode 03: Ted Nelson

"So what we have now are documents which imitate paper — which to me, is stupid. You know, it's like putting an imitation horse on a car." Ted Nelson still doing his thing at 81. I just bought a copy of the new print of Computer Lib/Thinking Machines.

The D in SystemD stands for Danger, Will Robinson! Defanged exploit code for security holes now out in the wild • The Register Forums

"A modern OS is a matryoshka doll of abstractions. In hardware you have translation of instructions into micro-ops as well as execution-reording, At the top you have web applications written in interpreted languages (both client- and server-side) that use compiled languages to interact with a supervisor that lives inside a hypervisor. And you don't just have one stack, but many different interpreters and several compiled languages. And a few different hypervisors. And ARM support, and initial support for RiscV. So I'm not sure why Poettering thinks that POSIX compatibility is the biggest threat to the elegance and efficiency of a modern Linux server or desktop."

Revive a Cisco IDS into a capable OpenBSD computer! | The demiblog

"So, how do you get around installing an operating system on a computer which has no video output nor console redirection? For Windows and most Linux distros, you can’t, but OpenBSD, an *nix-like OS, does it beautifully, because it uses console out-of-the-box! So, let’s get started with the installation." I think you could get one of the BSDs to run on a modern toaster if you put your mind to it.

The 500-Year-Long Science Experiment - The Atlantic

"No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date." Probably the best strategy, although the metal plate idea sounds very nice. I'd go for printing the instructions, together with a map showing the locations of the boxes, in a widely used textbook. History tells us that some copies of all the major printed books can make it through the centuries even if the attrition rate is large.

Transport Firms Reviewing UK-Registered Ships Ahead of Brexit – gCaptain

>> “In the light of the Brexit process we are considering whether the UK flag can become a possible issue for us when it no longer will be an EU flag post the 29th March 2019, but we have taken no decisions and are reviewing different scenarios,” said Ian Hampton, chief people & communications officer and Brexit spokesperson for Stena Line. << P&O shifting to Cyprus and now these two 'reviewing' the situation.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail

"That’s how I came to spend a substantial part of my teenage years replacing fences, digging trenches, and building flooring and sheds. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this building, it’s that reality has a surprising amount of detail."

The Tao of Programming

>>A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: "What sort of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. There hair was long and unkept and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed out hospitality suite and they made rude noises during my presentation." The manager said: "I should have never sent you to the conference. Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd, an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations. Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother with social conventions? They are alive within the Tao." << An oldie but a goodie

Inlined code

"Using large comment blocks inside the major function to delimit the minor functions is a good idea for quick scanning, and often enclosing it in a bare braced section to scope the local variables and allow editor collapsing of the section is useful. I know there are some rules of thumb about not making functions larger than a page or two, but I specifically disagree with that now -- if a lot of operations are supposed to happen in a sequential fashion, their code should follow sequentially."

Cumulative Frequency Curves - YouTube

Might still be useful

Mean, mode and median from frequency tables - YouTube

Another old one

Probability Part 2: tree diagrams - YouTube

Old work for new syllabus. 12 years ago!

Don’t call it gentrification | Salon.com

"I helped form the San Francisco Community Land Trust and I believe that this model can simultaneously preserve affordability and build community. It’s basically a rebooted version of the old cooperative housing model where affordability and tenure is protected, much in the same way that forests are protected through trusts. Without forms of community ownership, even the most impressive housing organizing victories are temporary. It’s important not to romanticize the cooperative and deal head-on with the problems it presents. For example, the SFCLT has been incorporated since 2004 and we have secured about six dozen homes. Not enough to intervene in the housing crisis yet. Land trusts are part of the solution, not the entire thing. And yes, one of the main obstacles is the accepted notions of what people expect from their housing. It is hard to move beyond the poles of renter vs. homeowner. The CLT model makes asks of both society and the individual. It asks society to move toward housing as a human right. It asks individuals to take personal responsibility as part of a community. It is a heavy lift given the times we live in." Coops with no-sale guarantees.

'Ancient' Aberdeenshire stone circle found to be replica - BBC News

Looks fine. I have seen a real stone circle (well post holes and one or two stones still in position) in the middle of a council estate. This one at least looks the part

APNewsBreak: Undercover Agents Target Cybersecurity Watchdog - The New York Times

"Citizen Lab, based out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, has for years played a leading role in exposing state-backed hackers operating in places as far afield as Tibet , Ethiopia and Syria . Lately the group has drawn attention for its repeated exposés of an Israeli surveillance software vendor called the NSO Group, a firm whose wares have been used by governments to target journalists in Mexico , opposition figures in Panama and human rights activists in the Middle East ." We have the international law of the sea. Perhaps time for international law of the network?

Google Search Operators: The Complete List (42 Advanced Operators)

Useful to know. I like the define: operator

Why I use old hardware | Drew DeVault’s Blog

"This laptop is a Thinkpad X200, which turns 11 years old in July and is my main workstation away from home (though I bring a second monitor and an external keyboard for long trips). This laptop is a great piece of hardware. 100% of the hardware is supported by the upstream Linux kernel, including the usual offenders like WiFi and Bluetooth. Niche operating systems like 9front and Minix work great, too. Even coreboot works!" I'm on X220 and L440 now mainly because of the screens...

Drove through Johnson City west out of Kansas and into Colorado.

"She told me that meeting and helping these families also helped her change the dynamic of the conversation when she returned to East Texas. Instead of arguing about what FOX or MSNBC said about what was happening on the border, she could share what she saw and heard in person. Appeal to their empathy and compassion, lessen their fear and anxiety." Actual interaction with the 'other' usually resolves some of the bullshit I find. People realise that their basic needs and aspirations are similar.

World3, the public beta | bit-player

"If you could strip the model down to its mathematical essentials, it would be a system of coupled differential equations, something like the Lotka-Volterra equations for predator-prey populations. But the model is actually formulated in the language of “system dynamics,” a simulation methodology invented in the 1950s by Jay W. Forrester of MIT, with heavy influence from control theory and servomechanisms." I'll go for the differential equations thanks...

The Weight of Change - SouthPark Magazine Feature

>> "One of the books that was a role model for me was a book by David Carr called The Night of the Gun. David Carr was a really bad drug addict. When he went to write his memoir, he went back to all these people and said, “Tell me what this was like because I only vaguely remember. Tell me so I can hear from your perspective.” That’s what I did for this." << Another link. Other people as mirrors

Weight Loss Is a Rock Fight - The Atlantic

"There were no Neanderthal foodies. They ate to survive. They went hungry for long stretches. Their bodies sent up alarms telling them they’d better find something to eat. Our DNA still harbors a fear that we’ll starve. But now most of us have access to food that is more abundant, cheaper, and more addictive than at any other time in human history. Our bodies haven’t caught up to the modern world. Our cells think we’re storing up fat for a hard winter when actually it’s just happy hour at Chili’s." This is the thing. I had to try to get over the anxiety about the next meal when I was losing weight. The trust that there always be food...

Claps and cheers: Apple stores' carefully managed drama | Technology | The Guardian

"The company’s extraordinary wealth is not simply a reward for innovation, or the legacy of “innovators” like Steve Jobs. Rather, it flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying “crash”. The profits have been stashed offshore, tax free, repatriated only to enrich those with enough spare cash to invest." Bit of myth busting

Entrepreneurial State | Mariana Mazzucato

In Penguin

Mainframe, Interrupted

"Yeah, but there are a lot of class divisions within that work, and those are really important for organizing. I’ve been trying to follow the changes and crunch the numbers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out to understand what’s increasing and what’s decreasing. What I’m looking for is the numbers of people in the field—and what is the field?" IT as a field for unionisation: is this about differentials again?

Beto O'Rourke – Medium

Can you imagine Jeremy or Teresa doing a road journal?

The antisocial laptop

"I find it fascinating that for years I’ve had all the information necessary to debug this, but my mental model of causality was limited to the design of the machine - software interfaces and physical connections - and was completely missing the possibility of non-intentional interactions via the physical world. I suspect someone with an EE background would have immediately realized what was going on." We sometimes forget that we are using walkie-talkies with processors...

The three-page paper that shook philosophy—a hacker’s perspective « the jsomers.net blog

"Having a term for these tricky cases allows you, I think, to be ever-so-slightly more alert to them." Having a word or term for something provides us with a 'handle' for the idea or pattern

Mathematicians Seal Back Door to Breaking RSA Encryption | Quanta Magazine

"But there is a back door, and it has to do with polynomial equations. Every number can be represented as a unique polynomial equation. While it’s hard to find the prime factors of a number, it’s easy to find the factors of a polynomial. And once you know the factors of a polynomial, you can use that information to find the prime factors of the number you started with." The paragraph that follows is pure gold and I can get a couple of lessons out of it...

Feedback: canaries, bad managers, pranks, and book 3?

"It's the gentle reminder that you really should not brazenly ship code for the biggest web site in the world without testing it first. You definitely shouldn't turn something on and then head out the door to go on vacation for two weeks." Or perhaps your colleagues can complete the testing while you go on holiday...

Johnny.Decimal home · J•D

Nice idea but it will never catch on

Old UNIX V6 ed _lightly_ ported to modern systems

1300ish lines of K & R C produce a minimal text editor.

Google’s AI Guru Wants Computers to Think More Like Brains | WIRED

"[...] When you train a neural net, it will learn a billion numbers that represent the knowledge it has extracted from the training data. If you put in an image, out comes the right decision, say, whether this was a pedestrian or not. But if you ask “Why did it think that?” well if there were any simple rules for deciding whether an image contains a pedestrian or not, it would have been a solved problem ages ago." Food for thought

Where Does a Shark’s Skin Get Its Pattern?

"Turing’s model, called a reaction-diffusion mechanism, is beautifully simple. It requires only two interacting agents, an activator and an inhibitor, that diffuse through tissue like ink dropped in water. The activator initiates some process, like the formation of a spot, and promotes the production of itself. The inhibitor halts both actions. Critically, the inhibitor spreads through tissue more quickly than the activator does. This faster diffusion of the inhibitor prevents pockets of activation from spilling over. Depending on exactly when and where the activator and inhibitor are released, the pockets of activation will arrange themselves as regularly spaced dots, stripes, or other patterns."

Brexit: Farmers call for new law to guarantee food standards - BBC News

"Mr Gove said concerns the UK would have to lower its food standards to access US markets were not new, because they had been raised a few years ago during discussions over the now aborted plan for a EU-US transatlantic trade and investment partnership." Strikes me that US based producers of good quality food might not want people thinking that all US sourced food is adulterated. Who actually makes money of bulk low cost ingredients?

Footnotes to Plato | A philosophical series from the TLS Online

One for lazy afternoons in the cafe

The Men Peddling the 'Secrets' to Getting Rich on Amazon - The Atlantic

"It may seem obvious to an outsider that most people aren’t going to become rich by selling things on Amazon. But that’s the thing about gold rushes: Some people do find gold, and it is sometimes hard to tell what distinguishes the people who make it from those who don’t." Random choice?

Unpacking the Millennial Work Ethic – Member Feature Stories – Medium

"Arendt’s notion is that labor—the realm of metabolism, maintenance, and consumption—has colonized and supplanted work—the realm of craft, fabrication, and use. Arendt describes the work of labor as both futile, in that it will never end, and necessary, because to be without its products is to die. The logic of the market that Neoliberalism extends to all spheres of human activity essentially makes everything into labor." Arguing against Graeber's Bullshit Jobs book

What is the Point of Equality? Elizabeth S. Anderson Ethics, Vol. 109, No. 2 (Jan., 1999), pp. 287-337

Looks like a compact treatment

The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker

"...the bank changed its office plan. When Anderson had started, the bookkeepers worked in rows of desks. Coördination was easy—a check that fell under someone else’s purview could be handed down the line—and there was conversation throughout the day. Then cubicles were added. That transformation interrupted the workflow, the conversational flow, and most other things about the bookkeepers’ days. Their capacities as workers were affected, yet the change had come down from on high." Legitimate peripheral participation is something very valuable and easily lost...

A Tiny Austrian Town Has the Coolest Bus Shelters We've Ever Seen - CityLab

I like the bus stop combined with the tennis court spectator stand one. And the one made out of scrap wood (Ensamble Studios)

Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can’t | The New Yorker

>> "...the fact that some of the leading indicators for poor sleep and sleep loss are low household income, shift work, food insecurity, and being African-American or Hispanic suggests that the quest for rest is not so simple. Huffington does acknowledge, in passing, that “the vicious cycle of financial deprivation also feeds into the vicious cycle of sleep deprivation,” but she goes on to note, piously, that “the more challenging our circumstances, the more imperative it is to take whatever steps we can to tap into our resilience to help us withstand and overcome the challenges we face.”" << Same old same old. George Orwell's stuff in Road to Wigan Pier springs to mind.

Essential C (2003) [pdf] | Hacker News

"Most code that creates value to people is messy, written in a hurry with vague specifications & unclear understanding of what the end user wants or would pay for, and it gets iterated by disjoint teams of people with competing timelines, politics, credit mongering and resource constraints, and most of it is for reporting something to someone."

Potholes to avoid when migrating to IPv6

Scripts are used to automate things including connections to services on given IP addresses, sometimes with a specific port. IPv6 changes some of the conventions about how IP addresses are written to the extent that some scripts will break. Much hilarity will ensue.

🎈 Public Lab: Build a papercraft spectrometer for your phone -- version 2.0

Looks cool - slit made from black paper and the grating is a bit of DVD coating.

Index of /mirrors/slackware/pub/slackware/slackware-iso/slackware-current-iso

A full 32 bit iso of Slackware current. Installs fine. Just checking again in August 2019

Logic Noise: Sweet, Sweet Oscillator Sounds | Hackaday

Just hilarious...

Maritime Journal | Cory Riverside modernise Thames tug fleet - By Jack Gaston

"The Cory Riverside tug and barge operation provides a unique and well established service transporting refuse from a number of London boroughs through central London and down the Thames for disposal at sites in the lower reaches of the river. Refuse is compressed, containerised, and carried aboard purpose built barges, each capable of carrying 26 containers." 8 years later and Resolution and Revovery are still going strong - saw them pulling barges with 70 odd containers between them the other evening.

Australian food history timeline - Damper first mentioned

"Take 1 lb of flour, water and a pinch of salt. Mix it into a stiff dough and knead for at least one hour, not continuously, but the longer it is kneaded the better the damper. Press with the hands into a flat cake and cook it in at least a foot of hot ashes." Sounds cool. Just seeing how I translate 'a foot of hot ashes' into an oven temperature! The interweb suggests Gas 6 for 35 to 40 min (bicarb to rise it)

Jack Monroe's bannock recipe | Life and style | The Guardian

Linked from the medieval bread blog.

Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap

Jdk 11 has long term support (2023) and the new jshell command to quit is /exit

Univalent Foundations Redefines Mathematics | Quanta Magazine

"Type theory has its origins in an attempt to fix a critical flaw in early versions of set theory, which was identified by the philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell noted that some sets contain themselves as a member. For example, consider the set of all things that are not spaceships. This set — the set of non-spaceships — is itself not a spaceship, so it is a member of itself." An oldie but a goodie

Text mining for history and literature course page

Via usesthis for one of the 'instructors' on the course. Wealth of links to online resources about algorithmic and statistical methods for analysing texts and some statistics background.

Why Can’t We Find Planet Nine? | Quanta Magazine

"The first evidence for Planet Nine surfaced in 2014, when the discovery of a planetoid revealed that a handful of mini ice-worlds beyond the Kuiper belt followed suspiciously similar paths around the sun. “If things are in the same orbit, then something’s pushing them,” said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the co-discoverer of the 2014 planetoid. Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin made a specific prediction two years later: The “perturber,” as they call it, should weigh between 5 and 20 Earth masses and follow an elliptical orbit hundreds or even 1,000 times more distant from the sun than Earth." Jupiter is 300+ Earth masses so 5 to 20 at these distances can evade observation pretty easily. Where is Clive Tombaugh and his big mirror when you need him?

With trust destroyed, Facebook is haunted by old data deals | TechCrunch

Fall out from NY times article linked previously, via HN

As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants - The New York Times

"For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews. The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond." Now you know why I'm sticking resolutely with Web 1.0. HTML and all. I miss HoTMetaL so much.

A Caravaggio for Christmas: is his stolen Nativity masterpiece about to reappear? | Art and design | The Guardian

"One of the most moving of all such scenes of reverence for a newborn child is about to mark its 50th year in limbo. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Nativity With Saints Lawrence and Francis was painted in Palermo, capital of Sicily, in 1609 and stolen 360 years later. It hasn’t been seen since, at least not by any honest citizen. Yet as the anniversary of its disappearance approaches, it may be about to resurface." Caravaggio always brings to mind M by Peter Robb

Almost surely - Wikipedia

measure theory hits probability. The set of possible exceptions can be non-empty but the probability of picking an element in that set is zero. Example, probability proportional to area on some target. Probability of hitting a line across the target is zero because line has no area.

Why you should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

"Predictions have two types of uncertainty; aleatory and epistemic. Aleatory uncertainty is concerned with the fundamental system (probability of rolling a six on a standard die). Epistemic uncertainty is concerned with the uncertainty of the system (how many sides does a die have? And what is the probability of rolling a six?). With the later, you have to guess the game and the outcome; like an election!"

Donald Knuth: The Yoda of Silicon Valley | Hacker News

>> And they asked him, "How could you possibly do this?" And he answered, "When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the program going, it just had to be written right. So people just learned to program like it was carving stone. You sort of have to sidle up to it. That's how I learned to program." <<

The Yoda of Silicon Valley - The New York Times

>> “Knuth made it clear that the system could actually be understood all the way down to the machine code level,” said Dr. Norvig. Nowadays, of course, with algorithms masterminding (and undermining) our very existence, the average programmer no longer has time to manipulate the binary muck, and works instead with hierarchies of abstraction, layers upon layers of code — and often with chains of code borrowed from code libraries. But an elite class of engineers occasionally still does the deep dive. << Abstractions built on abstractions again - this pattern keeps coming up

Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra – Vectors, Matrices, and Least Squares

Not light reading but comes with julia language code

Instead of Writing a Thousand Words, Part One: Ideas

Takes a bit of loading (and battery) but worth a look

Mary Poppendieck's "The Tyranny of 'The Plan'" - Chris Gagné

Transcript about how the empire state building got built

The Waterfall methodology was a historic accident and they knew it | Hacker News

"What’s not so obvious is that a surprisingly small portion of what people think of as a software project is actually about software development. Interacting with 3rd parties, writing contracts, hiring developers, planning how your project interacts with other projects and the wider organization, responding to regulations and external enquiries, managing the demand for certainty from stakeholders, obtaining funding, maintaining financial control..." HN discussion of waterfall blog post, user jl6 nails it

Waterfall

Early paper on the software implementation process reveals an understanding of need for iteration

FreeBSD Desktop – Part 2.1 – Install FreeBSD 12 | 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚗

Whole drive encryption for the laptop

A FreeBSD 11 Desktop How-to » Cooltrainer.org

Process from FreeBSD install

The End of a Red Giant - https://purpleidea.com/

Another take on the redhat acquisition by IBM. I had not realised that there was a tension within redhat between the gpl and the permissive licence bods

Untethered | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as he saw himself

"Instead, The Red Wheel depicts Russia as having been betrayed twice, by an indolent and corrupt homegrown elite, and by a hyperactive and destructive intelligentsia obsessed with implanting “foreign” ideas, which the author portrays as a liberal-socialist continuum. The Revolution becomes something alien. Concepts of foreign or alien, it must be said, present insurmountable difficulties for anyone who would write the history of Imperial Russia and the Revolution."

Show HN: Stock Trading from Google Spreadsheet | Hacker News

"I worked for one of the largest financials services companies in the world and they STILL use excel to drive their trading activities. They are so large and so complex that it's impossible to convert them because no one completely understands how it all works. They were developed by traders/market experts with no help from IT, for years IT didn't even knew they existed." What could *possibly* go wrong?

Tom Sachs: Working to Code

Personally, I'd rather have a written text

Tom Sachs (artist) - Wikipedia

>> BULLET VIII: ALWAYS BE KNOLLING (ABK) Scan your environment for materials, tools, books, music, etc. which are not in use. Put away everything not in use. If you aren't sure, leave it out. Group all 'like' objects. Align or square all objects to either the surface they rest on, or the studio itself. << Quoted from the Wikipedia page

Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage every day situations? | Hacker News

Nice list - some hilarious

Robert Mueller's Endgame May Be in Sight

"With his major court filings, Mueller has already written more than 290 pages of the “Mueller Report.” As Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes has said, if a 9/11 Commission–style body had gathered in the wake of the 2016 election to study Russian interference, its findings would read much like Mueller’s novelistic charges against the Internet Research Agency and the military intelligence agency commonly referred to as the GRU." Hiding the 'report' in plain sight.

13brane.net

"TL;DR: Tarr is no longer maintaining a node.js package that everyone and their dog uses. No legitimate users step up to maintain said package, even though they depend on it. Tarr hands over said package to a “helpful” stranger, who immediately decides to monetize it via cryptocurrency pilfering. Internet polarization ensues." Strikes me as a clueless outsider that this is an npm issue rather than an open source issue.

arXiv:math-ph/0005032v1 31 May 2000 - 0005032.pdf

Lie groups for beginners

Killing 3ve: How The FBI And Tech Industry Took Down A Massive Ad Fraud Scheme

"Once on the websites, the bots were programmed to mimic human behavior such as mouse movements and clicks, and to click play on videos to ensure lucrative ads were displayed." Turing test for modern times...

Wide-band WebSDR in Enschede, the Netherlands

This is both hilarious and amazing. Try 6098KHz on am.

Why Trump Can’t Stop Talking to the Press - POLITICO Magazine

"In a recent Politico article, Eliana Johnson and Daniel Lippman wrote of the days in which Trump allots to himself up to nine hours of “Executive Time,” in which he tweets, phones friends, watches TV and otherwise dawdles." So who is actually running the country?

It's good to talk: Why the phone call needs to make a comeback - BBC Three

"And while we used to think nothing of using our mobile phones to, you know, actually make calls, we are now doing that less. In fact, Ofcom reported that in 2017 mobile voice calls dropped for the first time ever in the UK, with the total volume of calls made decreasing by 1.7%." What could cause that drop other than behaviour change? Could it be firm action on cold calling?

Computer Science and Biology Explore Algorithmic Evolution | Quanta Magazine

Algorithmic evolution sounds interesting

Remembering W. H. Auden, by Hannah Arendt | The New Yorker

Pruned: Gardens as Crypto-Water-Computers

"In the front right corner, in a structure that resembles a large cupboard with a transparent front, stands a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the economy. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower tax rates or increase the money supply or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing the growth in personal savings, tax revenue, and so on." I'm convinced that I can use pure data or spice to simulate an analogue computer simulating the dripping of a tap...

The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis

Julian Jaynes was an interesting character apart from his book which is densely written but thought provoking.

Ethan Akin, In Defense of "Mindless Rote"

"Following Whitehead, I propose to defend not thinking, to consider the relationship between thinking and not thinking and to describe how symbolism - particularly in mathematics - facilitates not thinking. Above all, I want to argue that all this avoidance of thought is a Good Thing."

Analogue radio is the tech that just won't die • The Register

Data from OFCOM about device use by age and socio-economic group in the UK. 10Mb PDF download, useful for stats lessons

In which Theresa May calls a referendum despite expecting to lose her job | Elections Etc

This gets worse every time I read about it

Bjørn Karmann › Objectifier

>> “Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs” was one of the headlines in the Wired issue “The end of Code” from 2016. The dog training analogies inspired me to investigate the assumptions myself, and went on a quest to visit real dog trainers. << So the geezer built a device that you can train to associate actions with controls in your house.

TipsAndTricks/MultimediaOnCentOS7 - CentOS Wiki

Nux repository and epel are essential for Springdale Linux 7 I find.

A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace | Hacker News

Lots of DFW resources from the hackers

The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal | Hacker News

Discussion about the viability of outrageous discovery in physics. As Peter Shor comments "So, people, go hide in your attics!"

The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)

Very strong poetry

Decentralising the web: Why is it so hard to achieve?

>> "When technology is built, the biases of its creators are often embedded into the technology itself in ways that are very hard for the creators to see, until it's used for a purpose you didn't intend," she said during an interview with Internet Archive. "So I think it's really important that we talk about this stuff." <<

The biomass distribution on Earth | PNAS

"Earlier efforts to estimate global biomass have mostly focused on plants (3⇓–5). In parallel, a dominant role for prokaryotic biomass has been advocated in a landmark paper by Whitman et al. (6) entitled “Prokaryotes: The unseen majority.” New sampling and detection techniques (7, 8) make it possible to revisit this claim. Likewise, for other taxa, such as fish, recent global sampling campaigns (9) have resulted in updated estimates, often differing by an order of magnitude or more from previous estimates. For groups such as arthropods, global estimates are still lacking (10, 11)." What there is respiring

What now for the government? - BBC News

"One diplomat, in sorrow more than anger, last week said to me he simply couldn't see how the EU would be able to offer anything that the prime minister could get through Parliament. Yes, anything that is viable at all." Hope the diplomat is wrong

Debian User Forums • View topic - [SOLVED] startx not working in Stretch (with sysvinit-core)

Took a bit of time to find this one but allows me to run without dbus on devuan ascii

The Trump Protests – The personal, the political, and the possible… – Slugger O'Toole

"Central to politics in the UK, over the last century (or so) has been how we, as a country, care for each other. What is personal, and what is the responsibility of the government? How we do we, as far as possible, try to ensure that no one gets left behind?"

globalinequality: Bob Allen's new "poverty machine" and its implications

"...$PPP 1.90 poverty line was supposed to really reflect the same consumption opportunities (bundles) across the world. Mostly because of the differences in housing and clothing costs, but also in relative food prices, Allen shows that this line is broadly correct for African countries but that in Asia and in middle-income countries to achieve the same level of calorific intake, clothing, shelter you need between $PPP 2.50 and $PPP 3.50, and that in rich countries, you need about $PPP 4.50." Housing costs extremely non-linear at low end. > £70 a week or a tent basically.

Are Things Getting Better or Worse? | The New Yorker

"The power of bad news is magnified, Pinker writes, by a mental habit that psychologists call the “availability heuristic”: because people tend to estimate the probability of an event by means of “the ease with which instances come to mind,” they get the impression that mass shootings are more common than medical breakthroughs." "One longs for a modern equivalent—a data-driven version of Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgment” or Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” equal to the contradictions of the human situation."

What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer – Ben Fathi – Medium

>> “The reason that God was able to create the world in seven days is that he didn’t have to worry about the installed base.” — Enzo Torresi. 1945–2016. << Windows joke - like it

I Used A Phone Like Most People In The World And It Was Awful

"According to data from app analytics firm App Annie, Indians spend 36% of their screentime on communication (like WhatsApp), 20% on video players (like YouTube), and 16% on social networking (Facebook)." Pretty much teenagers in UK with the addition of flash type games. Via HN

Why Trump has few friends in Europe – POLITICO

>> “The politics of announcements is what unifies Trump, [Vladimir] Putin and [Italy’s Matteo] Salvini, who love to look very strong on social media and more in general to answer to people’s guts,” said Alli. << The politics of announcements - I like the phrase and will steal it.

JIBLM.org - Journal of Inquiry-Based Learning in Mathematics - Download Item - Notes for a Course on Proofs by Jensen-Vallin, Jacqueline A.

"These notes are used for an introduction to proofs course including the following topics: logic, number theory, set theory, induction, and relations. In particular, the purpose of these notes is to help students learn how to critically examine their proofs and those presented by their classmates so that all students leave the class with a working knowledge of how to complete direct proofs, proofs by contrapositive, proofs by contradiction, and proofs by induction." The proof book referred to below

Free Proofs textbook

"This teaching style requires that students work directly with the mathematics. It is the core experience of the class. That is, this style shows students how to be, and in fact requires that they be, active learners. Consequently, it is a good fit for this course." He calls it the Moore method - students do the proving basically.

Random Points on a Sphere (Part 1) | Azimuth

"While trying to get a better intuition for this, I realized that as you go to higher and higher dimensions, and you standing at the north pole of the unit sphere, the chance that a randomly chosen other point is quite near the equator gets higher and higher!" I've seen that before. Another reason to be very careful with statistical inference from smallish datasets with a lot of variables.

The Children of Anaxagoras | Lapham’s Quarterly

"In recent years, some evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists have gone as far as to argue that the refinement of the toolmaking abilities in the earliest hominids could have accompanied or even allowed for the development of language. Proponents of this theory, including Aldo Faisal, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, speculate that as early humans began working together to manufacture tools of increasing sophistication, they started communicating verbally in ways that were accordingly complex."

Davis resigns. My part in his downfall. | Conservative Home

"So it was that the next evening we found ourselves chewing his choices over, almost literally, over Albondigas and Pisto Madrileno upstairs at Goya’s in Pimlico." Personally, I sort of miss the days when these things were done over pints in the Dog. Ironic that the (no doubt excellent) restaurant serves a med menu.

How to Make Anglo-Saxon Bread: Version 1 | The Early English Bread Project

"Oats and barley often grew together, and wheat and rye often grew together, so these mixtures make sense. It was advantageous to grow two kinds of grain together, so if one failed through disease or bad weather, the other kind might still produce, and you had a better chance of not starving."

In home ownership push, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam follows Singapore model of Lee Kuan Yew | South China Morning Post

"On June 29, she announced she would make subsidised ownership cheaper in Hong Kong. In every such project in future, 75 per cent of the flats would need to be affordable to those making the median income among all non-property-owning households. Being affordable means fixing mortgages at 40 per cent of income. This would bring flat prices down to about half the market rates, instead of the previous 30 per cent discount" Median of the non-property owners. Presumably based on real income including part time/zero hours. Radical.

FOOD & DRINK : HOW TO GO WITH THE GRAINS | The Independent

"This is Linda Collister's version of the delicious, crusty, chewy loaf made popular by the Poilane family in Paris." 3 days for the starter. 36 hours for the sponge, and two 8 hour rises for the dough. I'm going to have to try this one!

Two Killed After Mooring Line Snaps at Port of Longview, Washington – gCaptain

"Bryon Jacobs, a father of three, was a 6th generation Longshoreman and worked for the ILWU at the Port of Longview for 16 years, his family said in a statement." Despite all the modern logistics, a mooring cable can still break.

CyberSquirrel1.com

Via The Register. Priceless

Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags – Locus Online

"Remember that elections are generally knife-edge affairs, even for politicians who’ve held their seats for decades with slim margins: 60% of the vote is an excellent win. Remember, too, that the winner in most races is “none of the above,” with huge numbers of voters sitting out the election. If even a small number of these non-voters can be motivated to show up at the polls, safe seats can be made contestable. In a tight race, having a cheap way to reach all the latent Klansmen in a district and quietly inform them that Donald J. Trump is their man is a game-changer." Via HN

Trump Says ‘Abolish ICE’ Is Bad Politics For Democrats. Is He Right? | FiveThirtyEight

"The Trump administration has essentially made the policy of reducing immigration its security strategy. That was the argument for the travel ban and for separating families at the border. You also see that in the constant talk about MS-13. That’s part of why it was so interesting to people who focus on this stuff that the ICE investigators said that focus is hurting their ability to do homeland security work."

The History Press | Bread: A slice of First World War history

Suggests several reasons for not selling bread fresh - this could ave had an impact on small bakers historically.

National Loaf

The crucial question is: why were bakers not allowed to sell their loaves until the day after baking?

What Scotland Thinks

John Curtice's blog

The Brexit Short: How Hedge Funds Used Private Polls to Make Millions

"Hedge fund executives were among those on the line. If YouGov was conducting another poll before the vote, traders said, they’d be willing to pay vast sums for a heads-up just 30 minutes to an hour before publication, according to two knowledgeable sources. Since news of the poll alone likely would move markets, the survey’s accuracy was meaningless; traders simply needed to know the results before they became public." That algorithmic thing again - advance knowledge can be used to make money

The Death of a Once Great City | Harper's Magazine

"As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring." Could this actually be true of most large cities?

James Joyce - Wikiquote

"The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it" Bloomsday (a few days late on account of my right knee)

The Quest to Break America’s Most Mysterious Code—And Find $60 Million in Buried Treasure | Mental Floss

“The computer is not the answer," Hammer said at a Beale Cipher Association Symposium in 1979. "Even if it does all the work, we still have to find the type of work for it to do.”

Why We Shouldn’t Be Surprised at the Theranos Fraud

"Holmes met with a firm called MedVenture Associates in the early days of Theranos that had a lot of experience in medical technology and had invested in Abaxis. They were familiar with microfluidics and they asked her questions about how her envisioned technology was going to differ from Abaxis’. She didn’t even know that Abaxis had a device and she certainly didn’t understand how it worked. She got defensive at the probing questions and eventually left in a huff."

FIU bridge that collapsed had key design mistake, experts say. | Miami Herald

"The faux cable-stayed bridge design created a highly irregular pattern for the diagonal struts. The irregular pattern, in turn, complicated the calculations for determining the stresses at different points and resulted in each of the 12 pieces being of different length and thickness, the three engineers who undertook a review of FIGG's calculations say."

The borrowers: why Finland's cities are havens for library lovers | Cities | The Guardian

"According to local authority figures from 2016, the UK spends just £14.40 per head on libraries. By contrast, Finland spends £50.50 per inhabitant. While more than 478 libraries have closed in cities and towns across England, Wales and Scotland since 2010, Helsinki is spending €98m creating an enormous new one." They take organised education pretty seriously as well

‘Americans are Being Held Hostage and Terrorized by the Fringes’ - POLITICO Magazine

"There are basically two kinds of people in life: people who want to win competition and people who want to shut it down. People who don’t understand competition actually are the ones who want to shut it down because they don’t understand that competition requires rules. It requires moral precepts. Pepsi doesn’t want to go blow up the Coca-Cola bottling factory. It wants to take their customers fair and square for the better product and better pricing. The same thing should be true in American politics and policy." Leaves out the effects of the algorithm: inevitable need for 'power structures' to implement a policy programme in a complex and interconnected set of institutions. "It’s not like 50 percent of Americans thinks one thing and 50 percent thinks another thing. No, 15 percent on each side are effectively controlling the conversation and 70 percent of us don’t hate each other." Parliamentary system?

Opinion | Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded - The New York Times

"And yet, fewer among us are poor, fewer are hungry, fewer children are dying, and more men and women can read than ever before. In many countries, recognition of women’s and minority rights is now the norm. There is still much work to do, of course, but there is hope and there is progress. How strange, then, to see such anger and great discontent in some of the world’s richest nations. In the United States, Britain and across the European Continent, people are convulsed with political frustration and anxiety about the future. Refugees and migrants clamor for the chance to live in these safe, prosperous countries, but those who already live in those promised lands report great uneasiness about their own futures that seems to border on hopelessness."

Joseph Brodsky's trial

Brodsky felt his calling had a value beyond political expediency, while the judge was tasked with reminding him that the state needn’t subsidize his hobby if he wasn’t going to say anything useful. But the incommensurability of these points of view runs much deeper than this one case.

‘What Happened to Alan Dershowitz?’ - POLITICO Magazine

"Around then, Dershowitz—never one to overlook a celebrity being railroaded—started getting more TV airtime for his argument that a sitting president could not be guilty of obstruction of justice." As a limey, one immediately thinks 'Nixon'??

Subscription hell | TechCrunch

"Take my colleague Connie Loizos’ article from yesterday reporting on a new venture fund. The text itself is about 3.5 kilobytes uncompressed, but the total payload of the page if nothing is cached is more than 10 MB, or more than 3000x the data usage of the actual text itself. This pattern has become so common that it has been called the website obesity crisis"

Junior doctors' job offers withdrawn after blunder - BBC News

"Last week, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) discovered a significant number of candidates were credited with the wrong score, because of an error transferring data from one computer programme to another - and may therefore have received an incorrect job offer." Never retype data: don't you just love legacy systems

The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code - Bloomberg

"Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time." Sometimes you can win against the bookies

'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention | Environment | The Guardian

>> “With doom ahead, making a case for cycling as the primary mode of transport is almost irrelevant,” he says. “We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.” <<

Can’t sleep? Tell yourself it’s not a big deal | Oliver Burkeman | Life and style | The Guardian

>> "In a review of the research published last year, Lichstein concluded that “non-complaining poor sleepers” – who sleep badly but don’t define themselves as insomniacs – don’t suffer the high blood pressure commonly associated with severe sleeplessness. Meanwhile, “complaining good sleepers” – who get enough shut-eye, but are heavily invested in their alleged insomnia – were essentially as tired, anxious and depressed as those who genuinely didn’t sleep." << Basically stay positive

LEM - SCIENCE FICTION'S PASSIONATE REALIST - review - NYTimes.com

>> ''What would happen to us if we could truly sympathize with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear, and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms, and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals. If from every unfortunate, from every victim, there remained even a single atom of his feelings, if thus grew the inheritance of the generations, if even a spark could pass from man to man, the world would be full of raw, bowel-torn howling.'' << Last paragraph of *His Master's Voice*

Solved: A Decades-Old Ansel Adams Mystery - Atlas Obscura

"Donald Olson sees all that and something else: a mystery. He wants to know the moment it was taken. An astrophysicist and forensic astronomer, Olson uses quantitative methods to answer questions raised by artwork, literature, and historical accounts—not the heady ones, but the basic, surprisingly slippery who, what, when, and where." Reverse search on Sun's position

Alien Pastures » Fun and games in -current when ABIs break

"Among others, an ABI depends on the machine architecture, and on the toolchain (compiler, linker) used to generate the binary code from its sources. An ABI guarantees binary compatibility: the program will work on every machine with the same ABI, without a need for recompilation." And somehow something the upstream provider puts in the source code so poppler/icu4c both change the soname so often

The Artificial Intelligentsia | Aaron Timms

"The story of Silicon Valley is as much about donkeys as unicorns, entrepretendeurs as entrepreneurs. Like all good stories, this story has the capacity to surprise. Many of the tech industry’s most memorable flops were at one point seen as great successes." So when the great and the good give their recipes for success, think 'survivor bias' notes

The Plunging Morale of America’s Service Members - The Atlantic

>> Decaul now has a playwriting fellowship at Brown University, where he assures me that racial dialogue happens very differently than it did in the Corps. But thinking back, he told me, “No one, including me, was offended. Everyone thought it was hilarious.” The party continued, and the deployment followed without incident. The last Decaul heard of J. was recently, when he got a Facebook notification that J. wanted to “friend” him. “I turned him down,” Maurice told me. “I thought, I’ve had enough of you, J.” << Keep an eye out for this guy's plays

Yeast Came From China - The Atlantic

"The out-of-China hypothesis for yeast is not so different from the out-of-Africa hypothesis for humans. Among Homo sapiens, Africa has the most genetic diversity of anywhere on Earth. All humans elsewhere descend from populations that came out of Africa; all yeast elsewhere descend from strains that came out of East Asia. Once wild yeast strains made it out of Asia, humans likely domesticated them several times to make the yeasty foods that we know: beer, bread, wine."

Rick Scott vs. Bill Nelson: 2018’s Florida Senate race, explained - Vox

"He is worth about $150 million, according to the most recent estimates, after making his money as a hospital executive." Just trying to work out how you can make $1.5 x 10^8 dollars running a hospital...

Want to Be Happy? Think Like an Old Person - The New York Times

>> For now, he said, “I’m thinking about resistance. What does it mean, resistance? What kind of resistance do we need today? Technology is now being used, much of it, for negative purposes. So to resist all what is happening negatively in humanity or technology is to develop the — O.K., this banal word, spiritual aspect.” << Perhaps we all *need* to be Jonas Mekas now.

Northern and Midlands trainee teachers 'told to change their accents' - BBC News

"The Department for Education told Newsbeat they would not comment on the issue." Says it all really

Turkish Flatbread - Pide Recipe

Making these. The ingredient list left out 2 tblsp of yoghurt.

News Diet (full essay) – Rolf Dobelli

"This article is the antidote of news. It is long, and you probably won’t be able to skim it. Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost the ability to read more than four pages straight. This article will show you how to get out of this trap – if you are not already too deep in the trap."

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier | Media | The Guardian

"News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether"

How kids in a low-income country use laptops: lessons from Madagascar

"But there was one marked difference: computer use in Madagascar tended to be a collective rather than an individual practice. Children and their families would gather around one laptop to play educational games, take photos or make videos. Computers were being used to strengthen existing social relations among siblings, parents and peers." Social learning spaces and 'egroups' as per my previous occupation. Vygotsky knew a thing or two about how people learn

BBC Food - Recipes - Pitta bread

Summer is coming

The Inside Story of Reddit's Redesign | WIRED

"In those early days, Reddit's makeshift design team worked out of an empty room on the fourth floor of the company's headquarters. They dragged up a TV, a couple of chairs, a little Wi-Fi station, a bunch of paper, and started to hash out how to bring Reddit into the future." Sounds like the best way to (re)design anything. Small group. Fresh look.

Rich User Experience, UX and Desktopization of War

"In 2013, Dr. Scott Fitzsimmons and MA graduate Karina Sangha published the paper Killing in High Definition. They rose the issue of combat stress among operators of armed drones (Remote Piloted Aircrafts) and suggested ways to reduce it. One of them is to Mask Traumatic Imagery." Link from Stallman's page.

Meet the Amateur Scientist Who Discovered Climate Change

“As man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time-scale, it is natural to seek for the probable effects of such a change.”

Listening to Kilgore - Columbia Journalism Review

How the anecdotal story started (plus newspapers have been under threat for about 90 years)

This is how Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook targeting model really worked — according to the person who built it » Nieman Journalism Lab

"The whole point of a dimension reduction model is to mathematically represent the data in simpler form. It’s as if Cambridge Analytica took a very high-resolution photograph, resized it to be smaller, and then deleted the original. The photo still exists — and as long as Cambridge Analytica’s models exist, the data effectively does too." Via HN again. Forget the search warrants and legal stuff, go after the model

Uses This / Tim Maughan

"A few years ago I made a trip up the consumer electronics supply chain to look at the labour and environmental impact of manufacturing and our lust for new technologies. We spent a week on a container ship, visited electronics and Christmas factories in China, and ended up at a toxic lake in Inner Mongolia that is the result of rare earth mining. It's basically a 5 mile wide pool of semi-radioactive sludge that's the byproduct of polishing smartphone screens and making the magnets in your earphones." Reuse stuff

The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark | The New Yorker

"Whereas in science there’s a whole row going on about criticizing people in public. The number of times that I’ve seen people give talks and people are thinking, That’s bollocks, absolute shit data, and no one brings it up.”"

Bad font rendering in Firefox for Helvetica - Ask Void - Void Linux Forum

This one seems to have sorted the R font issue

Aaron Greenspan :: Writing :: In Search of the Cookie Dough Tree

"Today, it's quite clear that we are all glad things did work back then, even if things required arsenic and benzene and PCBs and lead, because the Valley helped the United States win the Cold War, beat the Japanese economy, and propel Gross Domestic Product to great heights, raising the standard of living for everyone. As with all things economic, though, the Valley contributed such great advances at a cost, and that cost usually involved those chemicals leaching into the ground and into the bodies of low-paid, immigrant workers for years, and years, and years, until somebody finally noticed." Externalities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16681073

Look for the duct tape

"Look for the patches to the original system which were done by people who actually work in a given space. Track down the sharp edges which have been systematically covered up by users who were more interested in being productive and weren't willing to fight with the owners of the system to get things changed upstream." Works for processes as well as the software environment

Maths, Madness and the Manhattan Project: the Eccentric Lives of Steinhaus, Banach and Ulam | Article | Culture.pl

"They would lay the basis for new findings on the marble tabletops of the ambient Scottish café in pre-war Lviv. There professors, associate professors and people with doctorates from the Lviv Technical University and the Jan Kazimierz University would meet over coffee and cognac to discuss maths for hours on end. The results of these gatherings were twofold. They gave rise to many anecdotes and a thick, lined notebook with 193 equations (The Scottish Book), some of which have yet to be resolved. These meetings lay the foundation for the Lviv School of Mathematics – the most important Polish contribution to world science, entangled in the whirlwind of history that was World War II. Unfortunately, little is known of the school except for the great talent of its members. Culture.pl traces their footsteps." Via HN

The Cajun Democrat who could shake up the 2020 field - POLITICO

>> "Poverty is a form of violence, I believe. So is not having access to health care, or not having a real job,” Landrieu writes. “We all come to the table of democracy in the United States as equals. That's what makes America great.” <<

CIA Cybersecurity Guru Dan Geer Doesnt Use a Cell Phone | WIRED

"If there’s anything that I’ve come to be relatively adamant about is that, as humans, we have repeatedly demonstrated that we can quite clearly build things more complex than we can then manage, our friends in finance and flash crashes being a fine example of that."

Level 3 technician's misstep causes largest outage ever reported | FierceTelecom

>> "The technician left empty a field that would normally contain a target telephone number. The network management software interpreted the empty field as a 'wildcard,' meaning that the software understood the blank field as an instruction to block all calls, instead of as a null entry. This caused the switch to block calls from every number in Level 3’s non-native telephone number database.”" << Via HN, priceless

‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower | News | The Guardian

"Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles." Good heavens

Maths Revision Tips

pretty good ones

Can we fix it? The repair cafes waging war on throwaway culture | World news | The Guardian

>> “It’s a matter of confidence. It’s not magic. Someone put it together, someone can take it apart, you only need a Phillips screwdriver and some knowledge,” says Katsimbas as he shows Daniel Turner how to open up his laptop so he can clean out the fluff and dust that is causing the machine to overheat. <<

This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town - POLITICO Magazine

"The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale." 600Mw for large scale aluminium smelter so wondering total consumption

[Press Release] Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System originating in Serbia/Kosovo: Political solution urgently needed in addition to technical

49.996Hz as opposed to 50.000Hz means 113Gwh of power 'missing' (i.e. wholesale bills charged at 50Hz rate but only 49.999/50.000 being supplied)

‘It’s almost nasty’: Dems seek crackdown on sleeping in the Capitol - POLITICO

>> “I get up very early in the morning. I work out. I work until about 11:30 at night. I go to bed. And I do the same thing the next day,” Ryan said in 2015 when asked whether he would continue sleeping in his office after becoming speaker. “It actually makes me more efficient. I can actually get more work done by sleeping on a cot in my office.” << Euwww. Many years ago I remember a cat and mouse game between campus security and a sessionally paid tutor who was sleeping in the first aid room and using the chemistry lab shower. We found him a cheap room before matters came to a head.

Einstein’s Boyhood Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem | The New Yorker

step 3 is the biggy

Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research | Science | AAAS

"Brown, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, sent an email about the study to James Heathers, a postdoc in behavioral science at Northeastern University in Boston whom he had met a few years earlier. The description alone triggered a laughing spell in Heathers—not an uncommon reaction to science he finds risible." Sounds like a measured reaction to most of the stuff I get sent to read in emails...

President Donald Trump wants tariffs on steel and aluminium - World trade

"Americans employed in steel-consuming sectors far outnumber those employed directly in steel and aluminium industries (see chart). Higher prices of inputs for products such as cars, air-conditioning units, refrigerators and beer cans will be passed on to consumers. If they respond by buying less, jobs will be lost. Studies have found that George W. Bush’s tariffs on steel in 2002 destroyed more American jobs than they saved. If the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) continues in something like its current form, manufacturers could even avoid the new tariffs by shifting production to Canada or Mexico, from where they can export their final goods to America tariff-free."

U.S. heads toward dangerous waters with steel and aluminum duties - iPolitics

"Others in the business community as well as the Pentagon have objected to broad brush duties being based on national security. Clearly, reducing imports of primary aluminum will hurt aluminum processors in the U.S. and raise concerns with the military as well as in the defence, aircraft and aerospace industries." Canadian steel group geezer

Demoralized West Wing stokes fears over Trump’s capacity to handle a crisis - POLITICO

>> “Most presidents know when to recalibrate, to redirect, to hit a reset button” on their policies or their own leadership style, said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served at senior levels of both the Clinton and Obama White Houses. “So in the face of incompetence and total chaos you have a president who has no self-awareness of how bad it is.” <<

Stock market volatility wiped out investors betting against the VIX. That should make you nervous. - Vox

“It worked well for a long time until it didn’t, which is generally what happens in markets,” Ouch. Capitalist tells truth.

Why It’s so Hard to Actually Work in Shared Offices · The Walrus

"You, precarious worker who will never have a pension, are not a simple cog in a machine. You are an artist, the CEO of your own company, and the face of a dynamic personal brand. Your work is not merely labour, for which you deserve decent pay and security, but an extension of your personality. You’re doing what you love and paying $500 per month for the desk from which to do it." There was a lot to be said for 'from the cradle to the grave' back in the 1960s I think

What to Do When Laptops and Silence Take Over Your Cafe? - The New York Times

>> “Everybody was at a laptop wearing headphones,” Mr. Glanville said. He strode inside, unplugged the device that provided free Wi-Fi and tossed it into a bin in his office. << Which is fine but we have a country where people will sit in silence and ignore each other with or without wifi and devices!

The Limits of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning | WIRED

"According to skeptics like Marcus, deep learning is greedy, brittle, opaque, and shallow. The systems are greedy because they demand huge sets of training data. Brittle because when a neural net is given a “transfer test”—confronted with scenarios that differ from the examples used in training—it cannot contextualize the situation and frequently breaks. They are opaque because, unlike traditional programs with their formal, debuggable code, the parameters of neural networks can only be interpreted in terms of their weights within a mathematical geography. Consequently, they are black boxes, whose outputs cannot be explained, raising doubts about their reliability and biases. Finally, they are shallow because they are programmed with little innate knowledge and possess no common sense about the world or human psychology."

Facebook’s Desperate Smoke Screen - Study Hacks - Cal Newport

"Facebook’s revenue, for example, is almost entirely a function of the number of minutes the average user spends per week engaging with the service. Reducing this by even 5 to 10% — by tamping down or eliminating some of Facebook’s most addictive features — would have a disastrous impact on the quarterly earnings of this $500 billion company." I'm surprised the revenue function is that fine-grained given the gibberish Ruth sees in her feed.

74: Conventions - This American Life

"John Perry Barlow Elegance of design. And it attracted the strangest kind of hybrid, which was sort of like UNIX weenies by Armani , combination."

Why Paper Jams Persist | The New Yorker

"Bruce Thompson, the computer modeller who sat at the head of the table, had spent days creating a simulation of the jam. “We’re dealing with a highly nonlinear entity moving at a very high speed,” he said." I get to share 'flower arrangements' on a regular basis

The British Election Study claims there was no “youthquake” last June. It’s wrong | Prospect Magazine

The dangers of a small sample size

The Secret Sci-Fi Life of Alice B. Sheldon : NPR

"At last I have what every child wants, a real secret life. Not an official secret, not a Q-clearance polygraph-enforced bite-the-capsule-when-they-get-you secret, nobody else's damn secret but MINE."

If you watch closely enough, everything is a speaker

"Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning anything that vibrates into a speaker."

'An agent of chaos, fuelled by fire': stars' memories of Mark E Smith | Music | The Guardian

“People don’t have their own smell any more. Everyone bathes too much.”

Tasty Colours: A Very Problematic Bean

Fasola Jas from local Polish shop soaking now to make soup tomorrow. Off over to baker to get rye bread in the morning.

George Soros: Facebook and Google are a menace to society | Hacker News

“Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes. They deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents. There is a similarity between internet platforms and gambling companies.”

If You Multitask During Meetings, Your Team Will, Too – Dave Paola

"But then, I see your eyes drawn to your email inbox. During the meeting. While someone else is saying something. Electronically, someone else has asked for your attention, and you’ve given it to them. I’m not the only one who saw this."

‘Never get high on your own supply’ – why social media bosses don’t use social media | Media | The Guardian

hoho

The Transistor, Part 1: Groping in the Dark – Creatures of Thought

Looks promising.

Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.” | Hacker News

"The most striking thing here is that Linus has apparently dismissed incompetence as a rational explanation. Yes, he is often brash, but usually he is accusing someone of sheer stupidity. He does not do that here. Linus alleges that we are being lied to - that we don’t know the full story, nor Intel’s motives." This gets worse

Linux-Kernel Archive: Re: [RFC 09/10] x86/enter: Create macros to restrict/unrestrict Indirect Branch Speculation

"So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out." This whole thing is a bit odd.

20 Years of LWN [LWN.net]

"not big and professional like the real press" ;-}

Here’s why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy | Ars Technica

"But the rise of cryptocurrency mining has created an unprecedented global shortage of graphics cards. If you go to your local retailer, you're likely to find bare shelves where the beefier cards used to be. Instead of trading at a discount, used cards routinely sell for well above MSRP on sites like eBay and Craigslist." These things use quite a lot of electricity as well. Proof of work is basically a waste of power.

FOSDEM 2018 - Interview with Michael Meeks<br/>Re-structuring a giant, ancient code-base for new platforms. Making LibreOffice work well everywhere.

"When you look at the cumulative effect of seven years of aggressively paying back a national-debt sized technical debt, we are in an amazingly better place - it makes me cringe mentally to consider working on or even reading the old code; yet still there is plenty more to do." Interesting stuff. BUT the 'old code' (i.e. openoffice) actually runs quite well and has less confusing UI changes...

Unmasking American Legend D.B. Cooper, Who Got Away With Hijacking a Plane -- New York Magazine

"Porteous looked at the envelope. He studied the return address. Morris, Minnesota. He looked at a map. The town was two hours from Fargo, North Dakota. Population: 5,200. He opened the letter, and after peering inside for powders, he read it. It barely made sense. It was a rambling confession of finding the answer to a “famous unsolved caper” that would make a great movie—and one only Ephron could direct, because she had “heart.” She could call this movie Bashful in Seattle—because the main character in the caper lived near Seattle. Skipp thought, Strange, yes; dangerous, no. So he hailed a cab, rode over to Ephron’s building on East 79th, and left the letter with her doorman. Ephron got the letter. She opened it and looked at it and put it down on the kitchen counter. It stayed there for some time. Then it disappeared. “I don’t know what happened to it,” she says."

Jaron Lanier interview: on VR, LSD, and where Silicon Valley went wrong - Vox

90Mb download, 96 minutes of my favourite Windows user speaking about stuff.

Miles Davis is not Mozart: The brains of jazz and classical pianists work differently

Jazz pianists respond to unexpected changes more quickly

Black Death 'spread by humans not rats' | Hacker News

Discussion about a fairly recondite research paper and the issues around popularizing science. One of the authors of the paper is taking part.

How to Turn a Red State Purple (Democrats Not Required) - POLITICO Magazine

"Under Hammond, Alaska also amended its constitution to create the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenue for future generations. In 1982, the state began paying every resident the Permanent Fund Dividend, which is determined by a formula that relies on the fund’s income over the last five years. At its low point, in 1984, the dividend was $331.29 per person, and it peaked in 2015 at $2,072—meaning a family of four could expect a check from the state worth nearly $8,300." We got high house prices and tax breaks for rich people thanks to Maggie.

It’s not just the Brexit border question that divides Ireland. It’s imagination | Matthew O’Toole | Opinion | The Guardian

"As Bradley will discover, Brexit has unsettled one of the most intangible but important features of the fraying Northern Ireland settlement: the ability of its citizens to imagine themselves into different nationalities. This is why the border question is so difficult: it is about psychology as much as the practical mechanics of border controls. How does anyone know what nationality they are? Do they belong to the country to which they pay taxes, or whose football team they support?" Via Slugger

Improving Ourselves to Death | The New Yorker

"Carl Cederström and André Spicer, business-school professors in a field called “organization studies,” set out to do all that and more in their recent book, “Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization Movement” (OR Books), a comically committed exploration of current life-hacking wisdom in areas ranging from athletic and intellectual prowess to spirituality, creativity, wealth, and pleasure." Personally, I think the Danes have this one sowed up.

Legends of the Ancient Web

Radio as social media? Via HN

Things I Wish I'd Known About Bash | Hacker News

Bash stuff

Vintage Verification | Nuclear Futures Laboratory

"We pursue a fundamentally different approach: Our prototype of an inspection system uses vintage hardware built around a 6502 processor. The processor uses 8-micron technology (about 600 times larger than current 14-nanometer technology) and has only about 3500 transistors. Vintage hardware may have a number of important advantages for applications where two parties need to simultaneously establish trust in the hardware used. CPUs designed in the distant past, at a time when their use for sensitive measurements was never envisioned, drastically reduce concerns that the other party implemented backdoors or hidden switches on the hardware level. " Interesting approach - didn't see that one coming

User Interfaces: How Not to Design a Microwave

"Every UI principle I’ve learnt can be derived from the following statement: Good user interface design minimizes the friction between a user and the task they aim to achieve. In other words, well designed software makes it easy to achieve a task." Looks interesting and well written. The trouble starts when you need to provide an interface that supports a wide range of tasks and which supports a range of user knowledge (e.g. beginner to guru).

'Re: Meltdown, aka "Dear Intel, you suck"' - MARC

"Some people should be ashamed of themselves, but they probably purchased options." Got it.

'Meltdown, aka "Dear Intel, you suck"' - MARC

"Personally, I do find it....amusing? that public announcements were moved up after the issue was deduced from development discussions and commits to a different open source OS project. Aren't we all glad that this was under embargo and strongly believe in the future value of embargoes?" A commendable degree of understatement

Clydach Vale walker Trevor Ward turns 104 on birthday weekend - BBC News

>> "I go for a walk every day up to the lake. I'll go to the top of the road and meet my butty [friend] and we'll talk about everything and everyone and then [go] back down," he said. << Here's betting the lake is a couple or six miles up the hill

Why Raspberry Pi isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown - Raspberry Pi

Simple explanation of speculative processing and of instruction caches, and why the Raspberry PI isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown

Holyhead will be one of the biggest losers from Brexit

"There is simply no space in or around the port for the kind of infrastructure that will be required to process the number of lorries and trailers that currently pass through it. A hard border in Holyhead can only yield chaos." Contrast with informal cross-channel arrangements from Normandy local government and Kent/Essex &c. Via Slugger

Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of James Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance

"With his porkpie hat and trenchcoat, the portly Cram bore a passing resemblance to George Smiley, the fictional British spymaster as played by Alec Guinness in the BBC’s production of John le Carré’s classic “Smiley’s People.” There was some professional similarity as well. In le Carré’s novels, Smiley is introduced as a veteran counterintelligence officer called on by his superiors to assess a covert operation gone disastrously wrong. He is drawn into a hunt for a mole in the British intelligence service." I fancy a porkpie hat

python sweetness — The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table...

so here we go again

Vincent's blog

Lumina stuff for OpenBSD

Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings – What's the PONT

>> "Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. Advocate “caution.” Be“reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon." << I really need to make sure I do the *opposite* of these things. Via HN.

Does the White Working Class Really Vote Against Its Own Interests? - POLITICO Magazine

"The vast majority of farmers, black and white, were tenants or sharecroppers, and repressive poll taxes disenfranchised not just black men and women, but also poor white people. Designed by wealthy plantation owners and industrialists, the poll tax was expressly a class measure, meant to preserve the region’s prevailing low-tax, low-wage, low-service economy. It was more ingenious and insidious than many people today realize. In Mississippi and Virginia, it was cumulative for two years; if a tenant farmer or textile worker couldn’t pay in any given year, not only did he miss an election cycle, he had to pay a full two years’ tax to restore his voting rights. In Georgia, the poll tax was cumulative from the time a voter turned 21 years old—meaning, if one missed 10 years, he or she would have to pay a decade’s worth of back taxes before regaining the right to vote. In Texas, the tax was due on February 1, in the winter off-season, when farmers were habitually strapped for cash. It was, as one Southern liberal observed at the time, “like buying a ticket to a show nine months ahead of time, and before you know who’s playing, or really what the thing is all about.”" The franchise

Colin Marshall › Notebook on Cities and Culture

Via OpenCulture.org

Sue Grafton - Wikipedia

"This exercise led to her best-known works, a chronological series of mystery novels. Known as "the alphabet novels," the stories are set in and around the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California. It is based on Santa Barbara, outside of which Grafton maintained a home in the suburb of Montecito. (Grafton chose to use the name Santa Teresa as a tribute to the author Ross Macdonald, who had used it as a fictional name for Santa Barbara in his own novels.)" Shades of Georges Perec - the need for a structure and constraints

American reams: why a ‘paperless world’ still hasn’t happened | News | The Guardian

“If man may now be considered as having reached a high state of civilisation, his gradual development is more directly due to the inventions of paper and printing than to all other factors.” Something to ponder as you shred all the old bills...

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - The Talk

Excelent - quantum computing - via hn

A theoretical physics FAQ

"Most topics are related to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, renormalization, the measurement problem, randomness, and philosophical issues in physics. Since different sections were written at different times (some date back to the last century), there is some overlap in the treatment of topics, and a few are a bit outdated."

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Alastair Meeks and his predictions for 2018

"Jeremy Corbyn is of an age where he might consider that he could hand over to someone younger and spend more time with his manhole covers."

A City Is Not a Computer

"This seems an obvious truth, but we need to say it loud and clear. Urban intelligence is more than information processing." Via 538

Doug Jones’s Alabama win: the inside story of how it happened - Vox

"The key to us having a chance was to detribalize the politics of the state. If Alabama was reacting to the tribal politics of our times, there was no way for us to win. And in a weird way, the allegations created tribalism again. You either believe the charges or you don't believe the charges. Suddenly, we're back into Republicans who don't believe the charges; it's the media out to get Roy Moore. He's able to start tribalizing the race. Trump begins coming in with him. And every time that happened, Roy Moore would open a lead."

Meet Walter Pitts, the Homeless Genius Who Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence

Feeds into Neumann's design for the computer and based on Russell/Whitehead.

James Deagle: OpenBSD 6.2 + CDE

Because it is there! Via HN

The Screenless Office

Good heavens. I was doing this with a teletypewriter in the 70s. It wasn't *great*.

In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt - The New York Times

"In fact, Kazakhstan has become an example of how even a vast and still-developing nation like this Central Asian country can achieve a remarkable public health success. In 1999, only 29 percent of its households were using iodized salt. Now, 94 percent are. Next year, the United Nations is expected to certify it officially free of iodine deficiency disorders." Iodine: cheap and simple chemical

Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters more | Aeon Essays

"We can think of labour that goes into maintenance and repair as the work of the maintainers, those individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things. Brief reflection demonstrates that the vast majority of human labour, from laundry and trash removal to janitorial work and food preparation, is of this type: upkeep. This realisation has significant implications for gender relations in and around technology. Feminist theorists have long argued that obsessions with technological novelty obscures all of the labour, including housework, that women, disproportionately, do to keep life on track. Domestic labour has huge financial ramifications but largely falls outside economic accounting, like Gross Domestic Product."

Derivative Sport: The Journalistic Legacy of David Foster Wallace

One for the train

Is there data on the quality of management decisions?

"One specific lower-level reason “obviously” non-optimal decisions can persist for so long is that there’s a lot of noise in team results. You sometimes see a manager make some radical decisions (not necessarily statistics-driven), followed by some poor results, causing management to fire the manager. There’s so much volatility that you can’t really judge players or managers based on small samples, but this doesn’t stop people from doing so. The combination of volatility and skepticism of radical ideas heavily disincentivizes going against conventional wisdom." The inverse effect springs to mind as well: new teaching idea gets 'suggested' and credited with any increase in pass rate.

#Brexit: the DUP and the Risks of Not Passing Go | Slugger O'Toole

"The DUP torpedoed today’s sensible UK-EU compromise deal on the border because, according to an Arlene Foster tweet, the party could not accept any deal which separates Northern Ireland politically from the rest of the UK. This will come as a great surprise to campaigners for marriage equality, liberalisation of the abortion laws, and comprehensive education"

Algorithmic Bias? An Empirical Study into Apparent Gender-Based Discrimination in the Display of STEM Career Ads by Anja Lambrecht, Catherine Tucker :: SSRN

"We explore data from a field test of how an algorithm delivered ads promoting job opportunities in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. This ad was explicitly intended to be gender-neutral in its delivery. Empirically, however, fewer women saw the ad than men. This happened because younger women are a prized demographic and are more expensive to show ads to. An algorithm which simply optimizes cost-effective ad delivery will deliver ads that were intended to be gender-neutral in an apparently discriminatory way, due to crowding out. We show that this empirical regularity extends to other major digital platforms." Downsides... via The Register

After 37 years, Voyager has fired up its trajectory thrusters | Hacker News

"I’m currently travelling at about 180mph on board a high-speed train in Japan. I flew here on a jet which is something like 20% more efficient than the equivalent from a few years ago. Using the ubiquitous LTE network, I can make a real-time HD video call to my family back in the UK, using my palm-sized, battery-powered computer. I used the same device earlier to do some research about cities as we passed through them, and also to check the CCTV system at home. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve used a similar technology stack to locate my position to meter-level accuracy, to read and translate foreign language text from images in real time, and to record hours of 4K video." The upside

Why I leave hidden messages in High Street clothes - BBC News

>> "What it taught me about campaigning was that to 'win' a campaign you didn't have to protest publicly like a performance, you don't always need petitions signed," she says. "It made me see campaigning as much broader and creative than we often think." << Protest, civil disobedience and direct action. The latter can be quieter and often more constructive.

The legacies of 1917 – Eurozine

"You could have had, as some in the Bolshevik Party, in the Left-Menshevik wings, were thinking, a combination of local soviet-style structures with a national parliament."

Conservatives probably can’t be persuaded on climate change. So now what? - Vox

""The conventional wisdom gets the causal arrow backwards," says Mullin. People don’t develop political and policy opinions based on an assessment of climate science. They assess climate science based on preexisting political and policy opinions. That’s why trying to change minds with science-based arguments is so rarely effective.""

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs - David Graeber

"...technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it."

On slight hinting, proper text rendering, stem darkening and LCD filters

More about font rendering

[solved] Xorg-fonts appearance - Ask Void - Void Linux Forum

More on using default freetype

How to get good font rendering in Void Linux | Bruno Miguel

Just using stock freetype > 2.8 and the supplied config files. May try it on Slackie current

What a Physicist Sees When She Looks at a Fancy Gown - Racked

"People rarely think about the engineering of gala gowns, or of fashion at all. This is part of a larger problem of treating traditionally feminine interests as non-science-related. Baking is practical chemistry, knitting is manual programming, makeup is about crafting optical illusions, and adjusting pattern sizes relies on algebra."

Interview with David Graeber - The White ReviewThe White Review

"[My father] lived in Barcelona at a time it was run on anarchist principles and he would always tell me these fun stories about it. He always said Barcelona was one of the greatest experiments in world history, because what we discovered there was that white-collar workers don’t actually do anything. In Barcelona their idea of having a revolution was to get rid of all the managers and just carry on without them. And nothing really changed."

GCSE: Pass rate dips as students face tougher exams - BBC News

"But the exams regulator Ofqual says a pass or grade 4 in maths would have been achieved in the upper tier paper with just 18% of the overall marks." Hummmm - won't that encourage schools to enter students for Higher and coach them on the easy bits? This was one of the things Gove did the reforms to avoid.

Tokyo, urban design and mental health - Journal of Urban Design and Mental Health - Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health

"Shinrin yoku, is a term developed by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries in 1982 to describe a therapeutic health practice that aims to boost immunity, reduce stress, and promote wellbeing. Shinrin yoku is often called ‘forest bathing’ but more literally means ‘taking in the forest atmosphere’ – the opportunity for city dwellers to spend leisurely time in the forest without any distractions. Japanese research has found associations between this nature immersion and improvements in physiological and psychological indicators of stress, mood hostility, fatigue, confusion and vitality (Park et al, 2010)."

Constant Anxiety Won't Save the World - The Atlantic

>> "I would have thought that constant vigilance wouldn’t really be possible. But Scott Woodruff, the director of the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive treatment program at the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy, told me I’d be surprised. “The anxious mind and the worried mind can manage to bring back topics over and over again,” he says. “It is possible that people can really spend quite an amount of time every day worrying about world events.”" << Talking to people around you is the answer. We seem to 'anchor' to the people we interact with most. So make most interactions local.

Is Garry Kasparov Too Old To Dominate Chess Again? | FiveThirtyEight

"The result is shaped like a large floating apostrophe of mortality. After a steep increase in players’ early years (youth is wasted on the young), the estimated trend in ratings peaks just after age 38, before beginning a long, slow, irreversible and depressing decline (kinda like real life)." R^2 on that dust cloud can't be that high!

The Great American Bubble Machine - Rolling Stone

"The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Matt Taibbi - almost but not quite the new HST

“It’s just an embarrassing spectacle at this point”: Matt Taibbi on Trump’s America - Vox

"I know this will sound weird, but I actually thought Trump’s victory was a kind of triumph of American democracy. I mean, I’m completely opposed to everything that Trump believes in. But the notion that somebody completely outside the American political system, who had virtually no institutional support from either of the two parties, could actually win the presidency is something that I wouldn't have believed eight years ago. So I took his election as a sign that our democracy was functioning correctly." Book ordered. I still wish HST was still around

Military to Trump: we won’t ban transgender service members just because you tweeted about it - Vox

“We don’t have guidance. We have a tweet. We don’t execute policy based on a tweet.” Capt. Jeff Davis, DoD [spokesman] Nice to see candid responses

For Obamacare enrollees, Obamacare repeal is already real - Vox

>> “I don’t have intensive needs — I’m 39, I’m not planning to get pregnant — but that is a thing that could happen,” she says. “Still, I feel like I need coverage. I’ve watched people go through terrible things when they didn’t have insurance. I’m just risk-averse and don’t want to go without coverage.” << For all the NHS's faults, I hope we keep the safety net. I can't imagine the effect of having to worry about healthcare when starting up a small business given the impact of small businesses on most economies

10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives

"His mind was a heat-seeking missile targeting problems. What got him up in the morning was dissecting how things worked, not digressions into creativity and productivity."

BBC - Future - How Tibetans survive life on the ‘roof of the world’

"Our differences are slight and are held at the surface. Under the skin, deep in our DNA, we are nearly identical. From this sea of similarity, important genetic changes between populations can be seen as small but steep islands breaking the surface of the genome. But after looking more closely at the EPAS1 gene from the Tibetan genomes, Nielsen not only found it was a steep change, but it was a unique one too. After searching through the aptly named 1,000 Genomes Project, he couldn’t find anything quite like it elsewhere. “The DNA sequence that we saw in Tibetans was simply too different,” Nielsen says." Remarkable. Via HN from Medium

Don’t Compare Trump to Nixon. It’s Unfair to Nixon. - POLITICO Magazine

"Are we right to analogize the tarnished ending of the two-term Nixon presidency—with its historic accomplishments, as well as sordid tapes and long list of criminal convictions—with a chaos-engulfed Trump presidency that has not even been able to staff up, has no significant legislative wins to its name and is already, at just six months in as of this week, the most unpopular in seven decades?" Harsh... but accurate (Nixon was re-elected in a landslide)

[CentOS] Thanks to every one

"It is crucial for long running calculations that you have a stable OS - you have never seen wrath like a computational scientist whose 200 day calculation has just failed because you needed to reboot the node it was running on." In my day we wrote a tape, but then again the program was on punched cards.

Reality Check: Is public sector pay higher than private sector? - BBC News

"The point about qualifications is important, because jobs in the public sector tend to require higher qualifications. Also, there has been a tendency for public sector bodies to outsource lower-paid functions such as cleaning and catering to contractors, which moves them from the public to the private sector. Doing so on a large scale would increase average earnings in the public sector."

The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee’s early programming career | Cultural Compass

"How do you read code? What is the “text” of a program—the machine code, the high-level programming, or the output it generates? How do you preserve an electronic file and how should the scholar access it?"

Unhappy meals

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Eat the Seasons

Nice idea but is the production volume there?

Gambiarra: repair culture | efeefe

"Of course, a repair culture isn't about repairing things only. We could try to find a better way to define a culture of reuse, repair and re-purposing. But proposing repair - the physical act of mending things in order to extend their lifetime or else turning them into something else of use - as a core value sounds good enough for a current need: criticizing the path apparently taken by maker culture that is addicted to novelty, becoming consequently toxic, unsustainable, superficial and alienating." Or repairing stuff could just be useful :-)

How to See What the Internet Knows About You (And How to Stop It) - The New York Times

>> "The relentlessly unyielding (but highly profitable) personalization of the products and services we use is getting deeper and creepier than ever. This type of data is incredibly valuable, we’re producing a ton of it every day, and it’s all being used to turn us into products. As one Facebook developer famously said: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”" <<

The language of programming

"I won’t lie, this looks outrageous even to me. But not to my Dad, who is a civil engineer and doesn’t speak a word of English. He is dangerously fluent in Excel’s formulas, which he uses extensively in those hundred-sheet documents bristling with filters, conditionals, and pivot tables. Then the roads and bridges are getting built based on those calculations. He doesn’t know what IF means, but he uses ЕСЛИ all the time. What’s amazing is that if he emailed you one of his spreadsheets and you happened to open it in your “real deal” MS Excel, every formula would appear in English, but work just as he intended." Three cheers for the spreadsheet - one of the longest lasting end-user programming metaphors we have

10 charts that show the effect of tuition fees - BBC News

"But the biggest change, often overlooked, has been the collapse in part-time students. These were often adults with other responsibilities who were more sensitive to increased costs." 350k to 150k in status (remember there is a 6 year lead when taking a degree part time)

How Nature Solves Problems Through Computation | Quanta Magazine

>> "Like flocking or schooling, the policing behavior arises from individual interactions to produce a macroscopic effect on the entire ensemble. But it is subtler, perhaps harder to visualize and measure. Or, as Flack says of macaque society and many of the other systems she studies, “their metric space is a social coordinate space. It’s not Euclidean.”" <<

A big international meeting is exposing a Trump-sized rift between the US and its allies - Vox

"In a certain sense, Trump — who campaigned as a historically talented dealmaker — has ironically been the anti-deal president. It’s not just that he hasn’t struck a single major agreements with a foreign power; it’s that he has called into question many previous ones — leading American allies to wonder just how much they can trust America’s commitment to the entire international order."

Blake Watson | Why I left Facebook

One for the teenies

Monte Carlo theory, methods and examples

Lodsa Reading

Trump is preparing to meet Putin this week by reading tweet-length memos - Vox

"...Trump is preparing for his biggest foreign meeting with the leader of a country that actively tried to undermine America’s democratic process, a leader who sees the US as his personal enemy, by reading tweet-length talking points." What could possibly go wrong?

A near-disaster at a federal nuclear weapons laboratory takes a hidden toll on America’s arsenal | Science | AAAS

"In a hi-tech testing and manufacturing building pivotal to sustaining America’s nuclear arsenal, [technicians] gathered eight rods painstakingly crafted out of plutonium, and positioned them side-by-side on a table to photograph how nice they looked." ... "The technicians’ improvised photo-op, an internal Energy Department report concluded later, revealed the staff had become “de-sensitized” to the risk of a serious accident" Potential Darwin Award winners! De-sensitisation is a theme with people who get lucky most of the time until they don't.

www.trumptwitterarchive.com

json data feed for all of #realdonaldtrump's ruminations. For the ages.

The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world | Nature Ecology & Evolution

"While the cat’s worldwide conquest began during the Neolithic period in the Near East, its dispersal gained momentum during the Classical period, when the Egyptian cat successfully spread throughout the Old World. The expansion patterns and ranges suggest dispersal along human maritime and terrestrial routes of trade and connectivity." Your moggie is in a direct line from the Pharos' court. Quite an amazing thought.

The USS Fitzgerald Is At Fault. This Is Why. – gCaptain

"This is important because basic communication problems have been found to be a primary cause in nearly every multi-vessel incident gCaptain has reported on in the last ten years." Voice carries non-verbal information

Who Americans spend their time with

Hours per day on vertical axis, age on horizontal axis. Snapshot, not longitudinal, but makes you think

What conservatives know about climate change that liberals don’t - Vox

"I think the right understands this, and therefore chooses to deny reality. Whereas one of the things we see on the liberal side is, instead of denying the science, they deny the implications of the science." I always get worried when economists talk about the need for *growth*. We have to stop growing somehow and reach steady state.

The story behind that Connecticut deli math sign - Home | As It Happens | CBC Radio

>> AH: No, I can give you one example of a mathematical joke. People think the following joke is really funny, that someone is giving a lecture on group theory and they stand up at the board and say "let L be a group".<< excellent

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Alastair Meeks makes his first next general election bet: LAB to win most seats

"The government faces the most demanding peacetime challenge since the first post-war government and does so against a hard deadline with a divided party, a leader with no authority and with no majority in the House of Commons." What could possibly go wrong? Well, something has to happen, and it is not in the interests of the eurozone to have an economy the size of the UK going pear shaped, so we shall see...

Leading universities rated 'bronze' under new ranking system - BBC News

"The lowest score of bronze was awarded to 56 - including the London School of Economics (LSE), Southampton, Liverpool, Goldsmiths and the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas)." Who is kidding whom? Status is a positional good and a degree from a Russel group uni, the LSE or Goldsmith's is likely to be well-regarded.

Trump Doesn’t Want to Be President - POLITICO Magazine

"He’s always loved to lie (I mean, talk) to reporters because he lives for having an attentive audience, and now that he’s president reporters would line up to transcribe his words even if he started reciting a Maytag washer repair manual backward." Jack Shafer is a right of centre journalist but I love these Fourth Estate columns

Portrait: Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker | Watches By SJX

"Kikuno has built only a handful of watches in the seven years since he started, averaging one watch a year. That’s a consequence of his uncompromising adherence to traditional techniques of production."

Jigdo: Downloading Huge ISO Files Made Easy | Unixmen

Try updating the RC4 DVDs tomorrow...

'Re: Current FreeBSD looking to switch to OpenBSD' - MARC

"Even though building it with mandoc(1) only takes a minute on my notebook, i'm not sure it's a great idea to put all that information into a single file." The OpenBSD base system manual comes in at 15 458 pages when compiled into a .pdf file.

5 things Trump did while you weren't looking: Week 2

>> “So much is happening in Washington and yet nothing is happening at all” read one recent piece of commentary. << Noise to signal ratio is quite low

Those who leave home, and those who stay - Vox

UK has the third highest percentage of people who moved last year. Plenty of people seem to be getting on their bike unless this is just housing ladder churn.

Mapping the Shadows of New York City: Every Building, Every Block - The New York Times

>> “In general, zoning regulations show what the city values,” said Luc Wilson, an architect at Kohn Pedersen Fox. “In Shanghai, they care about getting light to the buildings. In New York, they care about protecting light and air in the streets and parks.” England has a Law of Ancient Lights, a common-law doctrine that guarantees a homeowner the right to light if he or she has had access to it for 20 years. << Via HN

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » From loser to leader – and beyond

"Corbyn showed that you can pitch policies from the left and get a hearing; while, crucially, he also demonstrated that you do not have to live in fear of the right wing press. Previous Labour leaders have focus-grouped policies to death, stage-managed their every appearance and carefully measured each word in order to avoid unhelpful coverage in the Mail, the Sun and the Express, but Corbyn just carried on regardless."

How Theresa May lost it – POLITICO

>> “The main difference is her,” one senior campaign official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a week before election day, comparing May’s campaign to Cameron’s two years before. << I think the *main* difference is policies. I think people are tired of austerity that results in no growth and low wage growth, and I think quite a few people are worried about the Brexit process. The other stuff didn't help but it is window dressing at the end of the day,

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Ideas, events and people. What the Conservatives need to do next

"The Conservatives are repeating their mistakes from the election campaign. They spent the entire campaign based on personality politics, presenting Theresa May as Prime Ministerial and attacking Jeremy Corbyn for his past unsavoury connections, with only terrorist attacks intruding to draw them up to the level of discussing events. Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn spent the campaign discussing his ideas." And it appears a new generation quite like some of those ideas.

The GOP That Failed - POLITICO Magazine

"But one often overlooked reason—and one for parties to remember if they hope to avoid future Trumps—is that the rules of the GOP greatly benefitted Trump. The party allows winner-take-all primaries by congressional district or statewide— which in many states hugely magnified Trump’s delegate totals. Trump won 32 percent of the South Carolina vote, but all 50 delegates. He won 46 percent of the Florida vote but all 99 delegates. He won 39 percent of the Illinois vote, but 80 percent of the 69 delegates." Wow. So he never had a base at all even in the Republican party. FPTP applied to candidate selection and aggregation at each stage.

What Really Happened with Vista – Hacker Noon

"Unfortunately, when you are building a complex system and running without clear constraints and delivery deadlines, the right mental image for a team that is generating lots of code is not one that is building a railroad and is now 90% across the country. A better image is one where you have dug an incredibly deep hole that you now have to figure out how to climb out of and fill back in." Insight into Vista development.

Live departure board for Duddeston - Accessible UK Train Timetables

Vital Link

Boehner: Trump has been a 'complete disaster' - POLITICO

>> “I wake up every day, drink my morning coffee and say hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,” Boehner said. “I don’t want to be president. I drink red wine. I smoke cigarettes. I golf. I cut my own grass. I iron my own clothes. And I’m not willing to give all that up to be president.” << Sounds sensible to me (apart from the smoke cigarettes bit which is surprising). Hitchhikers Guide scenario - those who *want* to be President should be prevented from being President. Small hut on planet with rain (and cats to feed).

Theresa May’s toughest (televised) moment yet – POLITICO

"Corbyn, a vegetarian north London peace activist who accidentally became the leader of the opposition, doesn’t strike the public as an opportunist who will say and do anything to get into Number 10. Indeed, if that was the case, he might stand a better chance." Hilarious - echos of George Orwell and his Sandal wearing vegetarians. One wonders if this might be a good election to actually lose (but with a vote share higher than Blair's and Milliband's)

Internet Atlas maps the physical internet to enhance security

"Professor of Computer Sciences Paul Barford, Ph.D. candidate Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan and colleagues have developed Internet Atlas, the first detailed map of the internet’s structure worldwide." The Cloud = Other people's computers, fibre optic cables, line amplifiers and generators.

How to make the perfect bagels | Life and style | The Guardian

"Bagels need boiling – Reinhart writes that a "number of bagel companies now skip the boiling (really, more like poaching) and use steam-injected ovens, but this produces a kind of a hybrid bagel/French-bread texture". Boiling sets the crust, so it will remain hard and chewy, but too long a boiling time (2-3 minutes on each side from Joseph, but 1-2 minutes from Roden) will make the crust too hard, and stop the inside from expanding as it should." Next challenge. Visit to Brick Lane Beigel Shop on soon as well.

We overanalyze Trump. He is what he appears to be. - Vox

"But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there’s no there there? What if our attempts to explain Trump have failed not because we haven’t hit on the right one, but because we are, theory-of-mind-wise, overinterpreting the text?" So impulsive 70 year old with no long term plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Rejection Letter - Charlie's Diary

"This is a really serious case of stable doors being bolted a week too late; the UK historically prioritized offensive internet operations far above defense and resilience, and we're paying the price." CESG now part of National Cyber Security Centre

Trump is dangerous. But he's not Nixon — yet - Vox

"I saw in Trump's tweeting and in his statements the peculiarity that I had heard on the Nixon tapes of a man who, though by all standards has succeeded in the game of life, comes to the most powerful position in the world thinking he's a victim." Timothy Natfali, ex-director of the Nixon presidential library

Lost Generation: The Relay Computers – Creatures of Thought

"He believed he could greatly improve the efficiency of Telegrafverket’s operations by building an automatic switching system entirely of relays: a matrix of relays sitting at each intersection in a lattice of metal bars which connected to the phone lines. It would be faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain than the sliding and rotating contacts then used."

Behind Comey’s firing: An enraged Trump, fuming about Russia - POLITICO

"Instead, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told him he was making a big mistake — and Trump seemed "taken aback," according to a person familiar with the call. "

Former presidents walk fine line in Trump’s America - POLITICO

>> “He doesn’t know much,” Clinton said in late December. “One thing he does know is how to get angry white men to vote for him.” << Seems to be general these days. Chill everyone

Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe

"It's all in the crust. My dough is just water, salt, flour and yeast. I use no dough conditioners, sugars, oils, malts, corn meal, flavorings or anything else. These violate the "Vera Pizza Napoletana" rules and I doubt that Patsy's or any great brick oven place uses these things. I've only recently begun to measure the actual "baker's percents" of the ingredients. Use this awesome spreadsheet to help you. The sheet allows you to track your experiments. Here's a basic set of ratios. The truth is that a lot of these recipes look the same and that you can vary these ingredients by several percentage points and it's not going to make a huge difference. You really have to learn the technique, which I'm going to explain in as much detail as I can, and then go by feel. Really, I just measure the water and salt and the rest is pretty flexible. The amount of flour is really, "add until it feels right." The amount of Sourdough starter can range from 3% to 20% and not affect the end product all that much."

The Physicist Who Sees Crime Networks – Backchannel

"Mizuno was surprised to find that companies behave rather like people. Like the urban myth of there being six degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and any other actor, Mizuno found that 80% of the world’s firms could be connected to any other business via six customers or suppliers. For example, Elpitiya Plantations, a producer of fine teas in Sri Lanka, is linked to financial behemoth Western Union by hopping from a hotel chain to a fertilizer company to food giant Nestlé to bargain US retailer Dollar General." networks and algorithms

Baking SOS: How to solve 10 common bread problems by Luis Troyano | BBC Good Food

"If you want a really great crust, try making your bread in a casserole pot with the lid on. That creates an airtight environment. Take your biggest casserole pot, get it hot in the oven, then put your shaped dough in there. It can be quite tricky to get in there, so I shape my dough on a loose bottomed tart tin lined with paper then lower it into the pot using string. Bake it in the pot for about 35-40 minutes and you’ll end up with as close to a bakery loaf as you can achieve at home." Try this one! Sourdough could have been over-proved

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked | Technology | The Guardian

Is using an analytics company a conspiracy? Need to think this one through. People have always used all resources when campaigning.

Lessons in Bread Baking: Oops! I forgot the salt - Bread Experience

"Salt serves a number of purposes in bread. It stabilizes the gluten structure which creates a better dough and adds flavor. It also slows down the fermentation process by dehydrating the yeast and bacteria. Technically, salt is an optional ingredient; however, if you’re going to omit it, you should use cold temperatures to slow down the fermentation process or reduce the rising times." Forgot the salt on my sourdough so cut it in and kneeded a bit more. See what happens when it bakes

Review: Brexit, by Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whiteley | THE Books

"According to the BBC, the ratio of Leave to Remain campaign spending was £16.4 million pounds to £15.1 million. That is a ratio of 52:48, almost identical to the ratio of the votes cast, but if the authors of this book are aware of this, they do not say."

Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms - The New York Times

"...He may have been thinking about the case of a Wisconsin man, Eric L. Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison based in part on a private company’s proprietary software. Mr. Loomis says his right to due process was violated by a judge’s consideration of a report generated by the software’s secret algorithm, one Mr. Loomis was unable to inspect or challenge." Algorithms that make decisions should be available for inspection. Via Techmeme.

Microsoft's Tuesday event: what to expect from its Chromebook response - The Verge

"Recently, Microsoft started hiding its touch-friendly mobile versions of Office in the Windows Store. While mobile devices can still search for them, if you’re a tablet or regular PC user then they’ve simply vanished from the Windows Store search. These apps are Universal Windows apps, and were supposed to be the future of Office and a demonstration of how powerful Microsoft’s Windows 10 apps could be." Taken a little out of context, via techmeme. Article about modified Windows 10 and cheap clients as competitor to Chromebooks in US.

Major apps abandoning Apple Watch, including Google Maps, Amazon & eBay [u]

"In the last few weeks, the latest update for Google Maps on iOS ditched support for the Apple Watch. Its removal was not mentioned in the release notes, and Google has not indicated whether support for watchOS will be reinstated."

Interview with Byron Westbrook | RHYTHMPLEX

"I am largely dealing with positioning and size of sounds as dynamic elements. If only one speaker is sounding from the center of the room, that can appear to be lower in dynamic scale, whereas if it shifts from that point to two extremes of the room, appearing to expand, that in turn expands that sound to a dominant position of scale and intensity. I do a lot of this shifting of sounds, but it happens very slowly, and (hopefully) imperceptibly enough that it should communicate more of a feel than the thought “the sound just went from mono to stereo” or whatnot. Another technique is to use two speakers playing the same sound slightly out of pitch or out of phase to position it in a place other than where the speakers are positioned. Height is another factor a well. I have these small speakers that I built which can be easily positioned on small ledges, and at every performance, they end up being configured differently. It’s also worth noting that I don’t use matched speakers/enclosures and different ones emphasize different frequencies. In general though, thinking about dynamic of sound in a room in terms of an x/y/z axis really opens up compositional/improvisational possibilities." Infinte Sustain geezer on methodology

My coffeehouse nightmare.

"There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. There's an even more elegant version of that rule: Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close." Hipster arithmetic

VS Ramachandran: The Sherlock Holmes of Neuroscience  

"Poverty forces you to be "ingenious" and resourceful early on in your career plus the history of science tells us the importance of simplicity. The minute you start using fancy technology, there are so many steps from the raw data to the conclusion that there is plenty of scope for unintended massaging of the data. Methodology is important but your research should be concept driven – not methodology driven. Lastly, using sophisticated techniques (especially if computers are involved) lulls you into a false sense of thinking you have done something “scientific". The use of hi-tech is – to quote Peter Medawar – seen, unfortunately, as a sign of intellectual manhood."

If Chinese Were Phonetic - The New Yorker

"With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper. With Chinese characters, you have to learn three thousand. And writing is even more difficult than reading; when you can’t use pronunciation as an aid to spelling, you have to rely on pure memorization. The cognitive demands are so great that even highly educated Chinese speakers regularly forget how to write characters they haven’t used recently." But then on the upside, reading is (I gather) independent of the spoken language. Handy in a huge polyglot country. Via HN

Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, rather than Phone and convergence | Ubuntu Insights

"I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS." Good heavens. I've just checked the date on the post really carefully, and checked that the sky is not actually falling.

The Real Story of Reagan’s 11th Commandment - POLITICO Magazine

"Fast forward to 2017. The Republicans have become the party of dysfunction. They inherited the Southern conservatives who abandoned the Democrats, and are now as deeply split as the Democrats ever were—even as they hold the presidency, the Congress, and a majority of the nation’s state governments."

Why Japan's Rail Workers Can't Stop Pointing at Things - Atlas Obscura

"Train conductors, drivers and station staff play an important role in the safe and efficient operation of the lines; a key aspect of which is the variety of physical gestures and vocal calls that they perform while undertaking their duties. While these might strike visitors as silly, the movements and shouts are a Japanese-innovated industrial safety method known as pointing-and-calling; a system that reduces workplace errors by up to 85 percent." Pointing and calling for maths?

The art of the denial - Vox

"About 100 people were slotted to come to the conference from Africa — from filmmakers to government officials, from Guinea to Ethiopia to South Africa. But all of their visas to come to the US for business travel were rejected. Every. Single. One." So the centre of gravity of the 'development' industry moves out of the US. The UK needs international contacts at present, and the UK civil service has a lot of experience with scrutiny of visa applications...

Democrats aim to take out Cruz in 2018 - POLITICO

"The affable O’Rourke cuts a unique profile in the House. He recently spent two days in a car with Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) driving from Texas to D.C. after a snowstorm. The two livestreamed the entire ride and took questions from constituents along the way." Sounds like a way to reach younger voters. Transcript of some of the questions could be fun

The failure of the Republican health care bill reveals a party unready to govern - Vox

"This is a party that has forgotten how to do the slow, arduous work of governing. Perhaps it’s worse than that. This is a party, in many ways, that has built its majority upon a contempt for the compromises, quarter-loaves, and tough trade-offs that governing entails."

IBM is ending its decades-old remote work policy — Quartz

"At IBM, which has embraced remote work for decades, a relatively large proportion of employees work outside of central hubs. As early as the 1980s, the company had installed “remote terminals” in several employees’ homes. And by 2009, when remote work was still, for most, a novelty, 40% of IBM’s 386,000 global employees already worked at home (the company noted that it had reduced its office space by 78 million square feet and saved about $100 million in the US annually as a result)." How the mighty have fallen. A company that sells remote working services...

Berlin strikes back against Trump claim that Germany owes ‘vast sums’ to NATO, US – POLITICO

“A sensible security policy is not just buying tanks, driving defense spending to insane heights and escalating the arms race,” he said. “A reasonable policy means crisis-prevention, stabilization of weak states, economic development and the fight against hunger, climate change and water scarcity.” Sigmar Gabriel has the right idea I think. Talking is cheaper.

How to fix Obamacare with this one weird trick - POLITICO

"The under 26 provision has contributed to one of Obamacare’s biggest flaws: Not enough young, healthy people have signed up for coverage in the law's insurance marketplaces, or exchanges." Any insurance based system for paying for health care has to fiddle the premiums some how as we all need high levels of health care eventually (What I call the Kurt Cobain principle). Only way to fund health care is to do it through tax somehow so we all contribute consistently and not at a level that depends on individual risk.

Brian Moriarty | Lectures & Presentations | Who Buried Paul?

"Who Buried Paul? was first presented at the San Jose Convention Center on St. Patrick’s Day 1999, as a featured lecture of the Game Developers Conference." Could this be the first alt-truth exhibit? Via HN

>I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff? I did. A... | Hacker News

"What I saw that most changed my mind? I was expecting a world of nefarious villains, but what I found was nothing but a bunch of weak anit-patterns and emergent behaviours. The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains were oppressing the sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed. Garbage accumulates and nobody bothers to pick it up." Nice analogy. It isn't a conspiracy, just neglect. HN discussion on cyberpunk manifesto.

Review: In ‘Spider Network,’ an Intriguing Tale of Complicity - The New York Times

"At bottom, the Libor scandal was not very complicated at all. Libor was calculated daily based on submissions made by relatively low-level bank employees with modest oversight by the banks, the private association collecting the data and the regulators. The value of banks’ trading positions in derivatives and other Libor-influenced securities could be tremendously affected by even relatively small changes in the financial benchmark. The result was a mad scramble by market participants to influence the submissions in the hope of moving Libor in a direction favorable to their holdings." Just ordered the book. Good example of small decisions taken at low level blowing up through network effects.

Moving Deliveroo from a Monolith to a Distributed System

"Beech is lead engineer at Deliveroo which was founded in 2013. They started with a typical Ruby on Rails monolith using PostgreSQL and Redis for data storage and handled the growth in business by using larger and larger databases. One year ago, they were running about 20 servers on Heroku. Currently, they are running a few hundred servers which is the largest application ever deployed on Heroku, at peek using 1800 cores and 3 TB of memory. They have grown from 10 engineers in 2015, to about 100 in 2017, working on a main codebase of 600,000 significant lines of code." So until recently, all your junk food orders could be searched for and patterns of location found.

Humans weren’t designed to be rational, and we benefit hugely from our mental biases — Quartz

>> " "But even if we were able to live life according to such detailed calculations, doing so would put us at a massive disadvantage. This is because we live in a world of deep uncertainty, under which neat logic simply isn’t a good guide." " << Black Swan 2.0

The New Party of No - The New York Times

>> "In a 2014 Pew survey, 82 percent of people who identified as “consistently liberal” said they liked politicians who were willing to make compromises; just 32 percent of “consistently conservative” respondents agreed." <<

Wherever Trump goes, his gang of aides stays close by - POLITICO

"The large number of senior officials present, at all times, is a major contrast with past administrations — and it speaks to the defensive crouch that has become necessary for top aides in a White House defined by rival factions and power centers." Delegation?

Structure - The New Yorker

"All I had to do was put them in order. What order? An essential part of my office furniture in those years was a standard sheet of plywood—thirty-two square feet—on two sawhorses. I strewed the cards face up on the plywood. The anchored segments would be easy to arrange, but the free-floating ones would make the piece. I didn’t stare at those cards for two weeks, but I kept an eye on them all afternoon." Hipster table!

Laugh all you like, says Oliver Burkeman, index cards are pretty cool | Life and style | The Guardian

"As each thought occurs, he records it. Then, for hours, he rearranges the cards, grouping similar ideas together until a structure begins to emerge, seemingly independent of his will."

Mr. Trash Wheel | Baltimore Waterfront

"Trash comes from people who throw garbage on the ground instead of putting it in a trash can or recycling bin. When it rains, water carries this garbage off streets and into storm drains, which flow unfiltered into neighborhood streams. These streams carry the trash into the Baltimore Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay." Sort of a surface skimmer

kde4 - How do I remove launchers from the KDE panel? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

At least on my KDE4 desktop I can remove a launcher like this: right-click on the right-most side of the panel and select Unlock Widgets in the popup menu right-click again on the right-most side of the panel and select Panel Settings now displayed in the popup-menu move mouse on the desired launcher icon and click on the X in its popup to remove the launcher you can also click and drag it elsewhere if you want to right-click on the right-most side of the panel and select Lock Widgets in the popup menu to prevent accidental panel changes

The Accidental Arrival of the Cubicle – Robin Powered – Medium

"In the 1960’s, the U.S. tax code made one small, but important, change. Businesses could now depreciate their office furniture over seven years — much faster than the 39.5 year rate for physical office walls. Under this system, companies could recover costs much more quickly on furniture. Furniture became considerably cheaper than construction when it came to creating an office." The genesis of the open plan office

Future life expectancy in 35 industrialised countries: projections with a Bayesian model ensemble - The Lancet

"Notable among poor-performing countries is the USA, whose life expectancy at birth is already lower than most other high-income countries, and is projected to fall further behind such that its 2030 life expectancy at birth might be similar to the Czech Republic for men, and Croatia and Mexico for women. The USA has the highest child and maternal mortality, homicide rate, and body-mass index of any high-income country, and was the first of high-income countries to experience a halt or possibly reversal of increase in height in adulthood, which is associated with higher longevity.20, 21, 28, 29, 30 The USA is also the only country in the OECD without universal health coverage, and has the largest share of unmet health-care needs due to financial costs.25 Not only does the USA have high and rising health inequalities, but also life expectancy has stagnated or even declined in some population subgroups.1, 2 Therefore, the poor recent and projected US performance is at least partly due to high and inequitable mortality from chronic diseases and violence, and insufficient and inequitable health care." Watch out for anyone suggesting ideas from the US about healthcare here!

The fallacy of Trump’s “send in the Feds” fix for Chicago - Vox

"Chicago is also far from the most violent city in America. An analysis by the Trace put Chicago’s murder rate at 27.9 per 100,000 residents. Many other cities, particularly in the Midwest and Rust Belt, fared worse, including St. Louis (59.3), Baltimore (51.2), and Detroit (45.2)." Birmingham UK is 5.7 per 100k and is considered bad. Uk average around 2.4 per 100K

Trump’s nominees gripe the White House isn’t protecting them - POLITICO

“We're reaching a point where nominees like Perdue are concerned. Potential ambassadors and judges are wondering how are you going to handle my confirmation? Very few people at that level don’t have skeletons in their closet so you [need to] get confirmations done lickety-split.” Where do these skeletons come from? Is it not possible to have a modest and effective career and a stable home life in the US any more?

Talk of tech innovation is bullsh*t. Shut up and get the work done – says Linus Torvalds • The Register

>> "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that. It's meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." << >> "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." << Torvalds nails it again. Just do stuff. Details matter.

WATERGATE FIGURE ANTHONY ULASEWICZ DIES - The Washington Post

"Mr. Ulasewicz later lived in Upstate New York, working on his memoirs and at one point tending chickens named Dean, Haldeman and Ehrlichman." Excellent. His book has been ordered.

I trained myself to be less busy — and it dramatically improved my life - Vox

"I started with a simple value: being outside. I am a regular exerciser, but I was losing touch with being outside and moving my body through space. I began walking more, that’s all. It was not a hard change to make — I just park a little farther from work and hoof it a bit more, or I go for a nice stroll during lunch. It would not be an overstatement to say that an additional 40 minutes a day of walking just two or three times a week has changed me in a profound way. Walking provides time to think, to be energized by nature, and to feel less frenzied. Quite dramatically, I am much less of a robot and much more of a human being." This works for me; a day when I am not out of the house for a few hours feels somehow wrong.

Prospects for the American press under Trump, part two - PressThink

"This is a crisis with many overlapping and deep-seated causes, not just a problem but what scholars call a wicked problem— a mess. You don’t “solve” messes, you approach them with humility and respect for their beastliness. Trying things you know won’t “fix” it can teach you more about the problem’s wickedness. That’s progress. Realizing that no one is an expert in the problem helps, because it means that good ideas can come from anywhere." Wicked problems. Is that a way of looking at the political process by which different forces resolve to define an approach or strategy?

Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again - POLITICO Magazine

"If Trump’s idea of a news conference is to spank the press, if his lieutenants believe the press needs shutting down, if his chief of staff wants to speculate about moving the White House press scrum off the premises, perhaps reporters ought to take the hint and prepare to cover his administration on their own terms. Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting, the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows conflict, where the fog prevents the collection of reliable information directly from the combatants, where the assignment is a matter of life or death." I like Jack Shaffer. Still miss HST and what he would make of this.

One Thing – Rands in Repose

"The perceived velocity achieved by being busy is a lie. Velocity is a vector. It is a combination of speed and a given direction provided by strategy. The rapid completion of small tasks might give you speed, but it is a well-defined direction that will give you efficiency, value, and impact. Who cares how quickly you are getting work done if it’s not the right work?" More marking and feedback. Less rootling around for The Perfect Handout.

Paris Review - Robert Caro, The Art of Biography No. 5

"And I had had a similar flash about Lyndon Johnson. It was the Senate, it wasn’t the presidency. He made the Senate work. For a century before him, the Senate was the same dysfunctional mess it is today. He’s majority leader for six years, the Senate works, it creates its own bills. He leaves, and the day he leaves it goes back to the way it was. And it’s stayed that way until this day. Only he, in the modern era, could make the Senate work. So he, like Moses, had found some new form of political power, and it was ­national, not urban power." I still hope the fifth volume gets finished this year...

The End Of Coder Influence | Zed A. Shaw

"But, I remembered that after countless blog posts about how terrible of a person I am and how terrible my books are, I still end up helping millions of people a year and still have the same sales." The 'hard way' books are good. Might do a maths the hard way using the templates.

Addicted to Your iPhone? You’re Not Alone - The Atlantic

"Harris is the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience. As the co‑founder of Time Well Spent, an advocacy group, he is trying to bring moral integrity to software design: essentially, to persuade the tech world to help us disengage more easily from its devices."

How I Got My Attention Back

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Simone Weil. That police photo. This quote.

Sir Ivan's resignation sign of greater Whitehall strain - BBC News

"Concern is growing among some high-ranking officials that ministers don't understand or won't admit the scale of the task they're facing." What can *possibly* go wrong?

The whole philosophy community is mourning Derek Parfit. Here's why he mattered. - Vox

"When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others." Derek Parfitt

Why this conservative radio host quit after Trump's victory - Vox

"Now, no matter how insane or crazy a belief is, you can find a media outlet that will affirm it for you. So the pressure to feed the crazies is immense in this media environment. What this means is that talk radio hosts are now gravitating toward their audiences rather than audiences gravitating to hosts. If a host refuses to do this, the audience disappears." Critical Thinking everyone

Class Breaks - Schneier on Security

"In a sense, class breaks are not a new concept in risk management. It's the difference between home burglaries and fires, which happen occasionally to different houses in a neighborhood over the course of the year, and floods and earthquakes, which either happen to everyone in the neighborhood or no one. Insurance companies can handle both types of risk, but they are inherently different. The increasing computerization of everything is moving us from a burglary/fire risk model to a flood/earthquake model, which a given threat either affects everyone in town or doesn't happen at all."

Why bad ideas refuse to die | Steven Poole | Science | The Guardian

"Actually, it’s a lot more than five centuries regressed. Contrary to what we often hear, people didn’t think the Earth was flat right up until Columbus sailed to the Americas. In ancient Greece, the philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides had already recognised that the Earth was spherical. Aristotle pointed out that you could see some stars in Egypt and Cyprus that were not visible at more northerly latitudes, and also that the Earth casts a curved shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. The Earth, he concluded with impeccable logic, must be round." And anyone who watched a ship sail from harbour would witness the sail disappearing over the horizon...

The Rhythm of Food — by Google News Lab and Truth & Beauty

One for the Quinoa Gang

2017 is not just another prime number ~ 松鼠博士的魔法眼鏡

Very nice

Remembering Roger Faulkner: UNIX Champion - The New Stack

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

What the ‘Godfather of Populism’ Thinks of Donald Trump - POLITICO Magazine

"Forty years before 2016’s “populist” president-elect stumped the country in his personal Boeing 757, Harris made his own quixotic bid for the presidency, crisscrossing the country in a borrowed Winnebago ahead of the 1976 Democratic primaries. At times wearing a cowboy hat atop his unruly head of dark hair, evoking a lumpen Johnny Cash, Harris financed his campaign with yard sales, house parties and picnics, and stayed overnight in ordinary voters’ homes in exchange for IOUs for a night in the White House, should he be elected." Sounds like how to do it

What’s really bugging Trump about Obama - POLITICO

“even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward. We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.” Obama - can't we have him back? UN General Secretary or something?

Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny - The New Yorker

"The problem of managing powerful systems that lack human values is exemplified by “the paperclip maximizer,” a scenario that the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom raised in 2003. If you told an omnicompetent A.I. to manufacture as many paper clips as possible, and gave it no other directives, it could mine all of Earth’s resources to make paper clips, including the atoms in our bodies—assuming it didn’t just kill us outright, to make sure that we didn’t stop it from making more paper clips." Note: Find out about Bostrom

Inside Evan Spiegel's very private Snapchat Story - Recode

>> "I often talk with people about the conflicts between technology companies and content companies," Spiegel said during a conference keynote two years ago. "One of the biggest issues is that technology companies view movies, music and television as information. Directors, producers, musicians and actors view them as feelings, as expression. "Not to be searched, sorted and viewed — but experienced." << Seems to have that sorted out.

Forgive me, techies, but here are the seven reasons why Silicon Valley likes Trump - Recode

>> "Yeah, he’s good at giving the people what they want, for sure. “We’ll get right on that!” “We’ll fix that!” “My guy will call your guy!” It is probably a relief from the smarty-pants Obama people who actually raised reasonable objections and wanted to debate the issues." <<

TLSTraveller's tales: on Patrick Leigh Fermor's letters – James Campbell

"In 1956, Ann Fleming wrote to Evelyn Waugh that “Paddy was invited for lunch and arrived with five cabin trunks, parcels of books and the manuscript of his unfinished work on Greece [Mani] strapped in a bursting attaché case”." That's the way to do it. The writer sings for his supper.

Christmas special: Survey research, network sampling, and Charles Dickens' coincidences - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

"In traditional survey research we have been spoiled. If you work with atomistic data structures, a small sample looks like a little bit of the population. But a small sample of a network doesn’t look like the whole. For example, if you take a network and randomly sample some nodes, and then look at the network of all the edges connecting these nodes, you’ll get something much more sparse than the original. For example, suppose Alice knows Bob who knows Cassie who knows Damien, but Alice does not happen to know Damien directly. If only Alice and Damien are selected, they will appear to be disconnected because the missing links are not in the sample."

The Binoculars of Jah | Colin Grant | Granta Magazine

"I’d been going to the island (mostly on my own) since I was nineteen; but when I mentioned my intention to go and find Bunny, my siblings and mother were filled with dread. They were rattled by tales of the Windrush Generation of emigrants, who had been retiring to the island only to be met with violence, muggings and sometimes worse. Increasingly, my family believed you went home to die – and not of natural causes." If true, this is really sad.

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

>> "As I mentioned earlier, the most effective way we've found to get interesting behavior out of the AIs we actually build is by pouring data into them. This creates a dynamic that is socially harmful. We're on the point of introducing Orwellian microphones into everybody's house. All that data is going to be centralized and used to train neural networks that will then become better at listening to what we want to do. But if you think that the road to AI goes down this pathway, you want to maximize the amount of data being collected, and in as raw a form as possible. It reinforces the idea that we have to retain as much data, and conduct as much surveillance as possible." <<

Why the white working class feels like they’ve lost it all, according to a political scientist - Vox

"One is that the media has a voracious appetite for controversy. It's the most extreme voices that dominate headlines because they are the most extreme and unusual and so they get more air time. Then there's also the campaign finance problem in the US. We only support politicians when they raise enough issues that are polarizing to make people fear that they not get their way. If there's agreement, people aren't scared and so not enough money is raised." That need for differentiation/distinction and inability to have consensus that adjusts.

The Hazards of Going on Autopilot - The New Yorker

>> "The more the pilots’ thoughts had drifted—which the researchers affirmed increased the more automated the flight was—the more errors they made. In most cases, they could detect that something had gone wrong, but they didn’t respond as they should have, by cross-checking other instruments, diagnosing the problem, and planning for the consequences. “We’re asking human beings to do something for which human beings are just not well suited,” Casner said. “Sit and stare.”" << Self driving cars anyone?

Term-time holiday case heading to Supreme Court - BBC News

"The evidence shows that every extra day of school missed can affect a pupil's chances of achieving good GCSEs, which has a lasting effect on their life chances - vindicating our strong stance on attendance." Peer reviewed? Seriously what evidence? Otherwise every child with a serious illness would need a funded catch up package including one to one coaching which would be very expensive

Labour MP Jamie Reed quitting Parliament - BBC News

>> "Mr Reed voted for renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system earlier this year, calling Mr Corbyn's opposition to nuclear weapons "juvenile" and "narcissistic"." << Perhaps Mr Reed can explain the precise strategic advantage to the UK of hosting a nuclear weapon system that the UK government can't actually use without the cooperation of the USA? Exactly what do we gain in exchange for the billions it costs us to *lease* these things? Perhaps some aircraft that are actually flown by the RAF on our aircraft carriers might be more of a deterrent?

Keith Ellison’s one-man march - POLITICO

"When I told him that his rhetoric on Farrakhan and Trump sounds similar, he smiled and sat up in his chair. “I’ll tell you this: They’re charismatic speakers speaking to people’s pain. Blaming other people is an old trick” — equating the leading black nationalist’s call to arms with a Trump rage-fest that fired up white nationalists." Eric wins again

My Priorities for the Next Four Years - Schneier on Security

"The election was so close that I've come to see the result as a bad roll of the dice. A few minor tweaks here and there -- a more enthusiastic Sanders endorsement, one fewer of Comey's announcements, slightly less Russian involvement -- and the country would be preparing for a Clinton presidency and discussing a very different social narrative. That alternative narrative would stress business as usual, and continue to obscure the deep social problems in our society. Those problems won't go away on their own, and in this alternative future they would continue to fester under the surface, getting steadily worse. This election exposed those problems for everyone to see."

How A Rust Belt Native and Silicon Valley Technologist Is Re-Thinking American Manufacturing – Initialized Capital – Medium

"So I moved here. I sold CloubFab to a manufacturer in Minnesota and had some time to do my own thing. I went to China and researched all of their industry in Shenzhen. I looked at injection molding. 3D printing. Basically all of these new technologies, and talked to the people who were working in the factories." What is manufacturing in 21st century? Can't we just sketch something and click the button?

Divisions deepen inside Trump Tower - POLITICO

"Trump, a businessman-turned-politician, has long encouraged competition among factions within his organizations, creating a pressure-cooker environment where almost every decision resulted in a winner and a loser. In the end, one side would be vanquished and another would take its place, and the cycle would repeat." This is NOT how governments work

AFL Font Pespaye Nonmetric | dafont.com

Looks appropriately distressed

A surprising number of great composers were fond of the bottle – but can you hear it?

"The other day I was reading a review of a new life of Liszt by Oliver Hilmes that reveals ‘hair-raising episodes of drunkenness’ in his later years. For some reason these were left out of the three-volume biography by Alan Walker, who admitted that the composer drank a bottle of cognac a day (and sometimes two bottles of wine) but didn’t think he was an alcoholic." I wonder what Mr Walker's idea of the consumption profile of an actual alcoholic is.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Betting on will Boris Johnson still be Foreign Secretary of the 1st of January 2018

"I think despite the events of the summer when Michael Gove’s transformation into the lovechild of Frank Underwood and Niccolò Machiavelli fatally damaged Boris Johnson’s chances of suceeding David Cameron, Boris still wants to be Prime Minister." I may need a new keyboard as a result of the images invoked by this post.

Word of the Year 2016 is... | Oxford Dictionaries

"After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’." God help us. Not only the content but the form (an hyphenated compound actually gets to be a *word* these days).

Paris Review - Martin Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 151

"A throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer’s part. At this stage the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about. In the absence of that recognition I don’t know what one would do. It may be that nothing about this idea—or glimmer, or throb—appeals to you other than the fact that it’s your destiny, that it’s your next book. You may even be secretly appalled or awed or turned off by the idea, but it goes beyond that. You’re just reassured that there is another novel for you to write. The idea can be incredibly thin—a situation, a character in a certain place at a certain time."

‘It’s Like a Powder Keg That’s Going to Explode’ - POLITICO Magazine

>> “Before everything went crazy I was producing 1,000 words a day and I was usually done with my 1,000 words by around 11 or 11:30,” Eisen said. “That’s still the case, but now it’s 11:30 at night.” << 1000 words a day before *noon* is some going.

Why cities need to fight Uber and give people a real transport choice | Evgeny Morozov | Opinion | The Guardian

"Cities that cosy up to Uber, however, risk becoming too dependent on its data streams. Why accept Uber’s role as a data intermediary? Instead of letting the company hoover up extensive details about who is going where and when, cities should find a way to get this data on their own. Only then should the likes of Uber be allowed to step in and build a service on top of them." Or cities could just follow the example of Prague and say 'here are the roads we can afford to build and maintain without damaging our historical core, if you want to spend an hour or so each day in a traffic jam, bring your car, otherwise use the trains and trams'

'The most beautiful and elegant city in the world' - BBC News

How do you document a city quickly?

What It Was Like to Work With Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer, Pauli, and Bohr?

"One was [J.B.S.] Haldane, the biologist who wrote excellent popular books. He was also a man of very wide interests. The people in Cambridge whom I got to know personally—Hardy and Littlewood and Besicovitch—were all great mathematicians. The joke was they spent most of their time playing billiards. Besicovitch had a wonderful billiard table. I was very lucky because my father had bought a billiard table when I was a child. So I immediately fit into this coterie in Cambridge. If I wanted to talk to the big mathematicians, I would just start playing billiards and then the conversation would turn to mathematics."

The Setup / Charles Berret

"And as a purely practical matter, I try to use free/open-source software and formats just because I can be reasonably certain that these will still be supported in ten or twenty years. I'm done migrating my work out of proprietary platforms. There's also an argument to be made for the environmental responsibility of using low-spec computers, low-overhead software, and basic file formats." Seems sound as well

Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown | Programming Historian

"Instead of following this tutorial in a mechanical way, we recommend you strive to understand the solutions offered here as a methodology, which may need to be tailored further to fit your environment and workflow." Seems sound

How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It) - The Talkhouse

"For those who haven’t seen a trailer or read the short story: When 12 alien vessels land in different locations around the world, the U.S. military brings in a pair of civilian scientists to help establish first contact. Louise Banks, a linguist, and Ian Donnelly, a theoretical physicist, are tasked with a unique challenge: The alien life forms (named heptapods, after their number of limbs) do not speak any form of recognizable language. We can’t understand them and, perhaps, they can’t understand us. So at first all the international teams at their respective landing sites collaborate to figure out why these beings parked on our planet, but our global relationships crumble as each country discovers how easy it is to misinterpret—or misteach—language with a true foreigner." Just bought the book

Buttery Smooth Emacs

"GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype." One of the core developers

How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’ - The New York Times

>> "Mr. Mounk’s interest in the topic began rather unusually. In 2014, he published a book, “Stranger in My Own Country.” It started as a memoir of his experiences growing up as a Jew in Germany, but became a broader investigation of how contemporary European nations were struggling to construct new, multicultural national identities." << Ordering a copy...

Senate Republicans can save the country — and their party — from Trump - Vox

"This, then, is where Trump’s presidency begins: with a closely divided Senate, a supermajority of senators who refused to back his candidacy, and a super-super-majority who harbor grave doubts about his fitness to serve. Assuming Democratic unity, it will only take three Republican defections on any given issue or nomination to create an anti-Trump majority in the chamber. Republicans would be wise to use the narrowness of their majority to curb the incoming president’s worst instincts." So will the President play to the gallery in the knowledge that the houses won't allow anything outrageous to pass?

Bach and the musical Möbius strip | plus.maths.org

Glide symmetry with a twist (the old ones are the best)

Trump win churns U.S.-Mexico water talks - POLITICO

"Moreover, hydrologists now realize that the period in the early 20th century when the Colorado River's water supply was divvied up was unusually wet. And as temperatures rise and climate change shrinks the winter snow pack that feeds the Colorado, the river is likely to carry even less water in the future." -- Politico "Events, dear boy, events." -- Harold McMillan

stunlaw: The Author Signal: Nietzsche’s Typewriter and Medium Theory

>> "One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”... “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts” (Carr 2008)." <<

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” | McLuhan Galaxy

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” John Culkin SJ often attributed to Marshall McLuhan

The firm that starts work at 9.06am - BBC News

"And at the end of the day everyone has to leave the office at 6pm sharp because staff aren't allowed to work into the evening." He gets it

Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency - The New Yorker

"Obama’s insistence on hope felt more willed than audacious. It spoke to the civic duty he felt to prevent despair not only among the young people in the West Wing but also among countless Americans across the country." Perhaps he has read Eric Hoffer - fear and despair is the soil in which extremism grows.

An ancient Buddhist strategy for overcoming paralyzing fear - Vox

>> "On a more practical level, Brother Phap Dung recommends that people stop reading the news if it feeds fear. “Go take refuge in nature, and find a cause where your heart doesn’t feel inactive and in despair,” he says. “This is the medicine.” We can and should focus on more tangible needs of the people around us than probable Trump doom. “Your friend may be somebody who is being discriminated against,” says Dung. “You can only be there to offer them kindness if you are stable. You cannot help them if you are filled with hate and fear. What people need is your non-fear.”" <<

R.W. Johnson · Trump: Some Numbers · LRB 14 November 2016

"Another telling figure. On average in 1965 an American CEO earned 20 times what a worker did. By 2013, on average, the number was 296 times. Marx foresaw ever greater concentrations of capital accompanied by the pauperisation of the working class." Interesting but I'm having issues with Trump and Marx in the same article.

There Is No Prospect Of Irish Unity : The Pensive Quill

"Well I can’t. I do remember that when I was at the Donegal border in 1971 we shot a Volunteer in the legs for stealing a tenner after an armed robbery so that was something that was completely unacceptable – any sort of personal gain and it is shocking. It shocks me that a lot of people in Belfast in particular seem to have benefited materially and have become very, very rich on the back of the struggle however they did it and I think that’s an absolute disgrace." Fucking hell. Raw. Via the ever amazing Slugger O'Toole

Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker - The New Yorker

"He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry." Taste

Advice from Leonard Cohen — Artist Reformation

"Ring the bells that still can ring forget your perfect offering there is a crack in everything that's how the light gets in."

Leonard Cohen Dead at 82 - Rolling Stone

"And if you can sense this resilience or sense this capacity to continue, it means a lot more at this age than it did when I was 30, when I took it for granted." RIP Leonard

Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded - The New York Times

"In many ways, there has never been a better time to be alive. Violence plagues some corners of the world, and too many still live under the grip of tyrannical regimes. And although all the world’s major faiths teach love, compassion and tolerance, unthinkable violence is being perpetrated in the name of religion. And yet, fewer among us are poor, fewer are hungry, fewer children are dying, and more men and women can read than ever before. In many countries, recognition of women’s and minority rights is now the norm. There is still much work to do, of course, but there is hope and there is progress."

On Wall Street, a high-ranking few still avoid email | Reuters

>> "After hearing a passing reference to regrettable emails during an interview at a conference two years ago, Dimon volunteered: "Don't send emails after you've had a drink."" << Sounds sensible

Ten Ways Your Data Project is Going to Fail

"This talk is based on conversations I've had with many senior data scientists over the last few years. Many companies seems to go through a pattern of hiring a data science team only for the entire team to quit or be fired around 12 months later. Why is the failure rate so high?"

‘We Are in for a Pretty Long Civil War’ - POLITICO Magazine

“I believed that the 2016 Republican primary was going to be a variation of Mom and Dad having the fight in front of the kids. Instead, the crazy uncle showed up and started a 17-person food fight,” Douglas Heye

Election Update: The Polls Disagree, And That’s OK | FiveThirtyEight

"As measured by the standard deviation, the spread in polls conducted since the third presidential debate is about twice as wide as what we saw at the end of campaigns from 2000 through 2012, on average. Again, that isn’t a perfect comparison because the range of polls may narrow over the final week of this campaign. But it’s not just your imagination if you feel like there’s more variation in the polls than you’re used to." Unstable polls

Jane Jacobs’s Theories on Urban Planning—and Democracy in America - The Atlantic

"Bacon took Jacobs on a before-and-after tour of his city. “Before” was represented by a street in a condemned black neighborhood; “after” was a towering new housing project. Before Street, Kanigel writes, “was crowded with people, people spilling out onto the sidewalk, sitting on stoops, running errands, leaning out of windows.” After Street was flat and deserted, with the exception of a lone boy kicking a tire."

The problem with perfection... | Classical-Music.com

"The most difficult thing is to break unhealthy patterns; the first time you try new ways of practising (or teaching) is the most difficult. Whatever has brought you where you are today can be the same thing which prevents you from further improvements. To improve is to change." Via HN

Confessions of a former neo-Confederate - Vox

"Here’s what O’Reilly doesn’t get about Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. When she said, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” her main purpose wasn’t to indict white people for owning slaves. Her purpose was to include black people in the grand narrative of American history, from the nation’s founding to the present day. If you want to include all Americans in the story of America, then there’s no getting around slavery, or the oppression of women, or the theft of Native American land, or the exploitation of immigrant labor. If you want to spare white people’s feelings, on the other hand, you have to get around all that."

Why kernel development still uses email [LWN.net]

"In short, Greg said, kernel developers still use email because it is faster than any of the alternatives. Over the course of the last year, the project accepted about eight changes per hour — every hour — from over 4,000 developers sponsored by over 400 companies. It must be doing something right. The list of maintainers who accepted at least one patch per day contains 75 entries; at the top of the list, Greg himself accepted 9,781 patches over the year. Given that he accepts maybe one third of the patches sent his way, it is clear that the patch posting rate is much higher than that." Greg Kroah-Hartman is accepting 3 to 4 changes per hour based on an 8 hour working day. The proposal rate is three times higher so he is assessing 12 changes per hour roughly. So that is 5 minutes per change to think through the implications.

How Pennsylvania Rye Whiskey Lost Its Way - The Daily Beast

"On the afternoon of Nov. 19, 1905, a young bottling-line worker noticed flames coming out of an upper story of Warehouse D at the Broad Ford distillery. Within minutes, the whole warehouse, which held 16,000 barrels of rye, was on fire, sending whiskey-fueled flames shooting high into the sky. By dint of and heroic effort from the distillery workers and the local fire departments and quick thinking from the plant engineer, who knocked the valves off the heating pipes in the other warehouses to fill them with fire-suppressing steam, the fire was contained to that one warehouse and the 810,000 gallons of whiskey it contained—some three months worth of production." Tragedy. Via Daringfireball

William Carlos Williams - Poetry Foundation

"Beginning with his internship in the decrepit "Hell's Kitchen" area of New York City and throughout his forty years of private practice in Rutherford, Williams heard the "inarticulate poems" of his patients. As a doctor, his "medical badge," as he called it, permitted him "to follow the poor defeated body into those gulfs and grottos..., to be present at deaths and births, at the tormented battles between daughter and diabolic mother." From these moments, poetry developed: "it has fluttered before me for a moment, a phrase which I quickly write down on anything at hand, any piece of paper I can grab." Some of his poems were born on prescription blanks, others typed in a few spare minutes between patient visits."

An “Infinitely Rich” Mathematician Turns 100 - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

>> “Give me a problem,” he said, “and I’ll unsolve it.” <<

How to Crash Systemd in One Tweet

"Systemd is dangerous not only because it is introducing hundreds of thousands of lines of complex C code without any regard to longstanding security practices like privilege separation or fail-safe design, but because it is setting itself up to be irreplaceable. Systemd is far more than an init system: it is becoming a secondary operating system kernel, providing a log server, a device manager, a container manager, a login manager, a DHCP client, a DNS resolver, and an NTP client. These services are largely interdependent and provide non-standard interfaces for other applications to use." What could *possibly* go wrong?

Restoring the first recording of computer music - Sound and vision blog

"Turing was not very interested in programming the computer to play conventional pieces of music: he used the different notes to indicate what was going on in the computer—one note for 'job finished', others for 'digits overflowing in memory', 'error when transferring data from the magnetic drum', and so on. Running one of Turing's programs must have been a noisy business, with different musical notes and rhythms of clicks enabling the user to 'listen in' (as he put it) to what the computer was doing. He left it to someone else, though, to program the first complete piece of music." I have sound samples for phone calls, text messages and emails on my old Blackberry. Same idea I think.

The Democratization of Censorship — Krebs on Security

"Today, I am happy to report that the site is back up — this time under Project Shield, a free program run by Google to help protect journalists from online censorship. And make no mistake, DDoS attacks — particularly those the size of the assault that hit my site this week — are uniquely effective weapons for stomping on free speech, for reasons I’ll explore in this post." Another example of the way algorithms make things that have always been possible easy to implement.

Philosophy, the Sartre blend: uncovering the birth of existentialism

"Bakewell ends her first chapter with a decent stab at answering the question: “What is existentialism anyway?” Acknowledging that it takes many forms, some mutually incompatible, she nevertheless commits herself to saying that it concerns itself with individual human existence, that it considers the defining characteristic of being human to be freedom, and that this entails assuming responsibility for everything we do, which brings with it an anxiety that is an inescapable fact of our existence, and, finally, that the purpose of existentialism is to enable us to understand ourselves better and thus to lead more authentic lives."

This could be the end of the Labour party

"Conspiracy theory saturates the far left as thoroughly as it saturates the far right. It is its default mode of thought. Its answer to everything." Nick Cohen: how to get people thinking through the logic rather than the conspiracy theories. Cohen mentions Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Danny Blanchflower.

If Brexit means Brexit, the UK Can’t Block an EU Army | Slugger O'Toole

"She has put leading Leave campaigners in the ideal position to make a success of Brexit if they can, and she is perfectly positioned to dump on them if it goes wrong. In particular, by repeatedly identifying the level of immigration as the main reason for public opposition to EU membership, she has the option of using any ‘five minutes to midnight’ deal securing the emergency brake that David Cameron failed to obtain as a material change in circumstances permitting a u-turn." Gerry Lynch with some interesting Brexitology (like Kremlinology only now). I think generally that Mr Lynch is perhaps hanging too much on a one sentence quote from Mr Fallon, but he is the political journalist and I am the maths teacher. The point above nails it: deniability provided by Leave supporters being forced (for a change) to actually do the work and make it work.

What San Francisco Says About America - The New York Times

"San Francisco has less than one-tenth Bangkok’s population but six times as many homeless people. I’m sure you could fill a book with the reasons for this. Ms. Nopphan believes that homelessness is more intractable in rich societies. “In wealthy countries there are systems for everything,” she said. “You’re either in the system or out of the system.” There is no in-between in America. In Bangkok, by contrast, rich and poor coexist. There are vast tracts of cheap, makeshift homes and a countryside where people in the cities can return to if they lose their jobs or hit hard times." Not makeshift housing or favelos, but certainly a range of low rent housing would help in UK as well. I mean seriously low rent.

Arts Council to impose quantitative measures of arts quality | News | ArtsProfessional

"The controversial Quality Metrics pilot, led by the agency Counting What Counts Ltd, has attempted to develop a “meaningful measure” of artistic quality that yields consistent and comparable findings across different artforms and types of organisation." MIS hits the galleries. What a huge job creation scheme for Excel pilots.

Eastwood ‘Northern nationalists are once more a restless people’ | Slugger O'Toole

"They summed it up in a clever and cutting soundbite – Take back control. To all those Brexiteers now at the heart of the British Government, Irish nationalism says this– we know how you feel. No one should therefore be surprised if in the wake of Brexit ‘Taking Back Control’ is precisely what we in the North now intend to do." -Colum Eastwood quoted on Slugger O'Toole

JavaScript Systems Music

"Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno"

How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math - Issue 40: Learning - Nautilus

"When learning math and engineering as an adult, I began by using the same strategy I’d used to learn language. I’d look at an equation, to take a very simple example, Newton’s second law of f = ma. I practiced feeling what each of the letters meant—f for force was a push, m for mass was a kind of weighty resistance to my push, and a was the exhilarating feeling of acceleration. (The equivalent in Russian was learning to physically sound out the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.) I memorized the equation so I could carry it around with me in my head and play with it. If m and a were big numbers, what did that do to f when I pushed it through the equation? If f was big and a was small, what did that do to m? How did the units match on each side? Playing with the equation was like conjugating a verb. I was beginning to intuit that the sparse outlines of the equation were like a metaphorical poem, with all sorts of beautiful symbolic representations embedded within it. Although I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, the truth was that to learn math and science well, I had to slowly, day by day, build solid neural “chunked” subroutines—such as surrounding the simple equation f = ma—that I could easily call to mind from long term memory, much as I’d done with Russian."

The gap between Trump’s America and Clinton’s is getting worse

"If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sometimes seem like they’re talking about two different Americas, there’s a reason: Their voting bases pretty much live in two different Americas. Clinton voters are concentrated in cities, in the nation’s denser and more diverse areas; Trump voters dominate rural areas and America’s wide-open landscapes." Brexit 2.0

ongoing by Tim Bray · Old Geek

"The Grey­glers are led by Vint Cer­f, who holds wine-and-cheese events (good wine, good cheese) when he vis­its Moun­tain View from his reg­u­lar DC digs." Sounds like a good gig

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Corbyn has overwhelming victory over TMay at PMQs

"Quite simply she and her team haven’t thought through the highly complex issues that her policy announcement last week would lead to. With so many in her own party not backing her she’s found herself in a hole so shortly after becoming PM." £50 million does not buy that many school places, and very few if building costs for expansion of existing schools added in. Many supporters of the policy will be disappointed when the result is 10 extra places here, 20 there. Massive numbers will hate *their* children failing. This looks no-win to me.

Boundary review: Corbyn and Osborne's seats face axe - BBC News

"The Electoral Reform Society criticised the decision to base the new boundaries on registered voters, rather than the actual population, saying this "risks skewing our democracy"." Depends on what the variances are. Do some demographics under-register and are those demographics concentrated in supporting one of the main parties?

politicalbetting.com

"It is worth remembering that this is Donald Trump we are talking about. The likelihood that he can go the final 8 weeks or so of this campaign without making any more mistakes seems slim. However, the fact Clinton seems to need him to shoot himself in the foot to win is worrying. Right now, this campaign feels like the EU referendum where a struggling Leave side refocused on immigration and Remain didn’t have an answer." Large group of voters in US describing themselves as 'undecided' as well. Where IS Hunter S when you need him?

MPs set to hear grammar school plans - BBC News

"All state schools in England will be allowed to select pupils by academic ability "in the right circumstances" and where there is demand" How could this possibly work? Who decides what the 'right circumstances' are and how do you determine if there is enough demand?

How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly ~ Stephen Downes

"From time to time people express amazement at how I can get so much done. I, of course, aware of the many hours I have idled away doing nothing, demur. It feels like nothing special; I don't work harder, really, than most people. Nonetheless, these people do have a point. I am, in fact, a fairly prolific writer."

Mexican Black Beans

"Another simple recipe for Mexican Black Beans – or refried black beans to be exact, in this case – goes like this. First, cook your black beans. You’ll need to soak them overnight with some baking soda, then boil them until tender. Conserve the cooking water. Mash the black beans with a fork or potato masher. Now, in a saucepan, fry some finely chopped garlic in olive oil. After a couple of minutes, add the beans. Stir in just enough of the cooking liquid to make the beans into a smooth paste. Cook until thick. You can serve this with bread, tortillas, tacos, or tortilla chips. Yum!"

The Lazy Cook's Way to Great Black Beans | Serious Eats

"But if you want a simple pot of whole beans in a rich, starchy gravy, the slow release of starch from dried beans is the best way to get there. Don't worry—as long as you soak your beans ahead of time and cook them thoroughly, they won't turn out tough."

Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert | Hacker News

Duty Arbitrage. Better draft those trade agreements *really* carefully chaps.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Grammar School policy is un-Conservative and will appeal to the wrong people

"Therein lies the first and most obvious problem with grammar schools in principle and with this proposal in particular: what do you do with those not selected? The idea that all secondaries can select on merit is either grossly ill-thought through or a chimera: it is simply impossible to have all schools operating selective criteria without an override mechanism – and if there is such a mechanism then it’s not truly selective." -- David Herdson I'm thinking that the Government is betting that a small number of new selective schools and a modest increase in existing grammar school places won't alter the ability distribution significantly in most areas. High political gains, low actual impact. Might be funny if they got that one wrong, but £50 million new funding won't go that far.

Springdale Linux 6.4 available : linux

>> "The only real "advantage" we have is not really having a gigantic user base to make happy - thus we can move faster and usually release sooner than the rest. To be honest, that's kind of the way we like it, but that shouldn't stop anyone else from using what we've created, ya know? It's kind of put out there as a "this works well for us, could work for you too" sort of thing." <<

Grammars debate trumps expert consensus - BBC News

"But this is post-referendum politics - where the symbolic status of grammars as a chance to better yourself has trumped the expert consensus. It is an unashamed pitch to the values of non-metropolitan England." Who needs experts volume 2.

How history forgot the black women behind Nasa’s space race | Life and style | The Guardian

Upcoming film with maths angle

Install Fedora Linux on an encrypted SSD

Automatic partitioning

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Two nations: the Brexit chasm

"The government will need to show both that it respects the formal result of the referendum and the substantive messages behind that, while simultaneously not riding completely roughshod over the nearly 50% of the population that felt differently – and then to persuade our erstwhile European partners to agree to that plan. Good luck to it with that task. It is clear what the referendum vote was against but it is far less clear what it is for." Pithy summary of the challenge

Teens Who Say No to Social Media - WSJ

"According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, 92% of American teenagers (ages 13-17) go online daily, including 24% who say they are on their devices “almost constantly.” Seventy-one percent use Facebook, half are on Instagram, and 41% are Snapchat users. And nearly three-quarters of teens use more than one social-networking site. A typical teen, according to Pew, has 145 Facebook friends and 150 Instagram followers." Questionnaire going out soon

Making Modern Toughness - The New York Times

"Such people are, as they say in the martial arts world, strong like water. A blow might sink into them, and when it does they are profoundly affected by it. But they can absorb the blow because it’s short term while their natural shape is long term." Via Slugger O'Toole

Even the Rich Are Being Priced Out of Central London - CityLab

"That’s because these new owners are so rich in both money and global property that their London addresses frequently sit empty, functioning more as dust-sheeted deposit boxes rather than actual homes." Old trees die from the inside out. Look where the artists and musicians are going.

How to Keep a Zibaldone, the 14th Century's Answer to Tumblr | Atlas Obscura

"Welcome to the world of the zibaldone. A strange melange of diary, ledger, doodle pad, and scrapbook, these volumes—along with similar "hodgepodges" and "commonplace books"—served as a pattern for interior life from the 14th century onward, bringing comfort and inspiration to everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Lewis Carroll." So now I have a name for what I do with notebooks.

Computers and Reporters: Newsroom Practices at Two Canadian Daily Newspapers | McKercher | Canadian Journal of Communication

"The reporter of the 1990s has at her fingertips an array of technologies never available before. But how is she using them? How do these technologies affect her work? This paper begins an exploration into how reporters use computers. Its aims are very modest: it starts with a review of the literature on journalists and computers. It then presents a snapshot, taken in the spring of 1994, of computer use in two Canadian newsrooms. It concludes that Canadian reporters are not, in Patten's term, "technojournalists." Instead, they use new technologies to perform old functions."

Reusse: A sportswriter weeps for old friend Radio Shack - StarTribune.com

"Everyone called it the “Trash 80.’’ They were so reasonably priced that we could buy them ourselves if the newspaper balked. They weighed 3.1 pounds and could run for hours with four AA batteries."

Filing by Computer: A Pillow Helped - The New York Times

>> "It was 1974, 40 years ago this week. I was trying, and failing, to file a story by computer — the first, I was told, in the history of The New York Times. At my end, a bulky, 15-pound behemoth that I called “the blue monster.” (I believe its real name was the TeleRam Portabubble.) At the other, A. M. Rosenthal, The Times’s voluble editor, cackling over my frustration." << GERALD ESKENAZI

WHY CITIES KEEP GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER | Edge.org

"[...]And so if you tell me the size of a city in the United States, I can tell you with some 85 percent accuracy how many police it would have, how many AIDS cases, how long the length of the roads are, how many patents it's producing and so on, on the average."

BBC Music - Bucket (and spade) list: a holiday crash course in classical music

Good old iPlayer still depends on flash (so last century) but the BBC have all the music

Rab Wilson: Sauf oor Stephen Daisley! | Comment | The National

"Nane o us wid lowp tae the defence o ony organisation wha daur’t tae try an gag journalists. E’en gin that journalist hus a proven track record o makkin a bourach o himsel oan cultural an language maitters, he hus the richt tae spout his haivers athoot bein bullied bi political pairties; gin thon’s the case." The shade of Swift still walks

Innovative, Interesting New Poll Has Some Problems

"People have a serious problem remembering if and for whom they voted for in past elections. Generally, people overstate their vote for the winning candidate. What that means is the “Romney voters” in their panel are probably a more hardcore sub-section of Romney voters than actual Romney voters." Romney was the loser in 2012

A Favorable Poll for Donald Trump Seems to Have a Problem - The New York Times

"The pollsters ask respondents whether they voted for President Obama or Mitt Romney. They then weight the sample so that Obama voters represent 27 percent of the panel and Romney voters represent 25 percent, reflecting the split of 51 percent to 47 percent between the two among actual voters in 2012. (The rest include newly eligible voters and those who stayed home.)" Stratified sampling for prior voting patterns, has been criticised on reliability grounds. Would be interesting to see how the previous non-voters vote this time.

What if house prices were linked to wages so local people could afford them? | The Co-operative Party

"For the first two weeks of each month, tens of thousands of Londoners work to pay their landlord’s mortgage." And most of the lower paid ones have to claim housing benefit to do that!

User Illusion: Everyday 'Placebo Buttons' Create Semblance of Control - 99% Invisible

"In the early 2000s, New York City transportation officials finally admitted what many had suspected: the majority of crosswalk buttons in the city are completely disconnected from the traffic light system. Thousands of these initially worked to request a signal change but most no longer do anything, even if their signage suggests otherwise."

Robert Caro: 'Power reveals - and not always for the better' | London Life | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

“What happened to contemplation? What happened to thinking things through? Everyone laughs at me because I don’t use a computer, I don’t write on a computer and over and over again people say ‘you could do it faster’. I hear this but I’m thinking the reason I write the first few drafts in longhand and then go to a typewriter is to slow myself down.”

Met terror warning as report reveals 'commuter cops' live as far away as Cornwall and the South of France

>> "Less than half of the Met’s 18,000 borough officers now live in London, with soaring house prices giving rise to a phenomenon known as commuter cops”." << If true, then a strong case for 'essential incoming worker' access to fair rent housing?

An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

"Being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing. We no longer live. We aspire. We work to get richer. Paradoxically, we find ourselves working in order to have a “vacation.” We can’t seem to actually live without working. Capitalism has thus completely occupied social life."

The problem with rallies — Medium

"While rallies might be great for Jeremy’s ego and inspire a lot of people who already support us they do absolutely nothing in terms of what Labour needs to do to win in 2020 – in fact, they perpetuate a false narrative, a narrative that says we are winning. We are not winning. When you speak to people who don’t go to rallies, who aren’t members of the party, you get the feeling that we’re losing, and badly. The polls suggest this too – and for those of you who don’t trust polls, remember that they actually overestimated Labour support in 2015. If voting intentions were judged by rally attendance the next YouGov poll would say “Labour: 100%”. Rallies are great, fun, and inspiring, but at the end of the day thousands of people at rallies doesn’t mean that Labour can win an election and doesn’t necessarily help us to." Echo chambers again - but more fun than Twitter I think

Page dewarping

"Flattening images of curled pages, as an optimization problem." Elegant model-based algorithm for straightening out a photo of a book page. Python script.

How I wrote my first novel during my daily commute — Medium

"I loosely followed the Snowflake method, devised by a novelist who also has a PhD in Theoretical Physics. In a nutshell, you describe the plot of your novel in a single sentence; then in a single paragraph; then in four paragraphs; then in four pages; then you make a list of every scene in the story; then you write. This fractal structure gives the Snowflake method its name." Could be a lesson planning process as well perhaps?

The Write Stuff: How the Humble Pencil Conquered the World

"Sometime in the 16th century, a tree fell over in Borrowdale, England. Under that tree was an igneous rock layer with protruding veins of a dark gray metallic-looking substance. The locals noticed that it looked just like lead. But this was no metal. It was pure carbon. It was graphite."

15 Page Tutorial for R | StudyTrails

"For Beginners in R, here is a 15 page example based tutorial that covers the basics of R." How to download, the assignment operator &c.

You may think the world is falling apart. Steven Pinker is here to tell you it isn't. - Vox

"News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall to zero, there will be always be headlines to click on."

Extracting data from Wikipedia using curl, grep, cut and other bash commands | Loige

"In this article I am going to show you how I was able to extract and process some information from Wikipedia only using a combination of common bash utilities like curl and grep."

Election Update: 10 Big Questions About The Election, Revisited | FiveThirtyEight

"But still, the number of undecided and third-party voters in the polls remains high, which has historically been an indicator of higher volatility. And the conventions concluded relatively early this year, so the comparison to post-convention polling from past years is somewhat imprecise." Improbability drive not quite back to 1:1 yet. Watch the next month.

The Shame of Palo Alto: An Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing | Hacker News

"It seems that we made a pact with the devil by positioning housing as an investment asset. By doing so, we've encouraged people to commit a very large fraction of their net worth into a rather illiquid asset, tying their financial fates to the future assessment of that asset. As a result, protecting the price and appreciation of this asset has come to overshadow the other crucial roles that housing plays in our society." Bingo

The Shame of Palo Alto: an Interview with Kate Downing on Affordable Housing — Stanford Political Journal

"I know a lot of people are paying attention to national politics and the presidential election, but in reality the most things that most affect people’s lives, that affect their housing, that affect what’s around them, where they can go and where they can hang out, all those decisions are made at the local level, and so I urge them to pay attention to their local politics and I urge them very strongly to vote." Local govt a bit less influential in UK of course

The Jefferson Bottles - The New Yorker

"He especially loved wines that predated the phylloxera epidemic of the late nineteenth century, when a grape-vine pest decimated Europe’s vineyards, forcing growers to replant with phylloxera-resistant rootstocks from North America." We are *all* drinking New World wines! Excellent

Jeremy Corbyn accuses Tom Watson of making 'nonsense' Trotsky claims - BBC News

>> In an interview with the Observer, Mr Corbyn said: "I just ask Tom to do the maths - 300,000 people have joined the Labour party. "At no stage in anyone's most vivid imagination are there 300,000 sectarian extremists at large in the country who have suddenly descended on the Labour party. Sorry Tom, it is nonsense - I think he knows it's nonsense." << Famously small ultra-left parties in UK.

Secret History of Silicon Valley - YouTube

Steve Blank: Silicon Valley history (guess what, government funded research going back 30 years before t'internet)

How I Founded a $2 Billion Company with a 95 Cent Book from RadioShack — Backchannel

"RadioShack-type people loved making things work, taking things apart and (sometimes) putting them together again. Brian and I were RadioShack people. Some RadioShack people go on to pursue other interests, some became professors, and some (Woz from Apple springs to mind, as does Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith and James Dyson of vacuum fame) transformed creative genius into commercial success." In UK that would have been the local small radio shop. The chains were always a bit crap.

roots: John Baez

"Around 2006, my friend Dan Christensen created a fascinating picture of all the roots of all polynomials of degree ≤ 5 with integer coefficients ranging from -4 to 4: "

The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol | MinnPost

>> "For McCahill, the realization happened on the street. “I saw a URL on the side of a bus,” he says. “That’s when I knew the Web was all about advertising. Gopher was not good for advertising. I knew it would start winding down.”" <<

Finance Minister says NI left out of Brexit negotiations: UK Gov won’t underwrite current EU funding for NI | Slugger O'Toole

>> "Máirtín Ó Muilleoir: Brussels my arse, as they say. It’ll be made in London. There has been no effort at all – not a phone call, not a letter, not an email – to say to us what do you think we should do with the PEACE money and the INTERREG money? Not a word. And we do expect that letter today. So the promise of Theresa May made and the homily she gave outside Number 10 and the commitment she said that we want to all work together … that has not been fulfilled." << Here we go...

Schneier on Security

"Instead, he argues, young people adrift in a globalized world find their own way to ISIS, looking to don a social identity that gives their lives significance. Groups of dissatisfied young adult friends around the world ­ often with little knowledge of Islam but yearning for lives of profound meaning and glory ­ typically choose to become volunteers in the Islamic State army in Syria and Iraq, Atran contends. Many of these individuals connect via the internet and social media to form a global community of alienated youth seeking heroic sacrifice, he proposes." The social pull factor ties in with UK Protect training.

Thieves can wirelessly unlock up to 100 million Volkswagens, each at the press of a button • The Register

>> "The hack can be used by thieves to wirelessly unlock as many as 100 million VW cars, each at the press of a button. Almost every vehicle the Volkswagen group has sold for the past 20 years – including cars badged under the Audi and Skoda brands – is potentially vulnerable, say the researchers. The problem stems from VW’s reliance on a “few, global master keys.”" << Central storage of master keys not so good.

Is Donald Trump going to drop out? Probably not. - Vox

"The speculation about whether Trump will drop out gets one important thing right: It is not at all clear that Donald Trump actually wants to do the work that being president of the United States would entail." The shade of HST must be laughing his head off at all this.

GMB union backs Owen Smith for Labour leader - BBC News

"GMB members cannot afford for Labour to be talking to itself in a bubble for the next five years while the Tories run riot through our rights at work, our public services and our communities."

Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half – Variance Explained

Trump tweets in the morning and uses more negative words. His team tweet later in the day and are more positive. Use of vocabulary analysis and sorting tweets between different devices.

Bungling Microsoft singlehandedly proves that golden backdoor keys are a terrible idea • The Register

"And perhaps most importantly: it is a reminder that demands by politicians and crimefighters for special keys, which can be used by investigators to unlock devices in criminal cases, will inevitably jeopardize the security of everyone."

Retail Location Data & Analytics from Local Data Company (LDC)

They pay people to check shops and then analyse changes over time. Sell live data and some summary reports free

Fighting the clones: Bristol developer calls time on chain cafes - BBC News

"Often they end up importing new, wealthy residents, and then bringing in expensive shops owned by multinational companies for them to spend their money in. "There is new economic activity, but very little of it is benefiting the local economy." Rachel Lawrence, economist, New Economics Foundation

Summer of Parading Peace points way for Bonfire Regulation | Slugger O'Toole

"In such an environment, the role of political leaders and others in authority is of paramount importance. We should not be under any illusion: the bonfire is a culture almost exclusively preserved in working class communities for the simple reason that middle class communities would not tolerate such an imposition upon their locality- and residents in more affluent districts would expect the active support of the PSNI and other statutory agencies to prevent their communities from being treated in such a manner."

Britons under-report calorie intake, study suggests - BBC News

"Physical activity is good for your health and heart but reducing calories is a more effective strategy to combat obesity."

European Cities Test Measures To Control Tourist Flows - SPIEGEL ONLINE

"The conditions German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger warned against in his treatise "A Theory of Tourism" almost 60 years ago are becoming reality. Enzensberger argued that travelers, through their mere presence, threaten or destroy what they are actually seeking: originality and local color."

Cornelius Cardew

"The indication here is already of his moving away from music as object towards music as process, and of a concern for the problems of the performers. Cardew was one of the first Europeans to grasp not just the musical but also the social implications of the new American aesthetic. And this was because his response to the music was not merely a cerebral rejection of the predominant western European compositional method - total serialism - but a deep-seated reaction to content and meaning, to the new ways of thinking and feeling, to the idealism, both moral and philosophical, that seemed to inform the new American music. 'There is no room for the policeman in art', Cage said in one of his polemics against the Europeans." Process

Find a new city

"I mean, all of my band left New York because they couldn’t afford to live there. We lost our practice place. I lost my art studio because all of our spaces were taken by entrepreneurs with a lot of money." And so it goes

Richard Gott reviews ‘Cornelius Cardew’ by John Tilbury · LRB 12 March 2009

‘one of the most difficult boys I ever knew – shy, reticent, introverted, self-centred, obnoxious to most people; lacking graciousness and humility … everyone was glad when he left.’

A former CIA chief is calling Trump a foreign agent. This is how absurd the election is. - Vox

"Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA, made the accusation in a New York Times op-ed published on Friday. In it, Morrell accuses Donald Trump of being an “unwitting agent” of Russia. An “unwitting agent,” in spy terms, means someone who has been tricked or manipulated into serving as a foreign operative without knowing it." Turtles all the way down. HST where are you when we needed you?

Center for Neighborhood Technology Shows That Reducing Household Costs of Living Can Help Cut Poverty Levels - CityLab

>> "It might not need to be. Urban poverty could be cut—rather drastically— through a basic principle of finance, according to the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Chicago-based urban policy think-tank. On Thursday, the CNT released the “Urban Opportunity Agenda,” with a central premise so simple that it’s sort of stunning it’s not talked about more: Reducing the cost of living for low-income citizens." << Transport costs reduced by providing alternatives to lone driving resulting in more access to jobs - the model is poor outside and rich inside so bus the poor in to work. Housing ecology a better lever?

The Political Process Isn’t Rigged — It Has Much Bigger Problems | FiveThirtyEight

"Here’s the truth: Washington is rigged, but not in a literal sense and not in any of the nefarious ways those loud voices are contending. Instead, the blame may lie more with voters than politicians: Our legislative process is not designed to withstand the current levels of partisan polarization in the electorate."

David Cameron and the problem of setting real political choices | Slugger O'Toole

>> "Now, consider a hypothetical example. To determine the average age by a majority vote, the question would probably be, “Are you young or old?” " << Suggesting multiple positive choices for future referenda

Welcome to AirSpace | The Verge

>> "But over the past few years, something strange has happened. "Every coffee place looks the same," Schwarzmann says. The new cafe resembles all the other coffee shops Foursquare suggests, whether in Odessa, Beijing, Los Angeles, or Seoul: the same raw wood tables, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs." <<

Sinn Fein could be set to say farewell to their wages policy | Slugger O'Toole

"It is Sinn Féin’s current policy to pay all its members, including ministers and special advisers, what it terms an ‘average industrial wage’, which in the north is in the region of £26,000 and in the Republic €37,000." Seems a good idea to me. All constituency expenses paid for out of general income

NickPalmer — politicalbetting

Relatively reasonable member with mathematical education.

Book1 - Probability and Risk in the Real World.pdf

Taleb's own Probability and the Real World: a mathematical commentary on his books

Statistics Project Report

Taleb 'Fooled by randomness' an attempt to calculate Table 3.1 using binomial distribution and a forward calculation from the 1 second level. Hard to follow.

probability - Help with understanding an example from the book 'Fooled by Randomness' - Mathematics Stack Exchange

How to calculate table 3.1 in Taleb's Fooled by probability. I was rather hoping to find a monte-carlo similation rather than a simple scaling of the normal distribution parameters.

IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro and apologises for the immolation of Greece

"The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory."

Understanding Hillary: The Clinton America sees isn’t the Clinton colleagues know. Why are they so different?

"It turned out that Clinton, in her travels, stuffed notes from her conversations and her reading into suitcases, and every few months she dumped the stray paper on the floor of her Senate office and picked through it with her staff. The card tables were for categorization: scraps of paper related to the environment went here, crumpled clippings related to military families there. These notes, Rubiner recalls, really did lead to legislation. Clinton took seriously the things she was told, the things she read, the things she saw. She made her team follow up."

Theresa May 'wants and expects' to protect rights of Poles in UK - BBC News

>> "She also reiterated that she wanted to protect the rights of EU citizens in the UK, providing the rights of UK citizens in EU countries are also protected. She said she had discussed the matter with Mr Fico and "that concept of reciprocity is recognised." "<< Sounds like bilateral agreements even if freedom of movement off table?? Am I taking 'reciprocity' too literally (one to one mapping)?

Iraq violence: Did IS use new type of bomb for deadliest attack? - BBC News

>> "If terrorists are trying to turn every element of life into a battlefield, I will turn it into a field of beauty and civilisation," declares Karim Wasifi, composer and conductor with Iraq's National Symphony Orchestra. << Alas, he is having to play again

How a Currency Intended to Unite Europe Wound Up Dividing It - The New York Times

>> "Q. You conclude that the best-case scenario from here is to reform and save the euro. But absent that, you contend that it is better to just scrap it as a failed experiment. What needs to happen to make the euro viable?" "A. A banking union with deposit insurance. Something like a euro bond. An E.C.B. that doesn’t just focus on inflation — you want it to focus on employment. A tax policy that deals with the inequalities. And you have to get rid of limits on government deficits." << Sounds similar pitch to Varoufakis' book.

What's Brexit? How Tech UK tore up its plans after June 23 • The Register

"Several of those interviewed by The Register have changed plans as a result of the Brexit vote. Memset, which was planning UK expansion, is now considering the US and continental Europe. Comtek – whom we spoke to here before the vote - canned the move of a research team of 25 people from Northern Ireland to north-east Wales and may instead shift them to the Republic of Ireland. Fantastic Services has moved investment from the UK to Australia and increased its focus on online booking – the latter through its tech team in EU member Bulgaria."

Newton Emerson: Will a return to the pound be the price of Irish unity?

>> "Much of the credibility of this arrangement comes from the unusually large and enduring example of Hong Kong, which has maintained a dollar peg since 1983. That system was designed by a Scottish economist, John Greenwood, who has given his blessing to a Caledonian version. Should any of this come to pass, the island of Britain would become a “poundzone”, or poundland, as it would inevitably be called." Newton Emerson, Irish Times, via Slugger O'Toole

Explainer: The Transit Ridership Recipe — Human Transit

"The local street network makes all the difference. In the neighborhood on the left, the gridded street pattern puts about 2/3 of the circle within walking distance, while the disconnected suburban street pattern on the right puts only 1/3 of the circle within walking distance."

3 winners and 3 losers from the 4th night of the Republican National Convention - Vox

"Trump isn’t the only billionaire to make a foray into politics, but it’s hard to imagine, say, Michael Bloomberg surrounding himself with fellow billionaires at an event like this. That’s not because Bloomberg is some kind of class traitor or whatever. It’s because Bloomberg views his money as a tool that lets him be involved in politics, rather than evidence of his inherently superior character. That makes the idea of inviting yet more rich people seem foolhardy, likely to backfire and make Bloomberg seem out of touch and detached from ordinary Americans." "Trump, by contrast, really does see his wealth as evidence of superior character. That’s the entire basis of his public personality. It’s evidence he has killer instincts, won’t give up, works harder than the rest, and so on. And Trump has been able to sell that idea, and that self-image, to the broader public, first on The Apprentice and now during the campaign." Dylan Matthews, Vox

What if There Just Aren’t Enough Jobs to Go Around? - Real Time Economics - WSJ

"The Roosevelt authors say a key factor is the concentration of resources in the hands of managers and owners of large corporations—think of CEOs who are compensated largely in shares of the firms they oversee. This ownership encourages them to skimp on labor costs to further enrich themselves, in their analysis. That shrinking demand for labor then helps depress job-market dynamism. It also contributes to broader secular stagnation, since wealthier people tend to save more of their incomes."

Corbyn: “I’m calling your Da…” (Honestly) | Slugger O'Toole

"Being Irish it would have been more effective he had said he was going to tell his mammy. Corbyn hasn't a clue." Dominic Hendron on comments. NI mammy same as Liverpool mammy by sound of it.

Fences: A Brexit Diary by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books

"It’s a very pretty redbrick Victorian building, and was for a long time in “special measures,” a judgment of the school inspection authority called Ofsted, and the lowest grade a state school can receive. Many parents, upon reading such a judgment, will naturally panic and place their children elsewhere; others, seeing with their own eyes what Ofsted—because it runs primarily on data—cannot humanly see, will doubt the wisdom of Ofsted and stay put. Still others may not read well in English, or are not online in their homes, or have never heard of Ofsted, much less ever considered obsessively checking its website. In my case I had the advantage of local history: for years my brother taught here, in an after-school club for migrant children, and I knew perfectly well how good the school is, has always been, and how welcoming to its diverse population, many of whom are recently arrived in the country."

Donald Trump’s ego is the best clue about how he’ll govern - Vox

"Politicians aren’t just human beings. They’re avatars for the coalition of interest groups, voting blocs, and ideologies that got them there. They’re trying to make the best decisions for their constituencies." "Politicians’ choices are almost always the result of analyzing the costs and benefits a given option would have for those constituencies. And you can know a lot of that cost-benefit analysis just by looking around. If an interest group normally allied with a politician is lobbying heavily against a bill, that’s a pretty big cost the politician would have to shoulder if she chose to vote for it." --Dara Lind

What could Brexit mean for the UK's farmers? - BBC News

>> "Now if there were controls on labour that made it difficult, or anything that made it too difficult, one option would be to take these machines, the celery rigs all around us, to Poland and grow the product there." <<

Inside the Obama Tech Surge as it Hacks the Pentagon and VA — Backchannel

>> "VACOLS itself is a symbol of the way the federal government sputters along when massive contracts for IT projects produce nothing but failures. It was the creation of a single civil servant who has worked on it for decades — even though it was not part of his day job. “He is a single point of failure, the only person who understands how to maintain it,” says Harshawat, who is in awe of the guy. “Some lines of source code are older than I am.” Recently, a Presidential Innovation Fellow assigned to the VA had been trying to revamp the system, but it really needed a total update. So a Digital Service at VA team is setting out to update it, creating a brand new system called Caseflow." <<

CentrePiece - The Magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

Usefully referencable

CEP | BREXIT

Those experts

Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2016 - Institute For Fiscal Studies - IFS

"The “new poor” tend to live in households where there is someone in work. Only a third of children below the government’s absolute poverty line now live in a workless household – two thirds of those classified as poor are poor despite the fact that at least one of their parents is in work. So if the new Prime Minister takes forward the ‘life chances’ strategy started by her predecessor, that strategy needs to focus on lifting the incomes of working households." Get rid of low pay jobs. Legislate against zero hour contracts and put the minimum wage on a wedge upwards.

Brexit will strengthen the Union | Slugger O'Toole

"We now have a Welshman (David Davis) in charge of Brexit & a Scotsman (Dr Liam Fox) as the first UK trade Minister in 40 years which is a prime example that cultural, economic & political ties throughout the UK are much stronger than anything in the undemocratic EU." A different view

Micheál Martin invokes Hume to argue that the centre has, can and must continue to hold… | Slugger O'Toole

"They fully understand the nature of economic insecurity, cultural suspicions and political inertia – and they have set about seeking to ruthlessly exploit them. They are not in the business of tough choices and credible alternatives." "They are offering easy solutions – providing targets to blame and pretending that all problems can be overcome if only an identified enemy would get out of the way." Micheál Martin quotes from a speech at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties. I find the experience of people in NI and the strategies they have used to maintain dialogue and sort practical day to day arrangements reassuring as we venture into the rough seas of the brexit process.

What you learn from reading 12 of Donald Trump's books

"But Trump did not come up in the computer industry, or in any other industry that rewards entrepreneurs for growing markets and innovating for consumer benefit. He came up in Manhattan real estate. In Manhattan real estate, wealth is not created by offering new products that make consumers’ lives better. There is only so much land, and strict building regulations and permitting mean there’s only so tall you can build on that land. You make money through working around those regulations and being the one to get the rights to build on a valuable parcel, while other people don’t." Vox

The History of the URL: Path, Fragment, Query, and Auth - Eager Blog

scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment] via HN

Labour has the stench of death – meet the killers | Nick Cohen | Opinion | The Guardian

>> “Danny” Blanchflower told me that all he ever heard was “Jeremy is against austerity”. Good, Blanchflower replied, but what policies should we pursue? Answer came there none. Blanchflower resigned. Thomas Piketty never attended a meeting and the whereabouts of Joseph Stiglitz remain a mystery. << So where are the non-neoliberal economists?

When Yahoo Ruled the Valley: Stories of the Original ‘Surfers’ - The New York Times

>> “Tech is sexy. It’s employable. Parents love it,” she said. “All of that isn’t worth a hill of beans unless we know why, to what end. We call it the humanities for a reason.” << Srinija Srinivasan, head of the Yahoo directory until 2008

Everything you need to know about Theresa May’s Brexit nightmare in five minutes

"So what happens when we fall out the EU at the end of the Article 50 process? It's Year Zero. We will have no trade deals, no financial arrangements with the EU or anyone else. We're like a man being thrown out of a plane into the sea with no lifejacket. Seriously. I'm not making this up. It's scary."

Texting parents boosts maths grades, study suggests - BBC News

>> They found that the intervention appeared to have "an extremely small, positive, yet statistically significant impact" on attainment, particularly on maths and absenteeism. << When N is large, tiny effects can be statistically significant.

Bernie Sanders has an important and largely neglected point about Donald Trump - Vox

"This is a kind of boring story, journalistically speaking. "Republican nominee agrees with other Republicans about major public policy issues" is a pretty boring headline. But it’s still a legitimate — and legitimately important — story. This suite of issues on which Trump is an orthodox Republican is probably a bigger deal for the most voters than are Trump’s heterodoxies on trade and other issues." ...and we have a Tory government that believes in a small state.

Reflections on Johnson and Davis | Slugger O'Toole

"And what for the Prime Minister? She has effectively invited Johnson and Davis in particular to put their money where their mouths are. Failure carries the risk of being dragged down with them in 2020 (we can probably rule out a snap election this autumn), but she may be banking on it being more likely that their success or political neutralisation will secure her place as Prime Minister."

Goodbye George, hello Boris: Theresa May's first Cabinet appointments

"David Davis is Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. This has pleased a lot of people, but most of those people are, like Mr Davis, Right-wing, Leave-voting Conservatives. This is, of course, the point. This, even more than Mr Johnson’s was an appointment to appease and calm the party, to avoid a split with the Leavers that could kill the May government at birth. Mrs May is following Norman Tebbit’s old adage: shoot the crocodile nearest the boat. She knows that unless the Leavers support her, she’s doomed to be the new John Major."

Donald Trump has ushered in a whole new era of fact-checking in journalism - Vox

"Even a decade ago you could meaningfully speak of journalists being able to police to some extent the focus and nature of public discourse, and that is simply not true anymore. Since the 1990s, it has become easier for politicians to speak more directly to the voters, and it is easier for people to tailor their own media diet to their own preferences." Echo chambers again.

Headphones Everywhere - The New Yorker

>> “Headphones—especially shitty ones, which are mostly what you see on the street—computer speakers, and small Bluetooth speakers have changed a great deal of what we do in the mixing and mastering stages of record production,” he wrote in an e-mail recently. “While good mixers have always switched on a single summed mono speaker to check important individual levels in a mix, we didn’t listen small to judge impact and visceral reaction. In a way, now we do.” <<

Theresa May: a one-nation Tory in a one-party state | Rafael Behr | Opinion | The Guardian

"She was feared as the proxy candidate for the minority faction on the party’s perpetually rebellious right flank, which likes to wield influence over Conservative leaders without taking responsibility for any mishaps that flow from their dogmatic demands." These big political parties perhaps need to break up and realign.

The prospect of Brexit Britain turning into a post-global disaster zone is real | Opinion | The Guardian

"Although some forex traders believe the pound will bottom out at $1.20, the pessimists are predicting parity: one pound buys you one dollar. And I think the pessimists are right. Because there is no situation in economics incapable of being made worse by the uncontrolled antics of politicians. And antics are what we’re getting."

How it all went wrong for Andrea Leadsom's leadership bid | Politics | The Guardian

"After the referendum on 23 June, focus on her policy positions grew. In 2012, two years after entering parliament as MP for South Northamptonshire, she called for “no minimum wage, no maternity or paternity rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no pension rights” for workers in companies with three or fewer staff." So you tax expansion. Surprising recipe for growth and innovation.

SETI mulls reboot: Believing the strangest things, loving the alien • The Register

>> “Ultimately, to find aliens, we must become the aliens”, Cabrol notes. <<

Writing an editor in less than 1000 lines of code, just for fun - <antirez>

"Well, now it’s time to release it, end of this crazy project. Maybe somebody will use it as a starting point to write a real editor, or maybe it could be used to write some new interesting CLI that goes over the usual REPL style model." One large C file. VT100 escape sequences to draw the screen. Syntax highlighting.

How Tony Blair came to be so unpopular - BBC News

"The prime minister who showed patience and ingenuity in Northern Ireland, subtlety in Europe, and who was notably suspicious of an ideological approach to domestic affairs, become a true believer. There was an element of naivete in his approach to the hard-liners around Bush - confessing, for example, that he didn't really know what a neo-conservative was." GFA was important, but, heavens...

Pinboard Turns Seven (Pinboard Blog)

Ever feel like just wiping your servers and running off to Mexico?

Newton Emerson: The hysteria of Irish nationalists over Brexit is irrational

"Turkey trades freely in goods without free movement of people via the EU customs union. The six Nordic countries keep their common travel area, despite three being outside the EU. Switzerland is a global financial centre. EU scientific and academic bodies offer associate membership to non-EU countries. Greenlanders left the EU but retain EU citizenship." So the main risk now is that Trojan horse coming out of Pandora's box (to quote Bevan) - a right wing Tory administration without a GE mandate.

How Trees Calm Us Down - The New Yorker

"In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed a curious pattern among patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery at a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Those who had been given rooms overlooking a small stand of deciduous trees were being discharged almost a day sooner, on average, than those in otherwise identical rooms whose windows faced a wall. The results seemed at once obvious—of course a leafy tableau is more therapeutic than a drab brick wall—and puzzling. Whatever curative property the trees possessed, how were they casting it through a pane of glass?"

Politics is too complex to be understood in terms of Left and Right | British Politics and Policy at LSE

"In ideological terms, the common assumption is that if you are anti-immigration, support an independent nuclear deterrent and adhere to pro-free market economic policies you are “right-wing”. If you welcome migrants, want to scrap Trident and believe in more state regulation you are “left-wing”. But as the recent spat between the Institute of Directors and Home Secretary Theresa May demonstrates, pro-business free-marketeers can also be pro-immigration. Conversely, many of those who feel the state should do more to protect their jobs may feel antagonistic towards immigration." Jonathan Wheatley has a 2d plot, similar to the one below but based on more recent data.

Distributors ponder a systemd change [LWN.net]

"> I don't see how you say that there's a GNOME design bug? I saw this being repeated various times, but it has to do with systemd user sessions. I have trouble distinguishing between GNOME and systemd. To the extend they are separate projects, you may be right. Roughly what happened was: 1. In the beginning there was there login. Every process started after login was a child of it, the kernel used a very simple process to track those children and so it was easy to clean up on logout. 2. Then X and xdm replaced login, but every process was a child of xdm, and cleaning up on logout remained simple. 3. Then there was GNOME, and gdm, and later gdm spawned corba. Things were rapidly getting more complex, but nonetheless everything was a process child of gdm and so cleaning up on logout was till simple. 4. GNOME moves to dbus. 5. systemd takes over dbus. 6. systemd takes over session management - primarily via logind. 7. GNOME immediately adopts logind, causing much angst on Debian because it meant the default desktop required you to use systemd. 8. GNOME starts uses dbus to lazily start services. 9. systemd starts dbus under a separate process tree (the one under systemd --user, as opposed to the one started by gdm). 10. GNOME notices if the user logs in twice, they start services such as the evolution-address-book twice. Seems inefficient. They share services between two login sessions. For some services. 11. Consequently keeping track of what session owns what process becomes hard. Some things aren't killed properly when the sessions logout. Since logind is tracking the sessions, seems like a good idea to make it the systemd mob's problem. KillUserProcesses is implemented, and GNOME's problem is solved. 12. But no one is turning KillUserProcess on so GNOME sessions are still leaving services running. So systemd-230 changes it to default to be on. And so here we are. If you tell me it's really systemd's at fault then so be it - for me it like picking between two peas in a pod."

Term absence fines soar past 150,000 - BBC News

"The evidence shows that every extra day of school missed can affect a pupil's chances of achieving good GCSEs, which has a lasting effect on their life chances - vindicating our strong stance on attendance." 'can'? Either the evidence suggests that one day's absence (i.e. approximately 0.04% of a school career) *does* have a measurable and significant impact on the outcomes for a specific child or it does not.

Why Feynman Diagrams Are So Important | Quanta Magazine

>>"Looking to break the awkward silence that followed, I asked Feynman the most disturbing question in physics, then as now: “There’s something else I’ve been thinking a lot about: Why doesn’t empty space weigh anything?”"<<

The 2.8 Million Non-Voters Who Delivered Brexit - Bloomberg View

"The slope of the fit line implies that a one-vote increase in turnout almost equals a one-vote increase in the "leave" vote. In other words, the net impact of the 2.8 million extra votes was entirely to the benefit of the Brexiters." Came out for the first time in a decade or two (good) caused economic mayhem (not so good). Compulsory voting a la Australia?

Universities take a knock post-Brexit - BBC News

"While post-Brexit Britain might remain inside the European research funding system, academics in other countries are nervous about collaborating with UK institutions." Here we go

Fintan O’Toole: Brexit fantasy is about to come crashing down

"The English seem to have been utterly unprepared for how deeply divided they are, how bitter and angry the Brexit debate would be, how political assassination would return to the streets of England."

Joe O’Toole resigns after Fianna Fáil demands he depart

“I am comfortable with the fact that I put my views honestly and transparently on the record. It is regrettable that my straight-talking has caused difficulties for others but in that regard I am unlikely to change anytime soon.” Excellent

BREXIT – A contested Brexit would be disruptive for Ireland, both North and South

"Ireland is more interdependent with the United Kingdom than any other European Union member-state – constitutionally, politically, economically, socially and culturally. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but the 1998 Belfast Agreement, a binding international treaty between the two states and registered at the UN, provides for “concurrent consent” there and in the Republic for Irish unification by two referendums. There is provision for dual British and Irish citizenship in the North, and a number of these rights are guaranteed by reference to European law and courts. And the 1949 Westminster Ireland Act declares that the Republic “is not a foreign country for the purpose of any law in force in any part of the United Kingdom”. That is reflected in the Common Travel Area between them." And... "The scale of what is at stake is clear from the fact that the Republic is the UK’s fifth or sixth trading partner in the world, with which it imports and exports more than with the whole Commonwealth or with China, India, Russia and Brazil combined."

How remain failed: the inside story of a doomed campaign | Rafael Behr | Politics | The Guardian

"Just moments before, they had received an email from Andrew Cooper, a former Downing Street strategist and pollster for the official remain campaign, containing the daily “tracker” – the barometer of support among target segments of the electorate. It had dropped into the defeat zone. The cause was not mysterious. “Immigration was snuffing out our opportunity to talk about the economy,” Will Straw, the executive director of Britain Stronger In Europe, recalled."

#Soapbox: The sorry tale of ‘Outcome-Based Performance Management’ | Slugger O'Toole

"It’s no coincidence that Outcome-Based Accountability talks about ”turning the curve” – OBPM is supposed to make the numbers look better, to make changes in the shape of the graph. But the problem is, even when it achieves this, the numbers cannot be trusted because the numbers are not real. They’ve been produced by people whose job it is to produce good-looking data."

Junior doctors reject new contract - BBC News

"Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt highlighted the turnout, pointing out that it meant only 40% of those eligible actually voted against the deal." That is a bit cheeky. 37.5% voted to leave the EU recently but we appear to be making that happen (at considerable cost)

From Trump to Brexit: Trust in Government Is Collapsing Around the World - The Atlantic

>> "This is part of a larger divide that has been opening up between “mass populations” and “informed publics” (Edelman defined the latter group as those who have a college degree, regularly consume news media, and are in the top 25 percent of household income for their age group in a given country). The 2008 financial crisis, he argued, produced widespread suspicion that elites only act in their own interests, not those of the people, and that elites don’t necessarily have access to better information than the rest of the population does. The sluggish, unequal recovery from that crisis—the wealthy bouncing back while many others struggle with stagnant incomes—has only increased the skepticism." << hypothesis only. That trickle down had better get a bit stronger.

Garrison Keillor Turns Out the Lights on Lake Wobegon - The New York Times

>> If that sounds dismissive, it’s not meant to be. Mr. Keillor has always worn his storytelling gifts casually. Here, he seemed to take a page from “Pontoon” (2007), one of his Lake Wobegon novels, in which he wrote, “You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.”<<

Downloading 14.2 from mirror with wget?

wget command without downloading sibling directories

Edge.org

"My untroubled attitude results from my almost absolute faith in the reliability of the vast supercomputer I'm permanently plugged into. It was built with the intelligence of thousands of generations of human minds, and they're still working at it now. All that human intelligence remains alive in the form of the supercomputer of tools, theories, technologies, crafts, sciences, disciplines, customs, rituals, rules-of-thumb, arts, systems of belief, superstitions, work-arounds, and observations that we call Global Civilisation." Brian Eno 2015 via HN

Andrea Leadsom: The lessons about banking regulation which stay with me from the collapse of Barings | Conservative Home

"There were around 20 financial institutions all working round the clock responding to the Governor’s attempt to save Barings. In the end, it proved impossible simply because over those 48 hours the potential losses could not be quantified and no financial institution would take the risk, either by buying Barings, or underwriting the losses." Hence hub/spoke model with clearing houses for derivatives.

Why Donald Trump? | FiveThirtyEight

"A 2000 study by political scientists found that Americans who have incorrect information about public discourse can be divided into two different groups — the misinformed and the uninformed. The uninformed simply don’t know about a given topic; the misinformed are interested in what’s going on, but their sources of information are flawed. Another study, in 2010, found that when the misinformed were told about their inaccuracies, they held onto their beliefs with all the more conviction."

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Ex-LAB MP, Nick Palmer, looks at what the party might do

"2) The serious left – of which Corbyn is a prime exponent – is about systemic change towards a society less dominated by big business and prioritising solidarity with people in difficulty. They are not interested in singling out personalities, or tactical advantage, or a comfortable life for themselves. It completely misreads Corbyn to think that making his life difficult or unpleasant will make him resign." View from inside

Modern China is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre | Literary Hub

"Everything is happening in China at great speed, and this speed brings with it all sorts of problems. This is a phenomenon captured in a very old Chinese saying in the Daodejing: “Good fortune is that wherein disaster lurks. Disaster is that whereon good fortune depends.”"

Queen urges calm in 'challenging world' - BBC News

"Poems by Edwin Morgan and the Scots Makar, Jackie Kay, were read out, with musicians from the National Youth Choir of Scotland also performing and singer Midge Ure giving a rendition of Robert Burns' A Man's A Man For A' That." Burns' poem may have focused a few minds

Brian Walker: One union lost to Britain. Can the other be saved?

>> "This was a referendum only the English right wing wanted and almost nobody thought would be lost. “England has collapsed politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically,” declared the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, at Tuesday’s meeting of European leaders. And he’s an Anglophile. David Cameron will go down in history as the most luckless prime minister since Lord North lost the American colonies. How has the Brexit referendum brought one of the most stable political systems in the world to the brink of collapse?" <<

Tory leadership choice will define UK-EU relationship - BBC News

"Things that are said in the rough and tumble of a leadership race will be crawled over by EU leaders and diplomats and used in the negotiations to come. So there is a real choice before the 100,000 plus Tory members who will decide this contest. And their decision will affect us all, not just by determining our next prime minister but also our future relationship with the EU." So much for 'taking back control'. 10 000 people who happen to be members of a political party will constrain future policy choices.

What Does Kevin Bacon Have to Do with Global Financial Stability?

"On the other hand, this little four-bank model also illustrates an alarming feature of highly connected networks. As Allen and Gale pointed out in their paper, a loss big enough to drain all four banks’ capital will bring down the fully-connected network just as surely as it will bring down the ring-shaped one. The difference is that, while the ring network fails one bank at a time, the fully connected one fails suddenly and all at once. This is what the Bank of England’s chief economist and executive director, Andrew Haldane, calls the “robust yet fragile” property of highly connected networks."

Brexit talks will be stunningly complex. Who will provide the statesmanship we need?

"Certain things surely are agreed by both sides. This was the most important decision taken by the UK in many decades. The result was clear but close. The country is now deeply divided, regionally, generationally and attitudinally." --Tony Blair

Rain and the referendum — Medium

"On the day of the referendum, severe thunderstorms affected London and parts of south and East England. Given that the result of the referendum was expected to be close, given that lower turnout was presumed to favour one side in the campaign, and given anecdotal and academic evidence in favour of the idea that heavy rain depresses turnout, there was some speculation that this heavy rain might affect the result." TD;LR no effect. Chris Hanretty is one of those statisticians

‘I’ll Retire When I’m Dead’: Why Continuing to Work Is Good for a Man’s Health — MEL Magazine

"And that’s on top of working on a new book, a nonfiction work about the moment certain Americans became aware of their whiteness or blackness and what that meant within the context of American culture. He’s flying to New York City next week to conduct some interviews for it." Leon Dash - look out for that book

EU Trade Commissioner: No trade talks until full Brexit - BBC News

"After Brexit, the UK would become a "third country" in EU terms, she said - meaning trade would be carried out based on World Trade Organisation rules until a new deal was complete. A recent trade deal with Canada took seven years to negotiate. The Canadian agreement will also require ratification by all EU countries, adding another one to two years before it takes effect." 7 + 2 on WTO rules (no passporting) = challenging times...

So, let me get this straight... the... - Benjamin Timothy Blaine | Facebook

"So, let me get this straight... the leader of the opposition campaigned to stay but secretly wanted to leave, so his party held a non-binding vote to shame him into resigning so someone else could lead the campaign to ignore the result of the non-binding referendum which many people now think was just angry people trying to shame politicians into seeing they'd all done nothing to help them. Meanwhile, the man who campaigned to leave because he hoped losing would help him win the leadership of his party, accidentally won and ruined any chance of leading because the man who thought he couldn't lose, did - but resigned before actually doing the thing the vote had been about. The man who'd always thought he'd lead next, campaigned so badly that everyone thought he was lying when he said the economy would crash - and he was, but it did, but he's not resigned, but, like the man who lost and the man who won, also now can't become leader. Which means the woman who quietly campaigned to stay but always said she wanted to leave is likely to become leader instead. Which means she holds the same view as the leader of the opposition but for opposite reasons, but her party's view of this view is the opposite of the opposition's. And the opposition aren't yet opposing anything because the leader isn't listening to his party, who aren't listening to the country, who aren't listening to experts or possibly paying that much attention at all. However, none of their opponents actually want to be the one to do the thing that the vote was about, so there's not yet anything actually on the table to oppose anyway. And if no one ever does do the thing that most people asked them to do, it will be undemocratic and if any one ever does do it, it will be awful. Clear?" Crystal

Brexit threatens UK project funding - BBC News

"The bank provides finance to a wide range of projects around Europe, with a particular focus on areas like infrastructure, social housing, renewable energy and education. It invested £5.6bn (6.7bn euros) in the UK last year and has ploughed £42bn (50bn euros) into the country over the last decade."

Waiting for Goffman | Lapham’s Quarterly

>> Over the thirty-five years of his active scholarly career, Goffman developed four metaphorical scaffoldings for his thought, each with its own usefulness and pizzazz—the theater, the ritual, the game, and the frame. All of these are useful for understanding the shocks and stresses of city life, but here I’m going to concentrate on introducing his “dram­aturgical” texts, which are his best known. As Goffman once said, “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.” <<

After Brexit: the options | Slugger O'Toole

"The Customs Union is one of the oldest parts of the EU, dating back to the EEC’s founding in the 1950s. It is likely that the UK will retain CU access in any negotiations, as its terms are relatively uncontroversial. It allows for tariff-free trade between its members, a common external tariff rate and a common negotiating position in trade talks with third countries (e.g. TTIP). There is no requirement for freedom of movement in the CU, so this would allow for the immigration changes that were the central issue in the Leave campaign." No agriculture protection, and I imagine, no 'passporting' (i.e. no banking free trade). Otherwise feasible.

What I learned from trying — and failing — to stop Brexit - Vox

"Although we had all the usual campaigning materials, it felt as though for every myth I debunked, there were another five that a skeptical voter could name as fact. I fear we only ever made a tiny impact in the many misconceptions around the EU, let alone convince people that it could be a positive thing." More myths than the Mabinogion. Does my head in. Does *anyone* actually *think* on this strange little island of mine or are they just on the effing mushrooms?

Corbyn putting Labour 'in peril' by refusing to quit - Watson - BBC News

>> He added: "My party is in peril. We are facing am existential crisis and I just don't want us to be in this position because I think there are millions of people in the country who need a left leaning government, who can give people opportunity and right now we're not doing that." << >>Arguing that his cause was "not about one individual", he said he wanted to move Labour away from a pro-austerity "economic orthodoxy" it embraced at the last election and change the way politics was done in the country. << How do we move to anti-austerity in a practical way? What are the options? And there are *rights* to protect quite soon once the Trojan horse prime minister is appointed and we start replacing EU legislation...

Daphne Oram documentary - Wee Have Also Sound-Houses - YouTube

We also have sound-houses Daphne Oram

Parliament must decide what Brexit means in the interests of the whole Kingdom

"TheCityUK has mapped out a post-Brexit order in which it could still thrive - rather than being reduced to the level of "Bolivia" as it said in the campaign - by switching efforts to global bodies that increasingly set rules above the EU level, such as the Financial Stability Board, the Basel Committee, or the World Trade Organisation."

The Laura Perrins interview: Brexit is a chance for a new socially conservative party, says Hitchens - The Conservative Woman

>> PH: No. The Leave campaign was from the start a very odd coalition, and the most conservative people in it are the Old Labour working class voters who rightly feel betrayed, morally and economically, in global multicultural liberated Britain. Many of the campaign’s supporters are Thatcherites, economic liberals, globalists and committed free traders who have no principled objection to open borders. I think the actual outcome of these events may fall well short of what many Leave voters hoped for. This was predetermined when such people as Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson, Michael Howard, and Michael Gove placed themselves at its head. <<

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The EU referendum: An attempt to analyse the in-play betting

"I was astonished by the in-play volumes. As PB reported, by 6am on polling day the EU referendum had become the first market on Betfair to surpass £50m in cumulative bets. But by the time the broadcasters called the result for Leave, the total matched on Betfair had more than doubled £113m." I'm glad *someone* made a bit of money out of this...

SDLP to feed a key NI perspective into the EU’s negotiations with the UK? | Slugger O'Toole

"To get the big one out of the road first, no one is going back to war. In fact of all the parts of the UK Northern Ireland is probably the calmest and the least hysterical, and as Newton Emerson put it last night, least embarrassing." When the going gets weird, the weird get going (HST) so NI can show the rest of us how to deal with large uncertainties.

Brexit: Cameron to face EU leaders after vote to leave - BBC News

"After two days of sharp falls in the stock market and sterling and political turmoil engulfing both the Conservative and Labour parties, there is increasing uncertainty about what Brexit will entail and the precise nature of the mandate that Mr Cameron's successor will be given."

Two Spreadsheets, Microsoft Access, and a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service

"When asked what data skills journalists need, I don’t hesitate to tout spreadsheets as the single, must-have day-to-day skill for every journalist at every organization in every mission. For those with a bit more time or motivation to experiment, I might recommend an acquaintanceship with database JOIN statements – it doesn’t matter if it’s in Access or SQLite or Postgres. This may not sound fancy, but even as a computer engineer, I rarely need anything fancier." Just getting the data can be a struggle of course

Defined by the Filter Bubble | Civicist

>> “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln. The people who run social media companies today have more power over the divisions in our national and international houses than almost anyone else alive. I hope they see that our fate, as well as their legacies, depend on taking action, now. <<

UK suffers leadership gap in risky times - BBC News

"When he first proposed a referendum three years ago I asked the prime minister what his Plan B was if his renegotiation failed or he lost the referendum. He refused to contemplate any such possibility. I asked him again during the general election campaign - he was no more willing to consider failure. The civil service were banned from making plans for Brexit." Wow.

Brexit: The Vote to Leave the EU and the Death of an Idea - The Atlantic

>> "One of the problems with immigration is though there’s an aggregate benefit [from immigration] to the economy and a huge amount of evidence of that—people who come pay much more in taxes than they receive in benefits—[the benefit is] not shared equally. There are losers as well as winners. If you have very large numbers of people coming into neighborhoods without tracking who’s going where, and without moving resources to local authorities to make sure they have enough money to create schools and hospitals, that does put pressure on public services. It puts pressure on house prices, and it can put pressure on wages in certain sectors. That’s what’s happened. It’s the left-behind voters who have risen up against the elites. They don’t trust anyone who they blame for having created these circumstances. In a way, there are very strong parallels with the rise of Trump in the U.S." <<

Caltech glassblower's retirement has scientists sighing - LA Times

"Full-time university glassblowers are considered tops in their field, but few institutions still offer such positions or give young glassblowers the chance to hone their craft." 'Driving out cost' has its limits

Brexit: Jeremy Corbyn Labour crisis and George Osborne speech - BBC News

>> And he insists: "There isn't going to be a Brexit government. There's going to be a Conservative government that will represent both sides of the debates." << New boss. Same as the old boss. >> He delivered an eloquent - yet entirely unscripted - address, setting out a radical vision for prisons, expressing his belief in redemption for offenders, and announcing his ambition to reduce the jail population. << 11:50 July 14th Danny Shaw. Gove was doing something useful.

There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove | Nick Cohen | Opinion | The Guardian

"Never has a revolution in Britain’s position in the world been advocated with such carelessness. The Leave campaign has no plan. And that is not just because there was a shamefully under-explored division between the bulk of Brexit voters who wanted the strong welfare state and solid communities of their youth and the leaders of the campaign who wanted Britain to become an offshore tax haven."

Britain’s Brexit vote has redrawn the rules of British politics « Labour Uncut

"As Johnson’s administration becomes mired in the administrative equivalent of a withdrawal from Vietnam, harried from the right by Nigel Farage who will be demanding swifter, more sweeping action while accusing them of betraying the people, Labour will be sitting on the opposition benches, shattered."

The Norway model is Britain’s only hope « Labour Uncut

"We have lost our triple A rating. Moody’s have downgraded us from stable to negative – for those that don’t know what that means it means all that debt we’re always talking about has become a lot more expensive overnight – that and the predicted loss of GDP will wipe out the much bemoaned £350 million weekly payments the leave campaign falsely claimed we would get back. We will only lose money, not save anything to spend at home." Would that be debt guarantee insurance?

Path to Irish unity now much clearer but major obstacles still lie ahead - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

"There is potential for the Fresh Start deal between the DUP and Sinn Fein to be derailed as European funding disappears without the promise of full compensatory funding from a British Government to replace the programmes that made Northern Ireland a net beneficiary from EU membership." Every mayor in England wants 'compensatory funding'. This one is going to run and run...

Democracy: Referendums, Petitions, and a Reality Check for Leavers and Remainers Alike | Slugger O'Toole

"Where are we, as Day 3 of the new era begins? In a mess – all of us. It’s startlingly obvious that the top people in the Leave campaign had no idea they were going to win, and no game plan for Brexit. I think an awful lot of them, and some of the people voting Leave, were playing for 49%, a high risk strategy that blew up in everyone’s faces."

The British government must seek a mandate to negotiate brexit | Slugger O'Toole

"The first thing that I’ve immediately noticed is how, after enthusiastically urging everyone to seize the moment to vote Leave, those who made that case have gone very quiet now that they have won." They are holding the bag for this and they seem to have absolutely no idea what to do.

Calm down, everyone. We may have voted for Brexit, but there's no need for any drama

"Now please, WOULD EVERYONE PLEASE CALM DOWN and yes CARRY ON!" Pigs flying in formation, and I'm agreeing with Norman.

Brexit's two tribes will go to war

"The only problem is that they are about to discover something that is galling in the extreme: the sneery Remain elite that they have so sensationally defenestrated will be quickly and seamlessly replaced by something startingly similar from their own side." Harry De Quetteville

Are we still capable of governing ourselves?

"The last people to advise on how we should now proceed are those leaders of the Vote Leave campaign, who I feared would lose us the battle by their refusal to offer a properly worked-out “exit plan”: one capable of neutralising Project Fear by allowing us to continue trading, like independent Norway, just as freely with the single market as we do now; but without the political baggage and without having to obey three quarters of the EU’s laws." Christopher Brooker has a point I think. The Bank of England seemed to have a contingency plan which they executed. No signs of anything else.

A disunited Kingdom... why Brexit Britain is as divided as Europe in 1914

"The Brexit reveals how deeply divided our supposed ‘One Nation’ has become, with Scotland voting 62 per cent to Remain, Northern Ireland 56 per cent. England – which voted overwhelmingly for Brexit – itself is deeply torn, with the North, the countryside, older people, and those who did not attend university, determined to leave, with only the cities, parts of the South East, the young and graduates favouring remaining in the EU." Anthony Seldon. Loving the use of the word 'overwhelmingly' there instead of the percentages.

Social Media's Filter Bubble Driving Political Anger - Guido Fawkes Techno Guido

The echo chamber is a worrying thing. We search and see things that fit our opinions. One of the reasons I buy the FT now and again and check out Guido's blog once a month or so.

The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life | Science | Smithsonian

"Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey." Bee puke. Cool.

A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge — Backchannel

"And the spreadsheet has begun to be a forceful agent of decentralization, breaking down hierarchies in large companies and diminishing the power of data processing." An old one from back in the day

Jan. 26, 1983: Spreadsheet as Easy as 1-2-3 | WIRED

"Technology pundit John C. Dvorak has lamented the effects of the “what-if society,” saying that corporate executives have become slavish devotees of spreadsheet scenarios, failing to make decisions based on what customers actually want. But there’s no doubt that the spreadsheet has given companies, both large and small, a far better picture of their bottom lines. For better or worse, that power has transformed American business and the economy."

Why a simple spreadsheet spread like wildfire | Opinion | The Guardian

"Years ago, I began to wonder if the popularity of spreadsheets might be due to the fact that humans are genetically programmed to understand them. At the time, I was teaching mathematics to complete beginners, and finding that while they were fine with arithmetic, algebra completely eluded them. The moment one said “let x be the number of apples”, their eyes would glaze and one knew they were lost. But the same people had no problem entering a number into a spreadsheet cell labelled “Number of apples”, happily changing it at will and observing the ensuing results. In other words, they intuitively understood the concept of a variable."

Spreadsheet Addiction - Burns Statistics

"I know there are many spreadsheets in financial companies that take all night to compute. These are complicated and commonly fail. When such spreadsheets are replaced by code more suited to the task, it is not unusual for the computation time to be cut to a few minutes and the process much easier to understand."

Guest Post: Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt - Roosevelt Institute

"As is evident, current period debt-to-GDP is a pretty poor predictor of future GDP growth at debt-to-GDP ratios of 30 or greater—the range where one might expect to find a tipping point dynamic. But it does a great job predicting past growth. This pattern is a telltale sign of reverse causality." Longish historical data set can allow statements about the 'direction' of causality.

Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems. - Roosevelt Institute

"The U.K. has 19 years (1946-1964) above 90 percent debt-to-GDP with an average 2.4 percent growth rate. New Zealand has one year in their sample above 90 percent debt-to-GDP with a growth rate of -7.6. These two numbers, 2.4 and -7.6 percent, are given equal weight in the final calculation, as they average the countries equally. Even though there are 19 times as many data points for the U.K." Averaging averages from different data selections! Excellent.

Memo to Reinhart and Rogoff: I think it's best to admit your errors and go on from there - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

"Maybe Konczal is overstating it when he writes, “one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.” I have no informed opinion on that at all. Really. I’m not being polite and circumspect, I know nothing about this stuff." Politics + Small, historical data set = arguments. Good collection of articles around an infamous data set

Bob Dylan’s Secret Archive - The New York Times

"For longtime students, seeing the archive may conjure a familiar feeling of astonishment at just how deep the well of Dylanology goes. There is always far more beneath the surface than anyone could guess. One example of this phenomenon — and of how radically the material could change existing Dylan scholarship — is the “Blood on the Tracks” material." So he wasn't rocking up to the studio and blasting off an album. Actually, a lot of hard work redrafting and iterating.

Andrew O’Hagan · The Satoshi Affair · LRB 30 June 2016

"Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird – to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ – and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his ‘toys’, but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama." The latest Santoshi Nakamoto sighting

Closest Thing to a Wonder Drug? Try Exercise - The New York Times

"Moderate intensity is probably much less than you think. Walking briskly, at 3 to 4 miles per hour or so, qualifies. So does bicycling slower than 10 miles an hour. Anything that gets your heart rate somewhere between 110 and 140 beats per minute is enough. Even vacuuming, mowing the lawn or actively walking your dog might qualify." Couch to 5K has to be done.

Alicia Keys is done playing nice. Your phone is getting locked up at her shows now. - The Washington Post

>> “If you haven’t been to a phone-free show, you just don’t know what you’re missing,” he says. “There’s something about living in real life that can’t be replicated.” << Might get me a set of those little baggies...

ISCOC04 Talk | Adam Bosworth's Weblog

"Consider the spreadsheet. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet. Lotus corporation (now IBM), filled with Harvard MBAs and PhDs in CS from MIT, built Improv. Improv set out “to fix all this”. It was an auditors dream. It provided rarified heights of abstraction, formalisms for rows and columns, and in short was truly comprehensible. It failed utterly, not because it failed in its ambitions but because it succeeded." The blog is suffering from character set uncertainty for those who enjoy a little irony. Adam Bosworth on Improv's attempt to get spreadsheets to behave themselves.

Lotus Improv - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"After a few months of studying existing real-world examples, it became clear that the data, views of that data, and the formulas that acted on that data were very separate concepts. Yet in every case, the existing spreadsheet programs required the user to type all of these items into the same (typically single) sheet's cells." Pito Salas' work lead to Lotus Improv and market failure, although the idea of separate views into data lives on in the pivot table. Perhaps people *like* the lack of structure on a spreadsheet? Perhaps they can get things done by clicking around and improvising rather than having to plan stuff out in advance?

Here are three scary reasons why LinkedIn sold to Microsoft for $26 billion - Recode

"...the deal should be able to help grow LinkedIn’s audience through a combination of integrations with Microsoft Office and a possible subscription tie-up." Clippy with job ads? "Looks like you are programming an Excel macro there... need a job?" Agghhhhhh

EU referendum polls and odds: Businesses fear Brexit hit | The Week UK

"All of this has some in the business community spooked. A survey by Charterhouse Research of 3,394 bosses, reported in The Guardian, shows more than a third (35 per cent) are worried about the economic hit that would result from an Out vote next Thursday." Switch the points, the train shudders imperceptibly, then slowly curves off to the right and comes to rest in a siding. Does anyone actually read anything and *think* any more?

Friends with benefits: A taxing problem for Ireland in a post-Brexit world • The Register

"Many in the UK will likely vote for Brexit because they want Britain to control immigration and whereas Brexiteers think of Romanians as the competition, Irish citizens like my parents are far more numerous and fewer will come to work in the UK, a fact that stands to boost the Irish tech sector at the expense of all those UK-based firms." Ireland Act 1948? Check terms.

Voter registration site collapse proves genius of GDS, says minister • The Register

>> Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) were highly critical of the switch to individual voter registration last year, which saw millions go missing from the electoral register. The missing included “Areas with either higher proportions of students (aged 16-74) [sic], higher proportions of people living in private rented accommodation and/or higher proportions of people living in communal establishments had relatively lower match rates.” << Wholly unrelated to the age differences in voting intentions in the referendum of course...

The Importance of Excel | The Baseline Scenario

"But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. "

Microsoft's Excel Might Be The Most Dangerous Software On The Planet - Forbes

"To translate that into the vernacular, the bank, JP Morgan, was running huge bets (tens of billions of dollars, what we might think of a golly gee gosh that’s a lot of money) in London. The way they were checking what they were doing was playing around in Excel. And not even in the Masters of the Universe style that we might hope, all integrated, automated and self-checking, but by cutting and pasting from one spreadsheet to another. And yes, they got one of the equations wrong as a result of which the bank lost several billion dollars (perhaps we might drop the gee here but it’s still golly gosh that’s a lot of money)."

How Ursula Franklin made me a technology journalist | Clive Thompson

"One lovely example is her discussion of credit-card-style keycards to unlock doors. Back around 1990 they were a hot new tech, but as Franklin pointed out, they weren’t just a “better” key. They were a different key, with new abilities. A regular metal key can let you in a room. But a credit-card key can gather information on how often you access that room, reporting back to the building-owner on your comings and goings. Or the owner can, on the fly, reprogram the lock from afar to suddenly lock you out. High-tech keys conferred new powers on those who owned the locks." Noone sits down and decides that they will install swipe card locks so that they can gather information and control access - those things emerge as social effects of the more capable (and more centralised) technological 'solution'.

Steps to Turn Off the Nagging Self-Doubt in Your Head - WSJ

>> A well-developed thought “is like a ski track in the snow. The more you ski down a path, the easier it is to go down that path and not another,” says Alex Korb << Can we use that image to explain learning to students?

Anders Ericsson: How to become an expert at anything - Business Insider

"In general, according to Ericsson, deliberate practice involves stepping outside your comfort zone and trying activities beyond your current abilities. While repeating a skill you've already mastered might be satisfying, it's not enough to help you get better. Moreover, simply wanting to improve isn't enough - people also need well-defined goals and the help of a teacher who makes a plan for achieving them."

Wittgenstein’s camera | University of Cambridge

"The composite photograph could be said to mark the start of the development of Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘language game’ and ‘family resemblance’, that things assumed to be connected by singular common features, as Galton believed with facial characteristics, are in fact connected by myriad overlapping similarities that weave complex networks, the possibilities represented in the fuzziness. Wittgenstein later uses human families to relate this idea, where “build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way"."

The Wittgenstein Controversy - The Atlantic

"What happened next may have been caused partly by resentment among the philosophers: Nedo had no professional qualifications in philosophy, yet he had been placed in charge. Or it may have been the result of Nedo's combination of obsessiveness, absentmindedness, and lack of regard for such things as schedules and budgets." There is a lot to be said for getting people with experience of organising a similar project involved on these occasions.

The Zombie Doctrine | George Monbiot

"Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that, Ludwig von Mises proposed, would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one."

The Science of Getting Through a Checkout Line Faster - Scientific American

"Previous researchers suspected that a single line leading up to multiple cashiers—the system many ticket sellers and big box stores use—could be maximally efficient. But a forthcoming study in Management Science challenges that assumption. A better system is not a single queue at all—it is many of them. When workers have their own dedicated set of customers, called parallel queues, they work faster." But why would I want someone to feel that they had to hurry all day? If I was *really* that short of time should I not use the self-service checkout?

BBC - Future - The Japanese art of (not) sleeping

"In my experience, it is the everyday and seemingly natural events upon which people generally do not reflect that reveal essential structures and values of a society." What I'm interested in is how things we do get to seem 'natural' - in effect disappear into the background - so quickly.

Daniel Kahneman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"With David Schkade, Kahneman developed the notion of the focusing illusion (Kahneman & Schkade, 1998; Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz & Stone, 2006) to explain in part the mistakes people make when estimating the effects of different scenarios on their future happiness (also known as affective forecasting, which has been studied extensively by Daniel Gilbert). The "illusion" occurs when people consider the impact of one specific factor on their overall happiness, they tend to greatly exaggerate the importance of that factor, while overlooking the numerous other factors that would in most cases have a greater impact. A good example is provided by Kahneman and Schkade's 1998 paper "Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction". In that paper, students in the Midwest and in California reported similar levels of life satisfaction, but the Midwesterners thought their Californian peers would be happier. The only distinguishing information the Midwestern students had when making these judgments was the fact that their hypothetical peers lived in California. Thus, they "focused" on this distinction, thereby overestimating the effect of the weather in California on its residents' satisfaction with life." Our famous referendum could be a huge focusing illusion, perhaps.

Making an 18th-Century Potato Pudding – JCB Books Speak

"The ingredients for both are very similar: mashed potato, sugar, brandy, nutmeg, currants and a shocking quantity of butter and eggs." Hard to go wrong with those ingredients really isn't it?

The Setup / Johan Nordberg

"I would also like to mention d3.js - it's mostly used for data visualizations but has almost everything you could ever want for working with 2D graphics and the DOM; I've built entire web apps using nothing but d3.js." Interesting

What's Our Next Fight? | Linux Journal

"Damn near everything runs on Linux, or on something so similar that you can open a shell on it and get stuff done." "Jonathan Zittrain calls general-purpose computers and networks generative, meaning by nature they generate and support countless other inventions and services, and the markets that grow around them." GP boxes and open distributed networks please.

Has Apple lost its simplicity? « Observatory

"Last week, I wrote an article for The Guardian with the above title. It was a question, not a conclusion, and I tried to offer a thoughtful opinion. Sadly, The Guardian chose to give it a click-bait headline that contradicted my point of view. So, for the record, here is the complete article as originally intended."

Ootside - Weather from a brutally honest Scottish perspective

Refresh the screen for variations on a theme

How Did Consciousness Evolve? - The Atlantic

"The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence."

Takahashi method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Unlike a typical presentation, no pictures and no charts are used. Only a few words are printed on each slide—often only one or two short words, using very large characters. To make up for this, a presenter will use many more slides than in a traditional presentation, each slide being shown for a much shorter duration." No use for maths directly, but could work for meta-skills

Education World: Wire Side Chats: How Can Teachers Develop Students' Motivation -- and Success?

"Teachers should focus on students' efforts and not on their abilities. When students succeed, teachers should praise their efforts or their strategies, not their intelligence. (Contrary to popular opinion, praising intelligence backfires by making students overly concerned with how smart they are and overly vulnerable to failure.)" "When students fail, teachers should also give feedback about effort or strategies -- what the student did wrong and what he or she could do now. We have shown that this is a key ingredient in creating mastery-oriented students." Sounds like a resilience strategy

ongoing by Tim Bray · On the Left

"In par­tic­u­lar, I think self-driving ve­hi­cles are go­ing to blow a hole in em­ploy­ment for the relatively-unskilled that may nev­er heal." Someone else is getting it as well. Just look at all the white vans and Deliveroo bikes...

How Sea Otters and Starfish Balance Their Ecosystems

"At the tip of nearby Alligator Point, he noticed that for a few days each month, the low tide exposed an enormous gathering of large predatory snails, such as the horse conch, some more than a foot long. The mud and sawgrass of Alligator Point was not at all boring, quite the contrary—it was a battlefield."

Why can’t the Estonian president buy a song off iTunes for his Latvian wife? | Ars Technica

"Estonia, like nearly every other EU member state, has universal health care. Since 2002, Estonia has issued digital ID cards to all citizens and legal residents. These cards allow access to a "citizen’s portal," enabling all kinds of government services to exist entirely online: essentially any interaction with the government can be done online, ranging from paying taxes, to voting, to even picking up a prescription."

Who Really Found the Higgs Boson - Issue 18: Genius - Nautilus

"This collective discipline is one way that ATLAS tames the complexity of the data it produces, which in raw form is voluminous enough to fill a stack of DVDs that reaches from the earth to the moon and back again, 10 times every year. The data must be reconstructed into something that approximates an image of individual collisions in time and space, much like the processing required for raw output from a digital camera."

[RFE] add a way to run in a new systemd scope automatically #428

"My concern is that we have a little function, daemon(), that does a simple little procedure to make a daemon that has worked basically unchanged across multiple platforms for maybe, what, 30 years? Now to do the same thing we need to add 150 lines of new, Linux-only code AND a library dependency." Slackware 14.2 comes out soon.

How the Internet works: Submarine fiber, brains in jars, and coaxial cables | Ars Technica

"And perhaps even more importantly, as our reliance on omnipresent connectivity continues to blossom, our connected device numbers swell, and our thirst for bandwidth knows no bounds, how do we keep the Internet running? How do Verizon or Virgin reliably get 100 million bytes of data to your house every second, all day every day?"

Bodleian Libraries | Exploring Ultramarine

"Before the use of explosives the mining of lapis lazuli involved lighting large fires against the rock and, when the rock was hot, throwing cold water onto it. The sudden cooling caused the rock to crack and split enabling the extraction of the lapis lazuli from the marble matrix with pick, hammer and chisel." The search for bright things and strong colours.

solnic.eu - My time with Rails is up

"It took me few days to add this stupid link. Why? The app was a big ball of complex domain logic scattered across multiple layers with view templates so complicated, it wasn’t even simple to find the right template where the link was supposed to be added. Since I needed some data in order to create that link, it wasn’t obvious how I should get it." Round and round the mulberry bush...

For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER - WSJ

"For decades, a computer revolution has been building in Scrabble, each improvement advancing the science of rack management, said Stefan Fatsis, author of “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players.” These days, competitors use applications to analyze, in real time, the wisdom of every letter laid, comparing their moves to those artificial intelligence would play." Montecarlo simulation gets everywhere

Programming the ENIAC: an example of why computer history is hard | Computer History Museum

"ENIAC – the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer – was a room-sized machine with over 17,000 vacuum tubes. It started running at the end of 1945, and for five years it was the only fully electronic computer running in the US. Estimates are that by the time it was retired in 1955, it had done more calculations than all human beings in all of history."

If We Could Put King Solomon in an MRI Machine, Could We See the Wisdom in his Brain?

"Grossmann’s cross-cultural studies have revealed that in cultures where the self is seen as more interdependent, more reliant on relationships with other people—such as in Japan—people are less threatened by perceived dangers to one’s self, and are more able to engage in wise reasoning."

Gulf of Maine Research Institute: Space Available: Make Your Own Globe

"Printing the location of continents and oceans directly onto a round surface would be difficult. Instead, this map of the Earth is printed in flat, roughly triangular sections and then attached to a ball. These sections are called gores." Construction activity

The Small London Company That Makes the World's Most Beautiful Globes | Atlas Obscura

"Bellerby says it takes around six months to complete just one of the globes, which range from £999 ($1440) for the smallest to £59,000 ($85,000) for the Churchill." These are lovely. This is the way of production I suspect, the William Morris thing of selling luxury goods and paying decent wages as the mass manufactured goods become commodities with low margins.

Rogue Columnist: Jane Jacobs is dead. Long live Jane Jacobs.

"To her, ideology was poison, offering "pre-fabricated answers" that adherents always fall back on. Instead, she was an observer of cities, a chronicler of what worked and what didn't." Multiple uses and multiple time tables. Still works today

How Failing Better Could Advance Science

"It is this unordinary meaning of failure that I suggest scientists should embrace. One must try to fail because it is the only strategy to avoid repeating the obvious. Failing better means looking beyond the obvious, beyond what you know and beyond what you know how to do. Failing better happens when we ask questions, when we doubt results, when we allow ourselves to be immersed in uncertainty."

Programming by poking: why MIT stopped teaching SICP | posterior science

>> "He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant. Nowadays, we do programming by poking." << Which explains a lot, for instance, web forms that won't accept an email address with a + extension e.g. foo+nospam@bar.notreal

Who Was Ramanujan? — Backchannel

"Over the years, I’ve found all sorts of results that seem interesting. Strange structures that arise when one successively adds numbers to their digit reversals. Bizarre nested recurrence relations that generate primes. Peculiar representations of integers using trees of bitwise xors. But they’re empirical facts — demonstrably true, yet not part of the tradition and narrative of existing mathematics." Wolfram on doing experiments with high precision numerical maths. His early work was on cellular automata I recollct

Software Error Doomed Japanese Hitomi Spacecraft - Scientific American

"The satellite managed to make one crucial astronomical observation before the accident, capturing gas motions in a galaxy cluster in the constellation Perseus. The instrument that made the observation, a high-resolution spectrometer, had been in the works for three decades. Two earlier versions of it were lost in previous spacecraft failures." Well, the design has been validated at least. Time for Sitzfleisch from the Japanese I think. Just iterate and try again.

Snowden’s Rubik’s Cube — Matt Davis [da5is.com]

"I don’t think anyone would have noticed it unless they were specifically looking for it." Well, I suspect that 'they' will be looking now... ...the question being how could a casual contracted employee get access to the whole Corpus...

Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider : The Two-Way : NPR

"A small mammal has sabotaged the world's most powerful scientific instrument." Great first sentence

Frank Auerbach: An interview with one of our greatest living painters - Telegraph

"The room measures about 25ft square. It has been Auerbach’s home and studio since 1954. There are a few pieces of furniture – a small wooden desk and two wooden chairs; the larger, slightly more comfortable one is for sitters. Circles painted in different colours on the lino ensure that the chair’s legs are returned to their correct place. A work in progress is on an easel. Other canvases are turned to face the wall. The floor is covered with globs of paint, the detritus of Auerbach’s method of painting. On every surface there are brushes, rags, pots of paint, spatulas, old newspapers, well-thumbed monographs and a paint-encrusted trolley. Sketchbooks are arranged neatly in one corner, obscured by a collection of plastic bags. The north-facing window is mired with London dust; a weakening autumn sun casts a faint golden wash over the room. On the back wall there is a functional kitchenette, and on a raised platform a single bed. Tacked to the walls are reproductions of two Rembrandts, a Hogarth, a Picasso, random postcards sent by friends, and three large black-and-white reproductions of Auerbach’s own work." So, just how much space do you actually need?

This study 40 years ago could have reshaped the American diet. But it was never fully published. - The Washington Post

"Steven Broste, now a retired biostatistician, was then a student at the University of Minnesota and used the full set of data for his master's thesis in 1981. He interacted with the researchers. Part of the problem, Broste suggested in an interview, may have been limits on statistical methods at the time. Computer software for statistics wasn't as readily available as it is today. So, at the time of the study, it wasn't as easy to know how significant the data was. Broste completed his thesis several years after the last patients had left the trial, but it was not published in a journal."

Alexa, Cortana, and Siri aren’t novelties anymore. They’re our terrifyingly convenient future.

"But the Echo’s inadvertent intrusion into an intimate conversation is also a harbinger of a more fundamental shift in the relationship between human and machine. Alexa—and Siri and Cortana and all of the other virtual assistants that now populate our computers, phones, and living rooms—are just beginning to insinuate themselves, sometimes stealthily, sometimes overtly, and sometimes a tad creepily, into the rhythms of our daily lives." Not my future, thank you very much. Just resuscitated my Nokia dumb phone and we have no desire for IOT at all.

A Nerd's Review of the Tesla Model S - David Smith

"I firmly believe that fully autonomous driving will become typical during my lifetime. It is a strange thought that I may never need to teach my 4 year old daughter how to operate a steering wheel. The experience of control and interaction that driving affords is a big part of what makes it pleasurable rather than just functional. Giving it up will be quite a significant change." Gearhead's view of timescale

Music To Your Ears - The New Yorker

"It isn’t a question of classical tastes against pop; it’s a question of small forms heard in motion against large forms heard with solemn intent. “Sgt. Pepper” baffles them as much as Beethoven’s Ninth." Adam Gopnik

Linux at 25: Q&A With Linus Torvalds - IEEE Spectrum

"If I had known what I know today when I started, I would never have had the chutzpah to start writing my own operating system: You need a certain amount of naïveté to think that you can do it. I really think that was needed for the project to get started and to succeed. The lack of understanding about the eventual scope of the project helped, but so did getting into it without a lot of preconceived notions of where it should go." Everyday mind, Linus style

The biggest mystery in mathematics: Shinichi Mochizuki and the impenetrable proof : Nature News & Comment

>>In his latest verification report, Mochizuki wrote that the status of his theory with respect to arithmetic geometry “constitutes a sort of faithful miniature model of the status of pure mathematics in human society”. The trouble that he faces in communicating his abstract work to his own discipline mirrors the challenge that mathematicians as a whole often face in communicating their craft to the wider world.<< Shinichi Mochizuki seems like a really together chap. Not another Perelman by any means.

Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy | Quanta Magazine

"If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after two coin tosses." There goes Easter

In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future? | Hacker News

"I cannot speak for Chess's mindset but as a Devoted Go Player, we are collectively trying to solve it, and so we have for centuries. We play Go to explore its universe and reach utmost understanding of the game(and a glimpse of ourselves). If we ever find(which eventually we shuold) the exact single pattern that is best for both players, and we solve the game, it becomes something different. Maybe it becomes something senseless, or something artful(I can explain the 'art' part if someone asks) but trying to be competitive is silly." Reaction to algorithmic go playing.

Harold Budd: the composer with no urge to make music | Music | The Guardian

'Art without risk is not art.' I agree with that profoundly. Take a flyer – and if it fails don't let it crush you. It's just a failure. Who cares?" --Harold Budd

This House Costs Just $20,000—But It’s Nicer Than Yours

I want one but land costs in UK would put it in the millionaire bracket.

Cornpone Versus Cornbread - VirginiaLiving.com

“You have to remember, the purpose of cornpone was making do with what you have.” --Bill Savage, Pungo Creek Mills

The Real Reason Sugar Has No Place in Cornbread | Serious Eats

"Cornbread is just one of many traditional Southern foods that are difficult to experience today in their original form for the simple reason that today's ingredients just aren't the same. Buttermilk, rice, benne seeds, watermelons, and even the whole hogs put on barbecue pits: each has changed in fundamental ways over the course of the 20th century." So corn pone and a pot of beans with a mucket of coffee becomes an exercise in Historically Informed Performance, like a Beethoven symphony performed by an orchestra whose string players use arch bows and whose brass section use straight horns.

An interview with Joey Hess [LWN.net]

"Also, learn a few quite different things very deeply; there's too much quick, shallow learning of redundant stuff."

A Conversation With Erik Spiekermann

"There are physical limitations as to certain size. It’s nice to read 10 words a line, 50 to 60 characters. This is science. This is not me. This is something that we like, the way our eyes move in little segments. There are physical limitations to our eyes: the curvature of our eyeballs, the space we have in front of us, the distance from the eyes. That’s human, and no machine can ever change that." This guy gets it

GCHQ mass spying will 'cost lives in Britain,' warns ex-NSA tech chief • The Register

"In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Binney became concerned that the NSA's approach of collecting all available data on everyone was misguided and illegal. He, and others within the NSA, favored a selective surveillance regimen against selected targets, but this idea was shot down by government controllers." Might be a Bayesian angle on this.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 197, Umberto Eco

The apartment is a labyrinth of corridors lined with bookcases that reach all the way up to extraordinarily high ceilings—thirty thousand volumes, said Eco, with another twenty thousand at his manor. I saw scientific treatises by Ptolemy and novels by Calvino, critical studies of Saussure and Joyce, entire sections devoted to medieval history and arcane manuscripts.

Neal Stephenson - Social Media - he does not do it

Nice piece, pity about the thin font on a black background

Why working fewer hours would make us more productive | Guardian Sustainable Business | The Guardian

"More than 6 million of us in Britain work more than 45 hours a week, while 1.85 million of us are unemployed. While it would need to happen gradually, alongside some reskilling and training, a shorter working week for all would mean fairer distribution of available work. It would reduce the number of people working far too many hours, and also the number with no work at all."

Anna Vital -  How To Think Visually Using Visual Analogies Most...

One for the design students to pick apart. Not sure about the row labels being written vertically with upright letters - I found them hard to read

Design like an astronaut - Deep Design

"Worry is the accumulated negative feelings and thoughts associated with an undesirable potential outcome. It can have positive effects (such as prompting you to put on a seat belt before driving), but far too often also has negative side effects, such as preoccupying our thoughts, paralyzing our actions, making us irrational, or fueling our anger. While it may once have been a fundamental part of our survival instinct, it now often kicks in at the wrong times and makes us do the wrong things." Useful reminder. Try on me and the students!

How Facebook (and Lee Berger) Found Homo naledi in a Tiny Cave

"I would like these discoveries to make humans more introspective and much more aware we are a part of natural world with a past. And a deep one. That’s complex. And if humans don’t become more aware that they’re part of the natural world, this isn’t going to be a pretty world for any of us, plant or animal, if we continue to use this as our right, and our domain, and treat ourselves as if we’re different. We don’t have some special privilege." Lee Berger paleoanthropologist

BBC - Earth - We know the city where HIV first emerged

Science and society thing as its in the news

A New Biography of John le Carré Offers Insight into the Cold War Author’s Life - The Atlantic

"A trap is being set for Mundt. Leamas is instructed to drift, detach, descend, burn out, become useless, until Moscow—convinced at last of his disaffection—makes its inevitable approach to turn him."

Installing OpenBSD 5.8 on your laptop is really hard (not)

Current setup. ZZZ does not complete.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 76, Raymond Carver

"Generous, yes, that's a good word for them. Yes, and I'll tell you why. Up at school there's a typist who has one of those space-age typewriters, a word processor, and I can give her a story to type and once she has it typed and I get back the fair copy, I can mark it up to my heart's content and give it back to her; and the next day I can have my story back, all fair copy once more. Then I can mark it up again as much as I want, and the next day I'll have back a fair copy once more. I love it. It may seem like a small thing, really, but it's changed my life, that woman and her word processor."

wireless from the command-line in linux

sudo iw dev wlan0 disconnect How you *disconnect* from a previous connection from command line

New install "standard system utilties"

root@jessie:~# tasksel -t --new-install Try this command on the ill box and see what is not already there

tasksel (800×592)

What happens if you don't install standard system utilities?

tasksel - Debian Wiki

aptitude search ~pstandard ~prequired ~pimportant -F%p Try above command and install anything that isn't already installed on the box with problems

systemd - How to set up a runlevel 3 in Debian 8? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

ls -l /lib/systemd/system/default.target shows graphical.target on Debian Standard Live session

The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ - Basics of the Debian package management system

Package priorities: Standard and higher packages are found on the Debian 'standard' live image. Booting into a cli session in the 'standard' image allows me to install xorg and icewm and run from startx without any issues including returning to the cli. Not so from a system installed from DVD1 installer with no package sets selected at the tasksel stage. Check run levels &c just in case the packages are the same but the configs different

Steve Bodow

More Things Change by Steve Bodow An early look at Mumbai IT industry, 2001.

How to Prevent Hand Pain from Excessive Writing (with Pictures)

Try this one with students

How the Ballpoint Pen Changed Handwriting - The Atlantic

"Ink is where László Bíró, working with his chemist brother György, made the crucial changes: They experimented with thicker, quick-drying inks, starting with the ink used in newsprint presses. Eventually, they refined both the ink and the ball-tip design to create a pen that didn’t leak badly."

Galaxy Note 5 design flaw: A backwards S-Pen can permanently damage the device [Updated] | Ars Technica

"It's important to note that the S-Pen can go in backwards with zero force. The pen is the same shape for its entire length, making backward insertion just as easy as forward insertion. It's something that a person could conceivably do if they weren't paying attention, and it's definitely something a small child would do."

Why We Can’t Rule Out Bigfoot - Issue 16: Nothingness - Nautilus

There isn't one but low sample size still causes large confidence interval

Want to spin your data? Five Ways to Lie with Charts

Nice one for statistics teaching

John Francis: Walk the earth ... my 17-year vow of silence | TED Talk | TED.com

Well, I catch the buses

Methodology of Singapore Math Part 1 - YouTube

School Maths Singapore style. Concrete -> Visual -> Abstract

Thinking Blocks Modeling Tool

Nice web ap for modelling numerical work visually using the Singaporean maths teaching methodology

The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle - The New Yorker

c.f. Nate Silver and earthquake prediction being harder than weather forecasting.

No Time to Be Nice at Work - The New York Times

"Charles Horton Cooley’s 1902 notion of the “looking glass self” explains that we use others’ expressions (smiles), behaviors (acknowledging us) and reactions (listening to us or insulting us) to define ourselves. How we believe others see us shapes who we are. We ride a wave of pride or get swallowed in a sea of embarrassment based on brief interactions that signal respect or disrespect. Individuals feel valued and powerful when respected. Civility lifts people. Incivility holds people down. It makes people feel small."

Customize Xterm, the original and best terminal... - Scarygliders

Currently using this in .Xresources Love the xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources command to restart the terminal with changed settings, like source-ing a config file

» Manifesto:: Néojaponisme

Heavy stuff

How Japan Copied American Culture and Made it Better- page 2 | Travel | Smithsonian

"International jazz musicians, local workers and jazz fans from all over the city are here because they appreciate the act of listening to a record together. It’s a pleasure that anyone who grew up before the era of the Walkman and iTunes can appreciate. What’s uncertain is whether the next generation will cherish the same experience." Tokyo Jazz coffee bars ""“When I learned to sew and tried to make these garments myself, I began to realize just how intricate the work was, what kind of tremendous skill level was required to turn out such huge quantities of high-quality garments,” Tateno says. “These were produced at a time when American workers were the most knowledgeable and skilled in the world.” Work wear

The short guide to Capital in the 21st Century - Vox

Looks like more summer reading.

Disk Cloning - ArchWiki

Trying the disk clone to tar.gz on Manjaro

Dudley Buck's Forgotten Cryotron Computer - IEEE Spectrum

Seriously cyberpunk. Excellent. Via HN

Thorium reactors: Asgard’s fire | The Economist

Explains difference between molten salt and pressurised water Thorium based reactors nicely. Good for Friday gang.

xkcd: Heartbleed Explanation

Very good as it happens

The Setup / Gary Bernhardt

"I track tasks with OmniFocus, both on my Mac and my iPhone. When I first drafted this six months ago, I praised it very highly because it was the only thing that never broke. In the meantime, it's broken a few times, losing some of my data. Support told me that this is a known possibility. All software will destroy your data." FOSS ASCII/UTF-8 formats. XML if really needed. Never lost data. Had to do a lot of work to render recovered data useful, but never lost it

What Heartbleed Can Teach The OSS Community About Marketing | Kalzumeus Software

"The security community refers to vulnerabilities by numbers, not names. This does have some advantages, like precision and the ability to Google them and get meaningful results all of the time, but it makes it very difficult for actual humans to communicate about the issues." We need Dewey decimal numbers on Web pages for sure.

Tobias Frere-Jones

Nice bit of research using old trade catalogues. Plots the location of type foundries. Finds they are basically in one small area of New York, since demolished.

soft question - Visually stunning math concepts which are easy to explain - Mathematics Stack Exchange

Very nice animations and visual ideas generally for zappy maths results

Linux: Convert a PDF File To an Image

Install Imagemagick and then run the convert command convert -density 300 file.pdf image.png The -density parameter is the dots per inch

Q: What does 0^0 (zero raised to the zeroth power) equal? Why do mathematicians and high school teachers disagree? | Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist

Fun to see the old chestnut

Whiteboard Picture Cleaner - Shell one-liner/script to clean up and beautify photos of whiteboards!

Very nice will try with phone pics of whiteboards

Einstein and Pi | Sean Carroll

neatish

The Flight of the Birdman: Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Speaks Out | Culture News | Rolling Stone

The man speaks

TI-Nspire "Press to Test" - TES Mathematics - Forum - TES Mathematics - TES Community

TI-nspire: expensive calculator has a lot of reverse lookup functions and a large memory. Do we allow sophisticated calculators like this in exams (and penalise the ones who can't afford one) or do we ban them and make exams even less relevant to the way maths is actually done?

RSA booked TV's Stephen Colbert to give the final speech. This is what happened next • The Register

"As for the NSA, he said that the agency showed that if you gave an organization unlimited budgets and no oversight the results were always fantastic. The NSA had built up an incredibly powerful and sophisticated organization that could be completely pwned by a 29-year old with a thumb drive." Excellent. T shirt material.

Hey, IT department! Sick of vendor shaftings? Why not DO IT, yourself • The Register

"Some impeccably dressed men with neat hair would ask you a stack of questions about how a business process worked and then would return some weeks later with a fancy tabulating machine to show you the process you described being performed digitally."

earth :: an animated map of global wind and weather

Nicely done, click Earth for more options

The Lost Art of the Saturn V

Bring back the Saturn V

Yours Truly Profiled in The New York Times — Krebs on Security

"...the newly-hired guy in charge of Windows share security at washingtonpost.com had for some oddball reason undone all the security put in place by his predecessor, so all local shares on the network were more or less readable by anyone who had network credentials." I've had this one a couple of times in past Colleges. Once with Windows shared drive policy suddenly changing so everyone had read/write. And once with Sharepoint where everyone on a 1200 seat system suddenly got the orange edit button in the top right of the Intranet. Managed to sort both before any damage done. Interesting that the *subject of the article* watched his comment *clarifying an aspect of the story* become buried on the newspaper's article. One wonders if the publishers could define 'sticky comments' or similar...

Drawing as a way of quieting the mind

Very Zen

Compiling Icecat 17 for gNewSense 3

The wiki page still works, just omit the source code patches because gNewSense 3 has gcc version 4.4. So download the source code for Icecat 17, unzip, install the libraries and the later version of YAST, then .configure and make and make install.

Debian User Forums • View topic - Vote Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in!

Interesting point: its awareness that matters rather than raw numbers with the free software arguments.

Fonts

OCR A and B are the OCR standard fonts here redrawn by Matthew Skala.

But it doesn't mean anything!

Nice page on what computer programs actually do

The Law of Accelerating Returns | KurzweilAI

Print this one out I think!

Stanford scientists put free text-analysis tool on the web | Engineering

Try this once the HN crowd have had a look (not responding at present)

Vienna failed to migrate to GNU/Linux: why?

Munich made it but Vienna didn't. One person's view as to why not. I have the feeling we need LTS distributions with lifetimes in decades here: CentOS style.

#693160 - xul-ext-adblock-plus: Adblock Plus should not be enabled by default - Debian Bug report logs

So here is a dilemma; Debian devs remove Epiphany because of security problems, but feel that they have to exactly duplicate Epiphany's functions so that Iceweasel can take place of Epiphany within the modified default Gnome desktop. Hence installation of Adblock Plus plug-in by default. The resulting dependency chain causes some issues for users who decide not to have the generic Gnome desktop.

The Debian Administrator's Handbook

The Debian Squeeze version is still up, just under /browse/squeeze instead of /browse/stable!

The Debian Administrator's Handbook, Debian Squeeze from Discovery to Mastery by Raphaël Hertzog (Paperback) — Lulu GB

Debian Squeeze printed version is good for gNewSense

Landscape of the Moon's Last Phase Nash

Amazingly poor choice of scans on t'web. Colour shifts all over as well

User:LucasVB/Gallery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Animated maths using animated GIF files. Old tech, strong visualisation.

Theo de Raadt Responds - Slashdot

"Can you imagine if a Boeing engineer didn't fix ALL of the occurances of a wiring flaw? Why not at least try to engineer software in the same way?"

Tales from an expert witness: Prior art and patent trolls • The Register

"I have to say that by and large I enjoy the work. Sometimes it's difficult, but all the easy jobs are over subscribed and we have to manage on what is left." Expert witness in patents court, but fits teaching well I think.

[CentOS-devel] Interest in a 32bit tree of the upcoming CentOS7?

1st world business logic hits 3rd world issues. Which is where free software should be coming in...

BBC News - Wilshaw warns staffroom 'moaners'

>> "It is a national scandal that we invest so much in teacher training and yet an estimated 40% of new entrants leave within five years," he told the conference. << They just don't get it do they?

Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes, yet there are only 24 hours in a day?: Scientific American

Babylonian counting systems

Playing cards, blank both sides, pack of 1000 - 00810: Amazon.co.uk: Toys & Games

You can get blank one side with pattern on the other as well. Good for algebra simplifying. Might try printing labels to stick on them as well.

Shell programming with bash: by example, by counter-example

Nice intro using the weasel words program

Photography, hello — Software ate the camera, but freed the photograph by Craig Mod

More from the author of the Goodbye Cameras post. With samples (and javascripts).

Goodbye, Cameras : The New Yorker

There is the way of working with a medium or large format camera that slows you down and encourages *looking*. Film is expensive, environmentally suspect and fragile of course. Someone might do a 'digital Rollei' but I suspect it will be expensive.

BBC News - Labour plan for teacher licences to 'update skills'

"Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt said regular re-licensing of teachers would allow the worst ones to be sacked whilst helping others to receive more training and development." Rolleyes. Has anyone actually looked at teacher training and professional development in the countries that score higher on these 'international comparisons' the politicians stress over? They might get a shock if they did.

Summary of the changes in GCSE Maths from 2015 | Stuff I'm learning at school

Looks like a very detailed list of changes. Going to be fun. Bit mad dropping soft stats skills as that is the one area of maths most people actually need

Building an Open Source Laptop | MAKE

Definitely an extreme project

The Science Behind Fonts (And How They Make You Feel)

Might try 24pt again in the style sheet

Mathematics, Learning and Web 2.0

A maths blog, bit more Web 2.0 than I tend to be, but handy all the same

The Amazon Whisperer | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

>>"He has an entire team of people who read reviews on Amazon, looking for moments when people say, "I wish this speaker were rechargeable." Pikarski then makes a rechargeable version. Hipe exists, in essence, because enough people think like me."<< Efficient market anyone? Via HN

The Open-Office Trap : The New Yorker

Actually, unplanned interactions are pretty useful to me sometimes, but generally I don't like open plan offices. Fortunately, I spend only a small percentage of my working day in an office of any kind.

What's Wrong With Your Organizational Structure? | Holacracy

The first Venn diagram could be useful for discussions about teaching, funding methodology and the actual needs of students.

IBM 704 Computer | Lee Jennings – Amateur Radio ZL2AL

Interesting story from early days of computing

It’s Not a Church, It’s Just an Apple Store | Re/code

"In my many years as a reviewer, I did get emails defending the hugely successful Microsoft operating system as practical and useful, but rarely expressions of love and devotion." Strange but true

Mark Bernstein: What should people need to know?

"At this point, it seems to me, knowing the elements of HTML markup is simply part of what we expect every educated person to know. Everyone needs it, it only takes an afternoon to learn. The resistance has surprised me." No surprise to me

Seymour Hersh - Salon.com

"After flunking out of law school, Hersh stumbled into journalism when a friend told him that the Chicago City News Bureau, a crime and courts clearinghouse for the city’s newspapers, would hire college graduates with no experience for $35 a week." $35 a week wasn't bad money in 1958, not far short of $300 a week now. Where are these kinds of jobs today?

Rebecca Solnit · Diary: In the Day of the Postman · LRB 29 August 2013

"I live in the heart of it, and it's normal to walk through a crowd - on a train, or a group of young people waiting to eat in a restaurant - in which everyone is staring at the tiny screens in their hands. It seems less likely that each of the kids waiting for the table for eight has an urgent matter at hand than that this is the habitual orientation of their consciousness. At times I feel as though I'm in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Which is what corporations are anyway, and mobile phones decoupled from corporations are not exactly common." - Via The Verge list of online reading 2013

Re/code

See if they do email digest of articles

mathematicalcoffee / maximus-gnome-shell-extension — Bitbucket

Excellent idea, maximus-gnome-shell-extension means that the window decorations disappear on maximising the window. Alt-drag window to restore the decorations. Works with the Panel Settings shell extension below, so that a maximised window fills the entire screen. This is very handy on a 1024 by 768 laptop screen. The Activity view (press Windows button) shows the top panel and smaller window images

Panel Settings - GNOME Shell Extensions

Works with Gnome 3.4 as packaged with Debian Wheezy. Works with maximus-gnome-shell-extension above

Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet - Taylor Clark - The Atlantic

"Even an hour of perusing Willms's business tactics was enough to make me want to cut up my credit cards and retreat to a tribal society that barters with root vegetables." Where all those tacky adverts come from

The Vega Science Trust - Science Video - Homepage

looks nice, but why the org.uk address?

GRUB 2 - FedoraProject

Try the official way of changing the boot order in RHEL7's grub2 config

Tractatus

Usable hypertext presentation. I'd like a version where the proposition number links to the proposition text.

Seven.CentOS.org | News, views and reports on CentOS-7

CentOS 7 build process from beta RHEL 7 srpms. I think they want to be first out of the gate when RHEL 7 is actually released.

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

A modern (post Goldstein) treatment of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics leading to perturbation theory and dynamical systems. Via HN

BBC News - NSA leaks: Obama hints at surveillance rethink

"Both the judge and the panel said there was little evidence that any terror plot had been thwarted by the programme." Making details public would deter others?

When You Criticize Someone, You Make It Harder for that Person to Change - Daniel Goleman - Harvard Business Review

"Working with colleagues at Cleveland Clinic, Boyatzis put people through a positive, dreams-first interview or a negative, problems-focused one while their brains were scanned. The positive interview elicited activity in reward circuitry and areas for good memories and upbeat feelings – a brain signature of the open hopefulness we feel when embracing an inspiring vision. In contrast, the negative interview activated brain circuitry for anxiety, the same areas that activate when we feel sad and worried. In the latter state, the anxiety and defensiveness elicited make it more difficult to focus on the possibilities for improvement." I've often thought this kind of thing could be applied to Maths teaching

Andrew Fentem: Why I went to an arts quango to fund pre-iPhone multitouch • The Register

"Fentem: I think that if the government really is keen to grow the economy it should be trying much harder to get money into the hands of young people - people with energy and ideas. Lack of jobs, inappropriate schemes, meagre benefits, inadequate housing supply and exploitative landlords mean that the young have little scope to express themselves creatively." Yes, they don't need much, just the rent and some money to live on, 12K per year or so. Sort of a bursary for a year or two against completion of a simple project form with some goals.

The Setup / Stuart Watson

recycled thinkpad and Ubuntu would sort this guy

Science Fiction’s Dark Star: Alfred Bester at 100

"But Bester was no mere populist hack; he was thoughtful and well-read, weaving historical, philosophical, and literary allusions seamlessly into his frenetic plots. And while his books were chock-full of incident and creative situations, he was not a writer of “hard” science fiction, striving for accuracy and plausibility."

Mugshots from the 1920s are Significantly Cooler Than Mugshots from Today - The Phoblographer

photography for documentation and surveillance. It was a new technology once as society became more organised

LOW-TECH MAGAZINE: High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network

"The introduction of a high speed train connection invariably accompanies the elimination of a slightly slower, but much more affordable, alternative route, forcing passengers to use the new and more expensive product, or abandon the train altogether. As a result, business people switch from full-service planes to high speed trains, while the majority of Europeans are pushed into cars, coaches and low-cost airplanes." I was wondering about that. HS2 only stops at two stations to begin with. Pretty rough if you live in between the stations.

The Surprising Reason We Have a 40-Hour Work Week

"Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles. — Henry Ford" So, logically, to stimulate growth through retail demand, we should be reducing the hours people work but paying the same money.

xserver-warnings

"...the X server code base is one of the oldest pieces of regularly used free software in existence. It was started before ANSI-C was codified." That aside makes me think...

Prolost - Blog - How to Take Good Photos for Under $1,000

50mm standard lens on a SLR for the digital age. Via daringfireball

Deadly conformity is killing our creativity. Let's mess about more | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer

"Ten days ago, I found him on the floor with two-dozen paper coffee cups figuring out how to make a Christmas star from the cups and red lids. I have to say it didn't look too promising, but the next time I went in, there was a Christmas tree made entirely of cups and lids, which wasn't bad at all."

command line - Remove titlebar from maximized terminal window - Ask Ubuntu

This works fine with Firefox/Iceweasel on Wheezy XFCE4

Sankey diagram - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

visualise 16-18 students' Maths pathways?

Programming in the 21st Century

"A 3D line graph is harder to read than the standard 2D variety, yet the code to create one involves the additional concepts of filled polygons, shading, viewing angle, and line depth. An exploded 3D pie chart brings nothing over an unexploded version, and both still miss out on the simplicity of a flat pie chart (and there's a strong case to be made for using the even simpler bar chart instead)." I'd go further, a dot plot, and a box and whisker plot tell most of the story for continuous data. A stem and leaf diagram is good for discrete data with low quantization threshold.

thread patterns

deflecting k00kitude - Joey Hess

Music Machinery | a blog about music technology by Paul Lamere

Sonic art blog.

Peter Higgs: I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system | Science | The Guardian

"It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." We need institutes of advanced study.

The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History - Businessweek

I like my OS 7 Blackberry even though the camera has stopped working with a mysterious error message. I might have to get another pre-qnx one before they go bust. The search by word for applications, files, images, music is great. I can sort my email single handed on the escalators on the way to the train platform (try that on your iThing or portable telly with voice calling).

Personal Fresh Air | JULIO RADESCA

Imagine classrooms like this... the height, the space, the light and the plants.

The internet mystery that has the world baffled

I wonder if you could teach the GCSE Maths syllabus this way?

BBC Skillswise - Can the Singapore method help your children learn maths?

Interesting reference to Bruner.

Christopher Payne Photography: Substations

Serious kit.

Vermeer’s Secret Tool: Testing Whether The Artist Used Mirrors and Lenses to Create His Realistic Images | Vanity Fair

Optical aids for painters

Steve Gattuso: A society of phone zombies

"While companies like Apple, Samsung, and HTC all compete over which device you use, there is a mass of companies competing for something much more important: your attention." Of course what people (especially teenagers) want is interaction with others. The adverts are parasitic on that

GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes « IgnorantGuru's Blog

API (in)stability causing problems for application authors.

Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England | Reviews in History

"Detective work also provided a distinctive degree of 'semi-autonomy' (p. 123), one that police supervisors sought to control by requiring extensive written reports: by the 1880s the now-perennial police complaint of being buried in paperwork could already be heard." Sounds vaguely familiar

Typical Programmer - Linus Torvalds goes off on Linux and Git

"I didn't really expect anyone to use it because it's so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or complicated for the black t-shirt crowd." --pseudo Linus

Umberto Eco - Exploring Imaginary Lands With One of Italy’s Masters of Fiction - NYTimes.com

Eco on form

The Original Floor Plans From The Very First Doctor Who Episode

my kind of telly: just do it

The Incredible Story Of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV News | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

We can do this with a script and a linode these days.

katsenblog - Blog of Paul Katsen — An Ode to Little Data

"What's the next step-up from the spreadsheet? Learning how to code. Learning stats. Leaving the comfort of a spreadsheet's visual display for R, maybe? Doing so opens the door to limitless possibilities for analysis, visualization, and automation. Good luck making a Sankey graph in a spreadsheet. You need to know how to code. And I don’t think the long tail is willing to invest in that." Some might if the code is easy, small, generic

R.I.P. Things – Rands in Repose

Text entry: editor One line summary: file name Tag: folder Multiple tags: symlinks Search: find or grep Done or %done: a line at the bottom with $done: at the beginning Sync: Unison on SSH

Merlin Mann

A long interview with the 43 folders chap

The Third User | askTog

"During the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank." Nailed it I think

'Planned maintenance' CRIPPLES nearly HALF of all Salesforce instances in Europe, US • The Register

"Tweeps complained that their entire businesses had been left unable to function because they couldn't get their CRM apps or data." Losers

Dedicated to Henry Charles Bukowski

"...there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering." Bukowski, Pulp

LAME - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

The encoder settings

This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time | Harry Leslie Smith | Comment is free | theguardian.com

"The American civil war's General Sherman once said that "war is hell", but unfortunately today's politicians in Britain use past wars to bolster our flagging belief in national austerity or to compel us to surrender our rights as citizens, in the name of the public good."

Debian User Forums • View topic - settings for 'free wifi' services [Solved]

dwm based desktop using wifi interface and wpa supplicant

Products | GNU/Linux Computers

wish I had seen these people a couple of months ago

Women and Dreams: Linux on a ThinkPad X60: Gelignite Child, Ignite

"I could in theory just get rid of Windows 8, but I paid for it and it works. It has been blamed for causing the current PC market slump, but I can live with it. It's like a bicycle-mad friend who occasionally rabbits on about veganism, you learn to ignore the bits you don't like."

The New York Review of Books turns 50 - The Washington Post

"So much of [business today] is about people doing things quickly, with haste. One of the first things to go out the window is a type of graciousness, because who has time? . . . There's a whole sort of rhythm and tone of how they deal with people. I'm sure it was always rare. But it feels in­cred­ibly precious now."

The TRUTH behind Microsoft Azure's global cloud mega-cock-up • The Register

"There are three truths of cloud – machines will fail, software has bugs, people will make mistakes," --Mike Neil, Windows Azure General Manager

Rands in Repose

"I've developed irrational emotional baggage about what constitutes a Rands article and I want to write more." Good. Not so good is the appearance of Excerpt

[ubuntu] Help with ABCDE

command lines for ripping higher quality mp3 tracks. Blackberry having glitches with ogg although earlier oggs worked fine

Increase your Productivity with 'Offline Hours'

"Mornings are for quiet, uninterrupted, and focused work. No emails, no chat, no calls until lunch break. We even moved our daily scrum meeting. " Sounds good.

Out of the picture: why the world's best photo startup is going out of business | The Verge

>> "People take more and more photos, but paradoxically, they become more and more disconnected from them," he said last month in a conference room at their co-working space. "You don’t want to go back to this whole life that you’ve captured, which is counterintuitive. It's the most important thing — it’s your life! So there’s this obvious problem." << Via HN. Perhaps we should use sketchbooks? Or a folding 120 film camera and two rolls of film per holiday?

Say Hello to Offline First

The travails of staying connected while travelling. These very sensible authors point to the need to provide offline capacity to various apps and software used while travelling. Via HN.

Statistics Done Wrong — Statistics Done Wrong

"How to Lie with Statistics" for the Facebook era. Nice

No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A. - NYTimes.com

"The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Mr. Ban's talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an "operational highlight" in a weekly internal brag sheet." GCHQ no doubt waste my money in similar ways. How do we get them to stop?

The secrets of the world's happiest cities | Society | The Guardian

"He threw out the ambitious highway expansion plan and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of cycle paths; a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and the city's first rapid transit system (the TransMilenio), using buses instead of trains. He banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week. This programme redesigned the experience of city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of the philosophies that have guided city planners around the world for more than half a century." Sounds fine but in Birmingham car ownership is larger than 20% so might not fly

you can't delete or overwrite a file while it is open on Windows

Never knew this

NBA Superstar Chris Bosh: Here's Why You Should Learn to Code | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

"The funny thing about coding is that I really didn't know what coding was when I was first discovering graphic design and computers in high school. Coding is at the base of almost every technology. If someone in school would have explained to me that coding could reach millions directly or indirectly and make their lives better, it would've sparked my interest much sooner. Plus I don't think people a few years ago really understood the impact that coding would have on the world today."

Does Life End at 35? | KZhu.net

Forget the title, this blog post is a partial telling of the recent history of China through the experiences of an academic. No mention of the Cultural Revolution specifically of course (grandfather still lives in Beijing). Via HN

Marie Curie: Why her papers are still radioactive - CSMonitor.com

"Along with her husband and collaborator, Pierre, Marie Curie lived her life awash in ionizing radiation. She would carry bottles of the polonium and radium in the pocket of her coat and store them in her desk drawer." Via HN

My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work done | Hacker News

Yes, a bog standard Linux is pretty good on a desktop these days, no surprises there.

Why Bletchley Park could never happen today • The Register

"Those at Bletchley Park were serving King and Country, but the NSA in particular outsources work to private companies – Snowden was working for contractor Booz Allen Hamilton when he flew the roost. And regardless of current employer, few people now expect to have a job for life, reducing the default loyalty of previous generations." Perhaps HM Govt. should be purchasing loyalty more effectively than at present?

Top Level Telecommunications: How Obama's BlackBerry got secured

"Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, also used a BlackBerry during the 2000 presidential campaign, but had to give it up, as well as the use of any e-mail software, upon taking office. Three days earlier, he sent out a final e-mail to 42 friends and family members to inform them that he would no longer correspond electronically." Probably the only secure communication channel left is direct speech. On a windy beach. Secured well.

Ten Steps You Can Take Right Now Against Internet Surveillance | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"The bad news is: if you're being personally targeted by a powerful intelligence agency like the NSA, it's very, very difficult to defend yourself. The good news, if you can call it that, is that much of what the NSA is doing is mass surveillance on everybody. With a few small steps, you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, both against you individually, and more generally against everyone." I'm just wondering *why* it is useful to do nass surveillance on *everybody*? It must cost a fortune and it must be labour intensive, leading to the 'flat' security model within the NSA revealed by the ease with which a young temporary agency employee was able to copy huge amounts of information. Would it not be better to *focus* efforts a little more?

Aaron Halfaker: publications

Via HN via a news article in technology review. Basically, effective editorial controls make it harder to learn how to be an editor, cutting off 'legitimate peripheral participation' and reducing the diversity and sheer number of editors.

Gzip + poetry = awesome | Hacker News

Inferred grammars. That is *really* interesting. HN discussion of the Gzip+poetry page

Day 16: gzip + poetry = awesome - Julia Evans

Illustration of how the first stage of compression finds related sub-strings in text, with source code. Something I've thought about now and again and someone has actually produced the code and analysed the stages!

BBC News - 'Plebgate': Police officers stand by account of Mitchell meeting

"Eight people, including five police officers, have been arrested and bailed over the original altercation at the security gates to Downing Street amid claims that details of the incident were falsified." Am I the only one who finds this an immense waste of time and money? Really, yawn...

Reset your life

"My ridiculous intake of over six cups of coffee daily definitely pushed me over the edge, but it was only the catalyst, not the cause." Er - that is a lot of caffeine and will cause various 'interesting' symptoms. I limit myself to one 'real' coffee per day.

Windows 8.1: Read this BEFORE you install - especially you, IT admins • The Register

>> "Consumers" here really means any copies of Windows 8 that weren't purchased through Microsoft's Volume Licensing programs. So a small business with 20 PCs to upgrade, for example, will have to do them one at a time via the Windows Store – so that's 20 separate 3.5GB downloads. << Good heavens, and I thought a CentOS version update was bad...

Passing show: Archive

Photos off the archive

NextDraft: Originals Dave Pell

Long form writing about real time communications. Looks ok, subscribed on the phone

BBC News - Calorie burner: How much better is standing up than sitting?

>> "If you want to put that into activity levels," Dr Buckley says, "then that would be the equivalent of running about 10 marathons a year. Just by standing up three or four hours in your day at work." << One of the occupational benefits of teaching I think. I stand up for six, two, three and five hours of the four days I'm teaching on! Might put a work surface at standing height in the man cave for the other days.

Thinkfan | Decebal Popa

Thinkfan on X60

The News is a Waste of Time: What Kind of Food is Your Brain Eating?

Worth the popup for the doughnut graphic a little down the page. Try this one on the teenagers (maslow tie in)

TED talks are lying to you - Salon.com

"The Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl." I carry a Cray 2 in my pocket, but then again, where is my jetcar? Innovation seldom leads where you think it will

Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy? - Christine Gross-Loh - The Atlantic

"Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher, taught that we should train ourselves to become "spontaneous" through daily living, rather than closing ourselves off through what we think of as rational decision-making." Wabisabi and everyday mind might be hard to turn into a lesson plan!

Prime-generating fractions | The Endeavour

18966017 / 997002999 gives a decimal expansion that has triples of digits that are prime numbers. The fractions come from infinite sums of carefully chosen polynomials. NOT one for a Friday morning class!

The Performance of Open Source Software | MemShrink

How memory allocation works in Firefox, and the about:memory command. And attempts to reduce memory consumption by a 'divide and rule' method. Excellent stuff. Via HN

Dynamic Everything Else

"I should be able to start tapping keys and, a command or two later, up pops a live OS X window that's draggable and receives events. I should be able to add controls to that window in a playful sort of way." Smalltalk?

insured

In the Land of the Free, rugged individualists are required to risk bankruptcy through ill health. What a strange system.

Computer Chess: Geek, gaming and retro-tech movie of the year • The Register

"Life can seem to become stuck in a programmatic loop out of which you can't break. Human interaction can sometimes seem like a series of moves, not all of them rational, on a chessboard." Steppenwolf

No. 504: Ethiopian Binary Math

Hoho. I call this 'russian multiplication'

Constant::TINKERER - Zach Feldman's Blog Chrome book with Cruton to run Ubuntu

Via HN

BBC News - Shutdown headache for Republican Speaker John Boehner

"Time and again - in national security debates, immigration reform, disaster relief, defence authorisations, and even agriculture appropriations - Mr Boehner has found his position undermined by these rebellious legislators. Buoyed by the Tea Party, the backbenchers are unswayed by the kinds of carrots and sticks that kept their predecessors in line." Mostly checks rather than balances by the look of it. Senate gives representation to very small populations in economically unproductive areas that is out of proportion to their importance. Not so sure how this can arise in Congress which is based on population.

French National Police Switch 37,000 Desktop PCs to Linux | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

"To make the switch less abrupt, the Gendarmerie first moved to cross-platform open source applications such as OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird. That allowed employees to keep using Windows while they got used to the new applications. Only then did the agency move them onto a Linux OS running these same applications." That's the way to do it!

Main/Download - gNewSense GNU/Linux

gNewSense 3.0 based on Debian Squeeze (or older?) and therefore running Gnome 2 desktop. A classic one CD installer with no binary blobs. Hunting for my Atheros based USB wifi adaptor to try it on a thinkpad.

Thoreau 2.0 - XOXO Conference Talk

Nice stuff from the author of this system

New film: "Hawking": A brief history of a man | The Economist

"Cameras fastened to Mr Hawking's wheelchair grant a sense of the world from his perspective, as he glides through crowds of admirers, gingerly sips champagne through a straw and heads to his offices at Cambridge University, where he continues to work every day." Via HN

Apple's Jonathan Ive and Craig Federighi: The Complete Interview - Businessweek

Via Daring Fireball

Mathematics Support Materials

All the PDFs. For H level students who have done a lot of Maths before.

The Universe of Discourse : The shittiest project I ever worked on

"Prudential didn't need an affiliate locator application. They needed a static HTML page that told people to call the number. All the work I had put into importing the data, into formatting the output, into displaying the realtors in precisely the right order, had been a complete waste of time." Committee, camel, space pencil.

Vim PDF Documentation

Vim help files collated into one large pdf. 2567 pages of it!

Raytracing - C++ program writes to ppm file type

The PPM image file type has an especially simple structure. Via HN

What killed BlackBerry? Employees started buying their own devices.

"BlackBerrys have never been particularly attractive, cutting-edge, or user-friendly. But they didn't have to be, because the user wasn't the one paying the bill." My curve was quite cheap, allows me to reach most functions by thumb-typing the first few letters of the name (one handed on an escalator with a suitcase) and plays my music. OK, the camera is a bit rubbish but the rest is fine. I'll miss all that when it stops working and I have to try and find another alpha keypad phone.

The Real Reason the Poor Go Without Bank Accounts - Lisa J. Servon - The Atlantic Cities

"Like the more experienced waitresses I worked with at a greasy spoon during college summers, Cristina often knew what her customers needed before they reached her window. Indeed, the relationships I encountered between tellers and customers at RiteCheck were much more like those I had witnessed as a child at Pulawski Savings and Loan than what I currently experience at the multinational brand name bank I use." That old familiar personal service thing; a sense of belonging. Via HN

Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Temperature and Fan Control | neolocus

Detailed page

GoSaBe Blog » Thinkfan: A quieter ThinkPad

psensor might not be in CentOS repos. The example figures for thinkfan.conf might be useful.

linux - How to control thinkpad_acpi via procfs, RHEL 6.4 - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

More fan stuff

How to: thinkpad_acpi and fan control on Arch « Mixu's tech blog

X61s is nice but fan 1 runs at 4000 rpm all the time (there is no fan 2)

Nanex ~ 20-Sep-2013 ~ Einstein and The Great Fed Robbery

Actually to do with someone releasing price-sensitive news early.

How to disable gnome-keyring?

a few ideas for getting rid of the keyring thing when using autologin

Schneier on Security: How to Remain Secure Against the NSA

"The NSA has turned the fabric of the Internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible." Surely the most 'valuable' targets are using the most expensive to crack systems? Is this not a huge waste of money basically?

Backups

Sync is not backup

Would your code work after a trip back in time?

"It's also like nerd candy, because, come on, time travel, right? Sending code back in time? They'll be so caught up in that fantasy that they won't realize you're asking high-level risk assessment questions in the present." Clever

Cassette 50: the interview | pixelatron - website of mark green: web content guy, writer and editor

Excellent! Kid programs BASIC game for spectrum and sells it to a company who release home made games on cassette. Tracked down 25 years later and plays the game with his son.

Two envelopes problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Try this one... with a real £20 and a real £10 for higher level GCSE

Red Hat CEO: Go Ahead, Copy Our Software – ReadWrite

Why the Red Hat management quite like CentOS

BBC News - Labour 'will abolish bedroom tax' says Jackie Baillie

"A UK Labour government would reverse housing benefit changes, the party's Scottish welfare spokeswoman has said." Someone got the memo

Dear Janice Lokelani Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele: Your name is way too long for your ID | National Post

I wonder what the family name field in our database can take...

Observation & the Everyday – Rhythms, Fragments & the Infra-ordinary | thecitymodule

"You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless…. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag... Question your teaspoons..." George Perec

BBC News - HS2 to boost UK economy 'by £15bn a year' says report

"The latest study was commissioned by HS2 Ltd, the company responsible for developing and promoting the project." Zombie project walking...

Unix Commands I Wish I’d Discovered Years Earlier | Hacker News

Big comment fest on bash commands

unix - Is it feasible to have home folder hosted with NFS? - Server Fault

NFS home directories on Linux. The catches (caching in /home, recovery after network problem &c)

A Year of the Linux Desktop | KDE.news

The original source of the year of the linux desktop article with a few photies.

Westcliff High School switches to Linux | opensource.com

"...includes 200 teacher machines, 400+ student machines, 33 IMacs, 100+ laptops, and a few Android tablets." 400 machines on KDE. Good choice of desktop. Some customisation. "The bottom line is that Linux will run well on an old tin box, but if you have LDAP authentication and NFS home directories—as you certainly will have in a school or business environment, you must have a gigabit network. It will run with 100Mb, but it will be an unpleasant experience as we discovered to our cost. " So they do roaming profile like things using NFS home directories, presumably on a remote server of significant chunkiness.

Doing Good in the Addiction Economy | Kaj Sotala (about attention spans in the networked age)

"...Burning with the inspiration to write it down, I hurry back home and open up my computer. As I wait for my word processor to boot up, I instinctively check whether I have any new e-mails or Facebook notifications. It turns out that I do, so I stop for a moment to read them…" ... "Whenever you do check for new items and find something interesting, your brain registers a small amount of reward. Thus, the action that led to the reward – the act of checking your inbox, say – gets reinforced and more likely to be repeated when you’re in a similar context. The more you are online, the more situations there will be that your brain registers as a similar context… and pushes you to check the inbox once again." Useful blog post with good quote

Science Fiction Writer Robert J. Sawyer: On Writing — Heinlein's Rules

Heinlein's rules with an extra on. Main message: just get started,

Canadian family gives up modern tech to live like it's 1986 • The Register

"As a result, McMillan, his 27-year-old girlfriend Morgan Patey, and their two sons, Trey, 5, and Denton, 2, have spent the last five months living a lifestyle that's a throwback to the 1980s: no mobile phones, no internet, and no computers." Another one year chill out.

Linux vs. Bullshit | Linux Journal

"We now know that the Feds and marketing mills are both harvesting massive amounts of personal data without revealing to us what they know, and that the two are actually in cahoots, at least some of the time. This is especially vexing, because the feds should be the ones protecting us from bad actors, rather than bad actors themselves." Via HN. Article by Doc Searls puts into crisp prose what I was feeling my way towards; most of the money spent on surveillance on the Web by advertisers or governments is wasted.

BBC News - 1950s robot Cygan smashes auction estimate

"Its designer, Ing Fiorito, was an aeromodeller from Turin." Now that is a *job description*.

BBC News - A Point of View: Why embracing change is the key to happiness

"Imagine three identical boxes. Two are empty and one contains your heart's desire, perhaps love, perhaps a nice cup of tea. A kind, if slightly perverse, person says you can pick one box and own its contents. Let's say you select Box A. The person then shows you Box B is empty. So either Box A - your choice, or Box C - a mystery, contains your happiness. Now, you can change your choice to Box C, or stick with Box A. But what gives you the better chance? Should you change or not?" "But what, for example, is the best solution to that three box problem? Remember we picked Box A of the three. Box B was empty. Now we can stick with A, or change to C. But should we? Yes, we should. Switching from Box A to Box C won't guarantee success, but will massively improve its odds." Monty Hall problem?

Ubuntu: How To Create an ISO Image from a CD or DVD | a Tech-Recipes Tutorial

cat /dev/sr0 > ~/some.iso For when you only have a CD-ROM and you want to make a bootable USB stick. Works for Ubuntu and Debian. Will try with CentOS

N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption - NYTimes.com

"The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show." This is just going to chill any new Internet based businesses. Just how many terrorists are there that we need this level of spying?

NSA: NOBODY could stop Snowden – he was A SYSADMIN • The Register

"...But there's no clear paper trail – investigators are said to be looking for red-flag discrepancies, such as accounts that were accessed while their owners were on vacation." Well, at least he could not alter the access logs... could he? Manning was the same. Lower level employees able to access all levels of security clearance 'for technical reasons'.

Moserware: A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

The comic approach. Quite minimal.

linux - Split Files using tar ,gz,zip or bzip2 - Stack Overflow

split -b 1024m file.tgz Splitting the 3.8 Gb tgz file up into 1Gb lumps to burn it to a DVD. Backup of Wheezy with all installed applications on a single optical disc. A neater command for splitting the compressed archive while compressing is # create archives $ tar cz my_large_file_1 my_large_file_2 | split -b 1024MiB - myfiles_split.tgz_ # uncompress $ cat myfiles_split.tgz_* | tar xz

Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments - Phil Nichols - The Atlantic

"It may be tempting to see convention and subversion as incompatible, but education thrives in the healthy tension between the two. Unfortunately, the latter resists the regimented curricula and bureaucratic order of schools, so there is rarely room for it in today's classrooms. That's why the TI-83 Plus and its progeny are so unique and significant." Tools that allow construction of arguments and testing of logic

The STEM Crisis Is a Myth - IEEE Spectrum

No jobs for Science graduates, but a shortage of Science students!

gnome - Cannot login to my user account - Ask Ubuntu

Answer 2 has it! When making tgz file, /tmp not included, so have to create a /tmp when expanding on the new hard drive. Created from root, so default permissions applied. When logging in, Xerrors show 'permission denied' for an ordinary user but not for root user.

drillchina | Just another WordPress.com site

does stuff with RStudio - best instructions for installing the desktop client on CentOS 6

Loads of mis-sold PPI, but WHO will claim? This man's paid to find out • The Register

"For example, what I've also been involved in is to try to figure out if people are likely to default on a loan. So [you] look at a similar group of people, how they've behaved in the past and you make your assessment." I wonder how 'Cole' is measuring 'similar'?

Jeff Sagarin talks stats in sports, more in Verbatim | One And One - SI.com

"I was born in 1948, started kindergarten in the fall of 1953. So in the mid-50s, I'd say 'Let me figure out this batting average. What if a guy got 106 hits in 279 at bats?' stuff like that, and I would do long division with the decimal points, for fun. You learn, you know?" Long division by a 3 digit one of whose prime factors is 31. Yup, that would do it!

What is algebra? | profkeithdevlin

"Those formulas and equations, involving all those x's and y's, are merely a way to represent that thinking on paper. They no more are algebra than a page of musical notation is music."

BBC News - Anti-Neet scheme claims GCSE success

"This project in east and north London achieved above the target of 30% of the at-risk young people reaching this benchmark." Good for them. How? What teaching methods? What ratios? What resources and crucially what selection process?

“Cloning” a hard drive to a smaller SSD |

Binary level, use gparted to shrink each partition so smaller than target disk, use clonezilla to 'saveparts' for each partition, boot on netbook. Use gparted to make partitions same size as the ones on old PC. Restore the partitions using clonezilla. Use gparted again to make larger if needed. May try the 'one big tar.gz' approach for file system level so can untar into smaller single partition

grub2 - How to fix the UUID in Grub after restore from another machine? - Ask Ubuntu

Put the whole lot in one tar.gz and then restore Grub with correct device UUIDs using a boot disk

Shaun Mallette's Blog: How To Restore Grub2 In Debian Based Systems

This may work...

BackupYourSystem/TAR - Community Ubuntu Documentation

Trying a tar of / and /home with preserved permissions on a USB stick formatted to Ext2. Then restore onto partitions on the old netbook and try to reinstall grub from a live stick. Will save loads of downloading when installing.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer retires: A firsthand account of the company’s employee-ranking system. - Slate Magazine

"As a software developer and later development lead at Microsoft between 1998–2003, I had to evaluate others and be evaluated myself under this system. And I can say that yes, stack ranking is as toxic for innovation and integrity and morale as media reports made it out to be, and then some."

This Little Sticker Works Like an Anti-Mosquito Force Field | Wired Design | Wired.com

"According to its developers, users simply have to place the patch onto their clothes, and they become invisible to mosquitoes for up to 48 hours. This is big news for developing countries like Uganda, where residents have little beyond mosquito nets and toxic sprays to combat the illness-spreading insects." Appropriate technology

Debian User Forums • View topic - NTFS-3G user mount

Certainly works, but I wonder why that line is in fstab in the first place?

Abandoned McDonald's Holds Glimpse of Life on Moon - Businessweek

1:30, Austin Epps "The quality of the analogue process used during the 1960s significantly degraded the actual quality of the images that were taken onboard the spacecraft, they didn't have the computing power necessary to do this as an all digital process back then whereas right now, you can basically do what was impossible to do in 1964/5 on a $2000 computer" 2:36 Dennis Wingo "I really want this material to be to be conserved, part of scientific validity is to be able to go back to the original sources." Please, anyone with budgetary power, pause for thought about the preservation of raw data for the future

www.centos.org - Forums - CentOS 6 - General Support - [RESOLVED] I need this file, help please!

This could be the future (heuristic matching of substrings in file names by cybernanny software) if Mr Cameron's ideas are implemented in an unsophisticated way.

The Twittertape Machine

Excellent. I'm just wondering about the tape itself, thermally activated I suppose.

Vasili Arkhipov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Three officers on board the submarine – Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second-in-command Arkhipov – were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch." Makes 'Twelve Angry Men' look like a squabble in the playground...

No Henry, you need to get real about Yahoo. Here are the facts — Tech News and Analysis

"Yahoo no longer enjoys the monopoly on the massive scale web advertising. That mantle has been taken over by Facebook, which, quite frankly, has figured out a way to create inventory of billions of page views at costs much lower than Yahoo." 'inventory' is what all your Facebook posts are!

Steve Ballmer: The. Worst. CEO. Ever. | PandoDaily

"Microsoft had removed all landline phones and required employees to use the company's Lync software, which runs phone calls through computers. Except every time I called my source at Microsoft, the call would drop or the quality was miserable, and I'd have to try again. And again. Microsoft personnel had taken to using their cell phones instead." Good heavens, is it really that bad?

Stack ranking: Steve Ballmer's employee-evaluation system and Microsoft's decline.

"For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings." How strange this is... One of the pleasures of teaching is working in a 'loosely coupled' way with excellent peers.

Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom: Scientific American

"In Pennsylvania, the closer you live to a well used to hydraulically fracture underground shale for natural gas, the more likely it is that your drinking water is contaminated with methane." When I was a child, we got water from an artesian well. Had to stop using it in 1970s because of fertiliser contamination. Here we go...

Type Hunting

Photos of display fonts on household objects (retro feel). Via daringfireball.

Butterick’s Practical Typography

The Web as a book publishing medium.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs | Strike! Magazine

"It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish." Golgafrincham. Watch out for the telephone sanitisers (but since we all have mobile phones now, that isn't such a problem)

Places — I.M.H.O. — Medium

"So I explored and walked a lot during that time to discover the city more. It's a personal moment between you and the place you live in, and you have time to observe and learn the geography. You get lost and appreciate the randomness of each place." --Michael Ortali

Normal Deviate

Statistics blog about inference and machine learning

Tillery to Represent Hayes Against UC Berkeley in Dispute over Lab Fees | 100 Reporters

"Hayes has publicly questioned whether UC-Berkeley is penalizing him for his outspoken criticism of atrazine because of a five-year $25 million research agreement awarded in 1998 between University of California-Berkeley and Novartis, a parent company of Syngenta. The office of the vice chancellor said that there is no current institutional agreement between the school and Syngenta." One is reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric ("While money doesn’t talk, it swears")

David Cameron is going to censor the Internet and he doesn’t care what you think - Blog - Clidus.com

MPs sending out form letters; ignoring technically literate views. Sounds about normal.

Quickly navigate your filesystem from the command-line

Very nice. Symbolic links in a dot directory and a couple of functions in bashrc

Introduction to the nano Text Editor

Nice cheat sheet. Pity about the colour!

Gamasutra: Ramin Shokrizade's Blog - The Top F2P Monetization Tricks

Psychology of getting money from mobile games. Via The Register

BBC - Blogs - Adam Curtis - BUGGER

"William Le Queux was a popular novelist in the early part of the twentieth century. He was half French, half British and he wrote books with wonderful titles like Strange Tales of a Nihilist." I shall have to get a copy. Shadowpuppets

Snowden leaks: the real take-home - Charlie's Diary

>> "Gen Y will stare at you blankly if you talk about loyalty to their employer; the old feudal arrangement ("we'll give you a job for life and look after you as long as you look out for the Organization") is something their grandparents maybe ranted about, but it's about as real as the divine right of kings." << Charlie's on form.

Re: RFC: Why are so many debian packages outdated? [LWN.net]

I suspect this may be a joke. Happy Birthday, Debian

40 Days Without Booze | J.D. Moyer

Loss of weight is impressive (125ml wine = 85).

Facebook's request to the flash industry: 'Make the worst flash possible' • The Register

>>""Photos, video – essentially, after you first create these, they're almost never updated," he said. "The majority of that data will probably be written once and read never - really, it's sad.""<< Facebook man speaks the truth. I've spent ages tagging scans of old family pictures because I'll be making copies for 10+ people. My own snapshots, not so much.

How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut - Forbes

>> "Palantir’s critics, unsurprisingly, aren't reassured by Karp's hypothetical court. Electronic Privacy Information Center activist Amie Stepanovich calls Palantir "naive" to expect the government to start policing its own use of technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Lee Tien derides Karp's argument that privacy safeguards can be added to surveillance systems after the fact. "You should think about what to do with the toxic waste while you're building the nuclear power plant," he argues, "not some day in the future."" << History tends to support these views, alas...

How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut - Forbes

"According to a former JPMorgan Chase staffer, they've saved the firm hundreds of millions of dollars by addressing issues from cyberfraud to distressed mortgages." Here we go with the algorithm based predestination stuff. Digital Calvinism anyone (with confidence limits)?

BBC News - Alfredo Moser: Bottle light inventor proud to be poor

"Most homes and businesses in the slums of Dhaka have no power and no windows, so 80-90% of them hook up to electricity lines illegally - and fall back on candles or kerosene lamps during regular blackouts." I had not worked out the 'no windows' bit.

The Beethoven Project » Explore

"...the great English cellist W.H. Squire began his recording career just after the turn of the century. Fritz Kreisler was recording by 1904 and such notable violinists as Joseph Joachim, Pablo de Sarasate and Karol Gregorowicz made records very early." Amazing. Tully Potter writing about string quartets and their renditions of Beethoven.

How to turn everyone in your newsroom into a graphics editor » Nieman Journalism Lab

See Chartbuilder above. Style sheet based charting from pasted data.

Quartz/Chartbuilder

Front end to d3.js that runs the python Web server and then lets you copy/paste data in and pull an SVG/PNG file out. Style sheet based graphics.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now

"Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Whenever things got "cockeyed," Richard would look back and try to understand how now was different than then." Thinking machines

References for "The Future of Programming"

A very nice set of references for the problem of making computer programming easier to do and more reliable.

The Legend of The Oregon Trail | Mental Floss

>> What Rawitsch hadn't expected was how the game would foster teamwork. Initially, when the machine asked questions, students would shout various responses. When this proved inefficient, they started putting decisions to a vote. "They invented democracy out of necessity," he says. Students also realized the quantity of food available hinged on how quickly they typed bang, and they began taking turns and learned to delegate: The best typist got behind the gun; the budding accountant kept track of the expenses. "They were like workers in a Henry Ford plant," Rawitsch recalls with pride. "Everybody had a job!" << Oregon Trail educational game started on a teletype

Yudkowsky - Bayes' Theorem

Helps with Silver's Ch8

Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk

"As always, disruption will come from our blindspot. From amateurs and children playing with toys, untainted by the sin of knowledge. Perhaps aided and abetted by a few turncoat hackers rejecting the dark side of super-intelligence." Excellent rant

NSA security award winner calls for hearings into agency's conduct • The Register

>> "But in a personal blog post the next day, Bonneau said that while he was honored by the award, he had "conflicted feelings" about accepting it in light of the NSA's conduct in industrial-scale snooping into private data, adding that he was "ashamed we've let our politicians sneak the country down this path."" << The old guard will turn over and the younger ones will change how the systems work.

Lifehacking is just another way to make us work more. - Slate Magazine

"Autopilot by Andrew Smart surveys some recent research in neuroscience (particularly the puzzling discovery that our brains seem to be doing a lot of previously undetected work while at rest) to argue that dedicating time to do nothing—literally sitting still and daydreaming—is absolutely necessary if we are to use our mental faculties and stumble upon new and original insights." Known this for years. All maths people have experienced the solution arriving in flash after doing something else while stuck

Quick-R: Home Page

The website of the book

R Tutorial

Covers the basics as found in most lab stats courses in UK universities. Data sets available.

Jazz Painting In Action | Painting With A Palette Knife

Jazz painting videos: sounds howard moonish but actually nice

Diffusion of innovations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The five factors worth looking at in relation to interfaces?

Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages | Locklin on science

J and K presented as well designed software products. Fairly light weight article.

Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution | MIT Technology Review

"What's more, Engelbart's pitches of linked leaps in technology and organizational behaviors probably sounded as crazy to 1980s corporate managers as augmenting human intellect with machines did in the early 1960s. In the end, the way Silicon Valley companies work changed radically in recent decades not through established companies going through the kind of internal transformations Engelbart imagined, but by their being displaced by radical new startups."

Edward Tufte - FT.com

Tufte at 71. He likes d3 and is looking forwards to dynamic documents.

Fast Time and the Aging Mind - NYTimes.com

"An engineer by training, he read constantly after he retired. His range was enormous; he read about everything from astronomy to natural history, travel and gardening." So with the Web, the next few generations of Octogenarians should have plenty to keep them going!

What is Miklos hacking

Miklos hacks on LibreOffice, especially the .docx import. He has test documents on his site

NSA: THE DECISION PROBLEM | Edge.org

"Unfortunately, the bad actors to be most worried about are the ones who suspect that they are being watched. The tradecraft goes way back. With the privacy of houses came eavesdropping; with the advent of written communication came secret opening of mail; with the advent of the electric telegraph came secret wiretaps; with the advent of photography came spy cameras; with the advent of orbital rocketry came spy satellites." George Dyson, a historian of science, on the NSA thingy.

BBC News - Exam board seminars won't be banned, says regulator

"It also says any events should be reasonably available to all teachers and that all training materials used should be published in ways that teachers can access." Will all teachers be able to obtain the training materials or just the ones whose institution is registered with the exam board? Apart from that, these arrangements sound sensible to me

Negative Probabilities | Azimuth

Here is one for the GCSE class: what could negative probability mean?

Azimuth

John Baez's blog about physics and mathematics applied to ecology with a large emphasis on explanation.

The Setup / John Baez

>>"I'm a minimalist when it comes to gear: I like to spend as little time as possible thinking about new tools, and as much time as possible coming up with ideas and explaining stuff." and "...paper books are good when you're trying to learn a new subject, because you can develop a physical memory for where things are in the book, and pop it open to the right section whenever you feel like taking another crack at understanding something." Mathematical physicist looking at climate change and explaining what he finds. Maximalist.

Fanbois smash iPhone 5s much sooner than iPhone 3s ... but WHY? • The Register

"...asked 1,486 adults how they managed to destroy their iToys." Nice stats, some percentages, good humour potential, stats methodology doubtful

Tatsuo Horiuchi | the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist | Spoon & Tamago

Excel drawing shapes artist. Basically using vector drawing to create scenes but function set needed is simple so Excel will do

The Pixel Painter: A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95 | Colossal

Deep knowledge of simple tools vs shallow use of wide range of tools. Once you can control r,g,b at pixel level you can do anything.

Adult heights and mixture distributions

Standard deviation 3 inches or about 8cm for data set simulation purposes. Interesting illustration of what happens when you sample men and women's heights.

Victory Lap for Ask Patents - Joel on Software

>> "Most issued software patents aren’t "inventions" as most people understand that word. They're just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours." Via HN

Here’s how Amazon self-destructs - Salon.com

"Amazon, as far as I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers." - Matthew Yglesias

Crime: The curious case of the fall in crime | The Economist

"...if tough prison sentences were the cause, crime would not be falling in the Netherlands and Germany, which have reduced their prison populations. New York’s prison population has fallen by a quarter since 1999, yet its crime rate has dropped faster than that of many other cities." Can we copy the Netherlands and Germany? Please? Much less expensive than copying the Americans

The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements - Paul Offit - The Atlantic

>>"Then all the rigor, hard work, and hard thinking that had made Linus Pauling a legend disappeared. In the words of a colleague, his "fall was as great as any classic tragedy.""<< Via HN. I tend to avoid supplements of any form.

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 on Vimeo

500 fps launch video played back at normal speed with narration. Majestic is the word I think

Flickr: slipah's Photostream

Ferenc Szutor from Hungary takes a mean snapshot and licences them as creative commons.

A snapshot of your computer with dd, pv and gzip - Part 1

"There are some caveats. When you restore, it needs to be on a hard drive of the same size or larger, and will overwrite anything on the drive. The benefit is that even if you absolutely ruin the data on your drive, restoration will include everything, including the boot sector, so on start-up it will be as if nothing ever happened. " Try this. Does it need the whole of the *backup* drive?

Your Startup’s Office Is Missing a Room • ex post facto

"At the beginning and the end of the project, we wouldn't intervene, but watch the user's first experience in silence with great interest. Other times, we focused the user on a particular element of the product by asking them to perform a task or asked pointed questions about the design of an input table or a workflow." Via HN. Once you have space, its a fairly low cost setup (on a scale of paying salaries)

Backported patches mean version numbers of variable utility

"It gets ugly when you have a customer who only sees the "external" version numbers and doesn't see the whole picture. They find out that their server is "running Linux 2.6.18" and flip out because there might have been a dozen security holes discovered in that since it came out." The whole point about RHEL and the clones is stability + backports. What librarians call 'user education' is needed.

Sharp 100W X-Bass USB Boombox Entertainment Sound System Stage with iPod Dock: Amazon.co.uk: TV

Sonic art mind blaster. Need battery powered system and this looks outrageous with the orange speakers. Has 3.5mm in presumably at line level.

Why I Love My Model 100

"The Radio Shack Model 100 textbook-size computer is every journalist's dream. I know. I've been able to act out my Super Reporter fantasies, composing hot stories in midflight, then standing in booths at the airport or on the Champs Elysees, transmitting my copy over the phone handset to the New York Post or over Telex lines to London." We can do that on our phones now. I have not noticed any *marked* increase in journalistic standards...

Cottage Computer Programming

"I began to think about a more ambitious project, a word processing program to "obsolete" my typewriter. Since I write a fair amount, I knew I would be able to test my program properly, which turned out to be very important." ... "Programming the present generation of computers in machine language means thinking about twenty things all at once without dropping any of the pieces." Dogfooding in the dawn of the personal computer

Elysium's Director Thinks His Hellish Paradise Is Our Future. Let's Hope He's Wrong | Underwire | Wired.com

You know you're in a Neill Blomkamp film when you're the actor and everybody else has a protective mask on their face,”

Trinity College experiment succeeds after 69 years - RTÉ News

"The Trinity College scientists have estimated that based on the results from the experiment, the viscosity of pitch is two million times that of honey." Plenty of time for a few pints of Guinness while waiting for the results. Via HN

NSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope | World news | guardian.co.uk

>> "John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform "a second or third hop query" through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations." << 6 hops would be the whole world! They must have amazing machines.

Microsoft admits it's '18 months behind' with Windows 8 slabs • The Channel Forums

"I expect most consumers will opt for one of those instead of the two separate devices, or (more likely), they'll buy one because it's the £400 option and everything in that price bracket is the same thing." I suspect chr0m4t1c has a point, if only because the current £399 laptop from PC World or Tescos has a DVD drive, 500Gb spinning disc storage and a 15.4" screen. A composite tablet/keyboard device will not have an optical drive and will have much smaller solid state storage. Less cost to manufacture. More margin.

PUB Manual

"PUB was an early scriptable markup language. It was similar in concept to today's web scripting languages, especially PHP and JavaScript. But, like Microsoft Word, its purpose was to create paginated documents. PUB was the brainchild of Les Earnest of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Under his direction, I designed the language and implemented the compiler in 1971. It ran on the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10." Tesler's first typesetting program.

Ad Hoc Data Analysis From The Unix Command Line - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

Stats in the shell. Complete with a largish data file to test examples with.

In times of change, make tires — New Media — Medium

"Harvey Firestone, seeing the future as well as the present, aligned his fortunes with that of friend Henry Ford, while continuing to make tires for buggies. (Buggies needed more resilient tires than ever because of the changes in the roads.) He also made tires for bicycles. He could play everywhere." Via HN

Why We Can No Longer Trust Microsoft | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

"Personally, if I were any foreign government or corporation, I'd stop using all Microsoft products immediately for fear of America spying on me. Nothing can be secret." Inertia will keep Office selling I think.

E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The Mathematical Divide (EWD 1268)

"Another thing this alien resident of the USA cannot fail to notice [is] how the American mathematical community is obsessed with mathematical pedagogy and educational reform." Seems to be English speaking countries generally.

Repetition and Practice (Epsilon Camp Parent Resource)

>> "No head for mathematics" nearly always means "Will not use a pencil." <<

My Linux Configuration // by Paul Rouget

Fairly dark minimal XFCE4 installation with Arch back end.

BBC News - NSA's access to Microsoft's services detailed

>> "The revelations come as three Swedish technology entrepreneurs seek donations for a smartphone messaging app that, it is claimed, will be impervious to the type of spying used by the NSA. In less than two days, more than $137,000 (£90,000) has been raised for the Heml.is app which has the backing of Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde." This all sounds like a Neal Stephenson novel but it is real.

BBC News - Great Train Robbery: How Bruce Reynolds became a writer

"You realise it's all tinsel to a degree. I only ever wanted to live in a place that I felt comfortable in, which, ironically I suppose, is about the size of a cell." Losing half a life for some tinsel is not so good

Divisibility Rules (Tests)

Much easier table with all the divisibility rules explained with examples

Divisibility Tests

digit sums and other tests for each of the numbers up to 11

The Unread: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript : The New Yorker

"[Ethel] Boole, the daughter of the famous mathematician George Boole, who became a popular novelist, was enmeshed in Russian revolutionary activity in London; the bookshop that Voynich set up with her was rumored to be a secret front for organization against the tsarist regime." Good heavens. Must find out where the bookshop was. Conradian references in London.

The History of CTRL + ALT + DELETE | Mental Floss

>> “We had very little interference,” Bradley says. “We got to do the design essentially starting with a blank sheet of paper.” << Via HN. Wonderful.

Moxie Marlinspike >> About

> "I like computer security and software development, particularly in the areas of secure protocols, cryptography, privacy, and anonymity. But I also secretly hate technology, am partially horrified with the direction "geek" culture has gone, and have little affection for the weird entrepreneur scene that's currently devouring the Bay Area." Quite a few younger people are developing reservations about technology. I suppose the Web/distributed networks are just part of it all now and have lost the aura of newness

Forget Snowden: What have we learned about the NSA? • The Register

"In 1948 the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a child born in that year would be 65 today; the retirement age of many 'socialist' states. The grandchildren of that generation are going to need similar principles that protect the individual from the increasing ability to map put someone's life online and off." Good quote

Forget Snowden: What have we learned about the NSA? • The Register

A useful and relatively calm summary of the PRISM affair.

The Setup / Jason Forrest

"And for this sort of premium service I have defaced it with lazily applied stickers, dirt, and duct tape." I think we need a photo site for hardworking hardware

Animated Factorization Diagrams – Data Pointed

"This is what dance clubs look like on alpha centauri" Animated prime numbers

BlackBerry's retro-look QWERTY Q5 mobe: Resentment by design • The Register

"At times, such as in the example illustrated below, it's simply impossible to pull the caret into the position desired to carry out an edit if that position is at the edge of the screen." QNX Blackberrys don't have trackpad/scroller buttons. I'm hanging on to my old curve.

Universal Credit? Universal DISCREDIT, more like, say insiders • The Register

"This has meant that even though the new Pathfinder infrastructure is inadequate, DWP staff are forced to find a way of making the applications work, often relying on distinctly low-tech techniques which take up so much time that IT work to make the Universal Credit system work has been sidelined." The very definition of a death march project (Mythical Man Month)

Mark Bernstein: On The Sideline

"I've added features in an afternoon that I spent a week trying (and failing) to implement only a year or two ago." Progress (article about Englebert, NLS and Winer and Frontier.

GoodUI

A lot of information presented in a clear way with visual restatements. 'Right' and 'Wrong' examples. Nice

Fractal Fern - CodePen

Nice editable example of IFS fern generator

Salon Brilliant Careers | Of mice, men and machines

"Designed to be used in conjunction with the mouse, which Engelbart's team also invented, the chordal keyboard allows users to type all the letters of the alphabet with just one hand. With both a mouse and a chordal keyboard, a computer user can navigate an information landscape by pointing and clicking and simultaneously entering text commands." Enjoy the 1998 Web design and the somewhat populist essay about Englebart

A few words on Doug Engelbart

"Our hypertext is not the same as Engelbart's hypertext, because it does not serve the same purpose. Our video conferencing is not the same as Engelbart's video conferencing, because it does not serve the same purpose. They may look similar superficially, but they have different meanings. They are homophones, if you will." ... "Engelbart's vision, from the beginning, was collaborative. His vision was people working together in a shared intellectual space. His entire system was designed around that intent. "

Independence day resignation letter | Tom Watson MP

"I wish to use the backbenches to speak out in areas of personal interest: open government and the surveillance state, the digital economy, drones and the future of conflict, the child abuse inquiries, the aftermath of the Murdoch scandal and grass roots responses to austerity." We need more MPs like this I think

Schubert String Quintet in C, D 956. "Filarmonica"-quartet & Boris Andrianov - YouTube

Nice recital. Bit noisy

Evening Edition | The perfect commute-sized way to catch up on the day’s news

5 stories every day at 5pm. I've subscribed to the London edition by email. Via daringfireball

Hacker News | Add Comment

"An older gentleman on a bench beckoned to me to join him. We chatted about the amazing implications of nanotechnology to change everything about human life. I expressed amazement that so few seemed to care. He told me that big ideas could take a surprisingly long time to become part of real life, something he'd seen again and again."

1968 Demo - FJCC Conference Presentation Reel #1 : SRI International : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Download this on a fast connection and burn to PAL dvd

This Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting | Privacy and Regulation - Advertising Age

"Players can gobble up cookies Pac-Man style, creating a pool of profile information that has nothing to do with their actual web behavior." Excellent!

The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968) - YouTube

The sound track on the demo was apparently captured live and has this amazing echo. Another one of the First leaves.

Lockdown – Marco.org

Good essay on the need to keep the distributed network with common protocols working and to resist the silos. Can't use directly with students because of profane f word used once

Firefox OS mobilises HTML5, without the added Steve Jobs • The Register

"Using the free, widely understood languages of the web stack means that the barrier to entry for potential Firefox OS developers is very low." That is the way to do it. How about this kind of developer library on a desktop OS?

How to Browse From the Linux Terminal With W3M

Images in w3m

Ster-Kinekor

Very nice set of made up travel posters depicting the locations of mid-20th century films. Shining and all.

Red Hat Confirms GNOME Classic Mode For RHEL 7 - Slashdot

"I think it's been hard for the Gnome guys, because they really, really love modern mode, because that's where their hearts are." --Denise Dumas, Red Hat engineering director, commenting on the decision to release RHEL 7 with the Gnome Classic Mode as default. I can see why the decision was taken (I have been involved in staff development around new software in the past). I shall continue to use Shell on this box

BBC News - Voucher scheme would 'water down' ultra-fast net speed plan

"BT and Virgin Media argued that new network would pose unfair competition to their own projects in the area and objected to the fact they had been barred from bidding for the work." So no fibre to front door for me for a decade. Thanks chaps.

If Earth Had a Ring Like Saturn

Nice work again

Smashed : The New Yorker

>> “Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing too. I don’t try, I just type.” Charles Bukowski. I think he meant 'don't consiously build complex things' but he could just have meant it directly.

Explain like I’m 5: Kerberos — Lynn Root

Kerberos with examples. I only had to use a kerberos authenticated system once.

Photographer Ron Miller creates incredible pictures of what it would look like if planets were closer | Mail Online

Nice idea, wish I had thought of that!

venomous porridge - Look, and Feel

"The moment you see this object, you have a sense not just of how to use it, but of what it would feel like." Visual detection of affordances based on experience. Nice essay via daringfireball

The Art of Journalism No. 1, Hunter S. Thompson — www.theparisreview.org — Readability

"If I have pages at dawn, it's been a good night. There is no art until it's on paper, there is no art until it's sold."

German City Set To Make Linux A Norm For Citizens

"The German city is now eyeing to wean its citizens off Windows XP with free Linux CDs. Munich City Council has plans to distribute thousands of free Linux CDs to the citizens in spring of next year."

BBC News - Study of lead levels in rice under scrutiny

>> "The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) said in a blog post that "even where the soil is contaminated with a lead spill, a number of studies have shown that rice plants do not take up a significant amount of lead and move it to the grains"." Investigate the *mechanism* once a result has been (apparently) found.

An Apology to my European IT Team | Fred Lybrand

I wonder how much foreign business we are going to lose because of the FUD?

xkcd: Real Programmers

Te Hee

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson

"What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners."

Papageorge interview | Alec Soth's Archived Blog

"Don't speak to me of the document; I don't really believe in it, particularly now. A picture's not the world, but a new thing."

Black & White World: A Celebration of Photography. Photoshop monochrome techniques, traditional darkroom how-to advice, famous photographers, digital cameras and software, and much more!

"Winogrand told us that anything was photographable. He said that we only make the pictures we know; it is hard to break from our preconceptions about how something should look photographed. He told us to let what we see determine where the edges of the photograph go. He challenged us to forget our preconceptions about how to photograph something."

Master Class with Winogrand/Arbus

"As a copyboy, you waited for a buzzer button located on the editor's desk to be pressed, buzzing a buzzer at your hallway post. You would then leap up, clear the annunciator flag, walk into his (or her) office and take the contents of his (or her) outbox and place it in the copydesk inbox. Thats it." A simple job that does not exist any more. That kind of job allowed quite young people to see what happened (in this case in a newspaper).

Creative People Say No — Design Thinking — Medium

"No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes." Via HN

The Get-Rid-Of-Crap-Every-Month Club — Medium

Nice idea

Binary Bonsai

>> "And iOS is the summation of their work; an operating system so simple, yet powerful, that babies, the elderly and even cats can use it. It is amazing." This the mark set by Apple. Can Canonical and the others meet the mark? Via daringfireball

The Setup / Gerard Holzmann

"At JPL I have a 64-core machine (4x16 AMD Opteron running at 2.2GHz) with 128 GB of memory, running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, for the bigger crunch jobs." That is quite a spec

Persuading David Simon (Pinboard Blog)

>> "I think Simon's fundamental argument, "same old stuff", is mistaken in a number of important ways, and that some of this reflects our failure as technologists to communicate what modern surveillance can do." Scope and speed of data capture wider as result of large network. Via HN

Priced out of Paris - FT.com

>> "When they'd told the headmaster at the children's school, he had looked sad and said: "Everyone is leaving." Paris is pricing out even the upper middle-class." Social Limits to Growth again, a la Fred Hirsch

Stella, stellae

CentOS with extra repositories all packaged as an installable live image! And here is me piddling about compiling Audacity!

Audacity Forum • View topic - Error during compilation of audacity 2.0.1 Linux

Compiling audacity under CentOS 6 - needs wX widgets

Enabling mp3 support in CentOS « SV’s Notes

How to use the Fluendo mp3 decoder (free for use) on a stock Centos. Attempts to install the rpm gave dependency errors with missing libraries

BBC News - Teachers must not 'teach to the middle'

"We're in a situation in this country where many more youngsters are going from the independent sector and grammar schools to the top universities than those in the comprehensive schools. We've got to do something about that." Class sizes perhaps? Noooooo just teach them until 7pm!

tonymacx86 - Building a CustoMac: Buyer's Guide May 2013

I have no intention of using Mac OS but this hardware would work *really* well with Ubuntu Linux!

obamaischeckingyouremail.tumblr.com | Hacker News

Hilarious tumblelog and some other funny gifs. One has to preserve a sense of humour about all this

How Not to Be Alone - NYTimes.com

"My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits." Via HN

Cross Cut | Push the Button

McCann's blog post on Nautilus

compact view removed from Nautilus

Nautilus 3.8 has list and icon view, the column view has been removed. This discussion as to the reasons for the removal of column view is of interest for the *apparent lack of any form of user testing* to support the 'thinking' that lead to the removal of the feature. Developers appear to be reasoning from an *untested mental model of a user* which has not been tested.

Ubuntu Studio 13.04 Released! « Ubuntu Studio

"Also, we have big plans for the audio infrastructure, which will require a few substantial changes in how audio is administered and controlled on Debian/Ubuntu. Our goal for 14.04 will be to simplify audio control for users, so that our users can focus on music production rather than audio settings." Sounds good - audio subsystem that is *just there*

The Setup / Brian Kernighan

"If you're going to have a second childhood, a good university is a great place to have it." Great quote

How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article. - Slate Magazine

"So now there are 100 of you left. Nice round number. But not for long! We're at the point in the page where you have to scroll to see more. Of the 100 of you who didn't bounce, five are never going to scroll. Bye!" Nice illustration of exponential decay!

Tutorial: Blender Video Sequence Editor (VSE)

Video on how the video editing system in blender works

BASIC / Blender Video Editing 101

Could be useful

Sketchnote Army - A Showcase of Sketchnotes

Illustrated hierarchical notes using little pictures and sketches. Nice. HN again.

Crunching subway data- a New Yorker’s busiest stations | Adventures (in code)

"...it appears that at certain points, turnstiles just go absolutely haywire and you end up with -200000 exits on one day, which can really mess with your totals." Nice stuff on New York subway via HN. I want the satellite data on buses in Birmingham!

Pan and Zoom Slide Show in Blender 2.6 - Part #1 - Blender 3D - Linux - YouTube

This looks like what I want.

Blender3D Tutorial - Introduction: Noodle on Vimeo

Nodes are used to make a flow through various assets. They call this path a 'noodle'. Magic

Blender3D Tutorial - Convert: Images into Nodes on Vimeo

Getting the images into blender in a form that allows composition? Need to learn some vocabulary!

Blender3D Tutorial - Introduction: Node Editor Window Controls on Vimeo

Looks like you need this before bringing pictures into blender

Blender3D Tutorial - Convert: Pan and Zoom on Vimeo

this looks close to what I'm trying to do

Tutorial: Simple video editing using Blender 2.6x

Setting up and getting video in

History of Lisp

McCarthy paper from 1979 converted to html from LaTeX

"Patch" by Samuel Pickering | Superstition Review

"People ache to believe their lives form organic wholes. In truth life consists of one patch atop another patch, most of which time peels from memory, thus enabling a person to imagine unity and meaning if he is inclined toward fiction or sublimity."

Critique Magazine :: On Writing II :: Sam Pickering

"People want essays—they kind of want essays to be on things like liberty; they never want them to be on toenails or something like that."

It’s 2013 and My [Note|Net|Ultra]book is Still Too Big | mockyblog

femtobook. * by 4 inches clamshell design with physical keyboard. Mockups and discussion. Dream on

Hexagonal Grids

"Hexagonal grids are used in some games but aren’t quite as straightforward or common as square grids. I’ve been collecting hex grid resources for nearly 20 years, and wrote this guide to the most elegant approaches that lead to the simplest code, largely based on the guides by Charles Fu and Clark Verbrugge. I’ll describe the various ways to make hex grids, the relationships between them, as well as some common algorithms. Many parts of this page are interactive; choosing a type of grid will update diagrams, code, and text to match." Maths all the way. Interesting stuff, especially the cubic coords approach

Fedora 19 Beta Released: Alive, Dead, or Neither? - Slashdot

>> "When I clicked into the disk setup tool, I was given the option to "reclaim" space, but I really didn't understand what that meant. There was no button or other option to "install over my previous Linux installation," despite the fact that this laptop only had Linux on it (an older Fedora 17 install). If I were a user with "typical" knowledge and "average" skill, I would likely be afraid to use this installer, lest it do the wrong thing." I was caught by this terminology as well. 'Reclaim' just does not convey 'destroy the other OS' to me at all. I ended up reformatting the test disc from a live session using the Disk utility then allowing Fedora 19 to use a default install.

Bug 922433 – Fedora 19 bugs cannot be reported because the server side cannot handle the release name "Schrödinger's Cat"

Classic

The Setup / Sarah Northway

"...but Apple's design methodology of focusing on an average usage behavior and obscuring advanced functions regularly infuriates me" Certain Linux distributions are copying this trend, but, fortunately, the system can be changed

The Madness Letters: Friedrich Nietzsche and Béla Tarr — Crosscuts — Walker Art Center

"...you have to know also that we really just wanted to do a very simple, very pure film. We’re just showing how [the world] will be over, the horse will be over, life will be over. It’s very simple. Please just trust your eyes. That’s too much—don’t be sophisticated, okay?!"

[gnome] Finding oddly named applications in GNOME3

Add a Keywords=list;of;functions; to the ~/.local/share/applications/.desktop file for a program to search for it by function from the Gnome applications search. You need to restart Gnome Shell (ALT-F2 and r) to see the changes.

How an Entirely New, Autistic Way of Thinking Powers Silicon Valley | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

"Once I realized that thinking in patterns might be a third category, alongside thinking in pictures and thinking in words, I started seeing examples everywhere. (At this point, this third category is only a hypothesis, though I've found scientific support for it. It has transformed my thinking about autistic people's strengths.)" Temple Grandin on pattern thinking.

Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog

>> "The source of the problem is that the desktop integrates together at a software level, but not a task level. Integrating these applications does not just mean sharing data between them, but it also means pro-actively adjusting the user experience of these tools in favour of a project." Jono Bacon in 2005. I'm not sure I do actually work on *projects* in this sense myself, and I would not like to have to fight a pre-imagined workflow, but interesting for the light it sheds on the development of Topaz/Gnome 3

GNOME Gets Formal, Public Usability Testing » Linux Magazine

Summary of Aakanksha Gaur's work with comments by Allan Day.

Design Open Sourced - Home

Aakanksha Gaur's work on Gnome 3 usability archived by way back machine. The blog engine that Aakanksha used originally has been closed down!

10.6.3 rsync to external drive always...: Apple Support Communities

--modify-window=1 is the answer to FAT32 backup drives apparently. Saves wear on the drive apart from time!

Rsync to Fat32 drives « Cincinnati Linux User Group

Might avoid the always copy every file issue when copying the other way (linux -> fat32)

BBC News - Urging old people into smaller homes 'may backfire'

>> "The report adds that elderly people are "often in denial about the realities of ageing" and struggle on in unsuitable, over-large homes when smaller properties might be more suitable." I want a cabin in a garden or park myself near shops and a market. Fat chance.

The New Flickr Sucks and Here’s Why | Infinite Hollywood

"The Pro level that used to offer unlimited photos is gone." I'll need to check if that means I can't provide password access to named people to collections. I need to distribute family photos to far flung relatives.

Universal Credit | cartesian product

"At the meeting the DWP announced that they would be using "Agile" as the basis on which UC was developed. I was only an MSc student but even I thought this looked like exactly the sort of project that the textbooks said Agile was not designed for – but I wasn't confident enough to say that then and nobody else in the room seemed remotely interested in hearing such a thing." Here we go again.

Going inside the machinery and machinations of working in science | Ars Technica

"What's missing is the background for these stories of discovery. How do you take an idea from its beginning as a casual musing all the way through an actual research program? What's involved in that process? How do you sort out the good ideas from the bad and choose what to pursue and what to abandon? That's the story I want to tell." Scientific method explained through an example

Hangover

How far can you overhang blocks? Nice application of sequences to a puzzle. Might get some wooden blocks made to demo this next year. A length of 75 by 25 par pine would do it sawed to 150mm lengths.

42 | Azimuth

Happy Towel Day everyone!

Ted's ComParadigm in OneLiners

>> ""Information", referred to as a commodity, is a myth.  Information always comes in packages (media bundles, called "documents" (and sometimes "titles")), and every such package has a point of view.  Even a database has a point of view." Ted Nelson's views about computers summarised in one page

BBC News - A Point Of View: The doors of perception

"Machen viewed London as unknowable, and believed that if you walked around the city without any premeditated plan or direction you might stumble on regions that haven't been seen before or would be since."

Inside Pixar’s Leadership

"if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It's better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things." Partial transcript of a video, via daringfireball

Game designer Jason Rohrer designs a game meant to be played 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert | Polygon

"Rohrer first built the game in computer form, designing a set of rules that would be playtested not by a human, but by an artificial intelligence. He said he plugged the game's rules into a "black box," letting the AI find imbalances, iterating new rules and repeating. Rohrer showed the video game version of his board game onscreen, but obscured key portions of the board game's layout, so no one in attendance could reverse engineer its mechanics." This whole stunt is surely an 'action piece'?

The Cult of Design Dictatorship - Alex Cabal

Essay sparked by the 'focus' of Gnome 3 but applied to other software systems

BBC abandons £100m digital project, Director General says the project "wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers' money" : unitedkingdom

Some details about the technology stack used in the project.

The Setup / Nicholas Rezabek

"Typically I am using my two hands, two arms and two eyes and then some paper and some pens." Scanned artwork printed, modified and rescanned. Then silk screened.

By accident, it records the oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date...

A dated plaque recording a donation using a number that ends in zero written in a place notation script.

SAP in search of autistic software engineers who 'think different' • The Register

Interesting development

Are Current Web Design Trends Pushing Us Back to 1999?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Klein Bottle Hats and Scarves

Excellent and on my shopping list for September. Read the 'unconditional guarantee' as well. Clifford Stoll is a relatively well known critic of technology.

BBC News - Higher staff pay may mean larger classes, says Ofsted

"Head teachers may have to increase class sizes if they are to pay the best teachers higher wages, the chief inspector of schools in England admits." Words fail me. Just ask your nearest public school what their average class size is.

If a mathematician wants to cross a road, they... - Maths and Science blog- matthen

"If a mathematician wants to cross a road, they will think carefully about their optimal path." Ho ho

The One-Person Product – Marco.org

"...I often served as an idea editor. David would come in with a grand new feature idea, and I'd tell him which parts were infeasible or impossible, which tricky conditions and edge cases we'd need to consider, and which other little niceties and implementation details we should add." The inevitable double act

Yitang Zhang Proves 'Landmark' Theorem in Distribution of Prime Numbers | Simons Foundation

prime pairs result explained nicely >> "Zhang said he feels no resentment about the relative obscurity of his career thus far. "My mind is very peaceful. I don't care so much about the money, or the honor," he said. "I like to be very quiet and keep working by myself." << True mathematician

Outlining Your Notes with Org » sacha chua :: living an awesome life

Basic use of emacs org mode (just touch a file with file extension .org) to have folding text

How do I create a program shortcut for a command in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS? - Super User

I modified a copy of the desktop file for emacs23 to point to emacs24 using the path /usr/share/applications and gedit commands here. Logging out and in again allowed the icon for emacs24 to appear in the Ubuntu applications lens. Then it was possible to pin the icon to the launcher.

[ubuntu] Install emacs 24 on ubuntu 12.04

This set of libraries and compilation instructions work for Emacs 24.3 on Ubuntu 12.04

Hemispheres Inflight Magazine » Playing God

"If Rohrer seems overly invested in how I do in a 15-minute playthrough of a video game, it should be noted that the game is one that he designed and built from scratch. In the past hours, he has shown me stacks of papers from the planning phases — notes about cognition and epistemology, aborted alternate designs — pen and paper versions played through at the kitchen table with his wife and kids." Diamond Trust of London is only available for Nintendo DS. I hope they publish the paper versions.

How to Make a Full Auto Book Scanner - a scientist's toy box

"Considering the fact that arrangement of LEGO blocks has much more value than LEGO block themselves, just like arrangement of electrons in computer has much more value than electrons, to protect the profit and joy of building LEGO models and sharing them from being monopolized by anyone, as they rightly are not now, I publish this machine under the GNU General Public License." Book scanner made with motors, a trolley, an upside down scanner, and lego. Ace. Via HN

BBC News - 'Culture of extravagant expenses' at academy group

"The investigation found that hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money was spent by E-ACT on purchases that were not in line with its own spending policies." This is what happens when you remove democratic accountability.

How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners » sacha chua :: living an awesome life

Hand drawn guide, like Donald Alocks

How to learn Emacs :: About this guide to Emacs

The other editor

We Made This Ltd | London Transport Museum Acton Depot

"How binary are those? Put your money in, get a ticket. Or don't put any money in, push a button, and get an Authority to Travel. Brilliant." Old style tube ticket machines

Skirlie – fast savoury oats — Mostly Eating

Worked well, but needs more than a 'splash' of water with whole rolled oats (not powdered).

Paris Review - The Art of Nonfiction No. 2, Gay Talese

"The care and formality of his appearance carries through into his writing. Talese works at a desk with an enormous computer on it, but the machine looks decades old; it is the computer of someone who views the computer as a more convenient form of typewriter, and even that with reluctance. Talese does not use the Internet. Talese does not have e-mail. In situations where other people would send an e-mail, he will send a typewritten postcard."

The Handwritten Outlines Of Famous Literary Works By Their Authors - DesignTAXI.com

Via HN. I like seeing the visual plans.

Bug 695371 – Transparent option disappears in 3.7.x

"For the record, I gave him two screens full of very good, pertinent reasons, still he ignored everything and is now sitting in his lair quietly chuckling to himself." More on the disappearing transparency option in Gnome Terminal

Perlisisms - "Epigrams in Programming" by Alan J. Perlis

"Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn't."

"I Contribute to the Windows Kernel. We Are Slower Than Other Operating Systems. Here Is Why." - Zorinaq

"We started caring about security because pre-SP3 Windows XP was an existential threat to the business. Our low performance is not an existential threat to the business." Interesting.

Bug 698544 – Background configuration is missing in terminal profile editor

Be very very very careful what features you remove from an application used mainly by programmers! I don't like transparency in terminal windows myself because I use jazzy desktop wallpaper and even a little bit of transparency makes reading the lowish contrast text I prefer harder to read. Some people obviously want a transparency control for the terminal!

Privacy Breach on Bloomberg’s Data Terminals - NYTimes.com

"Bloomberg said the functions that allowed journalists to monitor subscribers were a mistake and were promptly disabled after Goldman Sachs complained that a Bloomberg reporter had, while inquiring about a partner's employment status, pointed out that the partner had not logged onto his Bloomberg terminal lately." Oops. Via Daringfireball

The Paradox of the Proof | Project Wordsworth

ABC Conjecture with some simple examples

massimo vignelli

“The grid is an integral part of book design. It's not something that you see. It’s just like underwear: you wear it, but it's not to be exposed. The grid is the underwear of the book.” The book is a technology, and it has an interface

stratēchery | Jony Ive is not a Graphic Designer

"There's a lot of stuff that's really important that you can't distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you're very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it."

Adobe kills Creative Suite – all future features online only • The Register

"Michael Gough, Adobe's VP of product experience, said that these two devices completely eliminate the need to sketch out ideas on a piece of paper." Good luck with that

Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is - Quartz

Small is the new big. Most business value can be extracted from data you can process on a modern laptop

Unix Installation - MIT/GNU Scheme 9.1

Just works on Ubuntu 13.04. Finds local emacs for edwin.

NeXT Cube restoration

Industrial Archaeology of computers

I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet | The Verge

"I'd used the internet constantly since I was twelve, and as my livelihood since I was fourteen. I'd gone from paperboy, to web designer, to technology writer in under a decade." Paul Miller returns to the Internet

Overheard: Steven Soderbergh | Film Comment | Film Society of Lincoln Center

"So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it's fast and sometimes it's slower, and maybe what's happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it's gotten to the point where I can't hear between the beats anymore and it's just a hum." Things speeding up or us slowing down

GCSE maths algebra

Useful as a starter on projector

BBC News - Children 'should be allowed to learn from own mistakes'

"I have my placards ready for a march along the seafront, 'Fewer tests, more childhood'."

Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program

"It's extremely difficult to be simultaneously concerned with the end-user experience of whatever it is that you're building and the architecture of the program that delivers that experience. Maybe impossible. I think the only way to pull it off is to simply not care about the latter. Write comically straightforward code, as if you just learned to program, and go out of your way avoid wearing any kind of software engineering hat--unless what you really want to be is a software engineer, and not the designer of an experience. "

BBC News - GCSE English plan leaves speaking test out of final grade

"Speaking and listening are as much a part of English competence as reading and writing. They are profoundly important skills. It is all very well to say they should still be taught even if they are not in the exam but, in the current high stakes system, if they are not tested for the league tables they won't count." That's the thing that needs changing. I haven't a clue how to change it though without making the grade chasing worse.

This much I know: Magnus Mills, bus driver and novelist, 55, London | Life and style | The Observer

Excellent

The Setup / Jonny Wilson

"When I left school I worked a bit with Brian Eno, and one of the most useful things he taught me was just to record everything and cut the best ideas later." Well, storage is cheap now...

Svetlanov conducts Tchaikovsky - Serenade for Strings, Op. 48: Third Movement [Part 3/4] - YouTube

Tchaikovsky - Serenade for Strings, Op. 48: Third Movement [Part 3/4] Sounds better to me if a bit halty

Svetlanov conducts Tchaikovsky - Serenade for Strings, Op. 48: First Movement [Part 1/4] - YouTube

End part candidate

Pioneer Chamber Orchestra -- Serenade for Strings by Tchaikovsky - YouTube

Serenade for Strings Third Movement, bit halty but right feel for end

Schubert Quintet in C, D 956 - 2. Adagio - Zagreb International Chamber Music Festival 2008 - YouTube

Schubert Quintet in C, D 956 - 2. Adagio

Cognitive Overhead, Or Why Your Product Isn’t As Simple As You Think | TechCrunch

"This is especially pronounced for mass market mobile products. Normal people already have to use more of their mental horsepower to cut through cognitive overhead. Now imagine the added burden of having to do that while on a crowded bus, or in line at Starbucks, or while opening your app for the first time while eating dinner with a friend and texting another." Perhaps, just switch the phone off at dinner?

BBC News - The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel

>> "They called it a "coding error". This made it sound like they were sequestered in a bunker surrounded by black screens on which a continuous parade of figures flickered past... Instead it was just someone using Excel on a laptop who was highlighting cells for a formula and released his index finger from the left-clicky button of his mouse too soon."

Linux in 2013: 'Freakishly awesome' - and who needs a fork? • The Register

> He added, "I mean, it runs all of our stock markets, most of our air-traffic control systems, internet, phones, you name it ... most of the world's telecommunications systems ... this is really now beyond a movement and an operating system, this is now this real, shared, societal, important piece of work." The Register

A Music Lesson | Stemmings

"Everything we make doesn't have to be (and inevitably WON'T be) perfect. Have the courage to risk making bad work for the sake of exploring new territory, and look at it as practice."

Sharp Suits

A3 posters by Irish designers based on things that their clients have asked them.

Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride. In the Pipeline:

"If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. ... A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him." Hilarious (I'm upwind)

delanceyplace.com 12/18/12 - we used to sleep twice each night

"While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime... The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life."

The Setup / Patric King

"I've never worked on anything but Macs, more out of coincidence than preference. I'm sort of not really loving Mac OS right now, but it's the devil I know." The language mirrors what people said about Windows 10 years ago.

Gamasutra - Features - Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

April fool or neat graphics demo?

charles leifer | "j" for switching directories - hacking "cd" with python

cat ~/.bash_history | sed "s|sudo ||g" | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n Produces a frequency count of your bash commands. Most common, ls, next most common, cd

PDF manipulation tips, Part 2 [peteryu.ca]

Convert PDF pages to image files works just fine with the ImageMagick software included in Scientific Linux 5.9.

UK ad-slingers spent TWICE as much smearing sales-bluster on mobes in 2012 • The Register

"The amount of cash splurged on mobile advertising in Blighty more than doubled last year to £526m, as the global recession continues to have little effect on the eagerness of marketers to fill folks' every screen with ads." I realised yesterday that I have never actually bought anything *directly* from an online ad.

On Being A Senior Engineer | Kitchen Soap

"The tl;dr on trade-offs is that everyone cuts corners, in every project. Immature engineers discover them in hindsight, disgusted. Mature engineers spell them out at the onset of a project, accept them and recognize them as part of good engineering."

Hypercritical: Technological Conservatism

"The old OS had a feature like this, and it was useful. The new OS needs a similar feature, or it will be less useful."

Dunno if It’s Art, but I Like It - Zachery Bir

Lattices with circles on a different basis. I like tiles for desktop backgrounds!

Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy — Tech News and Analysis

"So if your phone doesn't move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving." Via Daringfireball - imagine the data processing needed to synthesise this data for (say) 3 million facebook users in the UK?

Stop externalising your life | James Shakespeare

"Recently the Barbican museum in London held an exhibition called the Rain Room. It was an installation in which water poured from the ceiling, but sensors detected where people were standing and would turn off the taps above their heads so they didn’t get wet." Nice idea.

Prime Ministerial exploding cheese expert to become 'entrepreneur' • The Register

"Google’s arrival in the area has inflated rents. This is ironic because startups typically need low rent to get by." Low rent areas: premises and housing. We need it.

Yes, 100%.One thing I've enjoyed so far about being a contractor (but not a cons... | Hacker News

"The best approach I've seen so far is described as 'list, rank, iterate'. Profile your problems aggressively, rank the issues in descending order of importance, and greedily work your way down the list, fixing them." Sounds good.

BBC News - SSE fined record £10.5m by Ofgem

>>"A customer who had decided to leave SSE because it was increasing gas prices by 9% was told that the firm she was moving to was raising bills by "14% combined". This was not true. In fact it was increasing gas prices by 7% and electricity prices by 7%." Interesting use of 'combined'. Functional skills maths project here I think...

The Setup / Tom Bihn

"I also use Adobe Illustrator a lot: PAD exports nicely in to Illustrator, so in refining small parts (or making graphics that include a pattern piece), I'm hopping between PAD and Illustrator quite a bit." Example of using software and specialised hardware (printer/plotter and a digitiser) to aid production of hand drawn designs.

wireless - How can I use my TP-LINK TL-WN7200ND? - Ask Ubuntu

Try this to blacklist the iwlwifi driver and enable the Netgear on gNewSense

Frank Herbert by Timothy O'Reilly 1981 chapter 6

"It is no accident that Santarogan children are trained by Dr. Piaget, for instance. Piaget is a famous twentieth-century developmental psychologist. Far more significant, however, are the names Dasein, Sorge, and Jaspers. Jaspers is Karl Jaspers, the German existential psychiatrist and philosopher (whose work, incidentally, Herbert had studied with Ralph Slattery in Santa Rosa). Dasein is a term used by Jaspers and Heidegger to denote the human being." Frank Herbert goes ontological!

The Meme Hustler | Evgeny Morozov | The Baffler

"In 1981 the young O'Reilly even wrote a reputable biography of the science fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune series, in which he waxes lyrical about Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers."

The best interface is no interface | Cooper Journal

Another interface essay

Designing Interactions

Starts with a coin and moves into the concept of tagging

No to NoUI – Timo Arnall

"Seamlessness is 'the deliberate "making invisible" of the variety of technical systems, artefacts, individuals and organizations that make up an information infrastructure. This work actively disguises the moments of transition and boundary crossing between these various parts in order to present a solid and seemingly coherent interface to users.' " References to 'ecology' of interfaces here

how to make a quick buck - Jacques Mattheij

"So I spent a few minutes interviewing the guy and then did one thing, I typed 'date' on the command line. And it came up with yesterdays date, whereas all the messages that are being queued are set to be transmitted today… "

Scientific Linux Forum.org -> RHEL 7 Roadmap

"First off, "systems people" are not here to roll with changes, they are here to enable their users to continue performing productive tasks using computing systems as an amplifier of human effort, regardless what the system is and absolutely in spite of changes."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Every Employee Should Work From Home - Forbes

"You need a strong culture of managing work, not chairs to make it work."

'Waiting for Sunrise,' by William Boyd - NYTimes.com

"The world is in essence neutral — flat, empty, bereft of meaning," "It's us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want. In theory." Dr John Benismon, fitctional psychologist

Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Another hoax; this time a visual artist.

CABINET // The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley

"His early death, clearly, was a tragedy. But then it became apparent that, behind this tragedy, a comedy lurked. Ern Malley was not dead, for he had never lived. He and his entire oeuvre had been made up, in the course of a single afternoon in a military barracks in Melbourne, by two young poets, Corporal Harold Stewart and Lieutenant James McAuley." Excellent

Patent shark‘s copyright claim could bite all Unix • The Register

Excellent. Especially "An attorney identifying himself as Ernest K Malley, who spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity, said forensic analysis of all known Unix derivatives had taken nearly three decades, but that the company recently is confident today's copyright filing will succeed."

Interview with Kurt Vonnegut | Robert Caro

"See, I have two lives-my researching life and my writing life. If you're interviewing people, your hours become what hours they'll give you the interviews, or whatever hours the library is open. When I'm writing I can actually go about five hours, no more. So that's a difference, but I get up early in the morning. I write from seven to about noon. I used to try to write longer, but I read and I found that I was always getting myself tired by working in the afternoon and then I was just throwing out what I wrote in the afternoon, so writing then was counterproductive." Caro

Why Innovators Get Better With Age - NYTimes.com

"If an organization wants innovation to flourish, the conversation needs to change from severance packages to retention bonuses. Instead of managing the average age downward, companies should be managing it upward."

Alan Cox - Google+ - So Fedora 18 seems to be the worst Red Hat distro I've ever…

"The new installer is unusable, the updater is buggy. When you get it running the default desktop has been eviscerated to the point of being slightly less useful than a chocolate teapot, and instead of fixing the bugs in it they've added more." I don't think he likes it

Scientific Linux for a Developer Workstation | Heaton Research

"I've always thought it would be a great theme for a post-apoplectic move to have the last computer on Earth shut down due to a Microsoft Windows license activation issue. But I digress."

How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business | Ars Technica

!With RHEL, Red Hat gives the enterprise what it wants: a stable lifecycle and roadmap, and a more careful system for inserting patches without breaking application compatibility."

Transcript for Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine | Dotsub

"I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. And Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand washed laundry for seven children. And now she was going to watch electricity do that work." Wicked. Via HN and another site

Big Data Could Cripple Facebook | TechCrunch

"Most people already know not to publicize individual things that reflect badly on them; once they realize that the totality of what they post can have serious repercussions, too, they'll clam up. In the end all public online activity will essentially become an endless ongoing job interview. Doesn't that sound great?" Hadn't thought of this angle.

Lessons Learned from YouTube's $300M Hole - Hank's Tumblr

"Spending more money to produce the same number of minutes of content does not increase viewership. Online video isn’t about how good it looks, it’s about how good it is." Sounds reasonable given bandwidth constraints in many parts of the world

"Screw The Mirrors" - Me, my blog, and my Johnson

"At any given time, for any given repository, we cannot assume that the repository is not in the process of being updated. In order to do such a thing, we would have to put in a number of kludgy, invasive steps where we mark the repository as disabled, wait for some period of time while we hope that people on slow/lossy/oft-unavailable connections are not still uploading new commits or packs (which can be very large as these contributors tend to commit more locally at a time while waiting for connections to be available), then perform a backup." This is a 25Gb project. Less than the music folder on my desktop. The metadata is crucial to the backup process. As we move more and more stuff to 'cloud', and decide to keep more and more stuff, and need to keep metadata about that stuff, this kind of problem will cease to be an edge case.

Too Perfect A Mirror - Me, my blog, and my Johnson

"However, while we planned for the case of the server losing a disk or entirely biting the dust, or the total loss of the VM’s filesystem, we didn’t plan for the case of filesystem corruption, and the way the corruption affected our mirroring system triggered some very unforeseen and pathological conditions."

Scientific Linux - Scientific Linux 5.9

SciLi 5 dates from May 2007. There have been regular minor version upgrades since. As if you could still run Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) and get security updates, and Firefox on the ESR channel. Runs nice on my recycled workstation. Web page coming soon.

"Put down the crack pipes" doesn't go so well

>> "So, basically, my options are: "be ignored and have bad things happen", or "get noticed and have bad things happen". The middle ground, if there is one, is impossibly thin. The slightest misstep will put you onto one or the other, and then you're in trouble." I've been in situations like that in the past. Noone should be in that situation just because of their gender.

What Being a Handyman Has Taught Me About Male Insecurity - Andy Hinds - The Atlantic

"Since then, it's been 25 years that I've made part or all of my living as a carpenter and contractor, despite having earned a couple degrees along the way. I love the work, and, let's face it, the pay is much better than my "hobbies" (as my wife calls them) of teaching and writing." Excellent

I've got a super free multi-petabyte storage box for you: /dev/null • The Register

"It currently takes 88 days to migrate a petabyte of data from LTO5-to-LTO6; this assumes 24-7 operation, no drive issues, no media issues and a pair of drives to migrate the data. You will also be loading about 500 tapes and unloading about 500 tapes." Do we have to keep it all?

Visceral Apps and You — Mysterious Trousers

"So here's my theory: I believe that introducing visceral elements into an app will take it past the point of just being awesome. It will make your app speak to the subconscious, built-in affinity that humans have for the physical properties I mentioned before." Resistance. There needs to be something pushing back. Via Daring Fireball

The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet - CloudFlare blog

Good technical backround on how it all works

Dan's Data - PC hardware and gadget reviews!

Totally random IT hardware reviews

BBC News - MPs urge readiness over housing benefit cut risks

"A number of housing associations said that moving large numbers of people considered to be under-occupying social homes was unachievable simply because there were not enough smaller homes available." Just because you change the pricing structure, the 'market' can't react instantly. There is inertia due to supply constraint.

Fraser Speirs - Blog - Beyond Consumption vs Creation

Chart with plane showing complexity and duration of task as two orthogonal axes. Maps out regions of suitability for phones, tablets and PCs. Sensible discussion of the type of task needed for each.

High-Low Tech – DIY Cellphone

"By creating and sharing open-source designs for the phone’s circuit board and case, we hope to encourage a proliferation of personalized and diverse mobile phones. Freed from the constraints of mass production, we plan to explore diverse materials, shapes, and functions." Bring it on. Local makers knocking up handsets.

Apple share-price-off-a-cliff: Told you that would happen • The Register

>> "So as you move down the ordered list you inevitably get less bang for your buck as necessary spending evolves into good spending into nice to haves and ultimately 'we've got to spend X by the end of the year else our budget will be cut next year.'" Horrible but true. No non-pay to slippage in months.

BBC News - A Point of View: Chess and 18th Century artificial intelligence

"Common sense should have told the people who watched and challenged it that for the Turk to have really been a chess-playing machine, it would have had to have been the latest in a long sequence of such machines. For there to be a mechanical Turk who played chess, there would have had to have been, 10 years before, a mechanical Greek who played checkers."

Thomsett International : Project Pathology

"These are simple examples of the need for an effective and powerful sponsor as, in both cases, the project manager would be able to raise these problems with the sponsor where he or she would use their power base and authority to address the issue at an executive level." Large IT project implies change in priorities which in turn involves organisational politics

You're Distracted. This Professor Can Help. - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Mr. Mayr, however, cautions against drawing the conclusion that multitasking weakens attention. If anything, he says, it's probably the opposite: People whose attention doesn't function well in the first place are probably most susceptible to the lure of distracting stimuli."

Titles are Toxic: Rands In Repose

"...the majority of your company is never going to be managers, but they want to grow, too." Teachers. We need ways of recognising teachers of wide experience and deep knowledge and skills.

BBC News - Children should be allowed to get bored, expert says

"But children need to have stand-and-stare time, time imagining and pursuing their own thinking processes or assimilating their experiences through play or just observing the world around them." -Dr Teresa Belton

Google’s trust problem

"But I'm a heavy user of Gmail. And so I've been buying more space on Google's servers. Recently, I hit 30 gigs — and learned Google won't let me purchase any more room. The service which once swore I'd never have to delete a message now tells me my only option is to delete gigabyte after gigabyte of past e-mails." 30Gb of email is a lot of email, but this all suggests that we return to the 'flat Web' and pay for our own space on iron and run our own applications.

Stock and flow « Snarkmarket

"Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time." Robin Sloan

Obsessed with the Now: Douglas Rushkoff and the threat of 'Present Shock' | The Verge

>> "For Rushkoff, the way to deal with these problems is to differentiate "storage" and "flow" — an idea you might’ve heard of back in 2010 as "stock and flow" from Robin Sloan. Something like Twitter, Rushkoff echoes, is a flow of data, which can’t be dealt with comprehensively, only dipped into. A slower medium like email can work as storage, where each item can be given its appropriate amount of attention in time. "The digital can be stacked; the human gets to live in real time." It’s the difference between adhering to a television programming schedule and using a DVR to watch shows at a time convenient to you." Thinking about organisational communication; we need a twitter *inside* the firewall for 'flow' things, like teaching opportunities or lesson ideas. These would scroll off the screen. You just step into the shower if you need an idea.

Start Presentations on the Second Slide | Facebook

"Programmers have a pavlovian engineering response. Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it. Give them a chance to co-engineer along with your presentation by making sure the first bite gets their saliva flowing. Then you can explain the rest of the problem and your brilliant solution knowing that they are there along with you." A bit like maths

writeLaTeX

LaTeX on a server with a JS front end that allows collaborative editing.

Box's 65-Year-Old Android Engineer Gives Your Startup Some Unsentimental Advice ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community

"I got a degree in computer science the first year that Berkeley gave a degree in it. But if I had to do it over again today, I might choose bio-informatics or nanotechnology.”

Docker - the Linux container runtime

Sounds fine to me; may try one with iPython and SciPy running under a virtual environment

MSDN Blogs

>>' I couldn't even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, "social isn't a product," she told me after I gave her a demo, "social is people and the people are on Facebook." ' But when they move...

BBC News - Teenagers' 'mismatched' job ambitions

"But the report says it suggests the narrowness of young people's view of the types of work available - and the failure of employers to present a broader picture of opportunities." Making things

Is UK web speech regulated? No.10: Er. We’ll get back to you • The Register

"This spontaneous "define by example" response leaves the most important areas still in need of a grown-up legal definition." Amazing

openSUSE 12.3 Multi-media and Restricted Format Installation Guide - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

looks like the Opensuse way of doing ubuntu-restricted-extras. You have to set the conflict choices to point to the pacman repository. Perhaps the rpm system of priorities would be less messy! mkcue-1-7.1.lk.i586.rpm does not appear to be in the repository.

Installing dropbox on openSUSE 11.2 with KDE | albertopassalacqua.com

Seems to work with 12.3 as well. The final stage of adding to autostart; when setting the drop down to 'Pre-KDE startup' system complains about needing an .sh extension on script. A dummy script didn't work, so just set the drop-down to startup not preKDE startup. Seems to work ok

What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - Anu Partanen - The Atlantic

>> "Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."" And no 'academies' either.

Converting Search into Navigation

"It would certainly be nice if schools would get better at teaching kids how to search. But I don't hold out much hope, because most people have the literary skills of an anteater... Having new and varied vocabulary words spring from their foreheads wasn't a survival skill for ice age hunters, so most people today can't think up good queries without help." Well, thanks, Jakob. However we (and Chimpanzees) are good at learning by imitation. Perhaps a few examples of good searches?

Accidental Empires, Chapter 7 -- All IBM Stories are True - I, Cringely

"Of course, I choose to warp reality. We all do. I tell myself that warm winters and fresh oranges are worth anything, while my friends in New York say exactly the same thing about plays that they don’t really attend and parks they are afraid to visit." And so do I. But it is cool

KRunner keyboard shortcut

How to set ALT-Space as the shortcut for KRunner in Kubuntu 12.10 and later KDE.

Debugging

"A banking system built in Chicago had worked correctly for many months, but unexpectedly quit the first time it was used on international data. Programmers spent days scouring the code, but they couldn't find any stray command that would quit the program. When they observed the behavior more closely, they found that the program quit as they entered data for the country of Ecuador. Closer inspection showed that when the user typed the name of the capital city (Quito), the program interpreted that as a request to quit the run!"

Why Google killed off Google Reader: It was self-defense | Hacker News

"Perhaps it's time for an organized "open internet" movement to build protocols and communities that resist the tendency toward centralization of data and control of user experience that's increasingly evident in the services offered by the big players"

BBC News - The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'

"Once in office [Nixon] escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia, with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, before finally settling for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968." Amazing.

A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013 - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

>>"But you know, even when you have a generous owner who is not trying to make a gazillion dollars and skim the cream, this game is still really, really hard. You still have limited funds. You still can't pay freelancers a living wage. The only strategy that makes sense is to hire some people. Then, you learn from each other (thanks, Megan Garber!). You work hard. You write good stuff. You comfort each other when people are huge a-holes in the comments. You catch typos for each other. You come up with jokes on Gchat. You figure out who has the golden touch with headlines (Derek Thompson is a certifiable genius at this). You make friends on the print side (Kate Julian! I know I owe you another Q&A candidate) and try to learn their game."

Install GIMP 2.8.2 In Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog

PPA to install Gnu Image Manipulation Program version 2.8 (single window mode) in Ubuntu 12.04.

Douglas Adams' 61st Birthday

Google Doodle

[kubuntu] Kubuntu vs KDE-Standard?

Firefox and Libreoffice look odd under KDE. Install gtk3-engines-oxygen and gtk2-engines-oxygen (in main repo no need to add a ppa) then in .config folder add the settings.ini file mentioned in this forum post. Logout/login and Firefox looks KDE oxygen style. Libreoffice: install the libreoffice-kde package.

Media Orchard Too | Inbound Marketing Dallas | PR Expert & Speaker Scott Baradell » Sharecropping: A Sucker’s Game Then — and Now

"Digital sharecropping means creating content that you publish on a site you don’t own — like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Just like sharecroppers of old tended the land of others, living at the mercy of large landowners, so those businesses today whose social media strategies revolve around the websites of others find themselves in a similarly powerless position — at the mercy of large social networks." Back to the flat Web. People put up pages.

Einstein's Zurich Notebook

Nice.

RPM RedHat EL 6 lame 3.98.4 i686 rpm

Using CentOS 6.4 on Thinkpad with only the CentOS and EPEL repositories enabled. Audacity installs, but lame not available. Don't want to enable another repository for one package so downloaded the RPM from here and installed to provide the mp3 encoding function needed by Audacity.

CentOS Linux 6.4 Released | Hacker News

"For me the strong point about RHEL/CentOS is the long term support (as in really long term support, 10y) and continuous back-porting of important features making it a lot less obsolete than it may appear. This is extremely important and many fail to actually realise it." This relates to server use. Desktop, you get Firefox on the ESR channel but will need to upgrade LibreOffice manually if you must. In comparison, Ubuntu 10.04 released in the same year as RHEL 6 (2010) has aged much more severely.

Ubuntu's other users | Hacker News

"I'm a large-scale linux HPC admin/architect/etc., whose previous experience is in gov't supercomputing labs and whose current company is running many, many thousands of ubuntu LTS servers." Mobile/tablet is great and I'd love an Ubuntuphone that I could dock to a monitor/keyboard and use Libreoffice on. BUT where are these kinds of users going?

Circle theorems - first page

Geogebra dynamic illustrations of the seven circle theorems for Higher level maths. Just so I can summarise them for the H level students.

The Setup / Chris Dahlen

"I just need a computer that boots in under five minutes and gets me to a browser and Microsoft Word." Probably true of 95% of users of computers. And the other 5% use PowerPoint and Excel. Sigh

Crafting the Perfect Intro Tutorial

Interesting

How should mathematics be taught to non-mathematicians? | Gowers's Weblog

A problem set to encourage discussion about mathematics

How I ended up with Mac - Miguel de Icaza

"Computing-wise that three week vacation turned out to be very relaxing. Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spend three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered." Oddly enough, my thinkpad has suspend, hibernate, resume working, wifi working, audio working and no issues with video drivers! And that is on CentOS.

Unix tricks | Hacker News

The comments contain lots of current bash hints.

The Tens

Trams. The Metro extension in Birmingham will make the city look more like this. But I wish we had the 60s style trams

The Tens

Photoblog by Brian Brophy. He does street vocabulary around San Francisco

The Apprentice Programmer | too-biased by Tobi Lütke

"The number of lilies in a pond double every day. So, on the first day of the month there is one lily. On the second day, two lilies, the next day four lilies, then eight, sixteen, thirty two, etc. If the pond is full on the 30th day of the month, what day is it half full?" An old chestnut. I'll try it on the GCSE classes next week

Penny Arcade - The MS Surface Pro

May not be an awesome business laptop but it looks as if the Surface Pro makes a decent art machine. A number of reviews mention aspects of the UI breaking as you zoom the size of the widgets to 150% which is what the Surface does by default to desktop applications. A hole in the market for a serious TIFKAM art package?

The Setup / Rob Pike

"This is 2012 and we’re still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary."

sed/awk to double space file - Stack Overflow

Use 'fmt input.txt > formatted.txt' to format a web page as 75 char wide line based file. Then use 'awk '$0 !~ /^[ t]*$/ { print $0, "n" }' formatted.txt > double.txt' to double space the file. The result preserves the indentation of bullet points and double spaces everything

How to double space a text file using Linux

"fmt -w 70 /path/to/inputfile.txt | sed G > ~/result.txt" The command line above formats a text file to lines that are 70 characters wide with a new line character at the end of each one. Paragraphs are demarcated using a blank line. The output of fmt is piped into sed with the -G argument. This -G switch without argument deletes all empty lines then appends an empty line as the 'hold space' is empty. Then prints. Need to clarify this aspect of sed but it works! Bullet points get merged into one paragraph.

What to Do When Your Non-Technical Boss is Just Plain Wrong

"It must be very difficult to have a sophisticated knowledge of a topic a specific area, and have to take suggestions from people who are objectively wrong about what is the best way forward. In effect, management gives you a goal to do something, and then their input pushes you further from that goal; or asks for results that are totally unfeasible."

Photoshop is a city for everyone: how Adobe endlessly rebuilds its classic app | The Verge

"But like New York, it can be a hard city to love. It feels its age, functional but a little run-down, maybe. It feels like if you tried really hard, you could probably still install Photoshop off a stack of floppy disks. You start to think about it the same way you think about NYC’s objectively amazing public transit system: why can’t it be better? Why can't it be slimmer? Why can't we just use Aviary and iPhoto and get our RAM back? Why isn't it dead yet?" Paul Miller going strong off the Internet and 10 months into his year.

Neil Fraser: News: Flow Charts

"COBOL code was written on paper, sent to a punch operator, who would type the punch cards, then the stack of cards would be added to the computer's input stack. I'd known about punch cards (don't drop the stack!). But I didn't realise the implications of being a programmer who could not type." I've used coding sheets. Wasn't just for non-typists. It allowed code review as well!

Grabbing for the Python name, a hosting firm gets bitten | Open Source Software - InfoWorld

"Poultney confirmed that he'd not involved any technical staff in the decisions he'd made about the Python product brand and told me he regretted that, because it would probably have helped him understand the likely reaction to his trademark challenge." I can actually believe this, having met a few 'entrepreneurs'. Not the best marketing move.

Domain Knowledge or a lack thereof - Jacques Mattheij

"What that translates into is that when I worked for a company making CNC equipment that I learned how to use a mill and a lathe manually. Only when I understood how you work metal by hand did I reach a level where I could confidently write software to work metal by numerical control." Sensible advice but the 'customer' for a typical business application is often a manager trying to solve a specific problem. The people who actually use the software may not get to meet developers or get a say.

SuperPaint

Early colour graphics program and hardware. Led the way to PIXAR and to the original Apple computer, but repudiated by the otherwise liberal Xerox PARC researchers.

Silicon Roundabout worthies in £2m UK.gov cash battle royale • The Register

"the arrival of Google et al has driven up rent the area to the point where few startups without government money can afford to hang around." The old story. Just provide cheap space somewhere central and leave them to it...

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

"I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities."

FOSDEM 2013 - LibreOffice: cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base

"Come and hear how we’ve built an international team of developers to tackle the problems of resurrecting a poorly-understood, gigantic code-base extensively commented in German, with no unit tests, a tangled build infrastructure, and twenty-five years of un-paid technical debt." LibreOffice is a package I use most days, and have used since the days of Star Office on Windows. It works! It has bugs! This can only make it better.

Mark Bernstein: How Software Is Built Today: II

"The point is to make things as simple as they can be, and no simpler. Everyone's everyday knowledge work is incredibly complex; if we want to even begin to help with that, we're going to have some complexity."

Microsoft needs to keep visible under waves of Blue • The Register

"According to Foley, Windows and Windows Sever are moving to yearly updates, away from about three years for new versions of the client and three-or-four year refreshes for the server. This is a major shift to Microsoft’s manufacturing process, as releases will speed up as Microsoft no longer relies on a big planned development cycles" So CentOS/Ubuntu LTS become the new stable

The Elsevier boycott one year on « Gowers's Weblog

"In one respect the boycott has been an unqualified success: it has helped to raise awareness of the concerns we have about academic publishing. This, we believe, will make it easier for new publishing initiatives to succeed, and we strongly encourage further experimentation."

Why there is no Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers | Math ∩ Programming

Just how much maths do you need to know?

The Star Wars Route: Do a traceroute to 216.81.59.173 | Hacker News

total geekness

Traceroute, Ping, Domain Name Server (DNS) Lookup, WHOIS express 216.81.59.173

excellent

Teenage Usability: Designing Teen-Targeted Websites

"Summary: Teens are (over)confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites." Still good content even though the new alertbox site looks like all the others...

Nielsen Norman Group: UX Research, Training, and Consulting

The end of useit.com. Terrible! That leaves just Drudge Report as a reminder of the old web

There was an earlier Hacker News submission about the Gates Foundation research ... | Hacker News

Question set for a simplified student questionnaire

White noise: 'Euphonia' exposes the horrors of our tech-mediated reality | The Verge

"Madden researched the story by using a sound recorder himself, and started to feel an “attachment” to the device. The recorder gave him a new lens to notice and recognize things around him, little moments he calls the “happy time.” "

I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square • The Register

"It was as if I’d been chiseling a message into a rock and someone walked over with a sketch pad and a fancy rollerball pen." On seeing Excel for the first time in a Lotus 1-2-3 shop

New BMI (New Body Mass Index)

"I must finish by emphasizing that I am an applied mathematician, not a doctor or an epidemiologist. The new formulas proposed above are not based on epidemiological studies and they may not be a improvement, for all kinds of reasons."

BBC News - BMI: Does the Body Mass Index need fixing?

As I'm taller than the mean for adult men, this new formula produces a lower BMI. Still a bit high and I suspect my muscle percentage is lower than Wilkinson's. A graph would be good to show the changes...

BBC News - Nursery ratios raised to cut childcare costs

"With this in mind, it is no longer acceptable that childcare professionals are not required to have a GCSE grade C or above in English and maths." Can anyone explain to me why someone looking after a toddler needs a 16+ qualification in Maths? Wouldn't some kind of short course about patterns, symmetry, simple number work and maths games be better?

Thread: MacWrite and MacPaint, a coral reef

"Asking whether he knew about MacWrite and MacPaint, imho, is like asking a person with an English lit degree if he's heard of Shakespeare. In other words, we have to work on this. :-)" We need a history/media studies of software. The time dimension and contingency (if you went back in a time machine and did it all again, would it come out the same or hugely different?) need to be documented.

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

The six rules

The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis - Charlie's Diary

"Because of this ability, we don't have to invent everything for ourselves, individually; we can borrow one anothers' good ideas. So we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers."

ACM Classic: Reflections on Trusting Trust

"Actually, FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular." Ken Thompson in full flow.

Can't paste screenshots to LibreOffice (Page 1) / Desktop / Xfce Forums

Yup: Debian Wheezy same issue, but installing clipman helps. I can use the screenshot application to screen grab a selection, click on it in clipman then paste into LibreOffice. Oh, the joys.

QArt Coder

Upload a small high contrast photo and make a QR code which includes the photo

Some of my examples can be further simplified (no -print0, no xargs) with GNU fi... | Hacker News

Note: find out how these commands work

jtnimoy: The Work of Josh Nimoy

"The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie." Excellent!

An Irrational Fear of Files on the Desktop

"What about the mess caused a screen full of icons? That's the best part: you can see your mess."

Why do programmers have better tools than educators? | peak 5390

A proposal for a lesson planning tool: seems to be based on US practice, and in a school where plans are reused.

data collection sheet for rolling two dice

Just to speed up practical work in a probability lesson. Space for students to roll two different coloured dice 18 times and to record results and the total of the two scores for each roll. Bottom section has a tally sheet blank to tally up the 18 scores.

Algebra revision activities: cards to sort and solve: higher

A set of 28 algebraic expressions (mostly linear, some polynomial) that students sort into four categories (expressions, equations, substitutions, and factorisations) to revise their algebra. Once sorted, students can solve/simplify the expressions. Used as a quick revision starter.

A Short Story About Verbosity

>> "In order for a book to sell," said my publisher, "it's got to be thick. 600 pages thick." "In the worst case we could go as low as 500 pages, but 600+ should be your target." << Why computer books are so thick (the best ones are thin)

Branko's Thought Dump: Six things I've learned about Linux and open-source

"Back in 2010, I worked hard with Dusty Phillips to bring order into chaos that was Arch Linux Wiki. The wiki is now one of the best places to find useful information not just for Arch users, but also for the rest of us." They did a very good job

Thread: We expect too much of geeks

"The other thing we all can do, if we love the product of technical minds, is stop thinking it's magic." Levi Strauss via Dave Winer. A lot of people think computers are just magic.

MathFiction Homepage

The short ones (1000 words) might be usable in lessons

Why trees can't grow taller than 100 metres - life - 16 January 2013 - New Scientist

"Jensen's equations describing the relationship show that as trees get taller, unusually large or small leaves both cease to be viable (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/j6n). The range of leaf sizes narrows and at around 100 m tall, the upper limit matches the lower limit. Above that, it seems, trees can't build a viable leaf"

Link by Link - Fordham Law Students Teach Scalia About Privacy and the Web - NYTimes.com

"Mr. Reidenberg was speaking about the loss of "practical obscurity," that is, the idea that certain personal information may always have been publicly available — down at the courthouse, say — but in reality was very hard to discover and disseminate. " Useful phrase, practical obscurity. Another example of distributed network computing making something that has always been possible much easier, and changing the landscape in the process

Facebook's Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search | Wired Business | Wired.com

It's called Graph Search, and it will eventually allow a billion people to dive into the vast trove of stored information about them and their network of friends. In Zuckerberg's case, it allowed him to type "Friends of Priscilla and me who live around Palo Alto" and promptly receive a list of potential celebrants. "We invited five people over who were obvious dog lovers," he says.

Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

"I think I've managed to balance things out through a few simple techniques that I've been refining for years. I still sometimes feel frazzled and info-whelmed, but that's rare. Most of the time, I'm on top of my workload and my muse."

Recovering from information overload - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Talent

"When we switch between tasks, especially complex ones, we become startlingly less efficient: in a recent study, for example, participants who completed tasks in parallel took up to 30 percent longer and made twice as many errors as those who completed the same tasks in sequence. The delay comes from the fact that our brains can't successfully tell us to perform two actions concurrently. When we switch tasks, our brains must choose to do so, turn off the cognitive rules for the old task, and turn on the rules for the new one. This takes time, which reduces productivity, particularly for heavy multitaskers—who, it seems, take even longer to switch between tasks than occasional multitaskers."

The Joy of Quiet - NYTimes.com

"Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once."

Nicole Jones podcast interview: content strategy at Facebook — lucid plot, by Jonathan Kahn

"I took this cooking class, and I was so taken aback listening to people talk about how afraid they are to not get takeout food, and actually chop an onion, or whatever, and these things are really important. If we don't know how to feed ourselves, it's really sad to me." Lots of strange stuff in this interview; about how Facebook works and something called 'content strategy'. This paragraph was the strangest.

The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering

Report by the win95 team. They planned a 'beginner's interface' but then abandoned the idea. Via The Register comments, Nate Amsden

Math Fun Facts!

Francis Su's short Maths starter page. Mostly US College level so outside the range I teach but could be simplified

The Mathematical Yawp: The Lesson of Grace in Teaching

"...since my performance doesn’t define me, I don’t have to be the center of attention in my classroom. I can do experimental things, and fail. I can get out of the way of my students... I can open up the classroom for things like inquiry-based learning. I don’t have to be in control of everything. I don’t have to worry about what people will think of me." A student of Persi Diaconis who now teaches

Happy birthday, Lisa: Apple's slow but heavy workhorse turns 30 • The Register

"According to Tesler, at various stages of application and interface design the results would be tested on groups of people with varying levels of computing experience including outright novices. This process ran into hundreds of hours and it’s claimed that most of the observations were caught on video with psychologists on board to analyse the responses."

APC » Paper

"Paper notebooks are such objects. Bookshelves, cabinets, files, and desks are often determined according to some relationship with its size. We think that designing a computer of a size and shape with the closest connection to these things would result in an object that blended in with that space. " My recycled laptop does all that but this PC disguised as a book looks nice

BBC News - Raising leaving age in 1970s 'improved children's GCSEs'

"Researchers found the children of parents who had stayed a year longer in education had higher GCSE grades. This was measured as an improvement worth one grade higher in two GCSEs." Excellent. Can we make it easier for adults to re-enter education then?

Security audit finds dev OUTSOURCED his JOB to China to goof off at work • The Register

"The scheme worked very well for Bob. In his performance assessments by the firm's human resources department, he was the firm's top coder for many quarters and was considered expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python." Funny on a number of levels

Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools

I'm going to have to find time to set up environments and play with some of these libraries. Via HN

Branko's Thought Dump: On the state of Windows on the desktop

"So I typed "Windows Live" in my browser's search box to find a live version, preferably an USB image. Ok, so Windows Live wasn't a live version of windows but some kind of service you must sign into." Parody

Mathematics - Multicultural Maths Activities

Vedic multiplication for two and three digit numbers with worksheets from a UK based Web site. Working out how it works could be a good algebra investigation.

An Advanced Guide to HTML & CSS

Looks very swish.

Magical Maths « How Japanese Kids Learn To Multiply – Amazing, No Need to Learn Japanese

Looks like Vedic multiplication to me. Nice alternative method.

Lessig Blog, v2

"I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you."

The Setup / Jonas M. Luster

"there aren't many chefs who keep all their recipes in hand-written XML checked into a Git repository and run XQuery queries over it for Christmas dinner menu ideas." Probably true

Lenovo's 27" tablet is a smart idea, costs £1,000 and is due this summer - Mobile Industry Review

Looks a bit daft being hefted around the house, but I can imagine using an accurate stylus on this flat on the table for drawing and photo work. Lenovo mention 'productivity' so I'm assuming its x86. Some faint hope of Linux on it.

US Dept for Homeland Security shafted by trivial web bug • The Register

"This particular programming flaw allowed anyone to pull up a configuration file, which included a database password, for the WordPress blogging software used by the Study in the States website. The data was then dumped onto a public Pastebin page." One of the reasons I now simply upload static html files from my desktop computer. It is just the time...

‘Be Wrong as Fast as You Can’ - NYTimes.com

"Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them." -- Attributed to John Lasseter, Pixar, in an article about writing by Hugo Lindgren

English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU

Excellent idea. Google make a word frequency corpus available that expands to 23Gb of text data. I think that counts as a large data set.

Arno Schmidt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Moreover, he developed an orthography by which he thought to reveal the true meaning of words and their connections amongst each other. One of the most cited examples is the use of “Roh=Mann=Tick” instead of “Romantik” (revealing romanticism as the craze of unsubtle men). The atoms of words holding the nuclei of original meaning he called Etyme (etyms)" I've had similar ideas. I tend to sit down in a quiet room and wait until they pass

Welcome to “Learning by Shipping” « Learning by Shipping

"The title comes from something impressed upon me early in my career, which is that learning as an engineer comes from the process of starting, then finishing, and iterating on products–getting products to market and putting the broad feedback loop to work." Steven Sinofsky has a blog

Keeping Safari a secret

"Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. That’s right, Apple has 16,777,216 static IP addresses." could they put them back into the pool, please?

My Experiments in Truth

Data based blog. Haskell is the tool preferred by the author, but we all have our problems.

Nuclear weapon statistics using monoids, groups, and modules in Haskell

"There are three things to note about this data. ...it’s only estimates based on public sources.. it probably overestimates the Russian nuclear forces. Second, we will only be considering deployed, strategic warheads... Finally, there are 4 countries who are not members of the NPT but have nuclear weapons: Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea." Download the CSV. Article deals with Haskell for data analysis, but I'll have a go with Calc and R.

Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating | Brain Pickings

"Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work." Via HN. That old protestant work ethic again...

water « Basic Japanese Characters

Kanji character for water calligraphy by Nao. Creative commons licensed with remix allowed. "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License."

Pyblosxom - main site

Blosxom but python based. We'll see how flexible the layouts are.

Getting Started with ikiwiki – part 1

I *think* I can run ikiwiki from a client computer with the git repository on the client computer and the working clone on the client computer. Then just use lftp to upload the html pages and assets to hosted Web server space. We shall see...

Linux / Unix: lftp Command Mirror Files and Directories

"If the second directory is omitted, base name of first directory is used. If both directories are omitted, current local and remote directories are used. If target directory ends with a slash (except root directory) then base name of source directory is appended." Looks like I can reverse mirror files produced by poole to arbitrary directory on remote server.

On rainbows · on Env

Charlie Lloyd is doing visualisation stuff nicely on his website/blog. Rainbow colour circles in processing with links

Fractals and Stories

Nice essay on Mandelbroit set and folk decoration. I'm not sure the circle should be four units wide though...

obensonne / poole — python based static Web site generator

Almost what I need. Alas, 'build' command regenerates all the pages, even the ones that have not changed. However, it is possible to get lftp to ignore the time tags so all is not lost. Just need to make a recipe to generate a site map page

skx/templer · GitHub

Looks like a promising replacement for my collection of bash scripts!

Over time, Linux package dependencies show predator/prey relationship | Ars Technica

"The team went back to 1993 and compiled statistics on every major stable release, noting the number of packages in each release and comparing it to the previous version. This allowed them to track the life history of packages, watching as new ones were introduced and older ones got deprecated. In addition to compiling the statistics, the team also compiled the x86 version of the operating system and installed packages at random, which gave them a statistical measure of the frequency of dependencies and incompatibilities." Popular explanation of the pdf linked previously. Via Debian formums

Evolution of a modular software network

"The Debian GNU/Linux operating system allows us to explore the evolution of a complex network in a unique way. The modular design detected during its growth is based on the reuse of existing code in order to minimize costs during programming. The increase of modularity experienced by the system over time has not counterbalanced the increase in incompatibilities between software packages within modules. This negative effect is far from being a failure of design. A random process of package installation shows that the higher the modularity, the larger the fraction of packages working properly in a local computer. The decrease in the relative number of conflicts between packages from different modules avoids a failure in the functionality of one package spreading throughout the entire system. Some potential analogies with the evolutionary and ecological processes determining the structure of ecological networks of interacting species are discussed." Free full article access. Nice work.

xoria256 terminal color scheme - The Terminal Programmer

another lowish but not really low contrast colour schems

Some Statistical Habits to Add, or Subtract, in the New Year - WSJ.com

"A major concern running through the responses is that data tend to be fuzzy—much fuzzier than they can seem when stated with neither margins of error nor qualification. "The most important numerical fallacy is that people tend to think of numbers as known, constant and having no variability," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston."

Facebook Opens Up Hardware World With Magic Hinge — www.wired.com — Readability

"Facebook is designing its own data centers and servers as well as its own racks and storage gear, and it’s openly sharing these designs with the rest of the world, hoping that others will help improve the designs, install them in their own data centers, and ultimately drive down costs even further."

HUGEpic

Tiled large images that you can zoom into.

NvidiaGraphicsDrivers - Debian Wiki

Works fine with Wheezy, including the partial xorg.conf. As no dual monitors, not bothering with nvidia-settings

hartmut esslinger's early apple computer and tablet designs

Pre-Ive designs. Most of them are limited by the small display size assumed then.

Debian User Forums • View topic - Ubuntu user curious about Debian

"Ubuntu forums try to be like a coffee shop in Seattle. Debian forums strive for the charm and ambience of a skinhead bar in Bacau. We intend to keep it that way." --dbruce has nailed the essential difference between the communities. In jest. Bacău looks fun.

Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture' : All Tech Considered : NPR

"They're solving local problems. There's one app that brings math and reading help by cellphone to village schools."

William Peng: "Shockingly Happy"

"It is the greatest luxury of all to not have to worry where your next meal is coming from, whether your life is going to be in mortal danger from exogenous forces. We can concentrate all of our efforts towards our own self-gain."

Minimalism in an Age of Tremendous Hardware

"You don't know minimalism until you've explored the history of the Forth programming language." Interesting blog with a simple CSS presentation.

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

Long paper suggesting that interaction design is part of the problem for some areas of work.

School of Data - Learn how to find, process, analyze and visualize data

Looks interesting, with an impressive range of sponsors. The glossary needs sorting, so I'll try an alternative...

GnuTLS, copyright assignment, and GNU project governance [LWN.net]

"Clearly, at least a few GNU project maintainers are quite unhappy with the current governance of the umbrella project. And when a maintainer of twelve years' standing wants out of the GNU project, that suggests that there are some serious governance problems." Well, they could start with an actual working up to date fully free GNU/Linux distribution for a start off! FSF US seems to be getting a bit yellow round the edges.

Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Nice Llama photo, but non-derivative creative commons licence so can't crop the image!

Home Page Design Advice from October 1991, 3 Months After the Web's Public Debut - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

Magazine or reference card? Home page design from 1993...

Mad Vis: Flying Bombs on London, Summer of 1944

Where the V1s fell plotted as a 3d surface showing frequency and a contour map. Via NH comments on previous link.

What does randomness look like? | Empirical Zeal

"Imagine, for a moment, that you are working for the British intelligence ... Someone hands you a piece of paper with a cloud of points on it, and your job is to figure out if the pattern is random." Poisson distribution used to test if points on a plane are distributed randomly, with remarkable historical applications. Via HN

BBC News - Law relaxed on digital copying

"The change in the law will also make it easier for teachers to use copyright materials on interactive whiteboards, for people to make parodies of copyrighted works and for writers to quote other sources." Depends which copyrighted materials. Format shift provision regularises what 80% of population do already so welcome.

An Interactive Guide To The Fourier Transform | BetterExplained

Not sure what animation package they are using

The Symmetry of My UnAmerican McCarthyist Cancer - Bradley M. Kuhn ( Brad ) ( bkuhn )

"This week, I watched Microsoft (who once ran a campaign to kill FSF's flagship license) do something helpful to Free Software, while also watching Canonical, Ltd. (who has helped write a lot of GPL'd software) pull a page from Microsoft's old playbook to attack GPL advocates. That's got an intriguing symmetry to it." Hummmm

Second Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." A militia. Dating from the days when a militia member could "provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder". 1796!

Police use 24/7 power grid recordings to spot doctored audio • The Register

"As reported by the BBC on Tuesday, audio specialists at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London have been recording the hum of this frequency continuously for the last seven years – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – and they say they can now use that data to verify the authenticity of audio recordings." Brilliant! But what if the baddies mix in a hum of their own...

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 178, Paul Auster

"I call it 'reading with my fingers,' and it's amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed. Repetitions, awkward constructions, choppy rhythms. It never fails. I think I'm finished with the book and then I begin to type it up and I realize there's more work to be done." Auster on why he types.

The Big Space : Summer Storage in St Andrews, Dundee and Stirling for students.

small business idea, very simple and would make a good project.

Stanley Kubrick held his own camera, so why shouldn’t you? | Future Bits by Daniel Zarick

"Our surroundings have pressured us to believe that doing less and moving slower are negative characteristics, but I see them as a obvious advantages. We could all use some more pacing and care in our work, particularly in this era of overabundance."

Google60 – Search Mad Men Style

A really nice simulation of an IBM 360 complete with card punch. Only with lower case letters for the URLs.

Honouring computing’s 1843 visionary, Lady Ada Lovelace | Official Google Blog

"Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." Ada, Countess of Lovelace, first sonic artist!

Index of ftp://reports.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/79/732/

Notes on Introduction to Combinatorics: lecture by lecture notes taken on a series of lectures by Polya and Tarjan on counting. A classic and an example of how to write about maths inductively, from examples.

Lecture Notes | Statistical Thinking and Data Analysis | Sloan School of Management | MIT OpenCourseWare

PDF lecture notes on statistical inference. Via comment on HN

BBC News - University personal statements 'further disadvantage' poor

"It also recommended that more schools and colleges helped pupils with their university applications and that more professions offered work placements to young people from middle- and low-income families." Work placements fine, very good idea, but not so sure about help. That just becomes an arms race.

Subcompact Publishing — by Craig Mod

"It felt like a platonic mobile-publishing container. No cruft, all substance. A shadow on the wall. The kind of app that's doing nothing fancy but everything right. The kind of app deemed anathema by Future Publishing Authorities because, quite frankly, it’s boring."

Thread: Why The Daily failed

"Everyone on the net is busy. All the time. I was riding the LIRR the other day from Queens to Manhattan, and everyone around me was staring into the screen of their smartphone, tapping, typing, clicking. I watched the faces. They looked like the people sitting around in the system lab at the UW Comp Sci Dept in 1978. Same damn thing. Except now instead of a handful of misunderstood geeks, now it's everyone."

BBC News - Gove challenged over exam changes by watchdog Ofqual

"The watchdog appears to question whether it is possible to have an exam which can provide reliable data for league tables and which at the same time is capable of being taken and passed by teenagers of all abilities." Popcorn

BBC News - Teachers' pay rises pegged to performance

"This is likely to have a hugely detrimental impact on children's education with teachers in key subjects such as maths, physics and IT who have highly marketable skills leaving teaching and graduates with these skills, and other sought-after skills, not going into teaching," How do you measure 'performance'? This could be bad news for less able children or disruptive. Who is going to want to teach them if the teacher might end up with less money as a result?

Damien Katz: Lotus Notes Formula Engine Rewrite

"Everyone thinks they're an expert, but very few have actually spent any time thinking seriously about it, reading any article or books on the subject, watching users behind one way mirrors during usability tests and seeing how easily users get confused and distracted."

GCSE Revision materials

Freebie PowerPoint file with a large collection of questions. Download at College tomorrow to see what it is like

Simon Collison | Colly | Journal | Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design

Old school blog post from a designer (a proper one)

US and UK spooks alerted over massive Swiss data leak • The Register

"He'd worked at the NDB for eight years but was reportedly disgruntled at his job and felt management were ignoring his suggestions on systems management." So he compromises the whole system? Madness

Cafe Blend - Coffee shops - Birmingham, Manchester - flavours from around the world

A chain of two coffee shops, and judging by the five quid I paid for an Americano and a creme cheese bagel, they are paying plenty of tax! Free wifi connects without issue on stock CentOS 6.3 laptop, and the password is on the bottom of the till receipt (clever). My till receipt also informs me that I have accumulated 27.8 Loyalty Points, worth 28p. Woopie do, that is something like 5% which might be worth it if I came here every day. Installing the EPEL repository and then the R-core and R-devel packages along with gnuplot shows a network speed varying between 500 and 700 kilobytes per second. Rdesktop does not want to connect to the RDP server at College, not sure if the wifi is deliberately blocking rdp or if the server is down.

How to Configure EPEL Repository on CentOS 6.3

Install EPEL on CentOS for R statistics. Installing R-core R-devel and gnuplot then brings in a minimal LaTeX and the compiler tools needed for installing packages from within R. ggplot2 installs nice.

Print: » Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool » Print - Salon.com

"Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries." Technologies overlap and the good stuff floats...

Thread: A time of information poverty

"We live in a time of information poverty. Someday you'll tell your grandchildren there was a time when you couldn't zoom in on the local theater and see how many people had bought tickets for the show that starts in 25 minutes."

The Setup / Yihui Xie

"By the way, I hope the Internet connection can be cut off for two months every year so I can focus on writing stuff other than coding. Then if you want to file a bug report to me, write me a mail with a return envelope." Quite a few clever people in their mid-20s are going this way. Might be a restoration of balance once the network becomes ubiquitous.

Making Reproducible Research Enjoyable | Yihui Xie

"I recommend you to watch this video if you have not heard of the Deception at Duke to see how improper data processing killed patients: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7398476n, then you should be guilty when you copy and paste as a statistician." Wow. The blog post is about reproducible research, the idea being that you encapsulate your data and the algorithms used to process your data with the article you write.

sed tip: Remove / Delete All Leading Blank Spaces / Tabs ( whitespace ) From Each Line

One line removes leading and trailing white space and the other removes empty lines in a text file

command line - find n most frequent words in a file - Unix and Linux

Command lines that find the n most frequent words in a list, and a version that takes a list of common words and removes those

An iPad Lover’s Take On The Surface With Windows RT | TechCrunch

"Explorer regularly and unbelievably there are still rendering issues on many sites. Apparently this is mainly an issue with sites sniffing for IE, thinking they have to render things differently to get them to display correctly (as they had to in older versions of IE). This is 2012, almost 2013; it’s ridiculous." Force a non-standards compliant Web browser on the world for 15 years and face the consequences.

BBC News - UK education sixth in global ranking

"The UK's education system is ranked sixth best in the developed world, according to a global league table published by education firm Pearson." Can we carry on improving, but do it in a less disruptive way now please?

Sample .bashrc and .bash_profile Files

Example bash scripts that show examples of use

Tech Streak

Works ok. Command line to mirror a tumblr log but only fetches the front page. Will try it with the archives list

Publishing Links With Perl by Jeffrey Veen

This works. Just install libxml-xpath-perl package and alter the delicious api string to point at https pinboard and convert your pinboard XML file to html list. Added a line for the extended tag contents ($guts .= $posts->find('@extended') . "</a><br />";)

How to extract string following a pattern with GREP, REGEX or PERL - Stack Overflow

grep -no 'href="[^"]*"' pin.xml Command above pulls out all the urls in a pinboard xml file

Coffee Time

Coffee Time cafe is small and just outside Oasis in Martineau Square. No toilets, it is a small space, but there are some in the shopping centre a few minutes away. They do reasonable sandwiches made fresh and americano for a total of about £3 to £4. Wifi is now available from the square as a whole, no password to connect but they do want you to create a login with an email as username, and a mobile phone number. There is a 'don't contact me' tickbox, and you can put a row of 8s in the box for the mobile number and it still lets you create an account. On a quiet Sunday, the speed is fluctuating between 900 and 300 kb/s. This cafe never had wifi before and had a low phone signal strength so I used it for thinking. C'est la vie.

XML and scripting languages

Simple substitution perl script works fine on the stocks.xml file so see if we can use this to format the pinboard xml export via api.

Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com >> Blog Archive » Why the UK’s mandatory opt-out censorware plan is stupid

"Think, for a moment, of what it means to have a 99% accuracy rate when it comes to judging a medium that carries billions of publications." Yes, well...

Skills Don’t Pay the Bills - NYTimes.com

>> “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” Nailed it here. Magically 'training' people is not suddenly going to solve the unemployment problem

Interactive Data Visualization for the Web - OFPS - O'Reilly Media

Statistics with a javascript library called D3.

BBC News - Norwich court reporter retires after 55 years

"She began as an editorial assistant at journalist Ted Chamberlain's agency in the city in September 1955, and was sent to City College for training. Her course was cut short when the agency needed her to cover a court case at the assizes, and she never returned to college to complete her studies. " Now, would that count as an early leaver/withdrawal under Skills Funding Agency rules? Excellent

“Your criticisms are completely wrong”: Stallman on software patents, 20 years in | Ars Technica

"The fundamental problem is this: every software patent, Stallman explained, is a monopoly on a "computational idea." In fact, that's how he has started describing software patents—as "computational idea" patents. Patents "protect" a lot more than one specific program, even though most people don't realize that." RHS nails it again. Protect the implementation not the idea.

Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice & Power Users (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

"Summary:Hidden features, reduced discoverability, cognitive overhead from dual environments, and reduced power from a single-window UI and low information density. Too bad." Jakob speaks

Wallpaper

Ferry boat approaching Liverpool at dusk, oilified, from mobile phone snap

Windows 8 Sales Well Below Projections, Plenty of Blame to Go Around | Windows 8 content from Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows

"But consumers have plenty of choice these days, and many are quite comfortable stretching out the next PC purchase and using a companion device, like an iPad or other tablet. The problem is, they may discover that’s all the computer they need and simply opt out of Windows going forward." Two people have asked me about tablets in the last week (a bit of a joke as I've not used one for longer than 10 minutes) and they are asking about Android (cheap) vs iPad (expensive). Not windows. Or Ubuntu/Other Linuxen

Animated Factorization Diagrams – Data Pointed

Wonderful. Via HN

mp3 playback on Centos 6.3 without enabling non-default repositories

The mp3 format is non-free. In countries outside US including the UK, I can install the codecs needed to allow Rhythmbox to play mp3 tracks perfectly freely. In the US, not so. However, on CentOS, you have to enable extra repositories to get the mp3 codecs and this complicates things. Using the free binary Fluendo mp3 codec means that I can download a generic .bin file, unpack the file, and copy the file to /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10 using a cp command from root. All legal, everywhere, and no extra repositories.

i3: i3 User’s Guide

DWM but more modern and with different stacking rules.

Coffee Lounge Birmingham - Restaurant Information , 10-11 Navigation Street

Another coffee shop that is not Starbucks or a chain. Cheapish and cheerful. They do beans on toast and a large coffee ('medium') for under a fiver. Fast wifi (1.3Mbyte/s downloading the Scientific Linux live rescue cd) with password given to you on tiny slip of paper. RDP session suggests reasonable latency as well as raw speed. Could do with a good clean up - not dirty just a bit used. Could also use some solid tables. There is a conference table downstairs so could be a good place for workshops with the reasonable broadband.

WORLDCLOCKS: World Population and Productive Land Clock in JavaScript

Javascript function is licenced for use so I'll do one without the junk around it

How to Create an ISO File in Linux - wikiHow

CentOS 6.3 cd back to iso: will try this, then try to put it back onto a stick. Works fine.

The Leader of Windows Exits Microsoft - NYTimes.com

Seems to be a general trend to put UI designers in charge of OS projects. Might be good, might be bad. The science/epistemology needs a look. We are not necessarily wanting to shave milliseconds off a series of predefined tasks when we use our laptops and phones, unlike the classic corporate HCI approach. Equally, we might be doing more than 'media consumption'.

lprm-cups(1): cancel print jobs - Linux man page

Issuing this command from terminal as my user seems to be the only way to cancel a print job in Gnome Ubuntu Remix. Clicking the 'stop' button on the printers dialog in Settings seems to do nowt.

Liberator: the untold story of the first British laptop • The Register

"The study revealed that senior civil servants could save almost three hours a week by using a portable machine for text preparation. A £750 machine would have paid for itself in six months, it was calculated." Classic ROI calculation appears to ignore the futz factor

Yorks Bakery Cafe

Latest in my non-Starbucks and non-Costa experience is the Yorks Bakery Cafe in Newhall st. A fiver seems about par for the course for independent coffee and a cake, so this is definitely a once a week on a wet afternoon thing. You can get a cake for 1p if you have an iPhone (some pay by phone business they are trying to start). I can recommend the oat and raisin biscuit. Nice and large and not too sweet. Posh coffee is probably wasted on me, I had the expresso based 12oz cappuccino and that was nice and smooth and milky. They do proper tea, and the light fittings and furniture are nice retro metal and wood stuff. Pity about the location (has been several cafes over the years, Kitchen Confidential style). Could do with more tables and less couches in my opinion. The wifi is fast, something like 1.5mb/sec on a compressed iso. Definitely the place to come when I want to download the CentOS DVD images...

All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites

Why we need less drm and more experiments...

Alex Payne — Alone Together, Again

"I first realized it in my early twenties. Everything important around me at the time, I’d found on Craigslist: my girlfriend, my job, my apartment. It was a powerful realization: I could sit down with my laptop and, in a matter of hours or days, change my world in both superficial and fundamental ways." This separates me from the younger people. Most decisions and events in my life are meatspace, not on a screen.

Six Eight Kafé, creating the best coffee in Birmingham.

Weaning myself off Starbucks/Costa slowly. 6/8 Kafe has small cups of very strong coffee in various confusing combinations and nice cake. Personally I'd like a mug of something smoothish filter coffee. Looks like they do one in the morning. Cakes are great. Wifi gets 400Kb/s or so. It strikes me as the kind of place where you could hang out for a few hours of a morning or afternoon without being hurried out.

Smuggling USB Sticks by Terence Eden has a Blog

"What I'm trying to get at, is this. It's quicker to send a 32GB card through the post than it is to download its entire contents. The cards are small enough to hide anywhere." Sneakernet samizdat

aseigo: ending the cults of personality in free software

"Sharing our viewpoints is great and a necessary part of democratic discourse which can move societies along their evolutionary path. So opinions have value and can be hugely beneficial when mixed together with hundreds, thousands or even millions of other samples." No, actually. I want an Interface Building Kit that I can use to make a customised UI that works for me. I don't want a locked down average UI based on somewhat dodgy 'sample tasks' that 'subjects' are asked to work through.

The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing Perfection | Fast Company

"So why exactly do computers see color so differently than human beings? Below, Petschnigg provides an illustration of very simple color blending in RGB space. The formula here describes a linear blend between a foreground color Ca, background color Cb, a blend factor alpha in the range of 0-1, and the output color, which we’ll call Co." RGB colour spaces explored using matrix arithmetic in the context of an iPad application

GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes « IgnorantGuru's Blog

"Anytime I hear the word ‘brand’ being used in Linux, I know something valuable is being poisoned."

AMD dismisses numerous open source developers - The H Open: News and Features

"A look at the patches contributed to the Linux kernel by AMD employees reveals that the closure will cause AMD to lose almost all developers who have recently submitted major changes to support new AMD processors and chip sets in Linux." Don't buy new AMD hardware for a bit...

BBC News - Living wage: Ed Miliband pledge over government contracts

"Others backing the wage include the Scottish government, which says all staff will get the living wage, and London's mayor, who said it made economic sense." Tonnes of maths on this page, and I'm doing percentages on Wednesday...

A trip to Watford Grammar School for Boys « Gowers's Weblog

"My first surprise of the day was that pretty well the moment I had asked the question the room went from almost silent to very far from silent: after a while I got used to this." excellent...

Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way - physics-math - 17 October 2012 - New Scientist

"Vortex uses network-analysis algorithms to construct diagrams for court cases that show the interactions between cartel members, governors and law enforcers. These reveal links that are not otherwise visible, what Salcedo-Albaran calls "betweeners" - people who are not well-connected, but serve as a bridge linking two groups" Strikes me that this kind of analysis could be useful in organisations other than illegal ones. Who actually makes change happen? I'll bet it is the in-betweeners.

Offline: the hurricane | The Verge

"I don't write offline tweets anymore, my brain just isn't wired that way anymore. This is the tradeoff of being able to read books: slower thoughts that get stuck in a rut sometimes, less free association, more plod." I deal in plod. A mathematical problem involves a fair amount of plod in the solution. It is 6 months and counting, Mr Miller is doing well

The Science of Scientific Writing » American Scientist

"If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs" Some perceptual psychology applied to reading

Lifehacker.com Updates: Stop Procrastinating by "Clearing to Neutral"

"In restaurants, the process of cleaning the grill is very important. It ensures the grill will last longer, the food will taste better, and you prevent any bacteria from growing. Before the restaurant closes, the cooks always clean the grill so the next day when they come in it is ready for use." This + pomodoro is all I use. Plus notebooks.

Transforming journalism for a transformed society

"In Scarborough’s journalistic epistemology, this is the trump card: Silver’s methods cannot possibly produce more reliable information than the official sources themselves." I've ordered Silver's book to explore his methods.

BBC News - GCSE English: Teachers' anger over generous marking claim

"I cannot understand how they can blame teachers if external moderation procedures were properly applied. I don't see how teachers can be accused of generous marking." - Val Tyreman, Science teacher Stop putting everything onto the teachers. Learning is situated, teachers guide and shape.

Comment #15 : Bug #1045718 : Bugs : “cups” package : Ubuntu

The first command seems to be working, at least with a couple of pdfs, on 12.10 with Gnome Shell

krank.se » Enabling hibernation in Ubuntu 12.10 with Gnome Shell

This actually works on Gnome Ubuntu Remix

David Allen on How to Fix Your Life - Technology - The Atlantic

"I've been coaching people about this before, but now I actually have to do it--I've got to block out a three-hour block so nobody grabs that, because I need that kind of time to be able to do that kind of thinking." Time management guru meets praxis. I'm off out for a walk in the autumn sunshine "The problem with all this digital stuff is "out of sight, out of mind." That's the bad news about the computer and why low-tech is oftentimes better--because it's in your face. "

An alternate universe – Marco.org

"Apple’s products say, “You can’t do that because we think it would suck.” Microsoft’s products say, “We’ll let you try to do anything on anything if you really want to, even if it sucks.”" But Microsoft *are* trying to lock these things down.

Ubuntu GNOME Edition

Should have arrived by now?

UbuntuGNOME/ReleaseNotes/12.10 - Ubuntu Wiki

An approach to a pure gnome desktop

Python for data analysis — The Endeavour

Another title to dent the credit card with. 1 to 2 months delivery time quoted in UK Amazon... might check actual shop shelves.

Learnable Programming

Nice page on the assumed knowledge used when reading some simple program code, and the properties of a system for presenting programming tasks.

What is Windows RT? Redmond, We Have a Problem — www.winsupersite.com — Readability

"Fact is, Microsoft has decided to launch a Windows RT version of its Surface three months before a Windows 8 version. And to do so without effectively communicating what, exactly, it is selling." "Some of the questions I’m getting are absolutely amazing to me. And these emails, which are almost child-like in their lack of awareness, speaking volumes about the job that Microsoft simply is not doing communicating this product—and its differences with Windows 8—to customers." The first surface tablets won't run most software that is available for Windows, and will have very few 3rd party apps available for download. Most people have a hazy grasp of what an operating system does, let alone CPU architectures.

Data centers – Google Data centers

inside the googleplex: art photography in the data centres

BBC News - Zephaniah warns 'black children turned off history'

"[Michael Gove] has said that the current approach to history denies "children the opportunity to hear our island story", and that this has to change." But this is a rather special island, and ignoring our maritime past and adventures, some regrettable, is also denying *my* history. *My* family has members on 5 continents as a result of this island's history. "Zephaniah also expressed concerns that multiculturalism was under attack, saying that "to be against multiculturalism is anti-British"." My childhood home had direct connections with most of the countries round the Atlantic. As part of a general trend to hide the mechanics of everyday life in large boxes in the green belt, sea trade has become invisible recently.

[Phoronix] Ubuntu Ported To Google Nexus 7

"Below is the video of Ubuntu (with the Unity desktop) on the Nexus 7. Expect more details to surface at month's end from UDS in Denmark." Using LibreOffice could be an exercise in frustration on this form factor...

BBC News - Computer science teachers offered cash incentive

"If we want our country to produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the internet, we need the very best computer science teachers in our classrooms. They need to have the right skills and deep subject knowledge to help their pupils." No comment needed

Ay caramba, Ubuntu 12.10: Get it right on Amazon! • The Register

"In fact having used the Amazon Lens for several weeks now I can say it's the single most useless feature Ubuntu has ever included in an actual release" So its download and make a USB distro then disable this crap

BBC News - A-level students facing shake-up

"It would include a range of A-levels, with an expectation that pupils would study a less narrow selection of subjects - such as studying sciences with an arts subject." Timetabling?

Add a newline after given patterns - Vim Tips Wiki

vim search patterns. /[.,] then :s//&r/g Preserves the space that follows a comma or new line when used to match those. Need to search for ,space and .space

orthographic reform of English

"There are many opportunities in current communications where presentation is sufficiently separated from content that one might easily experiment with ventilated prose without offending the sensibilities of naive end readers." Looks like there is a whole underground literature on 'one sentence (clause) per line' or 'ventilated prose'

Ventilated Prose « A Programmers Place

'Ventilated Prose' appears to be another name for 'semantic linefeeds' or 'one sentence (clause) per line'. Buckminster Fuller introduced the term for presenting text but most modern tech orientated authors see it as a composition and editing aid. Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting has been recommended for reading text. I remember a venerable guide to handout design suggesting one sentence per line for students who found reading hard way back in the 1970s. This Blog post presents an example of ventilated text but alas the blog uses the default Wordpress template which justifies text so the word spacing looks strange in the ventilated passages. I see the main use for one idea per line for editing. Line oriented editors and tools like diff that work at line level. Once edited, I pipe prose through par or fmt or markdown or LaTeX.

My vi/vim cheatsheet

Another one with oO and aA defined properly

Vim Tutorial - LinodeWiki

Text oriented moves and deletes

Canon Powershot-G5 Review: Features & Controls (Cont.)

G5 goes manual. Fixed ISO at 100 and using the Av aperture priority program. See what that does for the noise I'm getting in Auto mode.

XFCE Volume adjusting sound applet for 12.04 - Ask Ubuntu

use the gnome-sound-applet in the startup for IceWM if you are doing an IceWM desktop session alongside Unity.

Warm Digits - Keep Warm… with the Warm Digits

Nice music. These are supporting Field Music on a current tour.

Loci: Convergence | Learning Geometry in Georgian England

another way of measuring a trapezium: big deal on the 1800s

40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 - Video/Podcasts - Gene Kranz, His White Vest and Apollo 13

Why the white waistcoats?

Surprisingly undervalued books - Nabeel Qureshi

The Philosophical Investigations is out of fashion at present we find.

how to make firefox read stdin - Unix and Linux

Process substitution (answer 1) is really clever but does not work alas

The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent - NYTimes.com

The New York Times discovers Marxism?

myliblog: tkoutline, JOE, and Notecase Pro

How to get tkoutline working. Nice stuff.

photo-blog.jpg (JPEG Image, 1907×1553 pixels)

current archive. How big do pictures need to be to trigger memories?

day macha, Soft word wrap in VIM 7 (for prose mainly)

Prose vim with softwrapping, best for 'semantic new lines'

Linus Torvalds Answers Your Questions - Slashdot

"...I've been doing this for over twenty years now, and I don't really see myself stopping. I still do like what I'm doing, and I'd just be bored out of my gourd without the kernel to hack on." Sort of know what he means...

Why the First Laptop Had Such a Hard Time Catching On (Hint: Sexism) - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

"Though Hawkins doesn't quite say it. There is a distinct gendered component to this discomfort. Typing was women's work and these business people, born in the 1930s and 1940s, didn't scrap their way up the bureaucracy to be relegated to the very secretarial work they'd been devaluing all along." Now, try and find trained typists of any gender amongst 'information workers'. I really wish I had learned to type properly, although the way interfaces are moving that might not be so important soon

One sentence per line, please: Brandon Rhodes

"By starting a new line at the end of each sentence, and splitting sentences themselves at natural breaks between clauses, a text file becomes far easier to edit and version control. Text editors are very good at manipulating lines — so when each sentence is a contiguous block of lines, your editor suddenly becomes a very powerful mechanism for quickly rearranging clauses and ideas." fmt can deal with single line feeds within paragraphs delimited by blank lines (i.e. two line feeds with nothing in between). Might try this.

The Setup / Daniel Cook

"I don't bother much with the details of my computers since the only things I've noticed that impacts my output is the size of my screen and having enough memory to keep multiple Illustrator files and prototypes running simultaneously."

The Growing Trend of No-Tech | Skim.Me

"As an example, I have a new chat notification bouncing on my screen right now and it’s taking every ounce of my soul not to three-finger swipe right and check it out. I’d be more productive if I weren’t signed in but then I wouldn’t be able to feel in constant contact with my fiancee." Just, you know, move in with the significant other.

The complexity of user experience — Martin Kleppmann’s blog

"When you say that something is essential because it fulfils a user requirement ... that presupposes a very utilitarian view of software. It assumes that the user is trying to get a job done, and that they are a rational actor. But what if, say, you are taking an emotional approach and optimising for user delight?"

On writing « What’s new

Interesting links to a variety of mathematician's own account of their thinking processes. Via HN comments

Powered Flight Deck of the Space Shuttle Endeavour photos

End of era - love the displays

If you can’t explain what you do in one paragraph, you’ve got a problem | VentureBeat

"I like three sentences: (1) what we do, (2) who we do it to, and (3) why you should care." Perhaps (2) should be 'who we do it for'?

Structured Procrastination

"I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things." Excellent

Structured Procrastination - Laptops and Lab Manuals

"As I brought it home to unpack it I really did think I would probably just carry it around with me all day long, taking notes, saving great ideas in a way that would allow instant retrieval later, impressing my friends. And I was sure it would be great on trips. Instead of wasting my time reading mysteries on the plane, I would whip out an article or two on my portable computer. I was sure it would change my life." Increasingly, my humble payg Blackberry and a notebook is all I need.

The World's Best Photos of design and hex - Flickr Hive Mind

Solves the wallpaper problem nicely on the large monitor

Pearl Crescent Page Saver

Exceptionally useful add on for Firefox by Kathleen Brade and Mark Smith. Can save a png file of the whole page of any website, and can set the default directory to save to and specify a file name such as year-month-day-hour-minute-webaddress.png. And that is just the free version.

Lonely, but united: Sherry Turkle and Steven Johnson on technology's pain and promise | The Verge

"He also mourns his reduced ability to just sit down and read a book." "The best artists learned to find solitude in the middle of the metropolitan space," she said. And "we need to learn to find solitude in the technological space." - Paul Miller quoting Sherry Turkle

Some Depressing Thoughts On The App Store | Not The Internet

"...the role of the App Store is far more in generating iPhone and iPad sales than it is in making money directly."

BBC News - Warnings on pace of GCSE changes

"'Speak up' is all I can say. At the moment they don't appear to listen and it doesn't look very coherent. When you throw in on top of that incoherence urgent time lines which can't be done, you're looking at a mess. My key message at the moment is stop changing everything all the time." Rt Hon Mr Graham Stuart, a sensible chap.

BBC News - English GCSE: Senior exam board figure quits AQA

"Stephen McKenzie quit the exam board AQA on Wednesday after 16 years as a GCSE English moderator." An honourable man

Sea Of Empties

film geezer (medium and 35mm) photos

300px-iceweasel-icon.png (PNG Image, 300 × 300 pixels)

The iceweasel is coming to get you...

Bug #1054776 “Don't include remote searches in the home lens” : Bugs : “unity-lens-shopping” package : Ubuntu

"When I am searching my computer for a program or document, I am not looking to buy anything (not that typing 'pidgin' or some other program name will turn up anything useful in Amazon)." - comment 92 Best reason for not having the shopping lens integrated with Dash search - intention to shop isn't there. Amazon will gain little.

GNOME Keyring and auto-login

Squeeze on X200s. Gets rid of that annoying keyring popup when you enable autologin

MultimediaCodecs - Debian Wiki

Squeeze on X200s. Had to enable the multimedia repository to install the lame library that Audacity needs to save files as mp3. Did not need to play back mp3s in rhythmbox or to get the flashplayer for youtube. Flashplayer and ms web fonts just need contrib and non-free enabling in sources.list

iwlwifi - Debian Wiki

Squeeze on X200s

Installing Debian Wheezy (7.0) on a Thinkpad X200s - ThinkWiki

just in case Ubuntu fills with crapware

BBC News - Ofsted chief angers unions with 'work harder' comments

"As a head I would make it clear that if you teach well or try to teach well, if you work hard and go the extra mile, you are going to get paid well. You are going to be promoted. Somebody who is out the gate at 3 o'clock in the afternoon is not. Isn't that fair? Am I being unfair?" Here we go, heads base pay on subject shortages again (that pendulum just keeps swinging)

Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls • The Register

The fun starts at 3:40

Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well - NYTimes.com

Bit high level for our students

BBC News - The man who turned his home into a public library

"The idea is simple. Readers can take as many books as they want, for as long as they want - even permanently. As Guanlao says: "The only rule is that there are no rules." " Excellent. Alas, the climate is against me

Can Microsoft Convince People to Subscribe to Software? | Xconomy

"The consumer version of Office will cost $100 a year per household, which allows all of its applications to run on up to five computers." £1.20 a week or so. I think I could imagine people paying that one. I'll stick with LibreOffice myself...

A marine mystery solved (and a bit about birds) « Why Evolution Is True

"What was fascinating was that the fish’s sculpture played another role. Through experiments back at their lab, the scientists showed that the grooves and ridges of the sculpture helped neutralize currents, protecting the eggs from being tossed around and potentially exposing them to predators"

Streaming Video Patent Trolls: Beware. | Hacker News

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." The mathematical formula defence. So glad software patents of form 'do X using a computer|internet' are not issued in EU

Celeb Chefs - Chefs and Cooking, Cooking and Chefs, Billy Crystal, Emmylou Harris, Luciano Pavarotti, Suzanne Somers : People.com

"Pavarotti's Blue Cheese and Butter Sauce 4 parts butter 1 part blue cheese 1 Combine butter and cheese in a saucepan over low heat. 2 Melt together while stirring with a fork. 3 Pour over pasta cooked al dente. 4 Cover with "much" grated Parmesan." A 'part' in my case is a table spoon full, so 60ml/g of butter and 15ml/g of Danish Blue.

EATING OUT: With Luciano Pavarotti; For Pavarotti, the Proof's in the Pasta - Page 2 - New York Times

"One of his own recipes, which he indulges in only infrequently, is pasta with butter and blue cheese gratineed under the broiler. ''Ooooh, it makes you lose your mind,'' he said. ''But you know that it has two-million-five-hundred calories a spoonful.'" Tastes great, but literally two tablespoons full on a bed of salad.

Conway's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations" Yup

BBC News - GCSEs replaced by 'English Bac' in key subjects

"This will mean that GCSEs will continue for some subjects alongside the new English Bacs over a number of years." Really carefully thought out change in the system this...

10 Timeframes | Contents Magazine

"One of the engineers in the book burned out and quit and he left a note that read: “I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”"

The Medieval Farming Year @ The Penultimate HârnPage

Januar: By thys fyre I warme my handys Februar: And with my spade I delfe my landys Marche: Here I sette my thynge to sprynge Aprile: And here I here the fowlis synge Maii: I am as lught as burdie in bowe Junii: And I wede my corn well mow Julii: With my sythe my mede I mowe Auguste: And here I shere my corne full lowe September: And with my flaylle I erne my brede October: And here I sawe my whete so rede November: At Martynesmasse I kylle my syne December: And at Chritemasse I drynke redde wyne

7 sets Venn Diagram

nice

BBC News - 'Tougher GCSE' exam to be unveiled by Gove and Clegg

"...there is a single exam for all ability levels." One paper, covering G to A*? Popcorn.

Common Errors in English Usage

American spelling, but still useful

William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong — www.wired.com — Readability

"Humans have built little toys, steam engines, for thousands of years. The Greeks had them. Lots of different cultures. The Chinese had them. Lots of different cultures used steam to make little metal things spin around. Nobody ever did anything with it. All of a sudden someone in Europe did one out in a garden shed and the industrial revolution happened. That was steam engine time."

BBC News - Young children's ambitions 'hint at emotional strength'

"The findings suggested children from the poorest families were more likely than their better-off peers to want to work in the public sector perhaps as doctors, teachers or police officers." Simply a 'visibility' effect? If 'poorest' means parents not working, may simply not see private sector?

BBC News - GCSE exam changes to be announced by government

"It is believed the new qualification will involve a one-off exam in each subject rather than modules and continual assessment." G to A* in a single exam? Popcorn.

IPSUR - Introduction to Probability and Statistics Using R

Another R book but with development of statistics along the way.

Probability and Statistics Cookbook | Matthias Vallentin

I used to know about 30% of this. Nice summary in landscape mode with good graphs. Might try building from source (latex, R and some packages).

Books I Read this Summer

"The data shows that students today spend much less time actually studying, and they take less rigorous courses, most of which don’t require them to do much writing, for example." Bill Gates.

See your site like the rest of the world does. On the Nokia X2-01 - destroy/dstorey

"...the most popular phone was the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic. This is a Portrait QVGA (240×320) device. Six of the top ten were in this configuration, 1 was a landscape QVGA device, and 3 128x160 devices." Most of the world is using candy bar phones, many running S40. Hence my rather plain Web design.

Remote desktop from Linux to windows using rdesktop and gnome-rdp | Unixmen

graphical CentOS

Windows and Linux Networking: How to connect Windows Remote Desktop from Linux Step by Step

CentOS instructions using terminal

Vivek Haldar : English is heavily left-handed

"If you go by the relative frequencies of the letters in the English language, and assume a keyboard split like the Goldtouch keyboard, it turns out that characters on the left occur 58.73% of the time, and those on the right 41.3% of the time. This is certainly not helped by the fact that the right side has 11 letters to the left’s 15." Perhaps the 11 to 15 split explains the percentage weighting towards the left hand? Stats project!

Listen up, Nokia: Get Lumia show-offs in pubs or it's game over • The Register

"The other show-off feature is the quality of lowlight photography on the new kit, which is outstanding. The new phones take great pictures in near darkness without requiring a flash." As a 35mm rangefinder 50mm/f2.0 half second kind of geezer, this is good news.

BBC News - MPs to investigate GCSE dispute

"On Wednesday, the National Union of Teachers warned of a conflict between requiring schools to continue improving their grades, while at the same time expecting exam boards not to allow a continuous rise in grades." These messages from various parts of the government do cause me problems as a teacher of statistical concepts! Do we want norm referencing (grades as rationing) or criteria referencing (steadily improving performance within sensible limits)?

Science Fiction Writer Robert J. Sawyer: On Writing — Wordprocessing

Cross platform editing advice: shades of king

BBC News - Student visa 'chaos' claim by Public Accounts Committee

"It has to be audited against what the exact rules were of the UKBA at the time, and they have changed 14 times substantially in the last three years," Aha...bit like GCSE English grades

The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership - William Deresiewicz

"So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.”" Via some random page about UI design.

3 shell scripts: Kill weasel words, avoid the passive, eliminate duplicates

"...I've decided to replace myself with a shell script." contains sensible advice about writing technical English, and three bash scripts.

30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Alan Cox | Linux.com

"The other aspect of [GNU/Linux] is the changing the world part. Directly, it's put computers into places that could never afford proprietary licensing. Indirectly, it forms part of the first wave of the whole reclamation of culture and production by the people. This is something the maker culture is now extending into the physical world."

Sriram Ramkrishna - Google+ - miguel had a pretty cool post on why the linux desktop…

"Gnome isn't really a desktop anyway - it's a research project." - Alan Cox, reply headed +21. One for the quote wall I think.

Wunschkonzert, Ponyhof und Abenteuerspielplatz

systemd will replace init in RHEL 7. Three hops from an HN article about Gnome.

Book Notes on Willpower - Leo's Blog

"Researchers studied people with high self-control. They assumed these people would be using their self-control the most, but it turns out it was the opposite. The subjects had used their self-control to turn behaviors into automatic habits (or to break bad habits) so that they could save their willpower for other things." Try to present sensible defaults to GCSE maths students early in course!

Jonah Lehrer plagiarism in Wired.com: An investigation into plagiarism, quotes, and factual inaccuracies. - Slate Magazine

"I'm 10 years older than Lehrer, and unlike him, my contemporaries and I had all of our work scrutinized by layers upon layers of editors, top editors, copy editors, fact checkers and even (heaven help us!) subeditors before a single word got published." Print newspapers are cutting sub-editors.

Linux.com :: sSMTP: A simple alternative to Sendmail

This works

BBC News - English GCSEs will not be regraded, says Ofqual

"Instead of regrading, pupils would be offered early resits in November, Ofqual said." By which time Colleges and Universities will have filled their places for this academic year. This kind of joke will be remembered.

Vim tips: Using viewports | Linux.com

More on window splitting. Also try :help CTRL-W

Microshell » Split screen in vi

How to split the screen in vim

The Cooper Journal: The best interface is no interface

About the tendency to slap small poky lcd screens on most things, and to bury functions in menus

[Solved] Use Caps Lock key as another Esc (Page 1) - Help & Support (Stable) - CrunchBang Linux Forums

xmodmap fun for vi

What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?

Joy Peddl[e|a]rs?

How to Use Vim's Spellchecking Feature | Webmaster Tips

Turns the spelling on but seems to have a union set of all the available English dictionaries by default

On RHEL 5 and FIPS Mode | Steel

How to disable prelinking: same procedure on CentOS 6. Problems with Dropbox being foxed each time prelink runs

Interview with Bill Joy in 1984

Ancient history but the bits live on.... "I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away. Everybody has it now. So it actually had a chance to become part of what is perceived as basic UNIX. EMACS is a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it"

the brook › Spell-check in Vim 7

This seems to work in Vi mode vim (compatibility mode on) in Centos.

Linux Tips: take control of your bash_history | MDLog:/sysadmin

History set to 1000 and ignoreboth so I can keep track of what I'm doing to this box and ignore all those markdown refreshes. "the most efficent way to search your history is to hit Ctrl R and type the start of the command. It will autocomplete as soon as there’s a match to a history entry, then you just hit enter" No more history | grep <command>.

nano-highlight/markdown.nanorc at master · serialhex/nano-highlight · GitHub

Syntax highlighting file for nano that shows markdown markup in text files. Nice

History of Ubuntu: Revisited & Updated | Tech Drive-in

A series of screen grabs of each edition of Ubuntu from 4.10 onwards to 12.04. Useful, via Martin Owen's blog

Understanding FOSS Guide in Launchpad

29 slide presentation by Martin Owens downloadable as PDF or as a series of SVG files and a couple of bash scripts and a python program. To build from source you need Inkscape and pdftk installed. Interesting content and method.

A Course in Probabilistic and Statistical Modeling in Computer Science

Based on R with sample code. 400+ pages, subject to editing, but no obvious version number or release date. One way hyperlinks in text but text is in portrait mode. Looks useful.

‘How Children Succeed,’ by Paul Tough - NYTimes.com

“The part of the brain most affected by early stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is critical in self-regulatory activities of all kinds, both emotional and cognitive. As a result, children who grow up in stressful environments generally find it harder to concentrate, harder to sit still, harder to rebound from disappointments and harder to follow directions. And that has a direct effect on their performance in school. When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings, it’s hard to learn the alphabet.” Herzberg rides again. Interesting approach though,

Wallpaper composite of Aldrin on moon and Armstrong in the Lander

1920 by 1080 image which is on my desktop now.

Interview with Charles Wetherell

"Some ability to do formal mathematics. Some ability to write clearly in their native language. Remember that a program is primarily for communication with humans, not computers. The answer to the last question means that programs should always have the form of paragraphs of comments that describe the intention of the program followed by paragraphs of code that implement that intention" Things that computer programmers should be able to do...

Linux fdupes: Get Rid (Delete) Of Double Duplicate Files In Directory

Way of automating fdupes command but allowing for inspection

The Linux Blog » Cleaning Up Files & Directories

fdupes is available on CentOS 6.3. The --omitfirst option along with the --delete option implies that you can recursively search directories, then delete all copies of the same file except the first one it finds. I'll be trying that on a *copy* of my big dump everything external drive first!

Enrique Gutierrez - Google+ - I can't make this stuff up I'm sitting in a Starbucks…

"I'm writing this post after the FOURTH group of Starbucks patrons have made the connection that Samsung is now the same as Apple. They don't know the details, they don't really care, what they know is Apple is saying that Samsung is the same as Apple ... and with one simple Google Search, you get prices that are basically half for what seems to be the same products -- for nearly everything." Strange how these people did not know about Windows laptops and Android tablets BEFORE the famous case.

BBC News - GCSE grade changes may face legal challenge

"Alan Smithers, of the Centre for Education and Employment Research, warned the marking reforms could have "drastic consequences" for schools and that "about 10,000 fewer" pupils have got a C grade in English this year compared with last year." (65.4 - 63.9) / 100 * 700000 is 10500. I think we need to look at how scale marks get binned into letter grades. One of my students scored a UMS of 129 on EdExcel Maths option A, and another scored 130. One gets a D and the other gets a C. Should we report scores?

Cory D on Facebook 2008

"That’s why I don’t worry about Facebook taking over the Net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increase. Once that happens, poof, away you go—and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster, and their pals on the scrapheap of Net.history." Alas, FB continues to grow

danah boyd

"My research focuses on how young people use social media aspart of their everyday practices. In recent years, I have studied Twitter, blogging, social network sites (e.g. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook...), tagging, and other forms of social media. I have written papers on a variety of different topics, from digital backchannels to social visualization design, privacy to teen drama." Plenty of reading in the papers section, most have full text available.

misusing_slang.png (PNG Image, 400×441 pixels)

Yup

linux - Gnome-Terminal, how to start in a different directory? - Stack Overflow

Use a custom keyboard shortcut to start gnome-terminal. Use the command line "gnome-terminal --working-directory=/home/username" to make sure that the terminal starts in your home directory and not at the root of the filesystem

Test an old saying about measurement

“Once around the waist, twice around the neck; Once around the neck, twice around the wrist.” Is this true? How accurate do your comparisons have to be? How many different people do you need to try it on?

Measurement sort cards

Match the object to the measurement. A quick starter to see how much GCSE Foundation maths students know about metric units. Uses images found on Web, shout if you want them removed.

Paul Miller Articles & Activity | The Verge

He's keeping it up ok, 4 months in

why dropbox stops working after a few reloads on CentOS

Its because of prelinking...

ProjectTemplate

Try this one. Not sure how automatic reshape guessing is going to work. Needs a lot of packages.

Computer Productivity: Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail

"This general lack of real productivity is clearly reflected in modern lifestyles. Hard working couples struggle to buy the basic food and shelter which their grandfathers had purchased while their wives stayed at home." The wives had a harder time of it without electricity but there we are.

New York's first sci-fi bookstore opens its doors, wants to save forgotten novels from cosmic oblivion | The Verge

"Ultimately, this physical bookstore is a hobby for all involved. The rent is cheap, the books were already bought, and the real "business" is online."

Which Are More Legible: Serif or Sans Serif Typefaces? | Alex Poole

Detailed review of the literature. Not from the perspective of the needs of dyslexic readers.

Sam Muirhead open source in Berlin for a year

He has a laptop with Ubuntu on it (complete with binary blobs). This should be fun.

Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck? (Part Five) - NYTimes.com

"The technical aspects were carefully planned, and the social aspect just happened." Social aspects often just happen (given a platform)

Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth - NYTimes.com

"My quiz wasn’t really a test of the optimism or pessimism of the reader. There was a hidden agenda. It was a test of the effect of fonts on truth. Or to be precise, the effect on credulity. [2] Are there certain fonts that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?" Nice result set. Example of A/B testing that is possible on Web but also the pitfalls of such self-selecting sampling.

BBC News - Doctor Who (before the Tardis)

"A frail old man lost in space and time. They give him this name because they don't know who he is. He seems not to remember where he has come from: he is suspicious and capable of sudden malignance; he seems to have some undefined enemy; he is searching for something as well as fleeing from something. He has a 'machine' which enables them to travel together through time, through space and through matter." Hartnell had that menace...

The Slow Web – Jack Cheng

Nanex ~ 03-Aug-2012 ~ The Knightmare Explained

"We believe Knight accidentally released the test software they used to verify that their market making software functioned properly, into NYSE's live system." Ooops. See also the 'knightmare' link for a very interesting look at the world of high frequency trading. Via HN comment.

BBC News - Harry Hill's 'secret' paintings at Edinburgh Art Festival

"One of the works in the show Noel Gallagher face painted onto a coconut, this might seem funny, but is in fact a complex play on two and three dimensionality, and Bourdieuian simulacra, all incorporated into tropical figurative trompe-l'oeil." Excellent

[ubuntu] using rsync to backup system - Page 2 - Ubuntu Forums

nodrog's posts are important, you can use live disc to install grub2 and re set the fstab

Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - [ubuntu] using rsync to backup system

Recovery from rsynced backup - note need to update to current kernel

Full System Backup with rsync - ArchWiki

use rsync command to do a 'within file system' backup of a whole installation

How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline | Business | Vanity Fair

"Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft." Could selling software as product - the empty box with the DVD-ROM - be on the way out?

Alex Payne — The Game

"Each turn, a player who is not the master builds a structure from the shared pile of spare triangles. Each structure a player builds is marked with a stone designating its adherence to the master’s unspoken rule, just as with the master’s original example structures. If a structure fits the master’s rule, an additional green guessing stone is earned by the player that built it. A player can trade a guessing stone for a guess at the rule, asked of the master in front of the other players. Play proceeds until someone correctly guesses the master’s rule" Not a bad metaphor for mathematics; except the 'master' isn't there.

An Easy Way to Build Branched Scenarios for E-Learning » The Rapid eLearning Blog

Simple summary but no methods/implementation

davidbau.com: The Mystery of 355/113

"The fraction 355/113 is incredibly close to pi, within a third of a millionth of the exact value." True and remarkable

Alfred Bester—My Affair with Science Fiction

"...the first installment ended with the girl bringing the boy back to her apartment at midnight for coffee and eggs. The second installment opened with them having breakfast together in her apartment the following morning. Thousands of indignant letters came in and Lorrimer had a form reply printed “the Saturday Evening Post is not responsible for the behavior of its characters between installments.” " Priceless

BBC News - Science graduates 'lack skills needed by business'

"The report team even found evidence that even an A* in A-level mathematics was no guarantee that students would be able to cope with a university science course" Well, someone needs to rewrite their degree course then don't they? For heavens sake, a full A2 at 18 has a lot of Maths in it.

Is running IT for the Olympics the worst job in the world? • The Register

"Instead each has done deals with LOCOG and the IOC where a mix of money, goods and services are swapped for the chance to show off to a global audience." Good luck with that

Presentation Zen: What is your intention?

"Almost all ineffective design can be traced back to a failure right from the beginning to ask (and answer) the simple question: "What's my (our) intention?""

Google's R Style Guide

From the ones who use R a lot

[SOLVED] "bash: make: command not found" on CentOS 6

yum groupinstall "Development Tools" Installs the toolchain including make on CentOS/SciLi 6.x To install R packages from CRAN, you need to use yum install R-devel to get the R development packages. Then you can use the install.package("package") command

BBC News - A Point of View: What would Keynes do?

"We face a conjunction of three large events - the implosion of the debt-based finance-capitalism that developed over the past twenty years or so, a fracturing of the euro resulting from fatal faults in its design, and the ongoing shift of economic power from the west to the fast-developing countries of the east and south."

Overfocus on tech skills could exclude the best candidates for jobs - O'Reilly Radar

"But as DJ Patil said in “Building Data Science Teams,” the best data scientists are not statisticians; they come from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including (but not limited to) physics, biology, medicine, and meteorology. Data science teams are full of physicists." Systems have springs and dampers and they react to external shocks. Bits move independently, possibly in chaotic ways. Dynamical systems knowledge helps understanding the system, even though your knowledge of the parameters may be statistical.

Project Code Rush | Click Movement (dot) org

The coderush video is open source and available with offcuts.

Code Rush - Netscape Mozilla Documentary 1998 - 2000 on Organized Wonder

Long raincoats! Blue hair! Big hats!

BBC News - How schools will boot up a new ICT curriculum

"Now government wants us to go down a more academic route, it has narrowed down the qualifications that are recognised, which may mean we get even less people choosing it." There is, to quote Monty Python, more to this lark than meets the eye.

Apollo 11 audio recorded at Honeysuckle

Nice audio of the first Moon mission, 43 years ago.

Mission Transcript Collection

Eugene F. Kranz has a superb haircut. Alas, with my receeding hairline, I doubt if I could carry this off. The story behind the Quindar tones (the beeps) heard on all Apollo missions. Via poster on HN

Physicists solve Casimir conundrum - physicsworld.com

"His latest experiment involves measuring the force between a gold-covered sphere of radius 4 mm and an extremely thin membrane of silicon nitride that is also coated with gold. The membrane is just a few hundred nanometres thick and the gold coating is 200 nm think. An important feature of the resulting gold surface is that it is flat to within 3 nm throughout the entire membrane, which is a square with sides measuring 1 mm. " 500nm is the wavelength of light!

Mark Bernstein: The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter In A Distracted Time

"Something happens to every reading generation that convinces someone that the end is here, that kids can’t think, that they themselves can no longer concentrate. Today it’s email and Google and Twitter, but only yesterday people said the same thing about television. Before that it was radio. Before that, rum, theater, and all the delights of the city."

Scott Murray — alignedleft

Nice d3 tutorials but that opening page gets old very quickly...

D3.js - Data-Driven Documents

"D3 is not a new graphical representation. Unlike Processing, Raphaël, or Protovis, the vocabulary of marks comes directly from web standards: HTML, SVG and CSS. For example, you can create SVG elements using D3 and style them with external stylesheets" The library used in the gear wheel example below

Epicyclic Gearing

I'm just going to have to learn modern JavaScript, the Canvas object and the svg export. Save As over the gear wheels will freeze the animation and the resulting svg file loads into Inkscape but with a solid black fill colour.

notes on "we met on the internet"

"And maybe I am just looking for examples—seeing patterns where there are none—but a few things have appeared that makes me feel like other people are feeling the same way." What economists call a 'market correction', others call 'small signals' and I'd think of as the Web becoming natural, just one technology among many. Via daringfireball

Body Parts as Tools of Measurement

Used as a handout

Illuminations: Body Measurements

Measurement starter lesson for gcse: nail down the 'giraffe questions'

Miles - Playing in a Minor Key, for Now - Nevertheless, at 65, a Trumpet Flourish - NYTimes.com

"Don't play what's there," Miles has said, "play what's not there."

BBC News - Closure of forensic archive a 'shambles', experts warn

£2 million saved. Research advantage lost (no national database). Madness. I miss teaching on the BTEC.

El Patrón de los Números Primos: Prime Number Patterns - Jason Davies

Needs a Web browser that supports the canvas object. Very nice illustration of what is so unusual about prime numbers!

CentOS Now

"We now have corporate sponsors who sponsor 2 CentOS Developers to work on the CentOS Project full time. That means that we now have 80 paid hours per week of CentOS Project time where we get do nothing but CentOS Project related work. The sponsors do not ask for anything in return, just faster CentOS updates by the current CentOS developers who get to make the CentOS Project their daily work priority. This should be huge in preventing future delays." Excellent: Scientific Linux and now CentOS have paid packagers. PUIAS have always had some level of paid packager/developer time.

BBC News - Wirral Council frowns on cul-de-sac street garden

"Wirral Council said the garden may be able to continue provided it was licensed." Idiots. Encourage self-organisation like this!

Fake sarnie shop's big fake Likes leave Facebook looking flaky • The Register

All mirrors

Netflix's lost year: The inside story of the price-hike train wreck | Internet & Media - CNET News

How do we pay for films after physical media go away? One method to avoid

code.compartmental

Minim library with ugens (the newer version). This is the author's blog. Some nice code

Audio Processing in Processing

Try these, especially the live effects loop and the fft from mp3

Dr. Dobb's | Interview with Alan Kay | July 10, 2012

"When Christopher Alexander first did that in architecture, he was looking at 2,000 years of ways that humans have made themselves comfortable. So there was actually something to it, because he was dealing with a genome that hasn't changed that much. I think he got a few hundred valuable patterns out of it. But the bug in trying to do that in computing is the assumption that we know anything at all about programming. So extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve. It actually gives them more cachet. " And I thought it was about the connections and grammar of the domain you are programming for...

Apple bows out of program for environment-minded products | Apple - CNET News

"Apple has decided to stop participating in a major program devoted to the production of environmentally friendly products, reportedly saying that its design direction is no longer in line with the program's requirements." Via Daringfireball and other blogs. The bonded aluminium and glass referred to in the Retina macbook breakdown.

London Banker: Lies, Damn Lies and LIBOR

"Over the past 25 years the forces of regulatory liberalisation and demutualisation of markets have allowed the largest global banks to set the rules, processes and infrastructure of global markets to their own self-interested requirements." How do you regulate while allowing freedom to deal to best advantage?

Coming Home to Vim / Steve Losh

Extended writing about a text editor that is 20+ years old.

Vi Cheat Sheet

As installed on Scientific Linux 6.2 as terminal editor. Vi is cut down from Vim and does not have help files present

Necessary installs after new Scientific Linux installation

texlive on SL6.2 from the CPAN archive

BBC News - Hunting for a way out of Britain's double-dip recession

"If we have an economic model which increasingly concentrates the fruits of that economy at the summit, at the very top, then what happens is you strip demand out of the economy. You effectively create consumer societies without the capacity to consume." Deja Vu

CentOS 6 RPMForge/EPEL Repositories

repository priorities

PHP: The Right Way

PHP is still the most commonly used programming language for Web applications such as Moodle and WordPress.

How To Install Opera 11.64 Under Ubuntu 12.04/11.10

what it says on the tin

Jugaad - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Jugaad is also a colloquial Hindi word that can mean an innovative fix or a simple work-around,[5] sometimes pejoratively used for solutions that bend rules, or a resource that can be used as such, or a person who can solve a complicated issue." Teaching has a lot of Jugaad in it I think.

AIGA | The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway

"Even the famed Paris Métro was plagued by a welter of different styles of signs that was not brought under control until 1971, when Métro, designed by Adrian Frutiger and based on his Univers typeface, was introduced." Metro design language original version

The Next Microsoft - journal - minimally minimal

A redesign of Microsoft's corporate presentation. Rather nice as it happens but I like monochrome

Does Google Have Any Social Skills at All? — gizmodo.com — Readability

"Injecting so many menus, no matter how gracefully designed and modern, between your friends and the things you like, seems downright antisocial." Yup, we had autochange decks...

Fortnightly Mailing: Scaling up: a hindsight-laden reflection on the launch of the Ufi Charitable Trust

"Over the next several years, an enormous amount of funding poured into and through Ufi. According to the National Audit Office, by July 2005 Ufi and learndirect had received £930 million of education funding, consuming, in that year over 2.5% of the English expenditure on the entire FE sector." All I remember about UfI was being visited by two ladies who between them had more mobile technology than we could afford for all of our students; pdas, mobile phones, tablet computers &c. Oh, and the vicious drop out on their courses that we tried to help with.

Interface Design with a Homeless person

"He offered to help me replace my flat tire and show me some tips and tricks. I’ve been riding since I was 12 years old and have done several long-distance rides. Here I was getting schooled by a homeless person." It is the economics that makes people homeless not necessarily the people. Interesting.

A Style of Looking – Stuntbox

"(And as with many great technological leaps forward, the scaling-up happened so suddenly that it blocked the obviousness of these parallels for many of the participants.)" Most (published) writing is noise

Threepenny: Goldberg, Ken Burns's Jazz

effective invective

The 'Busy' Trap - NYTimes.com

"They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence." Pascal

Kangaroo Maths

Kenny's pouch has assessment tests at various grades

BBC News - Michael Gove hints at dropping CSE plans

"In a speech, Mr Gove said that he expected every child to have the opportunity to take the tougher exam." What is the positional value of a qualification that everyone has?

BBC News - Some 'failing heads' employed as Ofsted inspectors

"Baroness Perry says she is reliably informed some, including ex-school secretaries and governors, have never taught a class in their lives." This has to be a joke surely? "Most inspectors are now freelancers employed through private contractors." Surprised they haven't outsourced it to another time zone

Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic) | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com

"Typically, in music, architecture, web design, graphics, interaction design, even in manufacturing — we’ve got compositional systems that are a collection of standards and pre-sets. Then somebody articulates a gesture, they feed something in there, some impulse, some data set… They tweak it, they see what directions it’s going to go… They modulate the parameters, they move the switches, pull-down menus and the slider bars… They look for some optimum setting where they seem to get the best results with the fewest ugly screw-ups. They may come across some lucky accidents. Then they wrap that up and ship it, whether that’s a skyscraper or an mp3 track." Bruce Sterling

Pavingexpert - AJ McCormack & Son - Mortars & Concretes

Funky maths stuff here for estimating quantities, love the little piles to picture the ratios

Mary to Many - Did I have my hands on a Surface tablet? Yes and here's why it wasn't for longer

"The most common rational question was did I type on the keyboard? Yes, I have pressed keys and produced results on screen. I have not done a full-length live typing test, hence the lack of a detailed discussion of the action of the keyboard." Why were they not posting from the device? Why the time limit and rush?

Hands-Off: Microsoft Surface Tablet Review

"You’ve dragged 100 journalists out in the middle of Los Angeles in the afternoon (with LA traffic, imagine crawling slowly on broken glass), made a big deal about this keyboard on stage and no one can actually try it? To see for ourselves how well it works?" Great marketing, but I still want to see this succeed.

Feel UX: If Apple Won't Innovate The User Experience, Android Designers Will - Forbes

"...It potentially allows for unique “device experiences,” (to use Luke Wroblewski‘s phrase) that take advantage of certain use cases and hardware capabilities." Sounds like linux - remix your own interface

The Joy of Dumping » NYC Resistor

"TABLE LINE TABLE SAVE HELP First vial greater than last vial. End of table. Table is full."

No one watches TV, Nielsen, and you know it • The Register

"Because of young people's ability to multi-task, they may even be able to supply the plot of two TV programmes they viewed at one time, with some accuracy. They will however, have no recall of the adverts, because that‘s when they turned to their tablets and laptops and Facebooked"

Table of Contents | The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

Via HN

Data Mining Exec Pays For Burgers In Cash To Keep His Insurance Company From Knowing His Bad Diet Habits | Techdirt

Oh fine, so paying by cash becomes a criterion for caution by insurers...

Post • Train of thought • The Register Forums

Superb quote

Elizabeth Truss MP: It’s time Britain got a "Maths shock" and recognised the subject’s impact on our future prosperity Comment

"Higher maths [H Level] could be studied by those planning to take sciences at university or a highly technical apprenticeship. Preparatory maths [P level] would provide a basis for social scientists or could accompany a vocational course in a technical or engineering field. There could then be a core maths course [C Level] which could be taken by arts students or those studying other vocational disciplines." This paragraph reveals a lot of assumptions about the role of maths in various subject areas. Facebook and Google might be surprised about the social scientists only needing P level, and some engineers I know are pretty mathematical.

Peity • progressive <canvas> pie charts

Looks fun, needs Canvas and Javascript

The Bastards Book of Photography by Dan Nguyen

Strange title, possibly US cultural reference. About using manual controls on digital cameras. Via HN

I have ported XScreenSaver to the iPhone. | jwz

"As with all things, the first 90% took the first 90% of the time, and then the second 90% took the second 90% of the time." Must use this sometime

Surface: Because Microsoft does so well making hardware? • The Register

"Surface machines will be built by somebody else – unnamed – and branded as Microsoft, for sale by Microsoft through its US and selected online outlets." Would be fun if it was Foxcon

My First 23 Questions About Microsoft’s ‘Surface’ Windows 8 Tablet | Techland | TIME.com

"When you compete with your own customers, as Microsoft will be doing, the dynamic is weird." Yup. Looks fun, but I want to see a screen shot of Office on that small screen.

BYOD: The great small biz security headache • The Channel

"Company founder Dale Vile says the trend is driven not just by the so-called digital natives, but by more senior staff who have the disposable income to afford cool devices, and the seniority to override rules and use them at work if they want to." Note to employers: the teenagers I teach can work on anything - Windows XP/7 Mac / Android / Linux desktop. They like to keep their messaging network private as well.

The Curious Case of Internet Privacy - Technology Review

"When you start out your life in a new social network, you are rewarded with social reinforcement as your old friends pop up and congratulate you on arriving at the party." Doctorow doing his thing, linked from previous. Readable by students, references to psychological research

What Facebook Knows - Technology Review

"Much of Facebook's data resides in one Hadoop store more than 100 petabytes (a million gigabytes) in size, says Sameet Agarwal, a director of engineering at Facebook who works on data infrastructure, and the quantity is growing exponentially. " I wonder what the doubling time is? Interesting and ethically challenging article about Facebook's Data Science Team. Via HN

Knowledge of fractions and long division predicts long-term math success

"The research team found that fifth graders' understanding of fractions and division predicted high school students' knowledge of algebra and overall math achievement, even after statistically controlling for parents' education and income and for the children's own age, gender, I.Q., reading comprehension, working memory, and knowledge of whole number addition, subtraction and multiplication." This is not surprising really. The US seems to have a positivist approach to educational research though...

docopt—language for description of command-line interfaces

Might use this to port tmoon.c over to python over the summer

The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) | Empirical Zeal

Nice article: language changes how the perceptual system works at the higher levels

Simple Team Performance Management - iDoneThis

Monetising reflective writing. Wonderful. I'll stick to my page a day diary (couple of quid off the market) Via HN

Matthew Deiters : Announcing Pro Tips & Hacker Desks

Where people work. Makes me feel old.

Offline: 'Diablo III' | The Verge

<quote>"Diablo III requires an internet connection at all times," he said, with the sort of confidence and edge someone gains after repeating a line endlessly to down-with-fascist-DRM 16-year-olds and down-with-fascist-DRM 26-year-olds.</quote> Mr Miller is lasting well. He is the dude who has quit the Internet for a year.

The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable | iFixit

"...but my friends in the electronics recycling industry tell me they have no way of recycling aluminum that has glass glued to it..." "When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?"

Post • Re: What has changed? • The Channel Forums

Seems like a good summary of the situation and why low level IT jobs are hard to find now.

ARASAAC: Downloads Zone

Pictogram files for communication

University of Pennsylvania, Psychology 153, Judgments and decisions

Course syllabus with links to PPTs for each lecture on the psychology of judgements.

Research Shows That the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias : The New Yorker

"Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" Answer is in the article. Via HN

I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found. | Blog – Hooktheory

This looks very nice work; should liven up data handling lessons nicely.

BBC News - 'Cut and paste' Ofsted report claims

"Both schools were visited by a team with the same lead inspector who works for Tribal, a company contracted by Ofsted to carry out inspections." Should this be happening? Is it a sensible thing to do to outsource inspections?

Using Clonezilla to create and restore disk images | Forwest

Good quality instructions

forum.thinkpads.com • How to Clone HDD to include hidden rescue partition

try clonezilla

Installing Ubuntu 10.10 on a ThinkPad X201 - ThinkWiki

partimage to back each partition up

X200s, New HD, Rescue and Recovery

One CD and two DVDs to back up the factory partition pattern on Thinkpad X200s. Useful advice here including a separate copy of a partition where the ThinkPad data don't work

Installing and Maintaining Firefox ESR in Ubuntu / Linux - TuxGarage

This works. FF13 and Seamonkey 2.10 both short cut the Alt-F11 full screen behaviour in XFCE. I need my menu bar and don't need window decorations on a 1024 by 600 screen thank you very much. I have locked the current firefox version using Synaptic so that the symlink does not get overwritten when the next Ubuntu packaged Firefox upgrade arrives.

France's biggest Apple reseller sinks: 'Tech titan crushed us' • The Channel

"CEO Francois Prudent said at the time that his shops had been unable to get any shipments of the iPhone 4S and that Apple's unreliable supply had knocked his business's revenue down 30 per cent in the past year."

Technology - Alexis Madrigal - The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound - The Atlantic

Ahhh, nostalgia

Against the future: inside the Jewish anti-internet rally | The Verge

ubuntu - How to change the language of the Firefox built in spell-check from UK english to US english? - Super User

"In any text box in Firefox, right-click, and you should see a menu item "Languages". Select "English / United States"." That works but the other way round for me. Why are there several places to set language in FireFox?

HMNAO: Sunrise/set times for the United Kingdom - June

0445 BST tomorrow morning, what is the betting on it being cloudy for the last glimmer of the transit?

Pinboard Backup | chrispoole.com

This works, just got rid of the bit that deletes the old backups and that compresses each backup

Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? -Full Post | The Trichordist

The music business seen from the inside and looked at as an actual business (return on investment, percentages, &c). Via Andrew Orlowski at The Register

Tech Notes: Platform of the future

"One amusing instance of this effect was pithily noted by a coworker: "Chrome is a Windows application developed on Linux and designed on Macs." It's true: when writing cross-platform Chrome code you're best off writing it on Linux where the tools are better, but past that point there's little point in investing many resources into Linux-specific code as there are no users there."

The CADT Model

Wicked, but getting close

security - How can I securely erase a USB hard drive? - Ask Ubuntu

Recycling old laptops...

New ‘Digital Divide’ Seen in Wasting Time Online - NYTimes.com

"This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it. " Blame the parents volume 50 or a valid point? I shall be asking this question with next year's teenagers as well as doing stuff around attention and brain function.

Lenovo ThinkPad X230 review | The Verge

"The Lenovo approach to chiclet keys features a rounded "smile" shape, allowing for a bit of extra room for every key without actually requiring you to stretch your fingers any further. It feels natural and rather comfortable, despite being a notable departure from the sloped, curved keys Lenovo purists might be accustomed to." Chiclet keys on Thinkpads.

Rands In Repose: How to Write a Book

Printouts. On paper.

rentzsch.tumblr.com: Mac App Store vs Buying Direct

"All things being equal, it’s safer to buy directly instead of being cut off from your own software based on an arbitrary Apple policy change." Back to the 1960s, by which I mean that your laptop/PC is turning into a dumb client with a BOFH on the other end of the wire.

On Mastery. | gapingvoid

"A tiny little sushi bar in some ran­dom sub­way sta­tion. Yet peo­ple wait in line, peo­ple book a stool at his sushi bar as much as a year in advance, a pri­ces star­ting around $600 a head. Peo­ple have been known to fly all the way from Ame­rica or Europe, just to expe­rience a 30-minute meal. In a sub­way station!" So it isn't a simple Tokyo sushi bar any more but a simulation of one rendered as performance art. Authenticity does not scale. Authenticity of experience is about the ecology of the small street food place and how it is used by local people. I'm sure the food is very good, but that isn't really the point. The Tokyo salarymen and workers commuting home can't pop in for a quick snack.

Jonathan Ive interview: simplicity isn't simple - Telegraph

"Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple."

Metro (design language) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Content before chrome sounds fine to me, and I use full screen application windows a lot on smaller screens (XFCE Alt-F11). I have a nasty feeling I might like the Metro interface. Did I really say that...

Install LibreOffice 3.5.4 in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin ~ Rolling Ubuntu

Seems to be working except language-support-en gives package not found error. Suspect it has to be a libreoffice prefixed package... seems slightly faster on loading. Not amazingly so.

ScienceDirect.com - Computers & Education - Perceived academic effects of instant messaging use

"Results of this study suggest that college students use instant messaging at high levels, they multitask while using instant messaging, and over half report that instant messaging has had a detrimental effect on their schoolwork."

uwstopia ★ Blog ★ Text-to-Freemind released!

This works fine, just open the resulting .mm file and you can convert tab indented text files into Freemind mind maps

Text 2 Mind Map – The text-to-mind-map converter

Good for quick use on the interactive white board to establish the main and sub-headings in a piece of writing or similar

Nick Bradbury: Screw the Power Users

"So with each new version I tried to simplify the user interface, and dropped features & options that complicated the product. FeedDemon became more popular as a result, but you’d never know it if you visited my online support forums." 'Power users' know how to complain... sounds familiar to those of us who run Ubuntu...

Matt Mullenweg: I’m Worried That Silicon Valley Might Be Destroying the World | PandoDaily

"Mullenweg said he’s concerned that Silicon Valley is creating products that are so engaging that they’re also incredibly distracting, to the detriment of creativity and productivity." Nick Carr's ideas seem to be gaining influence.

Going Public Means Never Admitting You’re Wrong | Jordan Staniscia

Depressing but probably true.

Software « Linux at the UvA

Getting RQDA to work

Welcome to RQDA Project

Qualitative research plug in for R

German teen Shouryya Ray solves 300-year-old mathematical riddle posed by Sir Isaac Newton | News.com.au

"When it was explained to us that the problems had no solutions, I thought to myself, 'well, there's no harm in trying,'" he said. That lad will go far

A Man. A Van. A Surprising Business Plan. : Planet Money : NPR

"Inside, Adam had tricked out the van to be a mobile solution to Chinese bureaucracy. There are a couple of Mac laptops and a printer, plus an old couch, Christmas lights and bamboo mats. It's as cozy as a dorm room. And confused visa applicants line up outside." THIS is how to deal with paperwork. Via HN

School Cellphone Ban Spawns Thriving Niche Storage Market

An unexpected business opportunity arising from the ban on electronics in New York schools

Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL | Bootstrap - CNET News

"I couldn't afford to live anywhere," Simons recalled. "I started living out of AOL's headquarters." We had a VT once who got thrown out by his gf and was found living in the first aid room... he has a proper job now so no names, no packdrill. Why not? Sounds ok to me as long as he had some mates

r twotorials

looks sparse and useful

John's Tumblr • Computers = Trucks

"A couple of years ago at D8, Steve Jobs said on stage something like this: computers as we know them won’t go away, but they won’t be used nearly as much. They’ll be like trucks: most people don’t drive around in them all the time, but they’ll use them for special purposes, to get particular types of work done." I like trucks. I like big yellow trucks with wide tyres. I'll miss the idea that the teenager down the road can get an old laptop, but Linux on it, and could, in principle, do almost anything the clever people at Faceoogle can do.

ql2400-firmware-5.03.16-1.fc15,ql2500-firmware-5.03.16-1.fc15

Madness.

Fake algebra homework to mark

The made up student has problems with his directed numbers. Students have to mark the homework. Plenary gives teacher a chance to discuss marking schemes and part marks.

Algebra revision activities: algebra sort and solve cards, foundation

A set of cards with 28 algebraic expressions that students sort into four categories (expressions, equations, substitutions and factorisations) and then simplify/solve. Used as a revision task.

Protecting a Laptop from Simple and Sophisticated Attacks

Properly paranoid. Personally I just keep the minimum of data on the netbook, mostly handouts in the dropbox.

Loper OS » Engelbart’s Violin

Chording keyboards like stenographer's typewriters

echen/ggplot2-tutorial · GitHub

Contains the essential magick spell library(ggplot2) note lack of speechmarks

Confessions of a recovering lifehacker « John Pavlus

"When you assume that what you’ve got in-hand, right now, is good enough, you stay focused on doing — not fiddling." Reacting to 'the best camera is the one you have with you', a modern version of 'f/8 and be there'

Groklaw - Day 23, From the Courtroom: Oracle v. Google Trial - Jury: No Patent Infringement ~pj

"The damage from software patents is astounding, and the IP is so puny. There is an imbalance in the legal universe, and it needs fixing. Software is algorithms, and that is mathematics, and it's wrong, totally wrong, to let math be patented. These patents should never have issued." There are some people in the US who understand it all, and who are not cynically making a buck

A history of Windows - Microsoft Windows

The official history of Windows. As an Acorn Archimedes user, I refused to take Windows seriously until Windows 95.

[SOLVED] Grub (Ubuntu) does not detect Fedora 17 - FedoraForum.org

I have Fedora 17 in a spare partition to sample a 'pure' gnome shell desktop, and then installed Ubuntu in the main partition with the separate home partition. Ubuntu does not 'see' Fedora unless you mount the Fedora partition and update-grub. This is new behaviour and is different to other Linux distros.

Wordle - OFSTED Made to Measure report

Interesting, the most commonly used 150 words in the latest blockbuster from OFSTED

Creating the Windows 8 user experience - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

"Today, PCs are in the kitchen, in the living room, at the coffee shop, in your purse, on the train, in the passenger seat of your car. Increasingly they are mobile, always connected, affordable, and beautiful." Ubiquitous computing; but can you *really* have one interface for the whole dynamic range?

Ofsted | Mathematics: made to measure

Here we go

Start sending dates the right way (aka The ISO8601 101) - Tempus

Standard date format. My current time is Mon May 21 15:12:11 BST 2012 which would be 2012-05-21T:01:15:12:11

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz - NYTimes.com

"Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day. " I'd be clawing at the speakers within minutes of it being switched on. I use quiet PCs. I'm thinking of getting an SSD drive to stop the clicks from the spinning rust.

BBC News - Higher university fees 'will add £100bn to public debt'

"The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates the loans will cost £12bn a year by 2015-16. This is an increase of £5 to 6bn a year and "eclipses" the £3bn savings achieved through the cuts announced to the teaching grant, the report says."

We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines

"See, all those little design decisions actually matter, and there were places were we could have stopped and said "no, don't do this."" Via HN. Perhaps the fine grained options need to be discoverable? Simple surface, structure underneath? A personal computer in a few years will I suppose be a touch device the shape and size of a notebook with handwriting recognition. Bet it still runs a Bash prompt...

Web Design Manifesto 2012 – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

"This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation." Great stuff. Text is the new whitespace. Via daringfireball

Offline: Ghost limbs | The Verge

"In elevators I see people swiping back and forth between their home screens. On the sidewalk I see people reading and walking, headphones in, bumping into people and barely dodging more dangerous obstacles." OK it is longer than 2 weeks, but there appears to be no box number yet.

xkcd: Ten Thousand

UK version: 700,000 births a year, so 1 in 2000 on the same apparent calculation basis as XKCD

Game Theorist: What my 11 year old's Stanford course taught me about online education

"So what we can say is my 11 year old son just watched a bunch of videos on the Internet. "

How Google Developers Use Ubuntu ~ Ubuntu Vibes | Daily Ubuntu Linux Updates

"He starts by saying 'Precise Rocks' and that many Google employees use Ubuntu including managers, software engineers, translators, people who wrote original Unix, people who have no clue about Unix etc. Many developers working on Chrome and Android use Ubuntu and his cook in Google office uses Kubuntu." Sounds good. Caterbuntu "However, not many employees like new UI changes meant for consumers and not developers. Some of the Google employees also requested removing Unity and Gnome 3 and using xmonad instead." Inevitable I suppose. Xmonad isn't really a good interface for a netbook...

BBC News - Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw: Teachers not stressed

"Stress is, I'm sure, what many of the million-and-a-half unemployed young people today feel - unable to get a job because they've had a poor experience of school and lack the necessary skills and qualifications to find employment." I thought that we have a lot of unemployed young people because the UK is currently enduring the worst recession since the 1920s.

A Conversation with Alan Kay

"One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects."

High Caffeine Content: 2007's pre-M3 version of Android; the Google Sooner

I think I might like one of these (I like hardware keyboards) if it had g3 and wifi. Ubuntu 7.10 evokes no memory so awesome was Hardy (8.04) LTS so this is a kernel before 2.6.18 or so. Via daringfireball

Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things : NPR

"They're interested in another possible explanation: Human beings commit fraud because human beings like each other." I sometimes wonder about all the emphasis on team work &C. Teachers tend to be autonomous and cooperate for short periods with other teachers. We tends to pull in resources from other services e.g. libraries. External exams marked by 'disinterested' strangers. Suits me. Via longform

The Artistic Animal :: Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Via longform.org

Nvidia driver activated but not currently in use ?? - Ubuntu Forums

can't change driver from jockey

[ubuntu] Problem resolution in ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS with nvidia GT520 in HDMI - Ubuntu Forums

see what happens

BBC News - Couple in Somerset withdraw church bell complaint

"But church leaders said they had to silence it completely because the bell's computer software could not be programmed locally to stop it chiming at night." OK, timer switch on the power to the actuator arm - the bit that does the ringing? PC sends commands, just motors not on at night? We go to Giggleswick on holiday quite often. They have a church bell that rings the quarters. I get used to it after one night.

Introducing Futureproof | David Siegel

"I now clearly see that with respect to technology–specifically Internet-connected devices–we are still in a state of nature. Our relationship to technology is totally unsophisticated. We lack balance and harmony. We are natural over-consumers on a path to technological obesity. I unequivocally think that technology is a good thing, but I am equally convinced that if we do not develop a sophisticated relationship to technology, we will suffer consequences small and large, physical and mental, personal and interpersonal." Interesting, via Richard, thanks for the link

Boot up: TV viewing, Galaxy S3's exclusive app, Google+'s mistake, Apple's TV delay? and more | Technology | guardian.co.uk

The Boot Up page link to pinboard has the wrong syntax "You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on Pinboard" Link is http://pinboard.in/guardiantech Link should be http://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech

why we'll pay for internet plumbing — www.guardian.co.uk — Readability

"The most unpleasant sound online is the keening of the falsely entitled" -Charles Arthur Good quote

Ubuntu font rendering on Debian Wheezy & Sid « Programhalla

Lazy, we are just copying the xml files, but it does work.

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 9 Notes Essay

"CLV equals the product of ARPU, gross margin, and average customer lifetime." Simple enough for the business students...

I'm leaving the internet for a year | The Verge

I'll give this about 3 weeks? Just think about the software updates after he reconnects.

[ubuntu] Unity has slowed down my productivity - Ubuntu Forums

Detail on how people use Unity - useful

Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - [ubuntu] Growing pains! Problems after upgrading from 11.10 to 12.04

This post is advising someone who has just upgraded to install CCSM which can cause conflicts with the Unity plug-in and render the interface unusable. Need to check if MyUnity can alter the pressure...

Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - Your DE?

popcon data collected from installs of Ubuntu. Shows package by number of installs and by regular use. Not sure how you filter by version

openSUSE Lizards

Early Gnome Shell walk through.

GNOME Shell Status – 2009-02-09 « fishsoup

Early Gnome Shell screen shots

Why Ubuntu 11.10 fills me with rage | ZDNet

a typical non-review with some good points

Linux: Finding and Locating files with find command part # 1

When the fancy graphical desktop searches fail to work there is always the linux find command with a few options like find /home/user -name "*fragment-of-filename*"

ggplot. had.co.nz

This works with the version of R that is installed with Ubuntu 12.04, but asks to make a local library as it can't write to /usr/ from the R session. At least not from the R session in R-Studio

icaclient_12.0.0_i386.deb - puppet-autoinstall - icaclient-12-i386 - Automatic installation of puppet master and clients - Google Project Hosting

the older version of ica-receiver works, or at least, installs

The Dawn of Haiku OS - IEEE Spectrum

"Having an emotional attachment to a piece of software may strike you as odd, but to Phipps and many others (including me), BeOS deserved it. It ran amazingly fast on the hardware of its day; it had a clean, intuitive user interface; and it offered a rich, fun, and modern programming environment. "

Dropbox - Why did my public links stop working?

20Gb per day is a huge bandwidth allocation compared to most Web hosting accounts. And that is on the free accounts, it is 200Gb per day on a paid account. You could run a pretty big site off that. I have no intention of testing the question, but the wording suggests that the limit is 20Gb per day per link.

Rands In Repose: The Anatomy of a Notification

Use this for the indicators section

Skolelinux / DebianEdu

Most of the applications you need in a school; Web browser, Office package; some educational games for Primary including a simple circuit simulation program; touch typing tutor, an algebra/graphs and a geometry program, animation package, photo editing package, photo management package, video editing package, 3d animation package (full strength), drawing and desktop publishing packages, sound recorder and a midi/digital audio workstation, along with a drum machine.

Data and visualization blogs worth following

Who is doing what with data and software

12.04 Poster | spreadubuntu

Finally published

Firefox Fullscreen (F11) Lost with 12.04 ? - Ubuntu Forums

If an application is not behaving as it is expected to, but is not crashing, it could be funny settings. 1) Log in as guest and see if behaviour reverts to normal. If it does, then the funny behaviour is a profile issue. 2) Rename profile. If behaviour becomes normal, then must be a setting.

Run Away Brainz: Mystery Project update 2 "The Time Vampire"

Possibly should get out more. Nice work though,

Milton Glaser | Hillman Curtis

"His mystique in the design world only deepened when, at the height of his career, he gave up Web work to learn to make movies with a handheld video camera." Link is to a good example.

Linus Torvalds interview

"I find the low-level details of how computers work really interesting, but if I had to care about user problems and people forgetting their passwords or messing up their backups, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably turn to drugs and alcohol to dull the pain." ... "It’s simply not the end that matters at all. It’s the means – the journey. The end result is almost meaningless. If you do things the right way, the end result *will* be fine too, but the real enjoyment is in the doing, not in the result." Priceless

The Atlantic | July 1982 | Living With a Computer | Fallows

"In fairness to Darlene, she had come to a near-total halt on first encountering the word "Brzezinski" and never fully regained her stride." ... "For a while, I was a little worried about what they would come up with, especially after my father-in-law called to ask how important it was that I be able to use both upper- and lower-case letters." When people started word-processing their own work. This chap had a *custom* word-processor made. Via Shaun Blank

Home | spreadubuntu

Looks useful, you can upload source or print materials

David Foster Wallace on Life and Work — online.wsj.com — Readability

"It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register." Personally, I just go to the corner shop and get rice and some veg.

HOW I created and launched a website from the internet café in Zimbabwe,Africa « munyukim

"As a result of this project,my future now seem bright and I have started getting a lot of opportunities that I did not have before.If you find yourself in a position like me ,don’t lost hope instead start a project and tell people about it ,it doesn’t have to perfect and use all the resources you can get." Zimbabwe based Web programmer.

Download links for Ubuntu Desktop i386 | Ubuntu QA

Testing the 11th April daily i386 on NC10

BBC News - Which country has the most expensive postal charges?

There is a maths lesson in here somewhere: the idea of how you compare the costs of things between different countries.

So you want to try switching to Ubuntu? | Michael Hall's Blog

Very useful if somewhat wordy page.

Index of /ubuntu/dists/precise/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/

location of most recent netinstaller for Ubuntu 12.04

TedPage

Aha, Canonical's real reason for developing the HUD exposed.

Windows 3.1 rebooted: Microsoft's DOS destroyer turns 20 • The Register

"Savvy users knew about alt-tab of course, and did not have this problem, but Microsoft did not come up with a satisfactory user interface for multiple overlapping windows until Windows 95. Win 95 had a taskbar, making it easy to see what was running as well as to switch between applications. It is an interesting thought as the launch of Windows 8 approaches. Windows 8 in Metro mode has lost the taskbar, and once again alt-tab is the best way to switch between applications, which makes you wonder if a lesson has been forgotten." Not only Windows 8

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs | Andrew Chen (@andrewchen)

"The point is, humans seek novelty yet are pattern-recognition machines. What you put out will initially work quite well as they check it out for the first time, but afterwards, they will learn to filter your marketing efforts out unless they are genuinely useful (more on that later)." Via HN. Some really clever people are trying to get us to look at things. Continuous novelty is a good one for teaching as well (but within a secure framework).

ReTargeter The Importance of Rotating Creative

"Many of the most important banner ad best practices focus on conspicuity. Some examples include using bright, standout colors in your ads, using big buttons to make the ad look more clickable, and creating strong, concise calls to action." And a page full of 'conspicuity' is when I click the readability button...

upanddownhighres0mk.jpg (JPEG Image, 867×1668 pixels)

nice

Why Linux is not (yet) Ready for the Desktop aka Linux problems v0.9.9.2, 2012 edition

Very useful document, and I hope it is read widely. I must have been fortunate in my hardware purchases over the years - possibly buying recycled computers is an advantage with Linux as the drivers have had a chance to catch up.

Nasty bug

The detail is mind numbing. As the author states in the conclusion, it is a miracle any of this stuff works

Throw Out Everything You Know About Ads - a crazy CTR result | Hacker News

"The "test everything" mantra sounds good, but in practice, you generally have only so much data you can afford (in impressions per day, or whatever), and when your CTRs are often 0.1% or lower, you need quite a lot of data to get narrow confidence intervals around your CTRs. Using the basic binomial model, if you have two test conditions, one of which actually does 20-25% better than the other, (say, 0.11% versus 0.09%), your confidence intervals will keep overlapping until you have OOM 1M impressions. This is all just to say that running a whole lot of tests can quickly become expensive an impractical." Sampling stats applied to the testing of adverts. The discussion below this comment gives a nice illustration of quantitative versus anecdotal/gut feel

Rename dotfiles in home folder

rename 's/^./OLD-/' `ls -d .*` Finds directories and files that have a dot at the beginning and renames them to OLD-restofname. Error message about the . and .. files in each directory. Useful when installing new version of linux in the root partition on a hard drive where there is a separate home partition.

Eames: Design is a Method of Action - gentry i/o

Short interview with Eames, like the 60 second interview in the Metro.

Startups, This Is How Design Works – by Wells Riley

Interesting page about design. The page has a fixed width layout, and Firefox stops showing a horizontal scroll bar at 1063px (I'll check on the netbook later). Perhaps the last of Ram's Ten Principles could be applied more to the site?

Desktop Linux: Difference engine: Free is too expensive | The Economist

Someone tell this chap about CentOS/Scientific Linux/PUIAS

Music Management in Linux: Ripping CD’s with abcde | TK Assembled

abcde -g -d /dev/cdrom -a read,encode,tag -o mp3 -x

Mark Bernstein: Day 1

"To minimize processing, large parts of the file format exactly matched the data structures, so you could slam the bits right into memory. Unfortunately, this means that details of the 68000 compiler’s memory layout persist even in this new code, three processors on." Bernstein is recoding Storyspace, and showing how the old machine layout lives on in the new code...

Scripting News: People want to learn to code?

"But if it turns out that programming is like driving a car, and everyone can do it, and lots of people actually do it -- I would be very pleased. Because people who are making software for themselves are hard to push around. And they will demand real computers, not the limited kind ... that are becoming popular...." Dave Winer, on the popularity of learning to program. I think 'end user' languages could become popular; R, puredata, macros, a subset of Javascript (perhaps using a library)

Duplicate icons in GNOME Shell - Ask Ubuntu - Stack Exchange

Gnome-shell on top of a command line Ubuntu install of 12.04 testing. In the Activities view you get duplicates of most of the application icons. The second icons are low resolution and obviously not designed for the shell. To get rid of them, you run Main Menu application, click on the Debian entry on the left hand side of the Main Menu window. You will see two folders on the right hand side, Applications and another one will be ticked. You have to remove those folders, unticking is no good.

Ubuntu for Eyewear | Ubuntu

Corporate April Fool joke. Nice.

Introducing Gmail Tap

Wonderful!

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

April 1 joke that actually makes a few valid points by use of exaggeration.

MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son's First Words, Graphs It | Fast Company

"In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn." Piaget in the age of ubiquitous technology?

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz • The Register

"In the IPv4 world, you have one internet addressable IP address and the rest of your network lives in a non-routable space. Your internal network is on the other end of a NAT firewall, subnetted and organized into something that makes sense for the local sysadmins. If you need to change your internet service provider for any reason, that's perfectly okay. Your external address changes, a few firewall rules are changed and life moves on. If you need to reorganize your address space internally, no problem! You execute the change, and the outside world is none the wiser. Simple, easy and convenient. In an IPv6 world, this is a no-no. There is no NAT; it was deemed heretical by the priestly caste of network engineers running the holy church of the IETF. Blasphemers are chastened and belittled. " Let's take something basically manageable and make it hard...

Debian User Forums • View topic - Question on Gnome3

apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-themes-standard gnome-menus gnome-control-center gnome-session gdm3 --no-install-recommends Gnome without the Evolution calendar application. Evolution is actually quite nice but it can't print with sensible font sizes (bug open for getting on for three years)

Letters of Note: I am very real

"Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us." Via HN

Graphing on Google.com - Now in 3D - Inside Search

Works fine in Firefox on Linux and does most of the basic graphs I need. WolframAlpha basic can run on a mobile phone browser so still recommending that

The Digital↔Physical: On building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives — by Craig Mod

These people have *printed out* all of the commit messages for an application, together with screenshots and so on. They have made it into a book, so the team can have a physical document of the development process. Wonderful stuff. Via daringfireball

Intel: Xeon E5s to surf impending server upgrade wave • The Register

"...a [ large company ] did a similar survey of its data centers and found that 36 per cent of its servers were four years or older, were consuming a whopping 65 per cent of its data center power, and represented 4 per cent of the aggregate compute cycles across the data centers." Amazing but probably a one off gain...

Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it • The Register

"...if firms managed their staff rationally I would have to get a proper job." Recruitment consultant

BBC News - 'Pasty lover' David Cameron defends VAT hike

"It is an extraordinarily complex situation when you are having to check with the Meteorological Office on whether or not to add VAT on pasties in Greggs." You can't make this stuff up. We need a pastie tax app for mobile phones.

Building the worst Linux PC ever - Hack a Day

"Linux requires a 32-bit CPU and a memory management unit, something the puny microcontroller doesn’t have. For [Dmitry], the best course of action was emulating an ARM processor on an AVR. We’re not sure if we’re dealing with genius or madness here, but it did prove to be a valuable learning exercise in writing a modular ARM emulator." Madness (neat though)

Emmy Noether, the Most Significant Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of - NYTimes.com

"Through it all, Noether was a highly prolific mathematician, publishing groundbreaking papers, sometimes under a man’s name, in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory. And when she applied her equations to the universe around her, she discovered some of its basic rules, like how time and energy are related, and why it is, as the physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute put it, “that riding a bicycle is safe.” " I always thought it was Jordan who spotted the application to physics?

BgPatterns — Background Patterns Maker

Strangely addictive

apenwarr - Business is Programming

"...we are running Access in Wine in X11 on Linux in an isolated user account on our server slice that revision controls your Access database in git, and we're displaying it using VNC in your web browser in flash..." Amazing, but true

BBC News - Who, What, Why: How do cats survive falls from great heights?

"For instance, an average-sized cat with its limbs extended achieves a terminal velocity of about 60mph (97km/h), while an average-sized man reaches a terminal velocity of about 120mph (193km/h), according to the 1987 study by veterinarians Wayne Whitney and Cheryl Mehlhaff." I'd have thought it was a simple surface area to mass ratio thing. Human about 10 cat lengths, so 100 cat surface areas but 1000 cat masses...

Quadrilateral flash cards

A PDF file with four A6 size flashcards; quadrilaterals in general, trapezium, parallelogram and the kite. Just the facts. They can scale up for IW use.

Put Alan Turing on the next £10 note - e-petitions

Sign this now

Why Do The Labels Continue To Insist That 'Your Money Is No Good Here?' | Techdirt

"What I want you to explain is why, in this day and age, with the internet handling a large quantity of the sales, are labels still attempting to pretend that the purchaser's country makes any difference." Because they want to charge different prices in different countries, and they are worried about people finding out. Bad language in article (author quoting a rant)

About those vector icons · Pushing Pixels

"This is where the designer looks at the scaled down version of the icon, for each resolution, and begins a sometimes painstaking process of pixel-perfecting the visuals." Lots of work for things you just click on: maths here as well

#46 – Why software sucks « Scott Berkun

"But the surprise is that the best possible design for many things, especially things perceived as work, requires no change in behavior for the person using the thing. These designs are so good they eliminate unnecessary interactivity: they just do what they’re supposed to do without bothering you. " ready to hand

Letter from China: Apple, China, and the Truth : The New Yorker

"Schmitz discovers that Daisey made up scenes, never took notes, conflated workers, never visited a dorm room, and so on. Watching it unravel from Beijing makes me wonder: What does the debacle say about how we all look at China? Why were so many people so eager to believe it?" The issues are complex and its down to people who work for wages being able to bargain.

Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

"a 1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades by bureaucrats who never question _why_ they're doing things." via hn

Introduction to text manipulation on UNIX-based systems

cat, nl, wc, grep, awk, sed and various sorting commands with illustrations of use. Via HN

Twitter's usability lab setup | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Usability testing set up used by twitter employees to test their Web interface. This is not a 'natural' user setting, so we are looking at people completing tasks suggested by the researcher under artificial conditions. Pretty big observer effects...

BBC News - Public servants in poorer areas to get 'pay freeze'

"Why should they be penalised because of where they live? Surely we should be looking at a situation where we look to close the gap in income between different parts of the UK rather than make it worse, which is exactly what this will do." This guy gets it.

Notes from the Mobile World Congress 2012 « Canonical Design

"With the exception of tactile feedback the experience is closing in on that of pen and paper – and for many, the benefits of digital malleability can outweigh the constraints of analogue tools." A Mathematics Pad may be just around the corner...

hibernate - How to modify policykit to allow hibernation in upower? - Ask Ubuntu - Stack Exchange

Hibernation

Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and _why: The disappearance of one of the world’s most beloved computer programmers. - Slate Magazine

_why the lucky stiff dug up again by journalist

Charge of the Metro brigade: Did Microsoft execs plan to take a hit? • The Register

"I installed it one evening on my regular Windows machine, and the next day set about attempting to do a full day's El Reg work, just as if I were on a Mac or PC." This is going to be fun

A Scientific Desktop | Diznix Blog

Try the elrepo repository for nvidia drivers on PUIAS.

Bethnal Green Ventures

Is there anything remotely like this in Birmingham? If not, why not. Via HN of all places.

How to smartly manage Scientific Linux repositories

This works, but you really want to enable the PUIAS addons repository on a new clean CentOS install, not one you've been adding packages from REPL and other repositories. Only conflict so far is the MS web fonts package. Installing Lyx now...

CentOS 6 – Great, but for how long? | Standalone Sysadmin

Sky Chart for Birmingham UK

Heavens Above helping me find the planets

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

"You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward." There is a lot to be said for small course corrections and the practice of taking small localised advantages.

BBC News - Pupils in Rhondda Cynon Taf missing a 'year of school'

"The council said if children had good attendance levels they were likely to achieve better exam results. It added that if children had an attendance rate of 94%, the equivalent of missing 10 days per year, they were more likely to achieve five GCSEs at grade A*-C or equivalent than they would if their attendance was 90%, the equivalent of missing one day a fortnight." Correlation != cause

BBC News - Vice-chancellor warns over loss of student places

Strange how changes work through systems to do the opposite of what they were intended to do. The question is: will anyone change the system to fix this?

School for quants - FT.com

"Under the direction of the PhD students, the undergraduates were writing computer programs to haul millions of pages of publicly available digital chatter – from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news stories – into a real-time archive which could be analysed for signs of the public mood, particularly in regard to financial markets" Pretty neat idea...

Live Ships Map - AIS - Vessel Traffic and Positions

Ace! Via Hacker News. Just in time for teaching bearings.

Obama-January-SS-24-new.jpg (JPEG Image, 830×554 pixels)

Via daringfireball. Gruber has tagged this as 'from zero to the U.S. president's daily briefing in two years'. I am taken by the faux leather or real leather cases these chaps want to use with their iPads, thus adding gravitas to a bit of ephemeral electronics. I'm old school, what happened to the meeting table? Chaps facing each other across the baize?

AQA Unit 2 quick revision questions with answers

I used these in a revision workshop on the Tuesday before the Unit 2 GCSE Maths exam for the AQA Modular syllabus. (Everyone wants to put 4 down as the answer to 1) Algebra and percentages/fractions and number/factor/multiple/squares/cubes questions with answer. All rapid fire 'headline' questions. I have longer 'starred' questions from the AQA ExamPro service ready as backup.

AQA Unit 1 quick revision questions with answers

I used these on Monday am for a quick last minute revision workshop over lunch to get the brains working. Mostly ok and feelings positive after the exam. Data handling and calculator percentages with answers. Just the short sharp questions. No pictograms. Q5 catches everyone, they all want to divide 32 by 3. I draw a fraction wall like graphic with a line divided into 3 and ask for labels... Q8, they have to measure the angle for Cars.

Twitter / The Real Sabu: Die Revolution sagt ich bi ...

Can we not find work and a living wage for these people? There is so much that needs to be done, built, constructed, made, enabled &c. Why the negativity?

The one tiny slip that put LulzSec chief Sabu in the FBI's pocket • The Register

"Police locked onto Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed 28-year-old from New York – allegedly LulzSec hacktivist supremo Sabu – after he apparently made the mistake of logging into an IRC chat server without using the Tor anonymisation service" Perhaps we should find jobs/redistribute wealth/include people with these kinds of skills? There is plenty of (useful, positive, constructive) work to be done.

The Future of Schools - Three Design Scenarios

"A family might combine services from two or three different organizations into a learning plan" What about the children whose parents don't know how to combine services or how to formulate a learning plan?

Artist: Herbie Mash - Free Independent Music Downloads, Unsigned Bands, Artists & Producers, Music Videos

Rainbo remix. Bungle goes old school. Very strange, but sort of comforting.

Dude, it's a laptop you want, not an iPad - Andrew on Everything

"Basically, [some] people want [iPad] cases that (a) prop the screen up and (b) have a keyboard. The thing is, we already have a gadget that does these two things. It's called a laptop." Most of the iPads I see in the wild (corporate types, the teenagers have phones) don't have extra bits, just a wallet style case. Interesting.

Bayes' Theorem Illustrated (My Way) - Less Wrong

Visual presentation that uses the Monty Hall problem as an example, makes a change from cancer survival rates. Looks useful.

BUXTON COLLECTION

Bill Buxton's collection of input devices for computers assembled over a 30 year period. Be prepared to lose an hour or two when clicking on this link...

Giving Back, The Workshop Way – Richard Powell – The Kernel

Self initiated lessons on computer programming basics, no syllabus, no defined structure. Brave. Via HN

BBC News - Poor numeracy 'blights the economy and ruins lives'

"It doesn't happen in other parts of the world. With encouragement and good teaching, everyone can improve their numeracy." Yup, that's right, because other countries DON'T CHANGE THEIR QUALIFICATIONS EVERY 5 MINUTES and LET SCHOOLS GET ON WITH IT Was that loud enough?

The Speculist » Blog Archive » In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop

I've had thoughts along these lines, but did not write the essay. Certainly higher ed and offices. In fact, coffee shops are quieter than my office - just no storage.

Younger generation taking 'sledgehammer' to security • The Register

"Salem said that the average US 21-year-old has sent over 250,000 emails, text messages, and IM sessions, has spent over 14,000 hours online, and doesn't accept information from a single source, but checks with his or her network instead. "

Rands In Repose

"This is akin to saying, “I will solve a math equation that I can only half see.” It’s absurd, but it’s precisely what someone does when they start making critical decisions with incomplete data." This isn't my world, but nicely written

The Shocking Truth About How Web Graphics Affect Conversions

1. Images above headlines, else headlines don't get read 2. Captions read more than dense body copy 3. Don't break left margin (l-to-r languages) 4. Images must be relevant, either story appeal or demonstrations There you are, just saved you 5 minutes. Via HN

The Top Stories from Trejdify - blog.Trejdify.com: Why do we spend money on things we used to get for free?

"Bottled water is 3000 times more expensive than water from a tap" Bit of a maths lesson coming along there...

Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want!

Interesting but does not know about £ unless I'm really bad at drawing. Via HN OK: I'm really bad at drawing. You need to draw the bottom of the glyph with no loop, else it identifies your handiwork as a character from an Indian language

Graphemica - For people who ♥ letters, numbers, punctuation, &c

Fun, but does not give the original meaning of the @ sign, or at least the one I was taught

Right versus pragmatic – Marco.org

Discussion of a software issue (making paying for film content easy) by use of a physical analogy (design of loos in office buildings).

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

This needs summarising on one side of A4 in less 'techie' language as we see more people using free software. Via Karanbir Singh's post

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework - 1962 (AUGMENT,3906,) - Doug Engelbart Institute

Englebart's report in a nicely formatted Web version. Annoying table of contents list that 'follows' you as you scroll. Readability version gets rid of the table of contents but also gets rid of the images.

Learn Code The Hard Way -- Books And Courses To Learn To Code

Zed Shaw's take on regular expressions. He is using a shell thingy written in python so that you can write regexps on one line and test them.

A bad picture is worth a thousand long discussions. – Doug Seven

Boxology in Windows 8. This is simplified...

Will Windows 8 sticker shock leave Microsoft unstuck? • The Register

"If you don’t like Metro, WOA won’t let you seek refuge in the more conventional Windows desktop. That’s because while WOA will have a desktop option, just two apps can use it – Microsoft’s Office 2015 and Internet Explorer 10." This one is going to be fun. People have got more used to devices over the last few years, but still...

Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Ubuntu in your pocket

Phone + monitor + keyboard = netbook type desktop. As far as I can see they are relying on citrix for MS Office rather than a local LibreOffice. Nice idea, Ubuntu One for backup I suppose.

St Christopher's Blog: Malcolm Payne » Blog Archive » How many social workers in England?

There are about 45000 social workers (qualified) in England as of 2008. Allow the usual 9% turnover figure and you need around 4000 new entrants each year.

Information Diet | Notifications are evil

glad someone else agrees. I disable them all when I can

Why I Still Use Emacs | Hacker News

"The perfect coupling of an average biological agent, and a bubbly, baroque piece of antique Lisp technology." Excellent quote

How Companies Learn Your Secrets - NYTimes.com

One for the Business Studies students, a good reason to get interested in statistics.

How to pimp your CentOS into a perfect desktop

LibreOffice on CentOS 6.2

On An Overgrown Path: Salvation Army band plays Xenakis

"these are the guys with designer stubble, iPads and BMW X5s who preach that you can do anything with a brand provided that you mix in the occasional distinctiveness." Run for the hills the moment these people turn up

Back on Linux — dywypi.org

advocacy

Anger for Path Social Network After Privacy Breach - NYTimes.com

"The big deal is that privacy and security is not a big deal in Silicon Valley. While technorati tripped over themselves to congratulate Mr. Morin on finessing the bad publicity, a number of concerned engineers e-mailed me noting that the data collection was not an accident. It would have taken programmers weeks to write the code necessary to copy and organize someone’s address book. Many said Apple was at fault, too, for approving Path for its App Store when it appears to violate its rules." Via Scripting News

An interview with Phil Hagelberg

"Ubuntu’s push towards Unity bothered me, but given how easy it is to replace the UI with something more helpful it was easy to ignore. On the other hand, the way they’re increasingly pushing proprietary software is harder to ignore."

Electronic Security a Worry in an Age of Digital Espionage - NYTimes.com

Tradecraft in the networked era, Smiley would be impressed. Via Daringfireball. Gruber makes the point that copy/pasting a password is still vulnerable to keyloggers.

Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Microsoft breaks backward compatibility... and more details about win8

No more 'spread' (window picker for window group) from all workspaces - Ubuntu Forums

Work around in post #5 and the original locator of the changed behaviour.

Mark Shuttleworth Explains Launcher Dodge Decision in Precise

Narrowing of repertoire of behaviours caused by testing regime? 'First Hour' tests -> narrow 'monotonous' (Raskin) behaviour?

Social media explained using doughnuts

I like the Google+ entry

Clive Thompson: Retro design is crippling innovation (Wired UK)

"Why don't computer calendars work like that? Because they're governed by skeuomorphs --bits of design that are based on old-fashioned, physical objects. As Google Calendar shows, skeuomorphs are hobbling innovation by lashing designers to metaphors of the past. Unless we start weaning ourselves off these defunct models, we will fail to produce digital tools that harness what computers do best." So how do you devise interfaces that are not suggested by existing objects?

Roger Boisjoly obituary: Engineer tried to stop Challenger launch - latimes.com

"Boisjoly could not watch the launch, so certain was he that the shuttle would blow up. In the months and years that followed, the disaster changed his career and permanently poisoned his view that NASA could be trusted to make the right decisions when matters came to life and death." Via HN

Usable Help

A blog about making the help systems in software more, well, usable. The blog has been produced using Eastgate Systems' Tinderbox, and the last 10 years' worth of posts are held in the same xml format file. That's from Mac OS 9 to now. One file. The whole site. Tinderbox is one of the few reason's I'd ever start using Mac OS again.

Cultural Dimensions of Software Help Usage - WritersUA

Scholarly work on how people ignore what the computer says when they are trying to work out how to do something.

Vim anti-patterns | Arabesque

Avoid these, I do most of them

Export As Images — LibreOffice Extensions

This extension allows you to save all the slides in a Libreoffice Impress presentation as single images. Use the instructions in one of the comments to find the macro and add it to your File menu once you have added the extension. Works fine

The iOS-ification Of Apple’s Ecosystem

Nicely illustrated essay on Apple's use of iOS features in Mac OS

The Sound Agency » Blog Archive » More damaging evidence on open plan offices

"Julian often calls in his talks for architects and interior designers to create quiet working space in every office layout in order to regain this lost productivity; failing that, he advises workers to wear headphones and listen to birdsong, surf or rainfall to mask the distracting noise." Noise cancelling headphones I suppose with gentle ambient sound recordings...

Disable Synaptics Touchpad « Ubuntu Blog

Section “InputDevice” Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad” Driver “synaptics” Option “SendCoreEvents” “true” Option “Device” “/dev/psaux” Option “Protocol” “auto-dev” Option “HorizScrollDelta” “0″ Option “SHMConfig” “on” EndSection Try this on the old Dell

Org-mode beginning at the basics

Folding text in a window seems hard on Ubuntu

What is a good way to batch re-encode mp3 files from a higher bitrate to a lower bitrate in Windows? - Super User

ffmpeg -i source.mp3 -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 128000 -f mp3 output.mp3 Resample purchased MP3 files for use on the phone at smaller file size. Saves around 50 to 60% of file size.

Microsoft Security Essentials - Free Antivirus for Windows

Doing a Windows 7 laptop for a relative. Hacker News tip off that Microsoft's own anti-virus is better than AVG and the commercial ones and costs nowt. Also slows system less.

Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours - edw519

I'm so glad I work in a place where IT are a couple of floors up. Yup, they do use remote desktop most of the time but f something is hard to describe, they just pop down to have a look. Via HN

Hackful Europe

Hacker News for Europe, rails/ruby application. Watch this for London hacker space news

Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - The scandal of publisher-forbidden textmining: The vision denied « petermr's blog

Amazing software can mine a technical account of a chemical preparation and produce a balanced chemical equation. But can't be used on many articles as both the major chemical indexes owned by an academic publisher with very restricted access

Web Equation

You write an equation with a tablet or whiteboard pen. The application recognises the formula and renders it as LaTeX markup with a visual rendition. Needs saving as image. Via HN

Why I'd pay Apple more to give iPad factory workers a break • The Register

"If consumers continue to demand low-cost and high-quality products, their vendors will demand that component suppliers do more for less. And they will." I can't do much about this, but I buy recycled electronics (3 year old laptop and 4 year old HP Xeon workstation) to extract the maximum use I can from hardware, and to reduce the amount of electronics that ends up being stripped of rare earths in third world countries.

Shaped by war McCullin retrospective - we made this blog

"...also shows how the analogue process of printing a photograph shares a lot with the the digital process of adjusting an image in Photoshop." I think that is because the Photoshop programmers took and developed photographs!

Business & Technology | AP Interview: JC Penney CEO talks about the chain | Seattle Times Newspaper

"The importance of doing everything you do to your very best. And that the journey is the reward. If you do things well one at a time, you end up in a really good place. Don't get ahead of yourself. Control the things you can." Via Daringfireball Watch out for the popup credit rating advert! Cognitive dissonance strikes again...

AMS Design Blog: Confessions of a Designer - Quotes from the world of design

Nicely presented quotes that commercial graphic designers must think or hear often. Comments good, via Hacker News

A Design Primer for Engineers — www.randsinrepose.com — Readability

Will the readability version work ok on the phone?

Rands In Repose: A Design Primer for Engineers

Funny summary

Alternative Status Menu - GNOME Shell Extensions

I can now hibernate the PC from a menu. Giant leap forward.

Why this new record label is giving away all its music for free | Hacker News

Discoverability of music in the network age.

The man who hand-draws mathematical fractals - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

"During fractal generation, JP's brain uses the left hemisphere exclusively, and none of the regions in visual cortex are involved in producing the visual images. The regions in the temporal lobe normally associated with memory were not hyperactivated either. We don't quite know what to make of this yet. But it does seem to show for the first time that areas other than memory and visual areas can generate visual features." Never underestimate the difficulties faced by students who have had head injuries.

Download page - Context Free Art

Looks fun, need to compile on Linux

Learn to speak vim - verbs, nouns, and modifiers!

Vim grammar of commands

Google is FUBAR | ExtremeTech

Privacy and money

Meet HUD: Ubuntu’s New Way of Using App Menus in Unity

"We noticed in testing that new users found the HUD faster than the old menu, as did power users who hadn’t memorised the shortcut for a given function."

Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu.

Typing the name of menu commands into a special overlay window... sort of ubiquity for your computer

LogicMail for BlackBerry

Downloads easily and gives me a 'traditional' pop3/smtp client on my blackberry. The smtp problem remains though. t-mobile won't allow access to their t-email smtp server from mobile devices because of spam. If I use the gmail authenticated smtp server, then the email looks as if it has originated from my gmail account. At this rate it could be putty and ssh for non-google email on the phone...

HACK - Chicago Taxi Driver micro-fiction

just a paragraph or so describing entrances and exits of taxi riders with sketches

Eating the seed corn - Charlie's Diary

"I got my start reading fiction from my local library; the voracious reading habits of a bookish child aren't easily supported from a family budget under strain from elsewhere during a time of cuts. I hate to think what the long term outcome of this short-term policy is going to be, but I don't believe any good will come of it." This goes under the 'listening to faint signals' heading. Stross has noticed a 28% drop in his public lending rights payments in one year. His selling levels are increasing. His conclusion is that less people are using libraries, probably due to less availability of libraries.

The Story of the GNOME project

Early days of Gnome. Project prompted by a license issue with KDE's use of a non-free library (qt).

gnome-panel is dead, long live gnome-panel! - mon journal - par Vincent

Vincent Vuntz's page about gnome-fallback with the 'mary' quote

On the Usability of Codecademy

'for instance' is dangerous

A List Apart: Articles: Habit Fields

I've always tried to get students to find a place in their house or a library that they associate with Maths homework. Also a time and day. For those who are committed anyway this seems to work. Good quote "The more capable and multipurpose our tools become, the more the burden of deciding what they do shifts on us. Physical constraints must be replaced by artificial ones, and the effectiveness of our tools becomes an extension of our own willpower and self-discipline."

David Hockney: a life in art | Culture | The Guardian

"It is highly unusual for a show of this scale not to be a retrospective, and it is made more unusual in that much of the work was not even made when the show was planned four years ago." New work, some using iPad and video multiples.

Learn C The Hard Way A Clear & Direct Introduction To Modern C Programming

This guy is writing way too much. He must be underemployed.

Graphs 5: Plotting formulas

Two sides of A4 with some formulas to plot and an exercise about the characteristics of a set of lines deduced from their formulas alone. Students need squared (0.5cm) paper for this one and will need to draw axes.

Graphs 4: finding the formula of a straight line from the gradient and intercept

Two sided A4 handout with some ready drawn plots. Students have to 'test' their formula by substituting in for an X value and then checking that the resulting Y value does fall on the line when plotted.

Graphs 3: Describing straight line graphs in terms of gradient and intercept

Two sided A4 designed for use in class. Plots provided and students have to find the gradient and intercept.

Graphs 2: Special lines like X = 3 and Y = 2

These vertical and horizontal lines specified by an X or a Y value always confuse students. A two sided handout for use during a whole class discussion of what it means to 'fix' (say) the coordinate of a point so that it is always X = 1...

Graphs 1: handout about axes, coordinates and midpoints by calculation

First in a sequence of 5. Points to plot, shapes to complete and midpoints to find. These handouts are designed to be used in a lesson with pair work and tutor input. Just three sides of A4.

Double-Blind Violin Test: Can You Pick The Strad? : Deceptive Cadence : NPR

I love this kind of stuff. In the 70s, the geezer who ran Quad did a listening test with various HiFi journalists. Some cheap tranny gear, some excellent valve and expensive transistor kit. They were all over the place.

Welcome to the Post-WIMP Era | As far as I know

Stuff about desktop metaphor from an Ubunty

Design problem: Menus hidden by default in Unity : Mailing list archive : ayatana team in Launchpad

Matthew Paul Thomas email about hidden menus in Unity interface.

Canonical Ubuntu Splits From GNOME Over Design Issues | PCWorld Business Center

Documents and history

Acorn King Moir: BBC Micros, Ataris and 'BS' marketing • The Register

"The company that had inspired him at 17 had fallen under the control of accountants, he said, who overpriced the Archimedes to protect the BBC Micro." An A3000 could not have cost that much to manufacture compared to the BBC Master. But that is UKPLC for you, beancounter central

Daring Fireball: On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch

Gruber thinks it's ok for the alarm function on a phone to sound when the phone is switched off. I think 'off' should mean 'off', not functioning, not taking power, not operational. The issue is one of control over the device and expected behaviours, not simply the New York Phil nightmare.

The bagel man > — www.stephenjdubner.com — Readability

"As it happens, his accidental study provides a window onto a subject that has long stymied academics: white-collar crime. (Yes, shorting the bagel man is white-collar crime, writ however small.) Despite all the attention paid to companies like Enron, academics know very little about the practicalities of white-collar crime. The reason? There aren't enough data." The bagel man - wonderful, but the original page has unreadable white on black text hence link to readability version

Kids should be making software, not just using it - Gove • The Register

"The Reg asked the Department of Education to explain how students would be examined or awarded qualifications if there was no curriculum to test them on - for example whether ICT GCSEs be continue to be awarded in 2013 - but we have yet to hear a reply." I suspect there will be a GCSE in ICT in 2013... Scratch is built on Squeak, which is a dialect of Smalltalk.

Unity’s Technical Lead Neil Patel Talks Plans For Ubuntu 12.04

Unity plans through blogs, interviews and bug reports. Bilal Akhtar's comments about the relationship between Unity and Gnome Shell are refreshingly candid "Imagine yourselves in Mark's place. Once you've poured in thousands of $ on a project, done usability testing, hired a dozen developers, and have a thriving community around the project, and also have a large number of testers, and the software is JUST 3-4 months from release, would you suddenly drop all of this effort for something that's still somewhat inferior than your own project?"

This photograph is free - Standblog

"Most of all, I have realized a long time ago that in a world where everyone has a camera, a lot of free time and fantastic tools to publish stuff, there is not a lot of money to be made anymore by taking pictures." Making Andrew Keen's point (The Cult of the Amateur)

[SOLVED] Calling Stale Broker - Ubuntu Forums

Ubuntu One on Windows... pretty crashy on Ubuntu as well

Kevinjohn Gallagher .com :: WordPress has left the building « « KevinjohnGallagher.com

"WordPress is the best blogging platform I, or indeed we, have ever used… but as a CMS is falling far behind the alternatives." Then perhaps the software should be used for the purpose for which it was designed?

The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2012

Bruce Sterling winding people up on the WELL. Yes, its still going.

An interview with Liza Daly

"In fact everything about the company is in version control, from code to notes to contracts to legal documents." Interesting idea - commit log gives a journal of the context behind the documents and decisions. A GUI that was optimised for non coding records might be an idea...

Rands In Repose: The One Rule

mode shift costs and macos mission control layout

Open-Source ~ Killing the Desktop Metaphor with GNOME

useful essay

Tracker/Documentation/First5Minutes - GNOME Live!

This is a really good page to have. It tells you why you can't see anything happening when you first install tracker. The indexing process takes a fair amount of time and only starts when you restart Gnome by logging out and in again...

Microsoft, Defying Image, Has a Design Gem in Windows Phone - NYTimes.com

"The next major version of software for PC’s, Windows 8, will look a lot like Windows Phone, which Microsoft hopes will help it work better on tablet devices."

The Demise of the Public Library — latitude.blogs.nytimes.com — Readability

“A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.” Mark Twain in a speech given while opening Kensal Rise Library.

Mathematicians Solve Minimum Sudoku Problem - Technology Review

"Nevertheless, the resulting calculation is still a monster. The Dublin team say it took 7.1 million core-hours of processing time on a machine with 640 Intel Xeon hex-core processors. They started in January 2011 and finished in December." That's a few shillings in the meter

Comet 'sold 94,000 pirate Windows CDs', claims Microsoft • The Register

"Microsoft has accused high-street retailer Comet of pirating 94,000 Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs and selling them to consumers." There are benefits to free software (Linux can be copied and distributed legally)

Ubuntu +1 (Precise Pangolin) - Ubuntu Forums

rename 's/^./dot_/' `ls -d .*` Command renames all the dot files and folders at the current level but not recursively. Use (with backups) when upgrading to dump the config files...

mjg59 | TVs are all awful

"Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s." Strange, but true

Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » The Cost of Going it Alone

upstreamyness

Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » Lessons learned

Some of this company politics stuff. I can't find hard documentation of decisions that turn design -> code. Its all 'who is arguing with who'. Like a big flame war on some forum.

ThreePointZero/Plan - GNOME Live!

A more detailed planning document for Gnome Shell by Vincent Untz

The R programming language for programmers coming from other programming languages

"The R language is the scripting language for the R environment, just as VBA is the scripting language for Microsoft Excel. Some of the more unusual features of the R language begin to make sense when viewed from this perspective." Seems a sensible way of looking at it

GnomeShell/Technology - GNOME Live!

Nice technology block diagram showing how the whole Gnome Shell interface sits on opengl

GnomeShell/FAQ - GNOME Live!

Marketing language being used in an explanatory document.

Building a Precise Pangolin: A summary of UDS success | Ubuntu Cloud Portal

What it says on packet

File:ASR-33 2.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Teletype image: CC licensed. My first computer interface.

Design/Apps - GNOME Live!

The GNOME design whiteboards

GnomeShell/Design/Principles - GNOME Live!

Some fairly harmless principles that Gnome Shell people have adopted. Has at least some references to actual publications

nedrichards.com - nick richards

Notes for the iterations keynote that Richards gave in Berlin (these open sourcers get around).

GNOME Shell: Iteration's what you need | Desktop Summit

Nick Richards is an Intel open source geezer who is into customisation and extensions on Gnome Shell

Red Hat Magazine | Tour of GNOME Online Desktop

GNOME online desktop was a pre-cursor to Gnome Shell at least in the sense that the developers worked on it. Its about integrating online accounts into a desktop. What is an enterprise desktop for? NOTE: these days probably has to integrate to online/web based CRM, contacts, calendar for mobile phone sync if nothing else.

GNOME-Designer Jon McCann about the future of GNOME3 - Linux/Unix - derStandard.at › Web

Interview with the Gnome 3 geezer

Ubuntu Linux heads to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. | ZDNet

shuttleworth on devices

The best American wall map: David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” - Slate Magazine

Hand labelling over computer plotted topography. Site is down as bandwidth has been exceeded, so Mr Imus will need to work on his back orders. Long live Will Tirion

bartaz/impress.js - GitHub

CSS and js zooming presentation application emulating prezzi without the Flash. Via hacker news. Works best in Chrome/Safari. Slow in Firefox 10

GnomeShell/Design - GNOME Live!

More pointers to information about design choices

GnomeShell/Design/FAQ - GNOME Live!

Reasons for Gnome Shell

GnomeShell/CheatSheet - GNOME Live!

Gnome Shell keyboard shortcuts. Yes, you have to press a key to close the system down.

Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives, Part Two - Joel on Software

"Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions."

AppleInsider | Apple design chief Jonathan Ive awarded knighthood

"I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making," he said. "I discovered at an early age that all I've ever wanted to do is design." "Ive, who grew up in Chingford, a town northeast of London, credits his silversmith father with inspiring him as a designer."

The Dumbest Idea In The World — www.forbes.com — Readability

Where the shareholder value idea came from

Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy - Joel on Software

UI design walk through by an ex-microsoft programmer who worked on Office. Practical, aimed at programmers.

Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD Quick Start

For when someone boots the live CD and can't work out how the Unity interface works... Just two pages designed to print back to back and fold to form a four page single sided handout. Works at A4 page size. The first page of the PDF file is pages 2 and 3 of the guide, and the second page of the PDF file is pages 1 and 4 of the guide.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

And the Man's own web site looks more professional and inviting than the newspaper that published the article about his work...

NYT: A Literary History of Word Pro

The history of writing on computers is being written by the look of it...

BBC News - Train-switching technology 'poses hacking threat'

"A group of manufacturers met to address this and decided to switch to a single digital standard to ensure they could source replacement parts and make different companies' systems interoperable." Here we go...

Darts, Dice, and Coins

The computer programming aspects of discrete probability

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz - tech - 27 December 2011 - New Scientist

"Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp." That is some serious power

NetworkConfigurationCommandLine/Automatic - Community Ubuntu Documentation

Networking from the command line just in case

Thought bucket » Blog Archive » Creating a kiosk with Linux and X11: 2011 edition

How to do a kiosk in Linux

gLabels - LibreOffice doesn't have label generation built in...

...so these nice people wrote gLabels. Knows about standard peel and stick label sizes, and business cards.

Inkscape

Comprehensive book about Inkscape kindly provided free on HTML by the author. I intend to work through the quick start then consider buying the paper version from Amazon UK. Yes, paper, the Kindle doesn't do technical manuals well...

NoConformity | Learn to Code: A Non-technical Co-founder's Guide

program or be programmed example. Note the html hiccup (manual mark up added on top of a programmed template)

inessential.com: ‘Gamification’ sucks

That old thing about UIs for beginners being different to UIs for regular users of software? Or something new?

lisp.jpg (JPEG Image, 740×220 pixels)

Wicked and evil. Happy Christmas for those that keep the holiday and best wishes to all

The Linux Experience: Synapse and a bit about Gnome Dictionary

Synapse looks fun

Git In The Trenches

A free book about software repositories and version control. Uses fictional scenarios in a small company to liven up what could be a dry subject. Comes free as a pdf or as the LaTeX sources, themselves in a git repository. PS: the author did the Ubuntu Login Sound.

Stephen Voida - Giornata

An example of an activity based interface running on Mac OS. Has a section looking at desktop metaphor.

[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

Linus having a wobbly

The Ultimate Guide to Golden Ratio Typography

I'm not sure that rounding errors of 2% make that much difference, but I stand to be corrected. Application of arithmetic involving Golden Section to column width and line spacing on a Web page

Valerie Aurora

"The cultural phenomenon that has the most potential to overcome all the old prejudices and oppression is doing worse than the mainstream “closed” versions in many cases" Strange isn't it? Involvement in any of the incidents documented by Valerie Aurora would get you the sack in most large commercial companies.

Document Centric Gnome presentation by Frederico Mena-Quintero

Nice clear presentation that has me using the Dash a little more. I tend to work in a folder tree though and have little problem finding files.

TedPage

Ted Gould is an Ubuntu developer, and he spent some time recording his mouse track while using an application. Menu not used much. Suggests it does not matter where the menu goes!

The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen)

"But the next generation of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of obsolete technologies. Instead, we need to develop new interface paradigms based on the structure of computer systems and the tasks users really have to perform, rather than paradigms that enshrine outmoded technology."

Bad UI of the Week: The Menu Bar | Bad UI of the Week: The Menu Bar | InformIT

"There are a number of approaches to displaying the menu bar, and none of them are ideal in all situations. The screen-attached menu doesn’t scale to large screens. The per-window menu is difficult to hit in a lot of uses. The floating menu encourages clutter, and the mouse-invoked menu is difficult for touch-screen users and provides no visual clue to its existence for others. " Implications of the Unity fixed menu bar for X remote sessions: I hadn't thought of this. Scroll down to the X window bit...

Bug #883533 in unity (Ubuntu): “HighContrast miss shutdown button”

Look at Post #9. This is how to correct an annoying bug with the high contrast themes in Ubuntu 11.10. Then you can use the high contrast themes for screen grabs in training material, they reproduce much better than the lower contrast ones, especially if you are using monochrome printing for paper materials.

John Resig - JavaScript as a First Language

Finding a simple language to teach people who might be interested in learning programming is not easy these days. BASIC isn't around, and most languages have advanced features, which get used fully in production code. The Khan Academy is going for JavaScript.

The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why

Nothing new under the sun. The partition of tasks between the client and the server, new 21st century edition

Click or Tap: mock up of a new interface for LibreOffice

Better than a ribbon bar... I think

Haskell for the Evil Genius

Haskell tutorial. Still can't get my head around xmonad.

Response to an Ubuntu Manual Critique : Kevin Godby

"Instead of presenting step-by-step instructions for, say, scanning a photo using Simple Scan, we could provide instructions and tutorials on creating a great-looking birthday card that incidentally requires the reader to learn how to scan the photo, touch it up (to remove red eye, crop it to the appropriate size, etc.), install a funky font, pull the photo into Inkscape, lay it out on the page, set up her printer to use the special card stock she bought just for the occasion, etc." Sounds like "Do everything with Ubuntu" approach. The Ubuntu Manual is a less product oriented more task oriented publication. And a very impressive one as well.

The Minister of Information — nymag.com — Readability

"But Tufte, through his own Graphics Press, is the book’s publisher, and he doesn’t do the usual quick month of hard promotion before heading back to his desk. He keeps going on the road, selling steadily, a few gigs a month, year after year. That may be why there are 1.4 million copies of his titles in print—a staggering figure for self-publishing. (The top seller, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has been a reliable mover since 1983.)" Or perhaps the books sell well because they are excellent? Word of mouth, recommendations by lecturers, book lists

$ cheat ffmpeg

ffmpeg command line examples

The Command Line Crash Course Controlling Your Computer From The Terminal

Another Zed Shaw book this time about the command line

India’s “missed call” mobile ecosystem — Mobile Technology News

"It’s essentially the poor man’s text message: a free way to nudge another person or company, but which comes in just one flavor." 'The street finds its own uses for things'

Comment #139 : Bug #869502 : Bugs : “linux” package : Ubuntu

Asus EeePC rapidly becoming unusable with Ubuntu 11.10 due to kernel panics, so using this script to switch off the wlan power saving which appears to be part of the problem. See if this holds up...

RIM is rotting from within | ITworld

"Most of the design decisions at RIM are made by 50 something engineers, otherwise highly accomplished and credible in the field of engineering. But since they've lived most of their lives in the rural areas of Southern Ontario, and don't have any real background or even social sensibility for culture, design and such issues, they're woefully unqualified for the task of aesthetic judgement." Well, I'm 50 something as well, and I rather like my Blackberry 9300. It does what I need. Love the e-mail.

Map of CPAN

Really nice implementation. A version of this for GCSE Maths would be wicked.

Bach Cello Suites visualized

Nice idea

USB Pendrive HowTo

Mentioned in a post on Ubuntuforums by effenberg0x0. Might explain why the Kingston Traveller's won't ever produce a useable bootable usb.

Don Norman's jnd.org / HCD harmful? A Clarification — www.jnd.org — Readability

"The problem, however, is that HCD has developed as a limited view of design. Instead of looking at a person's entire activity, it has primarily focused upon page-by-page analysis, screen-by-screen. As a result, sequences, interruptions, ill-defined goals — all the aspects of real activities, have been ignored."

Ubuntu, Firefox updates, beta and why we need you » Chris Coulson's blog

Beta channel for Firefox

Don Norman's jnd.org / Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful

"The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior."

Focus on the Job, Not the Customer | The Intercom Blog

A practical example of a persona being used

The Messy Art Of UX Sketching - Smashing UX Design

Via Hacker News. Sketching for thinking through problems (in this case user interface designs) rather than as final product

Bug #869502 in linux (Ubuntu): “Kernel-Panic with 3.0.0.12-generic on asus eee pcs and msi wind (both using rt2800 wifi chipset)”

Asus EeePC has low frequency kernel panics on 3.0.0.14 so trying 3.0.1-rc kernel to see if it has been addressed or gone away. This bug links issue to the wifi driver, but not sure about that as I was getting panics just on this machine on 3.0.0.11

Vim: revisited

Old school editor tutorial. Good hints and the Web page uses a very nice style for keyboard characters <kbd>

Weby templates are easier, faster, and more flexible :: Joseph Perla

Another python html template library. Like buses, none for ages then three come along at once. From Hacker News discussion.

Pure python templates using with statement — Gist

Read this for the code

Pinboard: bookmarks for keithpeter

Amazon's Kindle Fire lets kids charge up a storm - Yahoo! Singapore Finance

"What happens is that when you order a Kindle Fire - which differs from the Kindle reader by allowing users to browse the web, play games, video and music - it comes with your Amazon account information preloaded, along with "1-Click" ordering. That means anyone who is holding that device can place an order, whether it's their account or not. No prompts come up to confirm the purchase or ask for a password." Someone *really* thought through their user personae when they were designing this product. Via Daringfireball (My electric ink Kindle needed some kind of registration with the web site but that could be because we are in the UK, or possibly because I did not have one-click enabled in the main account.)

No Copyright Intended - Waxy.org

"Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote." Young people's understanding of copyright.

The end of social - O'Reilly Radar

"Taking this a couple of steps further, the article points out that, to many people, Facebook's "frictionless" sharing doesn't enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let's go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It's also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what's queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless."

In Defense of Friction « Social Media Collective

"There is no doubt that technology has made my life much easier. I rarely share the romantic view that things were better when human beings used to do the boring tasks that machines now do. For example, I do not think there is much to gain by bringing back the old telephone operators. However, there are reasons to believe social computing systems should not automate social interactions."

Facebook Is Making Us Miserable - Daniel Gulati - Harvard Business Review

"In writing Passion & Purpose, I monitored and observed how Facebook was impacting the lives of hundreds of young businesspeople. As I went about my research, it became clear that behind all the liking, commenting, sharing, and posting, there were strong hints of jealousy, anxiety, and, in one case, depression." Some kind of equilibrium needs to be found for these new kinds of interaction. It took a generation to get the hang of coffee houses...

Alphasmart Neo word processor: retro simplicity and a very good keyboard | eBay

maybe make a bid in a few days

How the iPad 2 Became My Favorite Computer — technologizer.com — Readability

"Without the ZaggFolio, I used the iPad mostly for reading and light productivity. I’d happily type brief e-mails on it, but never anything as long as a meaty blog post or article. But Zagg’s no-compromise keyboard made typing every bit as comfy as it is on a notebook. All of a sudden I could write hundreds of words on the iPad. Or thousands of them." Well, yes, if you produce words for a living, what you need is a full size keyboard. Then anything becomes a production platform, even a 486 running a command line!

iPad 2 as a serious writing machine (how-to) | ZDNet

"What makes the iPad 2 and keyboard combo so effective for my writing is the “one app at a time” nature of the tablet. The running app takes up the entire screen, and thus my focus. There are no distractions presented while writing, just inputting words on the screen." Er - a netbook off ebay for fifty quid, Ubuntu and PyRoom. Job done. Alternatively, an Alphasmart Neo.

Annette Gendler: Hemingway on Writing

The Hemingway Trick works for prosaic worksheet writing as well as stories!

An interview with Derek Sivers

"By default, I boot into raw console mode. No Xorg. No graphics. It keeps me focused and writing, keeps me away from a web browser. I think my best work is done in this mode." I suppose I could use TeX and gs to do the graphics... Text only is fine for writer types. I just use a laptop and go somewhere without wifi, or 'forget' to switch the router on or something.

Mathematical Illustrations

Gnarly coodinate transformations coded in rpn syntax. Amazing. Directly code mathematical illustrations in PostScript. Could be useful to motivate the creation of functions in Python to draw basic types of chart, symbol & and export them as .eps files

Unity 2d tutorial guide

A 30 page handout with a series of activities designed to walk you through the Ubuntu Unity 2d desktop features. Based on an install of the Desktop CD.

Kindle Fire Usability Findings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Fat fingers

Browse vs. Search: Which Deserves to Go?

Scanners and searchers

Beware the bozo loop

"Quick, what's full of security holes, constantly needing to be patched, piggish enough to make your laptop sound like a jet engine, and yet probably installed everywhere?" Begins with F

[ubuntu] Thinkpad T420, Ubuntu 11.04 Fan running all the Time - Page 6 - Ubuntu Forums

Thinkfan instructions work for the T60 - hacked a config file that quietens the fan down a little.

QML | Ubuntu App Developer

Ubuntu have a developer page for QML but not too much there yet.

BBC News - Charity pressures councils over million empty homes

"In Wales, local authorities have powers to make empty houses available to those in need of homes. Conway council is the latest local authority looking to make use of these powers." Near where I live there are three huge Victorian villas boarded up, one with fire damage. No action as owners (development company) bankrupt. We need this regulation in England.

Убу́нту Моно: «Г» «Њ њ Љ љ» «Ђ ђ Ћ ћ» « Canonical Design

"Japanese uses different writing systems, for example there are Kanji (about 50 000 chars) and Kana (about 100), where the Kanji represent meanings while the Kana are more like western letters, but representing syllables. Kana are divided by two subsets: Hiragana and Katakana, where Hiragana is the most used part of." Clearest summary of Japanese writing systems I have come across. In a comment.

Ubuntu and QML | jonobacon@home

"I went to the Qt Developer Days conference with a simple question: could someone write Angry Birds in QML. In other words, can you write a fun, vibrant, visually attractive game in the high-level, managed environment that is QML." Looks like the answer might be 'yes'

Presentation Zen: Kamishibai: Lessons in visual storytelling from Japan

"Interestingly, some kamishibai masters from the 1950s noted that their young audiences became less engaged and were more passive as TV became popular. Kids became used to just sitting in front of content rather than engaging with it." Students now do *interact* with their Blackberries, so maybe I need kamishibai for phones...

Polar Bear hair has the same reflection profile as snow...

...hence you won't see them using infrared but you can using UV. Nice 'cool' bit of science.

Cutting their own throats - Charlie's Diary

"DRM is snake oil; ultimately the reader has to be able to read whatever they bought, which means shipping a decryption key along with the encrypted file. And once they've got the key, someone will figure out how to use it to unlock the book." Charlie's got it (although I pay for my Kindle books).

Welcome to Prineville, Oregon: Population, 800 Million | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

data centre details. Its all about hot air.

Ti Point Tork » Blog Archive » Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong

"Our grandparents grew up with very little. They valued every possession. I know this because I live in my grandparents’ old house and I’m still finding balls of odd-lengthed twine in the basement. In fact, we humans evolved with very little. We were always starving for food, short of objects, desperate for information." Essay about the role of libraries and what they should be archiving for the future.

Ivo – lubutu

nice simple page style. Terminal hair shirt linux

Simple-Kanban | The one file kanban board application

One html page with self-contained js. Could hack the headings and turn it into a simple task tracker.

Tyranny of the Tools

"We find that things we look at -- even in a casual, off-hand manner -- are the things we think about. We also find that as we see things, we work on them in our mind in the background. We make a lot more progress letting our subconscious mind work on things while we're busy with more important stuff, like technology development." So we teach people in rooms painted flat white. New Building Syndrome has to be resisted.

Ubuntu Unity Guide (Unity 2d)

Ubuntu is going for world domination with their Unity interface. PCs in education tend to have weak graphics and be a few years old. Here is a 1 hour lesson exploring Ubuntu default install as you could run of a USB stick. First draft. Workspaces section needs a little looking at.

DBMS pioneer Bachman: 'Engineers have more fun than academics' • The Register

"Talking to The Reg this month, Bachman reckons his dyslexia may have worked to his advantage: "I found reading harder than writing so I've always been in a situation where I was writing the forward-looking article because I didn't know what others were doing."" IDS designer - how you process 275 Million transactions a day.

An interview with Richard Jones

"At work I have a laptop stand made out of an old cardboard box, made by tracing/cutting around an existing cardboard laptop stand, and slotting it together. I pirated my laptop stand." Brit uses Ubuntu and pirates his hardware

David Foster Wallace’s syllabus: Is there any better? - Slate Magazine

Via daringfireball. In the US at University level teachers write their own syllabii and define their own criteria for ordinal scale assessment 'grades'. Wallace's syllabii show an honesty about the teaching role and about the student role that is refreshing.

Loper OS » Why Hypercard Had to Die

Via Hacker News: suggestion that end user programming was seen as disruptive to the market.

PressPausePlay

Film about digital tools and their relationship to creativity.

Bug #882274 in unity: “Community engagement is broken”

Can a change in UI design be described as a bug if it breaks a commonly used work flow? Interesting dialogue, and some examples. My own use of computers in general is not sufficiently intense for this to matter much to me, I spend most of my online time in a Web browser, slightly less in an office package, and a lot less in a photo editor, audio editor and a drawing program. Finally well back in the long tail is some programming using maths related languages (pyxplot and R).

BBC News - Coding - the new Latin

"But the problem, according to those campaigning for change, begins at school with ICT - a subject seen by its detractors as teaching clerical skills rather than any real understanding of computing." Yup, but LOGO back in the primary schools.

Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming

Book with a javascript console built in. Nice. Via Hacker News (ycombinator)

SchoolTool: the Global Student Information System

Runs on Ubuntu with a package for Fedora. Via Stephen Downes' blog.

Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge - Less Wrong

Can I use any of these to help my students to spend more time doing maths, which we all know is the only way to understand maths and therefore pass the exams? Caution from Weiten, quoted in an e-mail to the author... "Perhaps I am overly cynical, but I suspect that empirical tests are nonexistent because the authors of self-help and time-management titles are not at all confident that the results would be favorable. Hence, they have no incentive to pursue such research because it is likely to undermine their sales and their ability to write their next book."

Low vitamin D linked to heart disease, death | Reuters

"The study does not prove that vitamin D is the cause of the effects seen -- other factors, like disease, could be responsible both for the differences in health and the differences in vitamin D levels, for instance." Correlation != causality Useful teaching case

Turn On the Server. It’s Cold Inside. — www.nytimes.com — Readability

"Researchers, however, have come up with an intriguing option for that wasted heat: putting it to good use in people’s homes." Used to be swimming pools in the 1960s heated by mainframes...

Goldstrasz/Pantle: Kittler's Theory of Misuse

"...prompts Kittler to formulate his general theory that the "entertainment industry is, in all senses of the term, misuse of military equipment" (GFT p.149), a viewpoint he then supports by tracing the post-WWI civilian careers of military wireless equipment and its surviving operators." I'd always thought of RCA hiring out audio amplifiers to cinemas as the starting point of electronics in media, but I suppose seeing where the engineers went after the war is a good methodology.

The Power User’s Guide to Unity

Big list 'o links about Unity desktop and as always no curation so different versions mixed in, e.g. tab in dash has different behaviours documented. Section on correct terminology.

Ubuntu Desktop Guide

The official Ubuntu Unity guide which assumes that 3d graphics is working

[SOLVED] USB power management - Kindle does not charge - Ubuntu Forums

You have to plug in and eject twice in quick succession to get your Kindle e-ink to charge properly on Ubuntu. No idea why!

A cool solution to a rotten problem | Practical Action

Evaporation cooling in the Sudan.

All commands sorted by votes | commandlinefu.com

Vote up your favourite bash commands. I love the linux community.

elusivesnark

2560 dice, and the back of the portrait is a negative image.

The plumber programmer | Hacker News

Programmers in the enterprise application space talking about the little arrows between the boxes. I am actually one of the little arrows. I've spent a lot of hours this week reformatting information from one source and putting it in another place. Its internal inspection time again...

Edward Tufte forum: Touchscreens have no hand

"One reason I make sculpture is that I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens that show only flatland representations of real things. I like to make real things and Iove the physicality of making sculpture that resides in the physical world of three-space and time."

Unity+XMonad in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric | Mark Hansen

This looks very interesting...

Bug #857348 in libpeas (Ubuntu): “All python plugins are broken by a bad import”

Just spent a bit of time working out why my Gedit plugins won't work even when I use the 3.x ones... With the plugins in the right folder and these libraries installed, all is funky.

Rands In Repose: Why

"Now, as we live in a world divided by opinions acquired via Twitter, it’s never been easier grab onto a clever 140-character quip and assume it’s the truth. The fires of ignorance burn wildly on these acts of intellectual laziness."

An interview with Mary Rose Cook

"However, often, I find it much easier to get into the zone when I’m just using the laptop unadorned. It’s something about hunching over the small screen, I think." I'm noticing this as well for certain tasks (text entry) but not for others (anything that needs several windows).

Bug #92599 in linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20 (Ubuntu): “Incorrect (low/stuttering) refresh rate with NVIDIA driver”

try this on the Asus box

Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value - Smashing Coding

Thought provoking and another data point that suggests I keep the site as simple and design free as possible

Statistics Glossary - presenting data

Just some words - crossword and shorter definitions

westiseast.co.uk - Product listings - a surprising AB test result

Not surprising to me at all. Simple, serial, linear fits most people's reading style. Tables should have a reason for being tables as they impose a cognitive load, i.e. categories across top and down side.

Ten Lessons I wish I had been Taught Gian-Carlo Rota

Old page about lecturing in University and other mathematical career reflections. Worth it for mention of Von Neumann's characterisation of the 50 minute lecture as a 'microcentury'. A microcentury is actually a tad under 53 minutes if you take a mean year as 365.2466 days.

What happened to “asking for help”? » AlwinHoogerdijk.com

What they need is launchpad...

Yelping with Cormac | The Apple Store

Quite funny. Via the daringfireball

What I did use to learn CoffeeScript — Gist

Some references and materials for learning a popular client side library/front end for JavaScript

William McIlvanney, EIBF, August 15th

‘I don’t believe this is a planned universe – and if it is, I don’t like the plan.’ Pure Spirit

A writer's life: William McIlvanney - Telegraph

"I write everywhere - on envelopes, on the underground… It's a mania, a benign neurosis. I didn't stop writing. I didn't say, I'll take 10 years off."

Natural Loyalties: The Work of William McIlvanney

Gave the Laidlaw novels away years ago, just ordered Strange Loyalties a second time. Walking Wounded remains a guide and reference.

Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities | 43 Folders

"So, if a mud room, or a crying toddler, or a CPR class, or even a short note from an old friend turns up on your radar screen today, don't ask yourself whether it's a "priority." Ask yourself what you must not do in order to make sure it gets taken care of. " Merlin: Get the book written! The Amazon page is worse tan trains in New St.

Steven Poole: Whatever made you think it was your data anyway?

"If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow."

[ubuntu] How to tweak your Thinkpad t60 after installing Oneiric Ocelot 11.10 - Ubuntu Forums

T60 tweaks for Ubuntu 11.10, no mention of fan control problems yet so may have been sorted since 10.04

Comparison of data analysis packages: R, Matlab, SciPy, Excel, SAS, SPSS, Stata | AI and Social Science – Brendan O'Connor

Exploring R and python-with-libraries right now

paigesaez.org

I think I like the text size - certainly makes a statement on a large screen and looks fine on mobile opera. Via The Setup

Probability Summary GCSE New syllabus up to grade C

Just the basic facts on two sides of A4. No problems and just a basic example of each fact. Its really a summary to guide revision and problem solving and to help with the vocabulary found in textbooks.

Our Unpaid, Extra Shadow Work - NYTimes.com

"This is “shadow work,” a term coined 30 years ago by the Austrian philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich, in his 1981 book of that title. For Dr. Illich, shadow work was all the unpaid labor — including, for example, housework — done in a wage-based economy." I hadn't linked self-checkout with Ivan Illich, but I do avoid them...

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

Why the GUI needs to be customisable, preferably through GUI tools. People have different workflows.

a test which divides programming sheep from non-programming goats

Very interesting, complete with test, mark scheme and rationale. I might try this one out. a = b will strike many as a statement whose truth needs to be decided rather than as an assignment. I may reword the test using words like 'set a = b'

CodeKata: Code Kata One - Supermarket Pricing

A series of exercises in coding but this first one could form the basis of a nice activity for maths students when we look at 'best buy' problems.

This One Hurts « Dr. Walter Bortz's II's Blog

A remarkably honest doctor writing about having John McCarthy (inventor of LISP) as a patient.

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | www.kalzumeus.com | Readability

"Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc. Software solves business problems." I don't think that is boring at all. I find working out how obscure facets of businesses work fascinating. The almost fractal nature of all this buying and selling and tracking and measuring and the way it all fits together like a puzzle.

Longform.org

Longer reading...

Why Is This Cargo Container Emitting So Much Radiation? | Magazine

"As they decay, many radioisotopes emit gamma rays, and those occur at specific energy levels. Whatever was in the box was giving off gamma rays at 1,173 and 1,332 kiloelectron volts. It could be only one thing: cobalt-60 slowly alchemizing itself into nickel." Industrial x-ray or medical equipment. Cobalt 60 is sometimes packaged as small egg like nodules, an old X ray machine was dumped in Brazil years ago and children were found playing with the nodules... Via hacker news

Public-key cryptography

Description of the basics with some of the maths

Pinboard: howto page

Low Discipline Methodology

"I nominate: shorten the delivery increments to 4-12 weeks. Give a small team a war room to share and a qualified technical leader. Keep distractions away. Get the team training as they need it, people to give them information and feedback on their work."

Lifes Too Short

"I had a Eureka moment recently where I realized something that is inter-twined with LifesTooShort. It is this -- "There are no style points." Or, you might word it as "No one is grading this." " Ward's Wiki, LifesTooShort page

Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated - GeekWire

"Warren Buffett and I are two wealthiest Americans. Believe rich should give away wealth more than they do. Warren is only person to have a tax named after him. You can be very frustrated with the political system, I certainly am. Met with House members to talk about science cuts. Don’t think getting rid of wealth will solve problems. Need to fix education system, get cost of health care down, and society will feel more equitable." Bill Gates at his old University

The answer is 2011. The question can be brute force.

Irresistible. We shall have to try the game (with physical mini-whiteboards)

BBC News - Education spending 'falling fastest since 1950s'

"The IFS warns that the biggest long-term losers could be early years support, youth services and 16-to-19 education in England. They will lose an estimated 20%, but unlike universities, the IFS suggests their cuts will not be offset by private funding." 'Interesting' times ahead I suspect

REWORK: The new business book from 37signals.

Read the sample chapter. Twice. I've already got four books queued on the Kindle so I'm not buying this one for now.

A Review of Douglas Rushkoff's "Program or Be Programmed" | Social Memory Complex

"Those who control where that text box shows up - and where the text entered into it gets squirreled off to, and how it's ultimately used - are still exercising supremacy. Unless we can build our own software, or at least realize we're not fully in control of that text, we're at their mercy." Perhaps we all need our own Shiva Plug based Web server next to the router as well, as Dave Winer is always suggesting.

3.6.2 String Formatting Operations

formatting characters for python

Dell Latitude C600 xorg.conf file

For the low spec test machine that uses ATI graphics

CSS Color Names

Really useful page.

All Your Apps Are Welded Boxes - CogDogBlog

"View Source… is the most overlooked element of the open web." Yup, people can learn by just reverse engineering the page.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011 - New Scientist

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based." Nice application of graph theory to the links between large Trans National Corporations. Via Stephen Downes: Half an Hour blog

How the Japanese IT Industry Destroys Talent | Japan -- Business People Technology | www.japaninc.com

"In a magnetic disk factory, for instance, there was a man who could read micron level scratches with his naked eyes in many cases better than a million dollar microscope. In a metal-forming factory, I met a technician who could tell the curvatures of the metal surface just by touching it. His accuracy was comparable to that of a 3D precision measurement machine. He could then make fine adjustments on the forming machine, which was controlled by hundreds of parameters according to his feel." I'm very slightly sceptical of micron eyesight resolution (wavelength of light being 440nm for green) but I've worked with people that can work by knowledge sight and feel like this. Almost any accomplished violin player can play a scale in equal or true temperament at request. Is IT necessarily different? Code smells? Ability to 'grok' large quantities of information? Via Hacker News

Statistical Computing with R: A tutorial

Big gallery of R graph types with data and script files.

Using R for statistical analyses - Introduction

What it says on the packet. Short sections on the main commands.

Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - WriteRoom/Darkroom/?

Early version of pyroom using just a textarea object on a window. Hackable.

Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python

python resource including easter eggs

Software Popularity - r4stats.com

An interview with Zed Shaw

"I honestly could probably code with nearly anything, so having the same setup as the end user is more important than having the most awesome piece of tech ever." Sensible approach. "I have way too many guitars. My favorite guitar is a G&L ASAT Classic S, but it has single coil pickups so it’s hard to record with it." Why not just put whole fx chain into a small amplifier and then record the sound?

This Itch of Writing: How don't you do it?

"They are both teachers but, asked to explain something mathematical to O Level Emma, Carola will explain it as algebra, Sophia as co-ordinate geometry; each reaches for her own most natural way of expressing the same concepts." Used as an example to cast light on the writing of novels, but true literally.

Excel Box and Whisker Diagrams (Box Plots) | Peltier Tech Blog | Excel Charts

Box and whisker plots on MS Excel. I use Gnumeric under Linux for these types of graphs.

Web block would 'spark arms race' against pirates • The Register

You can't solve a social problem with a technical fix. Discuss.

The coffeeshop fallacy - Blog

"Caring about the product seems to be the most dangerous. It's how the coffeeshop fallacy pops up and it's how people end up spending years building stuff nobody wants to buy."

IdentityBlog - Digital Identity, Privacy, and the Internet's Missing Identity Layer

Nice one for teanage students...

Two sides on cumulative frequency and the box and whisker plot

A two sided handout on cumulative frequency curves and the box and whisker plot. This topic is a 'grade b' topic in the new AQA syllabus so I needed to differentiate for students on an evening class who may wish to take Unit 1 and Unit 2 at higher level. Worked ok with mymaths 'lesson' as backup.

emergency protractors

The cupboard was bare, so I used the eps version of the vector drawing of measuring instruments mentioned below to isolate a 180 degree protractor scale. I used inkscape to remove the delicate gradients (which just confused my laser printer) and then copied the grouped drawing so I have 6 protractors per A4 page. Laminated 3 pages of them in assorted colours and cut them out. Accuracy ok for drawing a pie chart given a pre-drawn reference circle.

Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"OpenClass has a Facebook-like news stream that captures activity and comments for each class, and a page that highlights different people taking a course, along with the questions, troubles, and solutions that they post online." Via Hacker News. Hosted, not open source on your server. Need to see terms of service to check what re-use of social graph is going on. Also how accessible to teachers? Does Google Apps for Education work for freelance tutors? Just a few concerns, glad to see some change in the space.

An interview with William Gibson

"Good interface design is as transparent as possible, because I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on."

The Internet Intellectual

Free Vector Ruler, Triangle & Protractor | fuzzimo

Free vector drawings of a selection of rulers, set squares and a couple of 180 degree protractors. Loads into Inkscape. The large image can be ungrouped, then the smaller 180 degree protractor re-grouped and copied to a new file. I used the eps format. The post-it notes and pins look nice as well. My Atom netbook with 1 Gb is just about able to manipulate the 16Mb eps file in Inkscape...

Coding Horror: Serving at the Pleasure of the King

Current phone is an Orange Rio, which is serviceable but not especially smart. Thinking about an Android for next year. Need a single column outliner app. Apple is a closed world. I need a more open one (albeit not properly open because of the way Google is sitting on later Android releases)

BBC News - Number of top A-Level grades could be limited

Does anyone else remeber S levels? Harder exams based on the same syllabus as the A level in a given subject?

what's your C migration plan? -- wingolog

C and security - an aspect I had not thought of

BBC News - Wellington College head: 'Schools becoming exam factories'

"Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, said measuring a school based on grades was "ultimately juvenile"" Well said Sir

Bret Victor, Tangle

Tangle library for making parts of Web pages interactive. See link below this one

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

Very nice illustrated essay. The embedded simulations are produced using a javascript library that the author provides.Via Hacker News (Ycombinator)

Throw your toys out of the pram

Mark Pilgrim has written many useful books and works for Google. He seems to have withdrawn from the Web and deleted Web sites, source code repositories and other resources. Oddly adolescent behaviour from a father and leader but there you go. Its his work (even though the licences were irrevocable). Others are using the wayback machine to copy and establish mirrors (which I assume was anticipated).

The legacy of Steve Jobs | www.washingtonpost.com | Readability

"Jobs exemplified that familiar American figure: the self-made man who had a vision and, through determination and intelligence, popularized his vision, making a fortune in the process. In this, Jobs resembles Edison, Ford, John D. Rockefeller and others." --Robert Samuelson This I agree with. However, I do think that mobile communications will bring changes on a par with electrification in a generation or two. The writer seems somewhat out of the loop. I'm linking to the 'readability' render of the original article as the original page is positively epileptogenic in its busyness. Via daringfireball

Linux Fundamentals, Part 1 - Funtoo Linux

The basics from the originator of Gentoo Linux

notes.variogr.am - Why music ID resolution matters to every music fan on Facebook

If we are going to have 'frictionless' social web, then I suppose we need to do it properly and have granular tagging of media. Via Hacker News

Bootstrap, from Twitter

A style sheet from twitter with a nice clean appearance. Fixed width, two column and multicolumn layouts. Via Scripting news

Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial

What it says on the tin

RTÉ.ie RTÉ Radio 1 "Reading Ulysses"

Listen to the last one first

Devour.com | Awesome Hand-Picked Videos

The Jobs video tribute. I also really like the grid layout on this page with the heading class in the middle of each graphic.

fizzPOP

October 26th Show and Tell by local makers.

Javascript bitshift sound generator

An in-browser realisation of the link below about bitshifting formulas producing demo music

countercomplex: Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code -- how and why?

C programs that dump PCM audio directly. Circuit hacking software style.

Seven Minutes in Ubuntu | Thomas Park

Nice review of 11.04 Ubuntu with the Unity interface. I remain wedded to the panel at the bottom with an application menu on the left and system information and indicators on the right. So I choose to use Xubuntu.

Innovation Starvation | World Policy Institute

Neal Stephenson on US turn away from heavy government science

A VC: Minimum Viable Personality

The writing style is mock primitive, but I like the drawings. Most software I use is just 'commodity'. Web browser, office package, photo editor, music playback, sound recorder/editor. Multiple choices, viable on any OS. Via hacker news

Simple Made Easy – Rich Hickey

Notes on 'simple' and 'easy' in the context of programming from a talk. Video of talk will be uploaded eventually

Open-source hardware group puts out vid system-on-a-chip • The Register

"What's remarkable is that a loose coalition of 10 or so people has managed to design a system on a chip and get that integrated into a production board to create a sellable product, all under the open-source banner. We were impressed when the NanoNote could be viable with a production run of 3,000, but to create any product with a viable production run of 80 is an impressive step towards entirely bespoke hardware." Bring this on! Bespoke hardware, customizable software, small businesses making devices that run business apps to collect data. Imagine marking registers and having all your student data available from an encrypted central server on one of these.

Open-source hardware group puts out vid system-on-a-chip • The Register

Amazing

What good Web Developers should know about sending E-mail - Diary of a Ninja...

spf records need sorting for my domain as mail is sent from a shared server address

MyMaths.co.uk - Integrate

Teachers upload and students put ratings on resources. Nice idea. I've used a couple for stats

High-Resolution Mandelbrot in Obfuscated Python

The program is an ascii art mirror of the images it produces. I'll play with this, something around A4 size would be about right.

Fractions and percentages with a calculator

Covers a little revision on metric conversion and finding the HCF of two numbers to motivate cancelling down (section A, B). Then finding value of a fraction using a calculator (C) and writing one quantity as a fraction of another (D). Moves into finding the value of a percentage (E) and then writing one quantity as a percentage of another (F). Brief look at percentage increase and decrease (G) and Index numbers, new on the GCSE syllabus (H). This handout is used to focus a lesson delivered in a community centre with a small flip-chart. There are card sorting activities and worksheets to go with it.

keeran's gist: 1197453 — Gist

How to deal with facebook on a linux box

U.K. Retail Price Index

Really brings home the way inflation has dropped over the last 30 years or so. Index numbers have popped up on the syllabus again for GCSE.

Startup company succeeds at hiring autistic adults - Yahoo! News

"Traits that make great software testers — intense focus, comfort with repetition, memory for detail — also happen to be characteristics of autism. People with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism, have normal to high intelligence and often are highly skilled with computers."

Imagine There’s No God Particle | Not Even Wrong

The title alone is enough... should be marking

House of Commons - The failure of the FiReControl project - Public Accounts Committee

"The Department told us it spent £68.6 million on consultants amounting to 76 % of the cost of the central project team." One huge bike shed

Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"

Why I'm using xfce on my netbook (which gets used by normal people).

An interview with Amy Jean Porter

"I’ve had this thing my whole life about trying to make the most out of two crayons and a piece of paper." Draws. Uses scanner to make electronic copies of drawing. Simple use case.

Richard Stallman: “Android Phones Do Not Respect Your Freedom”

Interesting take on the phone os situation. I'd love a basic phone/mobile device platform and then an open source os. Open firmware would be even better. Pods could be reprogrammed for all kinds of special uses, e.g. maths quiz machine, dedicated to updating and displaying maths quizzes...

Super Teacher Worksheets - Printable Worksheets

Handy when you need a worksheet for one student who has a thing about rounding...

L1 Numeracy & Functional Maths work book | Skills Workshop

This looks extremely useful as a guide for L2 students before starting their short course: that spiky profile thing.

Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs

Customised graph paper web application

Migrations Map: Where are migrants coming from? Where have migrants left?

Nice data visualisation with code available, but uses jquery so needs server side stuff

The No-Name Companies Selling More Phones Than Samsung, LG, and Apple Combined - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

"There are several tiers of companies. At the bottom are thousands of mom-and-pop factories that sell some small number of phones. It's unclear how many of them there are because they often sell into the gray market, but they number in the thousands, so the total number of phones they sell is quite large." I'd like to be able to get one of those. I'm hoping a 'mom and pop' phone factory in China offers a more humane working environment than the big free trade area factories

UbuWeb Sound - C.C. Hennix

3 hour Dutch radio programme about Hennix's music from UbuWeb

The Electric Harpsichord by CATHERINE CHRISTER HENNIX - CD/BOOK - Boomkat - Your independent music specialist

"This latest addition to Die Schachtel's sublime Art Series is a largely neglected masterpiece from Swedish-born composer Catherine Christer Hennix, a disciple of LaMonte Young and Pandit Pran Nath during the 1970s. Although her music is largely unknown - even among the experimental music community - those who've been exposed to Hennix's work tend to rank her among the elite of American minimalist composers of the twentieth century. The Electric Harpsichord (recorded in 1976) is talked about with the highest reverence by the avant-garde's cognoscenti, with Glenn Branca describing it as "a pure perfect piece of music" and "a work of transcendent power". Having embarked on her compositional career in the 1960s studying the techniques of Xenakis and Stockhausen, Hennix's musical bearing was jolted somewhat by the Nuits du Fondation Maeght festival in 1970, where she first encountered LaMonte Young and Hindustani raga master Sri Faquir Pandit Pran Nath. Over the course of the ensuing decade, Hennix would study with both these men, and to many the piece reproduced on this disc is her magnum opus. Made using keyboards tuned to just intonation and a tape delay feedback network based on Terry Riley's notion of the "time lag accumulator", the piece is a thing of sparkling psychedelic chaos, achieving that magical dichotomy between apparent narrative-shirking motionlessness and eternal flux. For all its droning stability on a 'macro' level, The Electric Harpsichord's continually recombining layers ensure it remains ceaselessly shifting in 'micro' terms. Significantly, none of this gets out of hand and you can still make out the individual pitches ebbing and flowing within the sound mass. Paying close attention reveals some incredible oceanic movements within the sound waves, and repeat listens reap considerable rewards. This recording lasts twenty-five minutes, though in the strictest terms it should be considered as only a fragment of what the composition represents; in conceptual terms The Electric Harpsichord would be an endless, perpetual entity. In support of the music itself, this release comes in a box that opens to reveal a 60-page booklet containing two LaMonte Young pieces written especially for this edition, plus an extensive essay by Henry Flynt (a close friend of Hennix) as well as some illuminating, if highly technical and abstract background text from Hennix herself, who reproduces excerpts from her "notes on the composite sine-wave drone over which The Electric Harpsichord is performed". This utterly absorbing and highly involved passage is just the thing to show drone music naysayers who think it's all just somebody holding a note for a really long time." I've been after a copy of this for years. Hope some of the dosh goes to Hennix, who is, according to the Wire article, in need of the income. There should be pensions....

Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

"Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table." via Hacker News

Kevin Meredith aka lomokev - Photographer, Teacher and Author

title says it all, good content, Brighton based by the sound of it

An interview with Kevin Meredith

"Because I am dyslexic, I can sometimes spell a word 10 different ways that are not recognized by a spellchecker. I take my different spellings and then input them into Typinator, so when typing as soon as I hit space after spelling words wrong they are auto-corrected. All my Typinator data is stored on Dropbox so that all my machines update text in the same way." Clever, hadn't thought of macroing the common mis-spellings like this!

awk one liners

the twin of sed

Announcing my second e-book "Sed One-Liners Explained" - good coders code, great reuse

80 page workbook of sed one liners

sed one liners

sed commands including # print all of file EXCEPT section between 2 regular expressions sed '/Iowa/,/Montana/d' which might be useful

2011 Calendar | 2011 Month Week Day Planners | Free Download 2011 Calendar

These have UK dates, load in OpenOffice / LibreOffice fine and are very useful!

How long does it take for shuffled poker chips to return to their original state? | Kevin Burke

Now, how many people do you know who will model shuffling small plastic discs using an obscure functional programming language? I like geek pages. Via Hacker News, in a digressive departure while writing lesson plans...

Deft

EMACs mode for managing notes and collections of notes. Blevin's Web site appears to be managed using bloxsom.

Organizational Charts | Bonkers World

The facebook one is nearest the reality of where I work, but officially its amazon.

Skills for Life Numeracy diagnostic materials

This search query produces links from which you can download the diagnostic tests for L2, L1 and the three entry levels for Skills for Life Numeracy. These pdfs are not on the archive site, so the links from readwriteplus archived pages won't work

Conrad Schnitzler (1937–2011) | Blog | Frieze Publishing

"Schnitzler’s distaste for conventional melodies and instrumentation ran deep, back to his childhood. Schnitzler’s father played music, according to Seidel, but whenever young Conrad tried to play an instrument, his father would grab the instrument from his hands to show him how to play it properly" Watch out for 'properly'.

Resource file for teaching

Current location of the Improving Learning in Mathematics materials pdf. Its moved since a teachers meeting in July, so I have blagged my own copy just in case

William Gibson interview: Boing Boing exclusive – Boing Boing

"You don't really get it until you're in a situation in which some entity has invested sixty or seventy million dollars in something and seems to be in the process of deciding that your creative input may be endangering that investment. It's an experience that will definitely get your fullest attention. "

Hands on with Acer's Aspire S3 Ultrabook • reghardware

"Unlike the Air, its major ports - two USBs, HDMI - are on the back." Bit like coming with a stylus really.

HydraHack - Monthly web developer meetup in Birmingham

Possible podcast subject

WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

Quick rough check on accessibility of a Web page. Prints results on top of a render of the page, and highlights any issues.

Debian User Forums • View topic - Web browser can't display Chinse

Japanese and Chinese display fonts for Firefox/Iceweasel in Debian

Author Interviews by Don Swaim

Uncut interviews with a range of writers. These are longish conversations that were then cut down to make a 2 to 3 minute slot that was syndicated on US radio. Interesting to hear the uncut material, and the interviewing style. Most date from mid-1980s

We won and we didn't notice – a conversation with Jeremy Allison of Samba - The H Open Source: News and Features

"People were sloppy. Code was sloppy, and it can't be that any more. Again, this is the same for proprietary software. If you're writing something simple just to test something out, you can throw it together with a minimum of fuss. But as soon as you have to write something that people depend on – and Samba is in that situation, there is a massive amount of work and infrastructure that has to be in place."

Linux Assembly Tutorial - Step-by-Step Guide

"This document consists entirely of unadulterated, hand-coded HTML, written character-for-character in a l33t Linux text editor." Comment found in the HTML code of the page. I was checking to see which of the tex2html converters they were using...

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles - O'Reilly Radar

"Our economy has many elements of a ponzi scheme. We borrow from other countries to finance our consumption, we borrow from our children by saddling them with debt and using up non-renewable resources." Tim O'Reilly putting it all in one sentence like he does

DIY Projects, Inspiration, How-tos, Hacks, Mods & More @ Makezine.com - Tweak Technology to Your Will

O'Reilly's tinkerer web site. Just wait until the Raspberry Pi becomes available.

MISHA GLOUBERMAN'S TERRIBLE NOISES

Essay about a sonic improvisation event in Toronto "Toronto teacher, artist, animator and organizer Misha Glouberman groups his activities under the rubric of The Misha Glouberman School of Learning, a suppositional atelier name that at first seems goofily redundant but subtly is much less frivolous: In his classes and events, he rejuvenates people's innate capacity to learn by freeing them from the goal-oriented regimes of their workday and schoolday and household-managing lives and suggesting an exploratory approach to leisure."

Asciiflow - ASCII Flow Diagram Tool

Strangely addictive and useful. Javascript applet to draw ascii flowcharts that you can copy and paste into plain text documents.

Shell Programming and Scripting - The UNIX and Linux Forums

Forum all about the shell

Education Week Teacher: Five Questions That Will Improve Your Teaching

Interesting set of questions.

An interview with Sirron Norris

"...and I use an iPad instead of a sketchbook" ... "It’s amazing that these kids grow up not knowing the significance of 72 dpi vs. 300 dpi." Future education...

The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - The College For-profits Should Fear

Read the first page of this article carefully. It explains quite a lot about the American educational system on a variety of levels. This is the system that our dear government is taking ideas from. Madness. The Governers University seems to be a good initiative, but one I seem to recall seeing before, rather closer to home!

Why The UK Startup Scene Is Doomed | Zach Inglis

Bankers. Website advice. WTF? I don't know enough about business to know if the deposit requirements are reasonable, but I recognise bikeshedding when I see it

Improvements in Windows Explorer - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

"We also knew that, similar to when we added the ribbon into Office, there would be concerns about reduced screen real estate." Yup, we'll see how the mitigation goes...

The lost world of physicality | John Graham-Cumming

"Now, I'm not against virtual worlds, but they're not the same thing as real worlds. Real worlds are filled with dirt, hazards, sensation, pleasure, effort and more. The virtual world is clean, colourful, free of danger and effortless. What I'm interested to discover is what we've lost by making that transition. What does it mean that virtual success comes without effort?" Interesting, but we have been using images from the media in our world views before the Internet. Cinema / magazines &c

Learn Vim Progressively

I like the illustrations of the command anatomy, stylish typography.

Who’s Going to Protect Us From Cheap and Mediocre Now? | www.mondaynote.com | Readability

"When I first met Steve, in February 1981, he was sitting cross-legged on a credenza in the Apple board room, picking his toes. Since then I’ve watched with glee as he went against received wisdom, causing pundits to have fits at every turn."

BashPitfalls - Greg's Wiki

Learning by analysing errors works in Maths so it might work in Bash scripting as well.

Gedit/Plugins/ExternalTools - GNOME Live!

Make markdown a Gedit plug in Preferences | Plugins | External Tools tab #!/bin/sh #runs markdown from path on current file #TODO: use "gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/applications/terminal/exec" /home/keith/bin/markdown $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH Save the current document, then Input current document, Output create new document and I set the last box to local documents only

Think Stats

"Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers" by Allen B. Downey. In HTML and pdf at no cost and dead tree at cost. Via Hacker News. Nice selection of advanced topics.

Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker | blogs.hbr.org | Readability

Many teachers would nod their heads at Myths 3 and 5. I'm linking to the readability version of the article as the native Web page is so full of blinking stuff it is a health hazard. Via Boing Boing

Vance Gilbert : Racial Profiling First Hand

"Flying While Black & Reading Antique Aviation Books"

Bash For Loop Examples

structure for index page

BMP files

Writing and reading bits to picture files in C

whitney music box var. 0 - chromatic - 48 tines

Nice animated with harmonic tones

P-III autopsy « Sciency stuff

Nice bit of industrial archaeology here! Big format black and white microscope pictures of a P3 processor being dismantled. You can see the actual junctions on the substrate. Good source of desktop wallpaper for techies.

Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor - Slashdot

Stephenson being funny. Good antidote (antipope?) to Charlie Stross.

BBC News - GCSE results: Traditional subjects less popular

"But more are opting to do the sciences in-depth as individual subjects" good!

How to Write a Spelling Corrector

Norvig again, from the Hacker News comments

Prescient but Not Perfect: A Look Back at a 1966 Scientific American Article on Systems Analysis | @ScientificAmerican, Scientific American Blog Network

"Suppose you wanted to run a Web site for people to play checkers. What architecture would allow you to scale up to hundreds or thousands of simultaneous moves per second? How much computing power would you need? How would you make the system secure from malevolent invaders? These are all common concerns of the modern world, but not in Strachey’s time." Peter Norvig's analysis of a paper published in Scientific American in September 1965. How far we have moved! Via Hacker News.

How to get $12 billion of gold to Venezuela | Felix Salmon

David Mamet, Neal Stephenson or Hunter S himself?

Mail::RFC822::Address

"The grammar described in RFC 822 is surprisingly complex. Implementing validation with regular expressions somewhat pushes the limits of what it is sensible to do with regular expressions, although Perl copes well"

Gentoo Linux Documentation -- Learning vi -- the "cheatsheet" technique

Nicely done, I like the drawings.

Nano - Community Ubuntu Documentation

Using the terminal a bit more so this might be handy. Don't fancy learning one of the heavyweights.

BloggEd! » Blog Archive » New digital notepad gadget

Must get some new batteries for the Medion notepad. Alas, does not work out of the box as an input device. The Java convertor for .top files works fine by the way.

The Little Book on CoffeeScript - Introduction

"More importantly though, JavaScript has a lot of skeletons in its closet which can often trip up inexperienced developers. CoffeeScript neatly sidesteps these, by only exposing a curated selection of JavaScript features, fixing many of the language's oddities." That word 'curated' again. They mean 'providing features that work consistently and produce less side effects'

Inferno (operating system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A virtual machine running an operating system under a byte code interpreter... Sounds fast(not) but Umberto Eco would find the names hilarious.

SSH Tutorial for Linux - Support Documentation

Need more practice with scp and recursive directory upload with permissions!

D Bnonn Tennant, Information Highwayman ~ website conversion-rate optimization expert, online marketing consultant, attention-thief

I love the title this web site has! Strange how the word 'design' has changed scope when applied to Web sites compared to, say, print media. In print, a designer is one part of a team who realise a product. In Web, it seems the phrase embraces the whole team.

The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO

Covers those things that you don't get from howtos on forums

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

"The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again." Got to be a maths angle in there that won't demotivate students...

DWM – start up script that works with GDM login manager | Home

Linking to google cached version as original web site has database error. dwm.desktop points to a script that runs then runs dwm.

Debian User Forums • View topic - autostart apps and dwm

Some hints as to how to start dwm with startup programs first with a gdm based log-in manager. There are also examples of the dwm.desktop file pointing to a script that pipes into dwm.

Command Line Notes :: jasonwryan

A much better search function for the command line notes script on 'one thing well'. Nice, but does not work on Debian yet, all terms are matched. I'm wondering if awk is installed. notational velocity

sudo - Debian Wiki

How to add commands to the sudo list and how to add users to the admin group. Use this for running hibernate and shutdown from dwm. It works fine, now I just need to bind a key combination to pm-hibernate. pm-hibernate command is located at /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate

Chapter 6. Building the package

Debian package instructions

Jekyll: Sites Made Simple » SitePoint

Static web sites

A very lightweight volume manager (Page 1) / Community Contributions / Arch Linux Forums

thunar --daemon is a command that runs the thunar volume mounting without running thunar: CHECK man

Fontin - a free font from exljbris Font Foundry

has a good range of diffeences in the ascenders and descenders. Could be good for comic-sans replacement

Wmii - Debian Wiki

another possibility with config file and cli install

Dwm - Debian Wiki

another and less hassly looking way to build dwm

Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - dwm Primer

compiling dwm from debian source sudo aptitude install devscripts debian-keyring sudo aptitude build-dep dwm dget -x http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/dwm/dwm_5.8.2-1.dsc cd dwm-5.3.1 debuild sudo debi debuild gives error about secret key not found. debi completes. assuming this is something to do with making a public package.

Debian User Forums • View topic - What does your desktop look like?

local compile of dwm with symlink to /usr/bin - not sure if this will create a desktop file & such

Olivia's tea cup: It's HOT in New York City

Nice, but no licence on the blog. Assume ok if e-mail

How city kids used to cool off in the summer « Ephemeral New York

people still do it this is a Life photo

File:US Army soldier instructing Afghan National Police Officers how to use a fire hose during a rescue training session at the Civil Military Operations Center, Khost Province, Afghanistan.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

copyright free image of fire hose being used

Hunkin's Experiments (over 200 home experiments)

The Maths ones are old chestnuts but nice to have them drawn in a funny style. I'll block off the 'reason' on the 2 = 3 proof and see who notices.

Classic Mistake Maths Podcasts and Posters - Gallery of Posters and mp3 Files

Fantastic and quirky resource this, ace, wish I had thought of it. There is even a podcast of each one. Must have taken ages.

BBC News - Universities 'may have to drop £9,000 fees'

"Because school achievement and economic privilege are closely related, these scholarships will effectively provide financial support for better off students." "An arms race will have been created, with no beneficiaries other than those students with AAB+ grades." Anyone remember British Rail? How it was privatised and broken up into 48 companies with hundreds of bilateral contractual arrangements?

Electronic Literature Authoring Software

Algorithmic text manipulation for cutups? Amazing.

Judy Malloy: its name was Penelope

Sounds interesting, but I have to install wine to read it...

Mark Bernstein: Fresh Code

"Malloy sketched the original Penelope in BASIC, which is what she knew, and I rewrote it in 1993 for a the original Macintosh edition. This is all-new code, it’s much nicer, and it was far easier to write." Hypertext makes the transition to iPad. Best tools versus access?

Xmonad/Frequently asked questions - HaskellWiki

Stuff on leaving space for panel

Howto: Step by Step Configuration of XMonad | Nepherte (dot) be

A step by step guide for xmonad with a desktop manager - need to check which version it is designed for however

$80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next? | Singularity Hub

Smartphones in Africa. Small web platform, so education can follow?

Paul Meier - Statistican who saved millions of lives - Web Exclusive Article - Significance Magazine

"Meier’s advocacy of – insistence upon – randomised clinical trials was one part of his legacy. The Kaplan-Meier estimator was another. It has many other uses – it can plot anything whose time of survival is of interest, for example fruit before it blemishes, or mechanisms before they break down - but in particular it gives medical statisticians a simple way of comparing patients’ survival rates after different treatments."

Personalisted Semantic News: NoTube RAI poster

Poster from the item below. How TV content will be personalised based on social network profiles of viewers

Personalised news | NoTube

"When the user enters inside the service he can start to see the personalized news program that has been automatically edited following his own preferences; these can be dynamically extracted following the behaviour of the user in the social network or can be fixed by the user himself through the selection of its favourite genres. " So we surround ourselves with content bubbles that reinforce our world view and presumptions. Am I just being a pessimist?

£222 per day in prison

"The average daily cost of keeping a person in prison in 2007/08 was £222. This total cost comprises approximately £149 staff costs, £42 non staff costs, including items such as prisoner healthcare, education and food, energy costs, staff training, travel and uniforms. The balance of £31 comprises non cash charges to the accounts including depreciation, cost of capital charges and provisions." Freedom of information request for the Northern Ireland Prison Service.

AuroraLeoOrange Xfce-Look.org

nice window theme

xfce + xmonad on Gentoo Linux - The Cattle Grid

another one, the gentoo people like xmonad. this one has slim as the login manager.

X&sup2;Monad « «Insert Name Here»

another approach to xmonad and xfce

xmonad.hs used to run xmonad with Xfce4 — Gist

an example xmonad set up for use with the xfce desktop environment

Xfce Minimal Installation on Squeeze - Debian - e-Notes

What it says on the packet. Might use with xmonad as wm in place of xfwm4

Another Ten One-Liners from CommandLineFu Explained - good coders code, great reuse

linux one liners

search google, wikipedia, reverso from the bash terminal « tonybaldwin | blog

bash scripts to allow searching from command line. Uses the lynx command line web browser to display results.

Xmonad/Config archive/John Goerzen's Configuration - HaskellWiki

Looks like a good 'pure' xmonad implementation. Will need something to handle USB sticks and hard drives (thunar?)

Xmonad and the Gimp at Nathan Howell

gimp layout for xmonad. Need to work out how to add this code to the basic xmonad config without barfing the lot

Introduction to the xmonad Tiling Window Manager | Tombuntu

Useful introduction. I'm using xmonad with Gnome for desktop services. Makes good use of a wide-screen monitor, with all that extra space down the right hand side.

IdeaBox for StoryBox - CogDogBlog

I've uploaded a podcast. Nice idea.

Half an Hour: How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly

Just in case

Q10

Full screen editor for windows with a portable app package. The portable app works fine from a USB stick, it creates a folder that contains the executable, a configuration settings file, and the dictionary files. CTRL-P brings up a preferences screen to allow colours, fonts and screen layout to be customised. I had to disable the 'sounds' item as Q10 kept complaining about not being able to find sound drivers. Good alternative for Windows machines.

Steven Poole: Goodbye, cruel Word

I'm beginning to think that there are Single Task Focus people and people who like time-sharing between many small tasks. Writers, those who deal exclusively with words, have it easy on computers as text, even rich text, is easily handled. I've noticed professional writers also seem to be Single Task Focus people. Some of us work more visually (mind maps, formulas, diagrams, tables) and I personally go for the multiple small task thing.

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich - NYTimes.com

"People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation." Could David Cameron ask Mr Buffett for a little advice on tax rates while he seems to be looking Westward?

The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse | www.businessweek.com | Readability

Half a million post-persons in USA, and they have the same issues that Royal Mail has only larger

Letter from the U.K.: If We’re Turning Off Social Media, I Want News Channels Shut Down, Too | Epicenter | Wired.com

The news coverage was a little overwhelming.

Scientific Linux 6 - Another great distro, but

BBC News - Council eviction notice for Clapham Junction riot accused's family

"A London council is trying to evict a tenant whose son has appeared in court charged in connection with rioting and looting at Clapham Junction." Can anyone explain to me how this gets us anywhere at all? Am I being thick? Aha, Conservative controlled. All is clear.

IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era | A Smarter Planet Blog

"I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing."

BBC News - Sir Hugh Orde denies Theresa May riot claim

"We need to have some very honest conversations with government about what we stop doing if we are to maintain frontline service delivery at current levels," - Sir Hugh Orde, ACPO boss I think that sentence could be repeated for many areas of public service. In fact, I'm going to print it in 72 point and put it over my desk at work.

xkcd: Password Strength

Brilliant

Detroiturbex.com

Good photography. Possibly the future

Meg Pickard

Blog has good interviews

BBC News - Too few trainee teachers end up in schools, says report

"The satisfactions of teaching interacting with lively and energetic young people all day every day are different from the impersonal abstract patterns that are the stuff of mathematics and the physical sciences," it said. I understand the logic: honey and mumford learing styles coordinates for Maths people are Theorist-Reflector and those for teachers are Activist-Pragmatist. However, I wonder if the report's authors have ever attended a physics conference or Maths department seminar? Plenty of interaction there! "The sort of person drawn to one may not be comfortable with the other."

the complete guide | www.techradar.com | Readability

"In an interview on the Gnome Journal, William Jon McCann, who contributes to several key areas of Gnome, notes that, at the hackfest in Boston, even before any kind of process emerged there was an intentional design-first ethic to the project. That's where the first mock-up of the Gnome 3 desktop was worked on." 'design-first ethic' is a bit of a worry, it might look great but be hard to work with. We shall see.

Calculize

Looks ok, but wondering where it fits with Wolfram Alpha

BlackBerry Messenger archives open for inspection • The Register

"While the Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) is necessary for interception of live communications. once the messages have been sent the archives (if archives there are) come under the Data Protection Act. The DPA is a much more flexible bit of legislation, which could permit the police to trawl all the messages sent over the network for evidence identifying individuals." So now it depends on a link between the 8 digit PIN unique to each BlackBerry handset and the identity of the owner (or at least the purchaser).

How To Use BlackBerry Messenger | CrackBerry.com

All about BBM. 8^16 different unique PINs. I wonder what happens if you sell the phone on? The PIN is unique to the device...

The unlikely social network fuelling the Tottenham riots « The Urban Mashup Blog

I predict a rise in the cost of BBM packages quite soon.

ubuntu 10.04 - Rip whole audio CD to 1 file - Super User

abcde -1 -a default,cue -o wav to rip a whole cd to a single mp3, you need to have lame, id3v2 and mkcue installed. These are not strictly dependencies of abcde in the apt-get sense so you have to install them separately.

BBC News - Carol Vorderman says pupils should study maths to 18

"Ms Vorderman said pupils were being taught trigonometry and algebra when "they can't even calculate a percentage"." What is Maths? What makes Maths important? What makes Maths transferable to different contexts? Why is it only English speaking countries that have 'numeracy'?

The Gentlemen Cyclists | Detailing a journey by two gentlemen from one end of Great Britain to another

Fund raising holiday blog

Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess' • The Register

"While you are at it, could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment?" he wrote. "I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3." Linus says what many think

Evan Roth

The artist mentioned below. Bad language (innit) but a nice page design with CSS that I can borrow, and no Javascript apart from the buzzfeed tracker so feature phone accessible. Thanks.

BBC News - Hacker artist takes over internet cafe for speed show

"To hold a speed show, an artist will rent time on terminals at an internet cafe, many times amidst a sea of teenage gamers, and pull up webpages containing his or her artwork on a cluster of monitors." Kidnap the plasma screens in pubs? No one ever watches them anyway.

University administration in permanent revolution? Try masterful inactivity | www.guardian.co.uk | Readability

"if you cannot sensibly plan on other grounds, you should at least make sure that what you do is sound in intellectual, scholarly and pedagogical terms" Written originally in the context of University politics, but this highly selective quote is good for those of us who stand in front of the projectors.

LayoutSound : Message: Audacity "Find Zero Crossings" and Looping Techniques

Another looping method

Audacity Forum • View topic - How do I create a seamless loop of audio?

Audacity trick. Its all in the editing of the middle bit

BBC News - Pupils 'shoe-horned' into EBacc subjects, say MPs

Graham Stuart who is the chairman of the education select committee said something close to "if you explain to schools how you measure success, don't blame schools for focussing on that ruthlessly" on Radio 4's Today programme this morning around 8:30. I scribbled that quote down as fast as I could. It seems to me to describe the situation very well. I'd substitute 'school management' for 'schools' as many schoolteachers are trying to do the best that they can for all their pupils.

Composition 1.01: How a Tool Everyone Has Could Change Education | www.theatlantic.com | Readability

Humm... 40 emails for the more alert 10 or so, so thats 400 per term, plus 6 emails each for the laggards, so thats 120 more. For three compositions. Three 520s is 1560 emails, so 1560 lots of 10 minutes. Thats 15600 minutes or 30 working days or so!

Design View / Andy Rutledge - News Redux

How do you design news so that it can be read easily? Via daringfireball

Utah cops baffled in case of mysterious anonymous cuffee • The Register

Shades of the astronomer Robert Burnham. Perhaps he has noone and nowhere?

Test Your Vocabulary - Blog

I aim to learn a new word every day from now on. Today's is 'flocculate' as a way of describing a liquid

More comments on Google+ and names | Infotropism

"You shouldn’t lose access to your email and documents just because you posted a risque picture on Google+ or a fan video to Youtube, any more than you should have your car towed for not paying your phone bill." The finer points of a private Web!

All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal, Genetics Confirm : Discovery News

"The modern human/Neanderthal combo likely benefitted our species, enabling it to survive in harsh, cold regions that Neanderthals previously had adapted to." Fascinating.

FutureMessage.me: Messages to the Future

Strangely interesting.

Your Computer Really Is a Part of You | Wired Science | Wired.com

"Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us." Excellent stuff. The full text of the paper is available.

Pliers - variations on a theme

Tools: could you work out the industrial process these pliers were used in if all you had was the artefact?

An interview with Jonathan Foote

"My tools have not changed much since grad school: emacs for coding and print statements for debugging." Jonathan Foote

ssd_disk_-_run_bodhi_from [Bodhi Linux Wiki]

The new home of these SSD hints

When Patents Attack! | This American Life

Looks interesting, I'll listen when the mp3 is available. Via Hacker News (Y Combinator).

Manufactory by Chris Coekin Wolverhampton Art Gallery 18 Jun 11 - 1 Oct 11

Pictures in three short series; directed portraits of people who worked in a copper wire factory in the style of trade union banners; tools found at the factory; the sludge and stains left by 150+ years of copper processing. Plus a 45 rpm record made from factory sounds that you can play on three autochanger record players.

blog.mobilephonesecurity.org: Voicemail hacking and the 'phone hacking' scandal - how it worked, questions to be asked and improvements to be made

The voice-mail hacking process: what they did, and how its harder now. Via daringfireball.

‪psychosides SLEP‬‏ - YouTube

A series of videos about basic number methods from the mysterious chap with the Manchester accent. Useful stuff.

AUSTIN KLEON is a writer who draws.

One way of getting round blank page syndrome

Even a URL tells a story - Reilly Brennan

I can beat the length of the Sony url: just try some of the UK academic databases!

Unemployment and jobs: Work for post-materialists | The Economist

Threshold + 20% I guess. Medium chill sounds good as well.

29 life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight | Fluent in 3 months

Interesting if predictably deterministic

Six Principles for Making New Things

"I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly." - Paul Graham I'm applying e and f to a space of a and b through a presentation that is definitely d, but I'm not sure if c fits as its exploring a medium.

Radio To Go

Good heavens, he is still going

Maps | High Speed Rail Consultation

Maps of the HS2 route, maps 33 and 32 are relevant to my patch

Birmingham History Forum

Could be useful

Why Apple dares to change your apps | Video | Macworld

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" Michael Gartenberg (via daringfireball) One of the best arguments for using/developing open source software for niche professional use that I have seen. The 'sound art movement' (if it exists, which I am not sure about) tends to use open source software (supercollider, ChucK, PureData) which can be forked and developed by small communities of interest. The 'cost of entry' is not money, its the time you have to spend learning the software. But no-one takes the software away...

Test Your Vocabulary

I'm 85th percentile, with an estimated vocabulary of 34 900 words. Might get a lesson or tutorial out of this but I think it might take quite a lot of time to define definition! Via Hacker News

Online map suppressing crime reporting, says survey • The Register

"An online poll of 2,685 adults conducted on behalf of the insurance company found that of the people not reporting crimes, nearly 75 per cent had ignored antisocial behaviour such as drug-dealing or vandalism for fear of devaluing the neighbourhood." Oops. Bias from being an online poll, but still a side effect that was not planned for I guess

{ feuilleton }

A stylish blog written by designer and illustrator John Coulthart.

Transom » Hindenburg

"One major issue… I really (REALLY) miss the normal visual representation of waveforms that cross the median line. I don’t understand why Nsaka chose what I suppose to be a spectral view. Surely I am not the only editor who has learned to recognize sounds visually and can fly in edit sessions as a result." Abe Martinez, comments section Review of the Hindenberg podcast/radio report editing software on transom.org. Review useful, comments section shows engagement from programmers. I, too, edit visually using the conventional median crossing waveform display in Audacity and Ardour.

Nsaka – Hindenburg

Would you name a new software package after the historical disaster that gave rise to the phrase 'crash and burn'? This sound package is specifically aimed at radio reporters, and there is a free (as in beer) version. Windows and Mac. Via This American Place and Transom. Looks like the free version is now only for use in Third World countries. Web site has changed literally in the last few hours. Of course, third world NGOs are going to be using proprietary operating systems (not).

Own your identity – Marco.org

"But there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours." I'm moving over to a mail and web domain in the UK. Just training the spam filters.

BBC News - How engineers create artificial sounds to fool us

"Nissan's new electric vehicle has a speaker fitted under its bonnet and a synthesiser in the dash to generate engine noise."

Exambuff - Open Sourced Startup

"I failed because I didn't know my customers, wrote code too early, tried to sell to institutions and didn't find a co-founder." I'd agree with the 'didn't know my customers' comment. However, this lot of code could be an on-line marking system of some use.

automate sftp using unix script by strobotta - Shell Programming and Scripting - The UNIX and Linux Forums - sftp host today

Good old lftp works with sftp protocol. Can synchronise the web root of a remote web server with a local directory, and change the permissions back to 777 so that the uploaded site can be visible to the world!

How to use lftp as a sftp client - a great resource for How To's from Wikia

lftp installed from Debian Squeeze repositories can run an sftp session despite not showing the libssl library explicitly. Using this to syncrhonise a remote folder with a local folder on this PC.

shalbum.org: the home of shalbum!

This works. Wondering if I need to negotiate my way through Yahoo lost user name hell to recover access to my flickr account, or just use this...

Why Twitter’s Oral Culture Irritates Bill Keller (and why this is an important issue) | technosociology

Twitter is like speech and blog posts are like writing.

The Twitter Trap - NYTimes.com

"My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills." To which my standard reply takes the form of two questions: 1) How do we decide what 'math(s) skills' are for our current mode of production? 2) When did you last analyse a situation, set up a set of linked equations to describe the variables, and then solve them analytically? Link via stuntbox.com

User Testing in the Wild: Joe’s First Computer Encounter « Boriss' Blog

Nice. Via Hacker News. "One of the hardest things to relate to Joe is the idea that you must first click in a text field in order to type.". I've always found that odd as well.

My Summer at an Indian Call Center | Mother Jones

I try to be nice to the call centre people. They are just reading from a script.

Loving the Penguin: Squeeze, Fonts, Firefox update

This does seem to have made a difference on a box running AntiX with the repositories set to debian testing as they are by default. Fonts look smoother in the Ubuntu way.

robert ghrist home page

Drawn notes about calculus within the US framework (very high level of algebra understanding assumed). He is producing these using a tablet with stylus and One Note. Nice idea. Via Hacker News

Acid Midget: The Acid Midget Manifesto

Chairman Meow is currently on my desktop

librarian.net » Blog Archive » presentations without powerpoint, how I do it

A simpler html based slide ware template

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

xhtml and javascript for basic slideware

CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job? - Charlie's Diary

"The skills of fiction composition are largely invisible, until you try to actually do it" Yup. Charlie has the videotape and the t-shirt as a crafts-person scribbler. He quotes some interesting statistics later in the post: income distributions for authors are skewed in a 'self-similar' way...

Reminder: why there's no tipjar on this blog - Charlie's Diary

"And without the publisher those books wouldn't exist: wouldn't have been commissioned, wouldn't have been edited, wouldn't have been corrected and marketed and sold in whatever form filtered onto the unauthorized ebook market." Charlie Stross explaining why publishers are a Good Thing and why he does not take money directly for books

Is there a way quicker way to delete old messages - Gmail Help

This works. Just backed up three years worth of gmail using imap and then deleted it all from the web app.

Why mobile apps suck when you're mobile (TCP over 3G)

I stopped bothering with a 'dongle' for mobile Internet because the performance was so spotty on trains and in certain buildings. This article explains why the connections were so flaky.

MIT Department of Economics : Abhijit Banerjee : Papers

Amazing range of papers here: specifically 'The Economic Lives of the Poor' 2006, A. Banerjee and E. Duflo. I'm wondering if the basic analysis can be applied to the relatively poor in industrial economies when it comes to educational outcomes.

AT&T’s Rube Goldbergian Web Form « JoelBlog

One of the reasons I'm not too keen on changing ISP. My current one 'just works' with a bog standard adsl/router. I can administer everything via a web form by going to the special IP address for the router. Via Hacker News, also worth reading the comments for this story on HN

BBC News - Literacy and numeracy tests toughened for new teachers

Here we go again. Well, I'd suggest that the Adult Numeracy Certificate is an excellent preparation for taking this kind of test, and they (or is that They) won't be monitoring that test. "But the NUT said candidates who needed several resits to pass the tests were dyslexic, had English as an additional language, or were less familiar with the on-line testing system." Again, I'd argue that the Adult Numeracy and Adult Literacy certificate courses and tests can give candidates experience of computer based tests and skills for life tutors will pick up any dyslexia or similar issues quickly,

Level 1 adult numeracy certificate quick questions for exam revision version 2

Just something to use the lesson before the second GOLA computer based test for my Friday morning level 1 numeracy group. I try to teach through understanding most of the course, but some specific targeted exam prep is needed.

Level 1 adult numeracy certificate quick questions for exam revision

Just something to use the lesson before the first GOLA computer based test for my Friday morning level 1 numeracy group. Almost everyone passed.

Seth's Blog: Show me the (meta) data

"We need software on our phones that can remember where we go and what we do, software for our browsers that can create profiles that save us time and money, and most of all, software for our email that gets ever smarter about who we are and who we're connecting to." Commercialising the Drift? Psycho-geographic loyalty cards?

Wim Wenders - The Official Site

When the child was a child, Peter Handke

Table of Contents | Writing Spaces

style guide for web content

Pathetic Fallacy: The sound of money

"The story goes: an innkeeper overhears a poor student tell a friend that he always eats his rice as the innkeeper is preparing his fish, and thus the smell improves his meal. The angry innkeeper brings the student before Ōoka, demanding payment for the stolen smell. Ōoka responds by having the student spill his pocketful of coins from one hand to another, and tells the innkeeper that the smell of fish has been repaid by the sound of money."

How Not to Deliver Bad News: Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi | Effectual Analysis

"After spending lots of time dealing with this bug and then poring over data logs to identify vulnerabilities, his mindset was probably more like that of an engineer than a marketer." Good. I'd prefer that Dropbox staff were thinking like engineers under these circumstances. I want to know what happened, what the risk is, and what audit trail there might be. Perhaps easier for me in that my Dropbox account has only maths handouts and interactive whiteboard presentations in it...

From editor to writer | www.salon.com | Readability

"They sit down and they type. I've known three of them, two of whom I was quite close to: Doris Lessing, Anthony Burgess and Updike. You just felt that between the desire and the act fell no shadow. And if they weren't writing, they weren't alive. I guess Updike was alive when he was golfing. But Doris -- whom I've been very connected to for 45 years or so -- she's always said that if she hasn't written during the day she feels she hasn't lived that day." Rereading Canopus In Argos.

Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible

"It took me a second or two to figure out what it was: an SX-70. Then I had to figure out how to unfold it, which I did by consulting a handy-dandy YouTube video on my iPhone." Technologies coexist

Dear Photograph

wow, visual montage

DairyCo - Datum UK Cow Numbers

Even better, a line chart with a truncated vertical axis and a nice thought provoking table of data

Average Milk Yield

There is a data handling Level 2 numeracy exercise hiding in this data set.

Mark Bernstein: More Art

"Our user interfaces are very Mondrian. I’d like to see some user interfaces that start from Kandinsky."

The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, by Georges Perec – review | Books | The Guardian

Review as parody. Perec's account of three days observations in a small neighbourhood in Paris didn't claim a tenner of mine, but perhaps it will now.

The Architecture of Open Source Applications

Chapters on applications such as Audacity and utilities such as bash and the Berkeley DB. Interesting.

Transition leaves frustrated corporates locked out of Google Groups • The Register

separate home and work email accounts, everyone...

Wicd | "Connection Failed: Unable to get IP address" (Page 1) / Networking, Server, and Protection / Arch Linux Forums

guess which kernel squeeze ships with? keith@t42:~$ uname -a Linux t42 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Wed May 18 07:08:50 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

Wicd can't get IP address but I can do it manually (Page 1) - Troubleshooting - Wicd

me too at cafe gusto (WEP encrypted with passphrase)

BBC News - What children think and feel about growing up poor

"More than 3.5m children live below the poverty line in the UK, which has one of the worst child poverty rates in the industrialised world." How did we achieve that?

Troy Hunt: A brief Sony password analysis

Statistical study of the passwords chosen by Sony Pictures users. This shows how 35000+ real people chose their passwords.

Quick module 5 questions

These questions were written to go with a set of revision flashcards downloaded from TES net. I selected the flashcards relevant to Module 5 of the AQA GCSE (most of them apart from the data handling ones). The questions on this worksheet are designed to mix some of the 'tricky' questions that are found on the Module 5 with the more straightforward calculation questions.

BBC News - AS-level maths error: students set impossible question

"My daughter realised there was a mistake and moved on, so didn't put a lot of working into the question." Sir, your daughter did well, excellent insight into the underlying maths. Her ability to 'smell a rat' says much for her problem solving skills. We have generated a situation where so much depends on very high marks for some candidates. Why can't we bring back S levels? S levels were extra papers set on the same syllabus as the A levels, just devilishly hard (but solvable) questions.

Seth's Blog: The hard part (one of them)

Nice. I'm reading some of Wallace's stuff over the holiday together with a nice cheerful rereading of Lessing's Canopus In Argos series.

Action and habit - Less Wrong

Nice. I like the quote from the classroom wall and I'll be using that one next year

Damien Katz: Error codes or Exceptions? Why is Reliable Software so Hard?

Have you ever wondered why Firefox or Seamonkey just quit when viewing a particular Web page? Or why LibreOffice folded its tent when importing some hideous Word file that has been edited by numerous versions of Word? Here lies the answer. Illuminating. Via HackerNews

Pelican — Pelican v2 documentation

Looks interesting, but gives div zero errors when trying it out.

EveryJS.com

Amazing what you can use Javascript for these days

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

Not just developers but also anyone using wordpress plug ins and getting text onto simple static web pages...

Read and Decode QR Codes Without a Smartphone — SnapMyInfo

This works, so now you can find out what information is on those strange two dimensional barcodes that are popping up on advertising hoardings.

Caterina.net» Blog Archive » A WORD ON STATISTICS by Wislawa Szymborska

Different take on some common numbers. what would your estimates be?

Minigroup

Could be useful for supporting students between lessons. You could put handouts &c there for them, and then only a particular class would be seeing what you provide.

Post Gazette Corrects Headline of Seton Hill iPad Followup — Jerz's Literacy Weblog

"It might seem that, because the online version of the article has now been corrected, the error no longer exists in the digital world, and is only a problem in the print edition; however, a Google search shows that the various blogs and news aggregation sites that have already spread the old headline are more numerous than the number of sites currently displaying the correct headline. This will have an impact on the way Google weighs searches for the related terms." Electronic text can be corrected in seconds, but, alas, the incorrect version may already have been crawled, indexed and pushed out over many channels. We need to proof read before posting even more than in the days of print.

lubuntu and xubuntu side by side

In two virtual machines. I personally like xfce4.8 quite a lot although I tend to go back to the single panel and get rid of the top one.

BBC News - Gil Scott-Heron: US musician and poet in profile

"Born in 1949, Scott-Heron was the son of a Jamaican footballer who was the first black man to play for Glasgow's Celtic FC." I never knew this.

YouTube - "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" - Gil Scott-Heron

"Well you know th th the catch phrase, what that was all about, the revolution won't be televised, that was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind, you have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move, so when we said that the revolution will not be televised we were saying that like er the thing that's going to change people is something that noone will ever be able to catch on film, its something that you see and all of a sudden you realise 'I'm on the wrong page' or 'I'm on the right page but I'm on the wrong note and I've got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what is happening in this country." RIP Scott-Heron.

Rands In Repose: Lost in Translation

"It’s called the Fall because in an instant the normally predictable floor upon which you stand vanishes and you enter a mental free fall where you feel like throwing up because you no longer know which way is up." Brookfieldian boom and bust in a context outside teaching.

You Are Solving The Wrong Problem « Aza on Design

Nice

Javascript PC Emulator

Linux on your web browser. Via Charlie Stross.

Puredyne - [puredyne] Ubuntu Studio will use XFCE for 11.10 - collaboration? | List View

"We aim to support relatively old hardware as our benchmark machine has always been a Pentium III 800Mhz with 384Mb of RAM, that's why we provide a light environment with no effects, bells and whistles." Puredyne 10.10 alpha runs in 124Mb ram on boot with wifi running. Has XFCE 4.6 and a tonne of audio applications, and a preemptive kernel.

Angle properties: 6 questions on one side of A4

As below, 6 questions about angle properties just for a quick quiz.

Angle property flashcards

As below printed 6 up on two sides of A4 as a PDF for use as a handout. Students have to add certain basic facts as they go along.

Angle property screens with questions

18 flashcards about angle properties including naming the angles (acute, obtuse &c) and angles at a point, line, two lines crossing, and on parallel lines. Also triangles, quadrilaterals and (other) polygons. With 6 slides with questions aimed at gcse Foundation at the end.

BBC News - Iceland volcano: Grimsvotn eruption hits local flight

"The ash in Grimsvotn is more coarse and not as likely to cause danger as it falls to the ground faster and doesn't stay as long in the air as in the Eyjafjallajokull eruption." Nice starter about surface area and density there...

madpropellerhead.com - Using MultiMarkdown

markup -> nice pdfs and web pages.

Cool, but obscure unix tools :: KKovacs

rsstail / newsbeuter look interesting. Vi/Emacs described as 'obscure' puts the poster as under 35

The next, next big thing - O'Reilly Radar

"Yesterday's hot job was a developer, today with the arrival of Big Data it has become a mathematician. Tomorrow it could well be a hardware hacker."

Armenian Vegetable Stew Recipe at Epicurious.com

I use real tomatoes and a stock in place of the tinned tomatoes and tomato paste. Okra is available fresh locally. Those who found the stew bland (see comments) should obtain a tin of harissa! Advert laden popup infested site.

Markdown is the new Word 5.1

Excellent. Via daringfireball

Videos of differential equations

iPad used for visualising dynamical systems

jtnimoy: The Work of Josh Nimoy

Very nice work and a nice home page. Found via The Setup. Bit boring with all the apple laptops but the work the people do is interesting.

In-app payment patent scattergun fired at small devs • The Register

So we all pay for the US mess on patents through developers being cautious? Magic

Operation card sort exercise

A collection of 30 short whole number questions on cards. Each question can be categorised as addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. There are four cards with the titles of the operations. Students were asked to work in groups to sort the questions into each operation and to make a note of the keywords that told them which operation was relevant. Used with L2 students for revision and with L1 students for number practice. You need to set your printer to print the cards 4 to a sheet.

Number lines for directed numbers

Just a set of number lines on a side of A4. -5 to +5 twice, then -10 to +10 twice then -20 to + 20 twice. Helps with the revision

Cross-browser Testing (in your Browser!) with Sauce Scout | Selenium Testing? Do Cross Browser Testing with Sauce Labs

Looks interesting, I'll create a free account and do some edge case tests over the weekend

Mark Bernstein: Possiplex

"Each morning the old paste had solidified into chunky flakes. I would scrape each brush and jar clean, then open the huge golden can (20 gallons?) of luminous fresh paste, and butter that paste into each paste- pot. The reporters would come in whenever they chose, type their stories, and then cut and paste them—that is, they would take scissors and cut apart the paragraphs or pieces, rearrange them,add new material in handwriting, and paste them down. That is what real cut-and-paste meant." - Ted Nelson Ted Nelson has published an autobiography: this link is to Bernstein's appreciation.

BBC News - Memory and method: In praise of learning by rote

Mind maps a bit like memory journeys? Card sorting and matching?

[SOLVED] Double Clicking on Open Office files leads to very slow opening

Adding a line to /etc/hosts stops LibreOffice accessing dns when starting and reduces loading time by about 5 seconds or so... /etc/hosts needs to have the third line added 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.1 compname 127.0.0.1 compname localhost compname.(none)

Alex Payne — al3x's Rules for Computing Happiness

All these text heads....

Bug #759406 in seamonkey (Ubuntu): “seamonkey 2.0.13 does not start, missing libxpcom.so and libxpcom_core.so (Natty, x86_64)”

Work around is to download the binary of Seamonkey 2.0.14 from mozilla/seamonky, extract and run from a local directory. To extract the .tar.bz2 file use tar xvfj seamonkey-2.0.14.tar.bz2 then to add Seamonkey to the menus, add a .desktop file manually in ~/.local/share/applications [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Type=Application Terminal=false Exec=/home/username/opt/seamonkey/seamonkey Name=Seamonkey Icon=/home/username/opt/seamonkey/chrome/icons/default/default.png Categories=Network;Internet;Other then add a symlink to /usr/bin so dmenu picks up seamonkey... sudo ln -s /home/username/opt/seamonkey/seamonkey /usr/bin/seamonkey

Ratio1.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

Nice little patience game for equivalent ratios

Living with Xubuntu: The Xubuntu Blog

Useful links

Raspberry Pi Foundation

Nice idea, and nothing to do with pastry

LinuxFr.org

"[...] your desktop is what you see every day, and you get attached to it. The attachment might be some kind of "stockholm syndrome" where you really don't necessarily like it (think of all the people who grew to know computers through DOS and Windows, and the three-finger ctrl-alt-del salute), but even then it becomes a kind of dependency where you get used to it and rely on it rather more intimately than you ever end up relying on the company mainframe." Linus Torvalds, echoing Nietzsche ("our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.") and Heidegger (tool analysis). Interesting reading but not for the usual Torvalds vs Stallman reasons.

Xfce 4 Window Manager

Toggle the window decorations in XFCE by doing alt-F11

The “book” is dead [dive into mark]

"In the analog world, even libraries “enable” piracy by putting a photocopier in the same building as a bunch of books." This copyright thing gets difficult...

Xubuntu Desktop Guide

This needs an update

Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Case Study: How I Got the Highest Grade in my Discrete Math Class

"By the day of the exam, you could give me any problem from the course and I could rattle off the proof, without mistake and without hesitation." Ah Oh, what if I set a question that isn't one of the propositions? What if I set a problem that requires using part of one proof in a new context? Is there a toolkit here?

Study Hacks » Blog Archive » On Becoming a Math Whiz: My Advice to a New MIT Student

"Keep working on your problem set after you get stuck." Now, how do I package this excellent advice for a group of teenagers with low confidence in maths?

What was the genesis of requiring a "Dropbox folder", versus allowing me to designate folders (like documents, etc)? - Quora

Dropbox is so simple it amazes me, the separate folder helps when you work across different operating systems...

How To Steal Like An Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me) - Austin Kleon

Excellent - love the hand drawn stuff. Impostor syndrome hits the sketchbook. Via daringfireball.

running_bodhi_from_ssd_disk [Bodhi Linux Wiki]

Good for SSD based netbook and swap settings good on HD laptop as well

Moby's drum machine collection

Analogue drum machines - and Moby uses them in his music.

Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

positive feedback loop with automated pricing by second hand book dealers. I'm surprised there is no sanity check or ceiling built into Amazon's system.

Maths4Life: Fractions Booklet - NCETM

Back to basics on fractions, I want to approach them from a variety of angles without being confusing. This booklet is a useful reminder of approaches.

Weird Processing: The Collision of Computers and Cultures at the Voice of America

How word-processing got introduced to Voice of America. Early networked multilingual text system, and resistance to change.

TipsAndTricks/TextBasedLinuxInstall - Dropbox Wiki

These instructions work in bodhi linux which I now have running on the T42 zero dollar laptop (Ubuntu 11.04 not going to play well, and Debian won't boot for some reason). Just make a 'new app' with the path to the dropboxd command in your .dropbox_dist folder in the home directory. Then add a 'new app' with the path to dropboxd. Then put that 'app' in the start up apps via the bodhi linux setup function.

Scripting News: Let's build a new Internet in academia

"An aside, what made all these things work so well is that they were empty inside. Almost skeletal. Hard to believe there isn't more to it. I asked one of my mentors how this could be and he said it has to be that way. If it's complex it can't work until it's empty. These days we have another way to describe this, my friend and former colleague David Weinberger called it Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. I've never heard a better description of the architecture of the Internet. Permanent link to this item in the archive." Dave Winer

How to Merge a PDF in Ubuntu | eHow.com

This works.

Pandoc - Pandoc User’s Guide

pandoc: I can make open office files from plain text with markdown style markup. Interesting and possibly useful.

Snide Remarks - Leaving in a Huff - www.ericdsnider.com - The Official Website of Eric D. Snider

on getting laid off

jtnimoy - Tron Legacy (2010)

How to gussy up a futuristic computer interface that uses credible commands.

The Usability of Passwords (by @baekdal)

Three unrelated words more secure than random digits?

Uciekinier -Kazimierz Piechowski -Auschwitz escape story.

Fuzzy copy of the documentary.

Today: Musical tribute to Auschwitz escapee - bbc Politics UK - FriendFeed

Amazing. Kazimierz ‘Kazik’ Piechowski is a lucid and intense man of 90 who pulled off a superb escape from a concentration camp and Katy Carr has enshrined the critical moment in song.

Metric Conversion Worksheet Maker :: TheCanadianTeacher.com

Very handy! You have to try it a couple of times to make sure you don't get scientific notation in the answers

General Election 2010: Parties' Share of the Vote - Telegraph

Top level stats about the election

News flash: I was wrong - Charlie's Diary

"Western Japan and Eastern Japan do not share an electricity grid; because of an historical accident, in the 1890s when they were first getting electric lighting, Osaka, in the west, chose to run at 60Hz and Tokyo, in the east, picked 50Hz. Consequently there's no grid interconnect between the two halves of the Japanese electricity supply system." Hot summers kill people but the risk is not visible/dramatic/concentrated

Frank Chimero - Classroom Rules

A nice set. Simplified and re-worded might be useful.

Southampton Uni shows way to a truly open web • The Register

Photo editor online - Pixlr.com edit image

Web browser app for image editing. Complex filters on large images can result in long wait times in Firefox but great for basic tweaks and cropping.

Radiation dose chart

Topical use of data visuaisation

BBC News - Japan nuclear threat: The tsunami is the bigger tragedy

Perception and reality. Reality, the brutal, shocking, hard, mottled reality. is tens of thousands drowned or crushed as a result of the earthquake and tsunami, and a few hundred extra cancer deaths a couple of decades on as a result of the radiation leak worst case. Perception is some kind of huge epic drama unfolding. We shall see,

Regular polygons investigation table

Just an A4 sheet with a table to capture data about regular polygons. The columns are headed Name, Number of sides, Total interior angle, Interior angle, Exterior angle. There are six rows, and my lesson plan is to look at the equilateral triangle, the square, the pentagon, the hexagon, the heptagon and the octagon and then go for a formula based on the patterns.

One side A4 handout with regular polygons

A triangle, a square, a pentagon, hexagon, heptagon and an octagon. The polygons with the larger sides are scaled up. Designed for partitioning into triangles, and for working out interior and exterior angles.

Quadrilaterals example sheet

Just a pdf with a selection of quadrilaterals including a square, a rectangle, a rhombus, a kite (upside down but not rotated), an isosceles trapezium, a trapezium with one end at right angles to the parallel lines, and a couple of 'random' quadrilaterals. Designed for use with the quadrilaterals property table and the quadrilaterals 'true/false' sheet.

True / false questions about quadrilaterals

15 true false questions that are designed to encourage thinking about the properties of quadrilaterals, and their angles, bisectors &c

Properties of quadrilaterals table

Handy summary and useful with the 'true/false' review sheet coming later

How Google taped up its email outage wounds • The Register

"That same exabyte’s worth of data can sit on idle tape cartridges and consume absolutely no power for the tape itself unless the data needs to be accessed, and very little power to maintain, monitor and cool the tape system as a whole." Tape storage is greener than silicon or spinning disks

Decimal Addition - WorksheetWorks.com

Slick web interface and nice range of choices, but they put the questions in columns already. That's the skill I want people to practice. The old 0.75 + 1.65 + 3 + 7.1 trick

Twitter angers third-party developers with 'no more timelines' urging | Technology | guardian.co.uk

The only protocols you can count on are tcp/ip, http, ftp and pop3/smtp. All the proprietary ones can be switched off. Via daringfireball

::::: MathsNet ::::: Resources: Formulator Tarsia (Jigsaw) files

Tarsia mother lode just so I don't loose it

Sign In - NCETM

todo

The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them

Bit heavy for gcse revision but gets out of the strict hierarchy of mind mapping tools.

Yacapaca! - Home

Never heard of this one before, thanks to a colleague who uses it with numeracy students

Mr Maths: nice stuff on angles

Thankyou Mr Maths for saving me half an hour! Nice stuff on an easy topic. I can use the time saved for some investigation style questions...

Protovis

Javascript library for charts including dynamic charts. Quadratic graphs with linked sliders may be possible...

Developing process skills within the maths curriculum

GCSE Maths Module 5 is harder both by topic and by the process skills and problem solving skills needed. I'm on a bit of a search for practical teaching ideas...

Bug 78514 – copy item in edit menu

Bug 78514, you can't make this up. Via K Mandla

BBC - Mark Easton's UK: Graduating for the 21st Century

"Go back to 1984 and ONS labour market data shows that 44% of UK jobs were unskilled or low skilled jobs. Now it is about 27%. People working in the knowledge industries accounted for 31% of jobs in 1984. Now it is close to 45%."

recursion - Google Search

Google's little joke. Via Jerz' twitter feed (Google Jerz' Literacy Weblog)

BBC News - Microscope with 50-nanometre resolution demonstrated

"As the name implies, evanescent waves fade quickly with distance. But crucially, they are not subject to the diffraction limit - so if they can be captured, they hold promise for far higher resolution than standard imaging methods can provide." Neat physics

Wordle - bodmas-list

I want to make an index page like this by using html/css and a bash script. The next project...

BBC News - 'Chuggers' or face-to-face street fundraisers?

"According to the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA), the method brings in up to 600,000 new regular donations each year and donors recruited face-to-face are worth £120m annually to good causes." and "The second is that the public, whenever asked, tend to express an aversion to the tactic. A 2009 survey suggested that two-thirds of people would cross the street to avoid them." These two assertions are not contradictory, but I wonder how many more lots of 600 000 people there are left to provide donations? What is the lifetime of a donor?

[all variants] Cooking an egg with Linux ? - Ubuntu Forums

Post #7 has a silly one line timer... could be useful for a lot of things

I Have Seen the Future and I Am Opposed - Core77

"Yes, Linux tries valiantly to exist as an open system for personal and business computers, available to all, but the world depends upon the offerings of the few major players, especially the applications provided by Microsoft Office. Linux simply cannot compete." Don Norman. There are implicit definitions of 'Linux' and 'world' in this paragraph that perhaps need unpacking. His main thesis about communication costs and content silos is interesting.

Nokia: Culture will out « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird

"Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events." I think its called 'not getting sued'. Via Daringfireball. I have a feeling I'm on the engineer side of the cognitive dichotomy that Greenfield is suggesting here.

Without Thought | Metropolis Magazine

Naoto Fukasawa is a Japanese designer, and this magazine page explains some if his work. The page itself is nice as well, only one blinking thing, the rest is just a quiet grid.

You are not a gadget - 2010 - Events - Public events - Home

Jaron Lanier talking about his recent book at the LSE. A recording of the talk is available as an mp3 file, but does not appear to be directly linked to this page. You have to follow the link to the 'LSE public lectures and events podcast channel'. The 'channel' is just a page listing all the talks with links to the mp3 files of each. Scroll about half way down or just 'find in page' for 'Jaron'. This hopeless site design is a minor an illustration of what Lanier is on about, however I am grateful to the LSE for making the effort to publish these recordings.

Wpa supplicant - Zenwalk Wiki

What to put in wpa_supplicant.conf to run a range of wpa2 encrypted wifi connections...

How To: Manual Network Configuration without the need for Network Manager - Ubuntu Forums

How to get wifi up from the command line assuming a functioning driver for the card, wpasupplicant installed correctly and knowledge of the ESSID/password of the wifi access point you are trying to connect to. For when network-manager pegs out next time...

Ubuntu Networking Configuration Using Command Line | Ubuntu Geek

How to restart networking manually when you have removed network-manager from your ubuntu 10.04 box...

FOSS maven says $29 'Freedom Box' will kill Facebook • The Register

"The Freedom Box, as the chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center has christened it, would be no bigger than power adapters for electronic appliances. The inexpensive devices would be deployed in a peer-to-peer fashion in homes and offices to process email, voice-over-IP communications, and the sharing of pictures, among other things. The decentralized structure of the devices is in stark contrast to today's biggest internet providers, which offer the same services in exchange for users turning over some of their most trusted secrets."

Radio 3 rolls back the years with a return to broadcasting live concerts | Media | The Guardian

Great news.

Quick exact numerical methods

Multiply £12.99 by 15 by doing 13 times 15 and subtracting 15p. Then do the 13 times 15 by adding 130 and 65. Quick exact methods sheet to accompany a whole class discussion. Prompted by watching an excellent student calculate 30 divided by 2.5 using long division...

Formula match starter

Match the correct calculation with the situation described in words. Part of a lesson to support students taking the Numeracy Certificate Level 2 course. This starter is designed to encourage visual recognition of the main types of formula so we can discuss the 'trigger' words in the questions. A later activity gets down to discriminating between the correct calculation and the common incorrect ones for each type of formula

How to Install LibreOffice in Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 10.04 - Softpedia

Takes more disk space than the go-office version of openoffice.org that comes with Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 10.10 but seems snappier.

Visual Understanding Environment

Java based mind mapping tool with native builds for windows and mac os. Looks interesting, I'm building a Number module mind map with it now...

FX MathPack - FX Draw, FX Equation, FX Graph, FX Stat

Shape and Space coming soon. I'm about to see if this lot will work under wine...

Paulo Freire and informal education

"Perhaps the most influential thinker about education in the late twentieth century, Paulo Freire has been particularly popular with informal educators with his emphasis on dialogue and his concern for the oppressed." I'm getting huge mileage from the cuts agenda. Budget 2010 figures for government income and expenditure in the billions. Averages and data presentation. Ironic isn't it?

Mean and median of wage data

If you make people redundant and those who remain take a pay cut, it is possible for the mean wage to rise. The median gives a clearer picture of the changes. Eval: students got the point very quickly (a touch of the paulo freires). The feeling was that it would have been better to have different wages rather than the same figure each time, so I'll modify this handout. That modification would also increase the usefulness as a revision aid for mean and median. The percentage change calculation caused some searching in notes as well.

BBC News - Why does pay go up in a pay freeze?

Passed on by a colleague. Nice illustration of why the median is best used for wage and income statistics!

BBC News - Row over David Cameron multiculturalism speech timing

"The issue here is not some sort of abstract culture. The place most people integrate is in the workplace. If people can't get jobs, you can't expect them to integrate." Trevor Phillips, BBC interview, seems sensible to me.

BBC News - Protesters stage overnight sit-in at New Cross library

"It's a kind of inward loss, a darkening of things, a narrowing of horizons that will gradually make us a less informed, less intelligent, less aware, less useful, less imaginative, less kindly people than we might have been." How do you measure the 'darkening of things'?

din is noise

Looks pretty good. Need to spend an hour to get it working on Ubuntu 10.10. Via PureDyne mail list.

Paul Buchheit: The two paths to success

Interesting angle on the recent Internet craze about tough parenting. I've noticed that I spend more time and effort on the interesting tasks, but then people have to learn strategies for managing the boring stuff.

Dropbox: Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality? - Quora

"We built a fantastic Windows client. 3 years ago, everyone was running Windows*. We were so excited to show the press, yet they *all* had Macs. Walt Mossberg wouldn't write about our product because it was PC only. Months after we hired our PR agency, we found out that they had never even used our product... because they too only had Macs." Quote from a competitor of dropbox. It amazes me how generations of software people make this mistake. Journalists Use Macs (JUM). See the book 'boo hoo: a dotcom story' for an earlier example. Dropbox is great, it does one thing really well, and that one thing is a thing a lot of people need. Via daringfireball

BBC News - Audio slideshow: Dark sky stargazers

Data gathering - idea for numeracy class i teach in a part of Birmingham near the green belt. Handout with Orion asterism and a sky view around 10pm

BBC News - January sees rise in private sector job vacancies

"Sectors seeing particularly strong rises, though, were engineering and manufacturing, two areas benefiting from a rise in exports."

Download The Last Express Collectors Edition - DotEmu

download for windoze adventure game

Measuring task

Measuring task for a Numeracy Level 1 group so people get used to metric units and reading scales. One side A4 with some instructions to find objects between 30cm and 1m and then objects larger than 1m. Students asked to repeat measurements for a discussion of sources of error and consistency in measurements. You need one 5m steel tape measure between two (or three) students.

Module 1 probability practice questions for GCSE

Two sides A4 with a summary of the basic formulas/ideas in a table (probability formula, expected frequency formula, probabilities add to one formula). Four questions: complete the table on a spinner with expected frequency, balls in a bag, fraction line question (find events that will have a probability of a given fraction), and a two way frequency table question. The fraction line question went down very well tonight,

Number paper practice questions for gcse

22 questions about basic number work (no ratio or fractions addition, they come later) with little vocabulary or context, mostly symbols including the 'fill in the gaps' questions. Then 10 story questions, including a two stage percentage change question and a reverse percentage question. Both with numerical answers, two sides A4.

Deborah Plummer | Helping Adolescents and Adults to Build Self Esteem

Was having a browse in the University book shop this afternoon, and came across this book. Some of the activities including the 'desensitisation' activities may have applications / could be mapped to Maths teaching and learning in that age range. Early success certainly helps.

BrightSpark Education

Food for thought. Additional support provided cheaply as a result of wage cost difference. When the wage difference between India and the UK decreases as the Indian economy develops... "supplement, not a replacement"

BBC News - Personal inflation calculator

Free numeracy lesson, thanks to the bbc

Inkscape: Creating fractals « Digital Art For All

Manual fractal construction: do it then write the pseudo code then program in processing?

Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs • The Register

There are warehouses full of ex-corporate laptops that can run a current 'full' Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or CentOS. They go on ebay for £100 to £150...

Data: box and whisker plot summary and question

Just a quick summary of the box and whisker plot and a question with the min, lq, median, uq and max given and a scaled grid to draw the chart. Meant as a quick 10 minute revision task and a summary for revision by the students nearer the Module 1 exam.

Data: scatter diagram question

Another one side 10 minute question to check recall of the vocabulary, spotting the outliers and drawing line of best fit. Data set about age and blood pressure after exercise. One data point has been fiddled so it is clearly an outlier. Asks for how removing this point would change the correlation. Line of best fit and a prediction question.

Data: Cumulative Frequency Diagram question

One side A4 with a frequency table, a spare column for the cumulative frequencies and a grid with scales to plot the curve on. Questions ask for median, quartiles and iqr. Also a question about what percentage more than a certain value of the variable. Meant for a quick 10 minute revision exercise for Module 1 exam soon, and so the students have (another) one side summary of cumulative frequency.

Data: frequency diagram question

Just for revision for the module 1 exams soon. A frequency diagram question with grid and data set all on one side of A4. I quickly sketch the answers on the interactive whiteboard using 'overlay', then we make some revision notes based on what each student finds they need to remember.

Writing exercise said to prevent test anxiety - The Boston Globe

"The researchers believe worrying competes for computing power in the brain’s “working,’’ or short-term, memory. If working memory is focused on worrying, it can’t help a person recall information the brain has stored. It also affects the working memory’s ability to stay focused." Interesting research. The 'dissonance' between the message in the text (one of calm focussing) and the very distracting and intrusive adverts on the page is instructive as well!

$1,000 reward offered for stolen cancer research laptop • The Register

If your computer was stolen NOW would you have a backup? I have essentials in a (free) Dropbox account and everything including media on a local external hard drive.

Man page of SELECT-DEFAULT-ISPELL

run sudo select-default-ispell to select the language for the spell or ispell program to use when invoked without options. You should see an ncurses box appear listing all the dictionaries available in /usr/lib/ispell. Select the one you want with the up/down arrows then press tab to highlight OK and press enter. I've set mine to british which means that nano will spell check using UK spellings when I press ^T

Ubuntu -- Details of package ispell-dictionary in dapper

How to get interactive spell checking working in nano. 1) install ispell. 2) install ibritish for the UK spelling dictionary - plenty of other languages around 3) change the default language for ispell (see next post)

Probability basics

Two side worksheet with the definition of an event, and an outcome and some questions based on coins, dice and packs of cards. The first activity was designed to get people talking. A much better talking point was the National Lottery!

BBC News - Europeans' strategies to cope with the economic crisis

"But you can either stay at home and moan that it's raining or you can grab an umbrella, get out there and jump across the puddles." Jose Miguel, journalism student, Spain. Here's to puddlejumping as a new national sport. How do we teach puddlejumping? Or help students acquire puddlejumping skills?

Worksheet on finding the value of a fraction of a quantity

Finding the value of a unit fraction, then generalising to the value of any fraction of a quantity. The numbers are 'easy' in the sense they are simple multiples of the denominators. There are a couple of extension questions.

sed - The easiest way to replace white spaces with (underscores) _ in bash - Stack Overflow

echo "This is just a test" | sed -e 's/ /_/g' Could be handy for improving webconvert. Takes a string and puts underscores in spaces

One Thing Well | A Poor Man’s Notational Velocity

simple note logging in bash. I could not resist tweaking the file name creation bit as follows... function n { NAMESTRING="$*" NAMESTRING=${NAMESTRING// /_} gedit ~/Dropbox/notes/$NAMESTRING.txt }

ShakeDesignScans_2009_05_10_184910 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

software UI sketches for node based video compositing software. Shake was bought and then discontinued by Apple, reasons unknown.

Bright space, improving the life chances of children and young people through the development of their creative skills

Do it if you are under 18.

Lessons at CES - how your tablet can compete with iPad - Chicago Sun-Times

"Tapping a button, scrolling a list, or zooming a screen in and out should make the user feel as though they’re tapping that user interface element directly. It shouldn’t feel as though they’re tapping a domino that knocks over other dominoes inside device which ultimately causes something to happen." Via Daringfireball. I'm hoping for a range of cheaper slates some of which can run the Ubuntu netbook variant rather than Android. Educational uses would then follow!

Hebrew and Arabic on track « Canonical Design

Sometimes I forget how much work there is in the design of the letters and other marks we use to convey meaning. And how reading a few sentences triggers an enormous set of interlinked cerebral processes that just work for most of us. Ubuntu designers are working on a font for the user interface and I hope for use in documents. Unicode fonts can cover a huge range of languages these days with different traditions of type setting.

Ion readies book scanner for e-book buffs • reghardware

Could be the answer to keeping evidence of student progress (and a database of common mistakes)? Could be the answer to all those forms... I need to know if the grey frame you put on the book is adjustable. Must be really.

[ubuntu] "Starting Init crypto disks..." failure to boot - Ubuntu Forums

might help with the puredyne starting init crypto disks error. Although the error shows up with no power off in the case of puredyne.

Building and Installing Fluxus on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) « sync-signal.com - audio, video, electronics and code

Try this on t42. Comments don't look to reassuring. Might try the puredyne ppa

new year – with fluxus and mixxx | ponnuki

Another dj using open source software. A three hour mix with Puredyne applications (MIXXX and fluxus) on, wait for it, an EeePC 701. Thats playing audio and beat matching together with projecting graphics on a low power CPU. I'd love to know what the dsp percentage was, Via puredyne mailing list

PHP apps plagued by Mark of the Beast bug • The Register

Amazing.

BBC News - Who, What, Why: What happens to £9.99 when VAT rises?

There has to be a numeracy task in here somewhere...

Graphs and coordinates part 1

Three sides introducing (x,y) notation and the patterns associated with a straight line graph. Some work on coordinate geometry (i.e. find the coordinate to complete the rectangle/isosceles triangle/kite). Plotting from formulas for simple cases. Idea that the constant in the y=3x +1 type formula controls how far up the Y axis the line is... Graph grids with points and labels produced using pyxplot 8.01, and nice they look as well. Page about using this software coming soon.

Detroit in ruins | Art and design | The Observer

Remarkable photos. Via daringfireball.

David Toop - Making Sounds on Vimeo

Short film about David Toop's work and the laptop orchestra

Box multiply worksheet

A 'vertical multiplication' worksheet with box multiplication examples for whole numbers, fractions and algebraic expressions including quadratics. 30 questions with answers on page 3 and 4. This is meant as a bit of consolidation after the holiday and an attempt to build a bit of a schema about multiplying.

Free Phase Shifting Looper Inspired By Steve Reich » Synthtopia

Reaktor got there first. I have this idea for a 'stevealator' in pure data. I'll still do it though...

BBC News - Tim Berners-Lee calls for free internet worldwide

"Sir Tim said the rise in mobile networks around the world meant there was now an opportunity to connect everyone. "What about these people who have a signal but are not part of the web, who are not part of the information society?" he said." BBC news page

Locus Roundtable » It All Started When: Charles Stross

"Writing, if it’s going to go anywhere, has to become a habit."

forum.thinkpads.com • View topic - NEW T60 Temperature Thread - Especially high GPU Temperature

t60 temperature sensor mapping

Samples of the Javanese gamelan of Museum Nusantara Delft

Nice, well documented, recordings of a 'collected' gamelan in a European museum. The author has provided wavs of each of the individual instruments in each of two contrasting gamelans. Copyright free for sampling provided original samples provided with derivative works.

Tate Britain| Past Exhibitions | Audio Arts : John Cage

William Furlong produced the Audio Arts series of tape cassettes for many years. Extracts from the master tapes are available from the tate's web site. Furlong interviewed many artists and sound artists for the cassette magazine. This is a short interview with John Cage.

Qtractor - An Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer

Alpha software at present, the other end of the scale to Jokosher, looks more like logic pro to me, and supports plugins of many types.

Jokosher

A relatively easy sound recording and mixing program. You can install effects plugins as well. Available in the Ubuntu repository and for windows.

BBC News - A million UK children 'lack access to computers'

A quick check on the 'partners' page suggests that this organisation is unlikely to be interested in recycling computers and in using open source operating systems, but I could be wrong...

CASH Music: Kristin Hersh

Kristin Hersch is selling a book of photos and lyrics. You obtain the associated music from this Web site, or purchase a download from amazon. You can download 'stems' (the separate vocal, guitar, bass tracks &c in stereo) for each of the songs on the album as 128Kb/s mp3 files. Converting these to wavs and importing them into a DAW such as Ardour results in you being able to remix and apply effects to the separate tracks and alter the final sound of the track considerably. Nice idea, excellent way to demo open source software with professional material.

Jon22 » classification images and perceptual learning

An academic paper that uses a statistical procedure or two, together with a non-technical explanation by the author. Could be handy

5 by 5 square graph axes, positive quadrant, made using pyxplot

# uses pyxplot to make a 5 by 5 square positive quadrant on a 6 by 6 graph grid # with lines each 0.1 and axis labels each unit # axes lines have arrows at end set terminal eps set output '5positive.eps' set size square f(x) = 0 set xtics 0, 1 set ytics 0, 1 # grid draws the lines, and mxtics/mytics says how the lines spaced # and where they start set grid set mxtics -1, 0.1 set mytics -1, 0.1 # make the axes arrows, and start at the zeros instead of the edge # of the boxes set axis x arrow set axis y arrow set axis x atzero set axis y atzero # basic labels, can't control linear position set xlabel 'X' set ylabel 'Y' rotate 90 set nokey # the plot command also controls the size of the box plot [-1:5][-1:5] f(x) This all needs to be packaged as a function with variables controlling the shape, range and amount of 'spare' space around the axes. It will save a LOT of time writing activity sheets and class notes about graphs

PyXPlot - A data processing, graph plotting and vector graphics suite

gnuplot with subroutines (have a look at the triangle example). When installed on Ubuntu, this brings the whole of LaTeX with it, turning a 3Mb download into a 300Mb download, so I installed LyX as well.

Gnuplot tricks: Plotting an inequality in 2D

Lovely - just what I need but 1/0 being 'quietly ignored' worries me. Shading the area corresponding to an inequality in gnuplot. Just work out how to use line shading instead of solid colour for the notes.

Gnuplot

graphical inequalities

Fuduntu

Sorts fans on T60, goes funny when waking from suspend. Actually, fan still a problem when installed to hard drive. Back to Ubuntu 10.10 with 2.6.35 kernel and tpfan triggering hardware control when cpu temp goes over 50. Livable with

Comic Sans Criminal - There's help available for people like you!

Excellent. Happy Christmas all... logging out for a few days...

IceCube in Scale

There is a jobs page.... IceCube nutrino detector

Enormous 1km ice-cube machine fashioned at South Pole • The Register

"Sealed up in the transparent darkness kilometres below the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, the sensors are able to pick up tiny flashes of blue light ("Cherenkov radiation") produced when a neutrino collides with a particle amid the ice." Wonderful idea

idle();: Prolonging the battery life on your laptop/netbook running Ubuntu

some hints

jonobacon@home | At home with Jono Bacon, Community Manager and Author

the new default desktop for ubuntu 11.04

Bach Festival 2010 Schedule | WKCR 89.9FM NY

New York student radio station WKCR is running a Bach festival from today until New Year's Day. MP3 stream available, clear sound, no glitches!

BBC News - Playbutton: Self-playing music for digital times

When you are tired of the music, you could use it for file storage... 256Mb is about right for most assignments...

Doyen of type design: The most-read man in the world | The Economist

The man who drew Verdana. Via Daring Fireball

Marcel's Daily Journal Script | Marcel Gagné

Aha - how to automate title generation. A little tweaking of the arguments and I could use this on the web site

Inside a Star-filled Sky

Looks like it might be fun

On An Overgrown Path: I am not interested in repeating successes

'Funny isn't it? It turns out the pie in the sky is the same pie that's in your fridge'. Philip Glass quote

Ted Leung on the Air | ChromeOS update

"Google is working with Citrix on an HTML5 version of Citrix’s receiver, which would allow access to Enterprise Applications. There are already HTML VNC’s and so forth. The Google presenter said that they have had an unexpectedly large amount of interest from CIO’s. Actually, that’s what led to the Citrix partnership." Now lads, just fix the formula editor in google docs and you could have an educational client device here as well.

Google Chrome Cr-48 notebook first look - Chicago Sun-Times

This could make IT managers in Colleges very happy - single small image on the hard drive and no unsigned applications. My question is the usual: mathematical formulas and typesetting.

MathSphere Maths Dictionary

Jolly decent of them. Print to PDF and you have a 60 page illustrated dictionary

BSL Glossary

British Sign Language glossary page for maths words

Scientific Linux - Welcome to Scientific Linux (SL)

Based on RHEL source packages and built by people who get paid at CERN and the US FermiLab. Those organisations use a lot of computers and a lot of advanced applications, and so managing their own conservative and stable linux distribution looks sensible! The live CD (maintained by another person) booted the T42, found the wifi card, and ran Firefox, Office, Gimp and Thunderbird, and that was that more or less. Flash enabled in the install. Adding the RPMforge repository (use the instructions for CentOS 5.5) widens the range of applications. Audacity installs and records sound with the usual alsamixer twiddle and a change of preferences. Updates on 5.5 'until at least 2012-02-02', same cut off as version 4, so I imagine this is funding related.

BBC News - How countries lead the world in education

"Although private schools do get better raw results in many countries, the OECD found that - when you stripped out the effect of pupils' socio-economic background - the state schools did as well, or better, than private schools in most countries." That PISA report.

Living in a browser [dive into mark]

" “Forget native apps,” I said. “Just make good web pages that do good things.” This was met with the IRC equivalent of people looking at you like you have two heads." Above quote from the entity known as bee, in a comment about Chromium OS on an old page by Mark Pilgrim.

[SOLVED] How do I remove sound from a video file? - Ubuntu Forums

ffmpeg -i thingy.avi -an -vcodec copy thingy-silent.avi How to strip the sound track off my crappy phone's videos

_48631346_dolar_coin_304.jpg (JPEG Image, 304×554 pixels)

numeracy alert! Ratio question based on the copper/Zinc/Magnanese/Nickel percentages. Do your students get allergies when counting change? Could be the Nickel.

BBC News - Internet shopping forces High Streets to adapt

"It is more a reflection of our changing shopping habits. The internet was widely heralded as the death knell for the High Street, but the data shows that shopping in person is still a key pastime for many." Is it just me or is shopping as pastime a little sad?

Scatter diagram notes

Foundation type notes about patterns, line of best fit, and making predictions.

The Music of Jeff Harrington

Interesting use of electronics to process acoustic instruments.

David Mamet's Master Class Memo to the Writers of The Unit | Movieline

Watch out for blue suited penguins

Tessellations

Very useful. Plain grids with common tessellations. No fancy stuff and no colours. Really useful!

BBC - Gardening - Gardening Guides - Techniques - Growing potatoes

Wonderful. Came across this looking for information about growing potatoes for a numeracy worksheet (don't ask)

Movie Quotes - Subzin.com

It works at least on my standard 2001 quotes. Via Daringfireball

Best buy

A one side worksheet that shows photos of two identically priced 400g tins of tomatoes, one shelf label showing as £1.45 per Kg and the other showing as £2.42 per Kg. Thanks to the management for giving me a superb functional skills like question.

Winter temperatures

A quick opportunistic worksheet on winter temperatures across the UK, emphasizing the colder end of the spectrum.

Crossword Puzzle Generator

Not a bad little crossword generator. Print to PDF and then load into Inkscape to get rid of the little buttons. You have to ungroup the objects. There is an annoying length limit on both the words and clues

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival : the UK's largest international festival of new and experimental music // hcmf// 2010: Art of noise: Cage and chance at hcmf//

Get the Cage Train from Staleybridge. Love it.

BBC NEWS | Health | Recruits to nursing 'must double'

Old data: 50 000 leaving with 20 000 new recruits and 12 000 from overseas. The loss rate appears to be something close to 50 000 / 400 000 = 12.5%, higher than the 8% benchmark figure but may have changed now.

Unions divided by decision to force nurses to take degree - Health News, Health & Families - The Independent

400 000 Nurses in UK. I can feel a numeracy activity coming on...

Number of 17 year olds in UK 2008-2013 - WhatDoTheyKnow

There are about 550 000 teachers in England. The government works on an 8% turnover (I read it on the bbc so that must be true :-). So that's 44 000 teachers each year assuming the 8% is lost to profession and not 'churn' of teachers moving to different schools. There are about 750 000 17 year olds. The Korean's only allow the top 5% to train as teachers, so that would mean a shortfall of 10 000 per year. In Finland apparently, the top 10% are allowed (presumably if they want to) to enter teaching, and that becomes feasible in the UK if you can persuade 59% of the eligible group to become teachers. Of course, the recruitment for a given year does not have to come from a single year cohort of 17 year olds. Perhaps Adult Education might be important after all, eh, Michael?

Nets (3D Models) : Free Printables : SEN Teacher ~ Free teaching resources for Special Needs.

Flash applet prints nets of a nice range of shapes straight to your printer. No way to save the image directly or to export as an illustrator file, so I just printed it using the pdf 'printer' then pulled it into inkscape.

Platonic Solids

These are going to have to get made...

Mark Simonson Studio / Notebook: The Lost Art of Type Spec'ing

You haven't lived until you have sat with someone who is manually 'justifying' typewritten text to make the columns in a photocopied fanzine. 1980s punk style. Count each character and add extra spaces between the words to justify the result both sides.

Tessellation worksheet with slab type questions

The first exercises need accurate cutting out of shapes, the later ones are fine for those questions about fitting small boxes into drawers.

Shapes around you

Nice interactive PowerPoint for Numeracy teaching. I'm using this as a starter for vocabulary development before work on tiles and tessellation.

ubuntu-10-10-on-t60.jpg (JPEG Image, 1024×768 pixels)

Ubuntu 10.10 on a refurbished thinkpad T60. All working, including hibernate as well as suspend. The fan control is aggressive on cooling, rear fan is on quite often, looking at installing tpfan control software. Apart from that, excellent. Rhythmbox plays my drm free purchased e-music tracks fine.

rbeq - Project Hosting on Google Code

10 band equiliser for Rhythmbox - works ok on 10.10 Ubuntu and small

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town » News

"Someone Comes to Town is my weirdest book by far, a fantasy novel about a man whose father is a mountain and whose mother is a washing machine, who moves from small-town Ontario to Toronto to help build a citywide meshing wireless network with a crustypunk dumpster-diver." Doctorov gives out all his books in electronic form free from his web site, and he hasn't noticed any reduction in paper sales, quite the contrary.

Formulas and Methods for AQA Module 5 - Resources - TES Connect

Useful: quick guide to the main results for module 5

Representing Data

Stem and Leaf Diagrams section here is 'good enough' to get the idea across. I'll provide a couple of data sets for students to build one with, and to get used to the need to have two passes through the data to put the leaves into size order...

Ratios: one sheet of book style questions

Designed for use after the PDF presentation. Consolidation.

PDF presentation on ratio with a visual approach

One of my own - just to help the ones who don't grok the word problem approach

Pie chart handout

Just a quick going over the mechanics of drawing them

Free Level 2 number (whole numbers, decimals fractions percentages) worksheets all  linked to UK adult core numeracy curriculum

The best buy handout about easter eggs is good for use now with GCSE groups! Number, formulas, gcse, ratios and proportion

The story of Polaroid inventor Edwin Land, one of Steve Jobs' biggest heroes - (37signals)

Nice piece: via daringfireball

How do you copy 60m files? • The Register

"What worked brilliantly was using a Linux virtual machine. A simple default CentOS 5.5 install was able to mount SMB shares on both the originator and destination machines. From there, the command-line tool cp was able to succeed where every tool except Richcopy failed." - yup, he had to use a virtual machine to copy files...

YouTube - stagesix6's Channel

Lots of Piano as the owner states.

Moving Space Productions - chailly

Nice music videos

Fedora 7, Samsung printer installation WORKING!

fedora 7 about same as CentOS 5.5

[CentOS] Best way to configure proprietary NVidia driver on CentOS ?

The 173 driver works fine on the ASUS Pundit. There were dependency issues with the latest and greatest.

Fractions, Decimals & Percentages Make Sense - National STEM Centre

The whole SMILE maths collection of worksheets is online now. Could be useful for Numeracy classes, especially in contexts where the motivation for the adults studying maths is work with children.

Howto: Open Images in a Linux Console using fbi, a console based Image Viewer | Linuxers

Grub2 is complicating things

Group Work that Works (Even in Large Classes!) - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"effective group assignments simply give groups a set of data and require them to make a difficult decision, much like a courtroom jury is given a great deal of complex information and asked to render a “guilty or not guilty” decision.  In this format, student energy is focused on analyzing different pieces of evidence, weighing their merits against one another, and using the concepts from your discipline to argue toward a “best” conclusion together." Via Jerz. I'll try something along interpreting statistics...

Adults Learning Mathematics

Association that has a list of publications and pointers to research in the field.

Great and Good honour the designer of world's first laptop • reghardware

Love it. GRiD.

Local Dance Commissioning Project: Affectations | Explore the Arts - The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

Dance piece produced in supercollider with motion feedback.

Home : Linotype: The Film

"How does the linotype machine fit in with current technology?" "It doesn't" Via daringfireball

Help With Background And Text Block :: Forum :: Indexhibit

nice gallery style

Tom Waits on his cherished albums of all time | Music | The Observer

"Monk said 'There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it'. He almost sounded like a kid taking piano lessons. I could relate to that when I first started playing the piano, because he was decomposing the music while he was playing it. It was like demystifying the sound, because there is a certain veneer to jazz and to any music, after a while it gets traffic rules, and the music takes a backseat to the rules. It's like aerial photography, telling you that this is how we do it."

Digging Up Thelonious Monk's Southern Roots : NPR

Nice documentary on Monk and his Southern roots. NPR.

» Who Is Thelonious Monk?

"The fact is, the Monk family held together despite long stretches without work, severe money shortages, sustained attacks by critics, grueling road trips, bouts with illness, and the loss of close friends." -- The book is on order

Daring Fireball: Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It

No flash for Mac OS X

Mark Bernstein: Card Sharks and Holy Scrollers

"Card metaphor is ideal for highly nonlinear presentation, where the hypertext map is complex; that’s why I used it in The Election of 1912. Stretchtext naturally lends itself to annotative hypertext a nearly linear reading. That’s why people lost interest in stretchtext well before the Web appeared"

Information Architects – iPad: Scroll or Card?

“Card Sharks” and “Holy Scrollers” - lots of small pages or long pages with scrolling. Via Mark Bernstein

PRS for Music Foundation - Winner

A composition prize goes to an accoustic sound art sculpture thing. Nice.

The Linux Blog » Rotating Videos in Linux

For when you get enthusiastic and use portrait on your point and shoot camera while taking a video...

The Rite of Spring - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Pleyela/pianola master rolls were not recorded using a "recording piano" played by a performer in real time, but were instead true "pianola" rolls, cut mechanically/graphically, free from any constraints imposed by the ability of the player. Musicologist William Malloch observed that on these rolls the final section is at a considerably faster tempo, relative to the rest of the composition, than in the generally used orchestral score."

Daniel Alfonso Massey :: Projects :: Trabalenguas

"Recently I came across some cassette tapes my mother recorded, spanning from a few months before my birth in 1982 to 1986. The recordings begin with fetal heartbeats and progress through episodes of crying, laughter, play, and different stages of speech development. The material interested me somewhat for its personal value, but moreso as an artifact of impromptu and performative documentation. Which is to say, there is a constant negotiation between the unpredictability of the child's behavior and the expectations which the parent projects onto the process of recording. This friction is reflected in the chaotic quality of the sounds, which move between soothing and anxious textures."

YouTube - RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

wonderful. I'd love the 'drawing' (if it ever existed) as a poster. Ken Robinson doing his thing. I have always had doubts about standardised testing. Via presentationzen.com

Sonics Project

The sonics course now has its own blog, so less link space here. Back to Maths!

Building Drums in PD

noise sources with envelopes

Small firms split on social media • The Register

"The research also found that 19 per cent of SMEs surveyed did not have a website" - probably the sort of businesses that don't need one for day-to-day. I think they do need a 'single page' just saying who what where and how to contact &c simply because so many people research purchases and so on using Web searches now.

An interview with Kieran Healy : The Setup

"On the hardware side, there's that absurd productivity counterpart to the hedonic treadmill, where for some reason it's hard to get through the to-do list even though the café you're at contains more computing power than was available to the Pentagon in 1965." -I'm not the only one who finds this strange. The combined computing power of my student's mobile phones is more than I had access to in the early 1980s for research purposes...

Hour One of Twenty Four « rob canning

Algorithmic music example. Python -> MIDI for the disklavier and -> Lilypond for a score. Do I want to get this close to 'music' for the project?

baby10.jpg (JPEG Image, 500×375 pixels)

breadboard circuit bending

Fractals and Music

"The mapping of nonmusical material to pitches is another ancient idea. A medieval technique known as soggetto cavato (a theme "carved" from words) maps the individual letters of words to music. For example, Hercules Dux Ferrarie, a mass by Josquin des Prez dedicated to Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, uses a theme based on the vowels in the Duke's name. The sequence of vowels e-u-e-u-e-a-i-e is first mapped to the six solmization syllables (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la), which generates the following syllables: re, ut, re, ut, re, fa, mi, re. When converted to traditional note names, one gets the pitches, D-C-D-C-D-F-E-D. This technique has been used extensively by composers throughout history, including J. S. Bach." Diaz-Jerez. That is a whole project in itself... music from text messages?

::: Gustavo Díaz-Jerez :::

Uses a single parameter iteration by Lorenz to produce some music - provides software that implements fractal music (l-systems and automata). PhD thesis is available as PDF, taken in Manhattan so in English.

4.2 Sequencer

Format of a text file that can send messages to pd objects, its called a qlist and there is an example in 4.2.1.2. I'm away with a basic program to generate the text file...

Processing stuff

Processing: when you are adding in libraries on Linux, you need to make sure that the folder with the library files in it has the same case as the name of the .jar file. So a .jar file called MyLibrary has to be in a folder called library within MyLibrary itself within libraries in the sketchbook folder. Many authors use lower case names for the folders in the zip files - those work on Windows but not on Linux (and I guess on Mac OS)

onebyoneblog » Lorenz Attractor – HTML5 Stylee

In javascript! With a background that is under the text width in CSS!

Lorenz Attractor - OpenProcessing

a much simpler lorenz attractor

Lorenz Attractor viewer - OpenProcessing

Nice implementation with real time controls of the parameters...

Tree-Axis » krister » Ess

Sound library for Processing with documentation and examples...

Week 1: Claude's notes :: Permacultures

digital art project (permacultures) by goto10 collective in a London studio and resources venue called SPACES. This looks like a crystal lattice and apparently there will be beasts walking around it...

List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Table of fractals with links...

YouTube - Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness

Mandelbriot's talk to TED

BBC News - 'Fractal' mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85

"Mandelbrot was also highly critical of the world banking system, arguing the economic model it used was unable to cope with its own complexity." Mendelbrot has died at 85. He knew a chaotic system when he saw one.

Welcome :: Indexhibit

indexhibit is a php script for your web server for displaying images with text and keeping it all organised. Needs a MySQL database. I remember it being a bit funky to set up. Gallery, portfolio, pages. Forum is active, but source code shows no updates to main application for a couple of years. Perhaps it just does everything OK now...

Steve Reich- early tape pieces

"The bone I had to pick with (Pierre) Schaeffer and that bunch was that if they were using the sound of a car crash, they had to lower it by an octave or speed it up by an octave, run it through a ring modulator or play it backwards. Why not hear that it's a car crash! These sounds that you're using in the original state have some kind of emotional resonance. We relate to them in various ways. If you bring them into the music, that brings in an emotional, theatrical meaning which is useful. It's worthwhile maintaining and building upon." - early tape pieces, stay low on the fx tracks!

YouTube - Blue Collar

The soundtrack rhythm made out of machine noise - idea for project

maxgadney.com: The Rise of The Tower Graphic

long graphics with information

GMPolice (gmp24_1) on Twitter

The Greater Manchester Police are tweeting every incident over the 24 hours on October 14th 2010. I had to log into my twitter account to see the messages. Looks like a real treasure hunt for statistics projects (classify, tally, display)

venomous porridge - They can’t be serious. Are they serious?

Lovely. Via daringfireball. Thank your lucky stars for the 'readability' bookmarklet

Blendnik

Blender + PD :: sound and visuals

Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics | CCRMA

the mother lode

Index of /centos.org/5.5/isos/i386

Nearest CentOS mirror to me with an installer DVD image. Netinstall generates daft corrupt .rpm errors due to gateway timeouts. Heading for ccrma repository once I get the thing installed with a real time kernel.

VST/VSTi support in Ubuntu Studio 10.04 Lucid Lynx for dummies « Shoe Hotline – 555-SHOE

VST on Ubuntustudio

Sound Is Art

Blog with links to sound art samples. Interesting range of stuff

Radio Silence | Zach Poff

I love those wire frame radio shaped loudspeaker holders... The idea of the propagating silences is nice as well

Installing Planet CCRMA on CentOS 5

Once CentOS is up and running...

CentOS 5.3 - Serious Linux for serious people

Useful post installation stuff for CentOS desktop. CentOS supports the ccrma music repository and actually has a real time kernel that is currently supported

CentOS 5.5 Netinstall – Network Installation

CentOS install with wired internet

Digital Media — Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

"Good quality paper is extremely durable. With a little luck it can last 500 years or more. Even cheap pulp novels and comic books can last 100 years. Just go to any self-respecting university library or even a vintage shop like Half to Have It in Half Moon Bay and you will have no trouble finding books, magazines and newspapers a century old." - a conservative back up strategy and food for thought

YouTube - Virtual Barber Shop - Binaural Recording

Cheesy or what

Homemade Binaural Microphones » phonography.org.uk

blue peter lives: make your own binaural microphones. I'm thinking of a ceiling tile head shaped cut out for isolation between the microphones. There are sound samples.

YouTube - Steve Reich - South Bank Show - Part 2

Its gonna rain starts at 2:45 with the actuality, and 3:12 for the tape phase (about 10seconds).

Countdown Numbers flash game

Works on Chrome but not Firefox for some reason.

Seth's Blog: The buddy system

Pair learning, peer tutoring.

Debian + Xfce: Install Amazon Mp3 Player In Debian Squeeze

The dependencies you need in one neat archive. Amazon need to get up to speed with the idea of a repository! Nevertheless, they do at least provide support for Linux.

YouTube - Strumming Music for the Bournville Carillon 2010

Charlemagne Palestine performing a short piece of strumming music on the Bournville Village church bells. Great stuff and how did I miss this happening?

YouTube - La Monte Young:The Second Dream of the HighTension Line Step

Catchy title and no beat. serious drone music.

NHS Evidence - Learning Disabilities - Work stress and depression among direct support professionals: the role of work support and locus of control

abstract of hard evidence linking internal locus of control to lower stress in a work setting

Khan Academy

This is amazing. The guy must be working non-stop

Jerz's Literacy Weblog

"(I do something similar, of course, by asking the students to post a quotation and a brief statement about each assigned reading, but if I could see the students' private annotations, I'm sure I'd learn a lot more from their passive, ambient annotations, rather than the piece they choose to display to the public.)" - can they label their annotations as private? You know, that shitty first draft idea where no one else but you reads what you write?

All sizes | Charlemagne at the keyboard | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Scott Unrien's photo of Charlemagne Palestine at the keyboard, Schlingen Blagen, I think at the Spitalfields performance.

Diversity and Citizenship Curriculum Review

Identity construction and quotes about classroom practice

Podcasts de Sismógrafo en la cadena  - RNE - RTVE.es

More recent podcasts from RNE Radio 3 with Jordi Giradez, search for Sismografo

Podcasts de Sismógrafo en la cadena  - RNE - RTVE.es

Podcast in spanish about oramics and other kinds of eletronic music

Daphne Oram - Oramics (PD 21)

some mp3 samples of oramics system tracks

Cloven tongues of fire

The composition on soundcloud.com.

सølγ שаябlɛş: Daphne Oram ~ Oramics [Paradigm]

Site with a sample of a composition produced using the oramics 35mm painting music system

oramix.jpg (JPEG Image, 602x390 pixels)

painting music - oramics in action

Oramics

what I was on about last Thursday. I want an oramics iPad app NOW

solitude

Puredata score realised into audio using puredata. Looks ace. Oramics for the 21st century

Solitude.png (PNG Image, 4000x543 pixels) - Scaled (34%)

Score for music realised in puredata

BBC News - Raoul Moat Taser company director 'kills himself'

Someone filled in a purchase request, and someone more senior countersigned it. An order form was printed and sent to the company. Collective responsibility. Shades of Kelly, we need to get this stuff out in the open and reduce the pressure on the inventive ones. Guns with 'safety' ammunition kill outright. Tasers seem to give those in reasonable health a very good chance of living whilst allowing the police to immobilize and render harmless. The Benthamite case is solid. Why the revoked licence? Do you really want Heckler and Koch machine guns used at short range in small villages instead?

Picasa Web Albums - Keith Peter

The circuit bending project starts. Just exploring affordances, no definite plan yet. Little time as well right now.

Rhizome | 101 Cassette Labels

Individual cassette tapes as tokens

The Hallucinatory Life of Tape

Paul Hegarty on the passing of a technology

Multiple choice test with issues...

...wonderful

JavaScript Permutations Generator

Saves my brain a job

Xmarks Blog » End of the Road for Xmarks

"It turns out that with the exception of people doing market research, consumers using search are not typically looking for an authoritative list of sites within a category; they’re looking for an answer to a specific question."

tessellation/javascript : Dylan Fisher

what would this sound like if it was a noise?

Rhizome | Interview with David Toop

"...that sound has this characteristic of the uncanny, that sound is to some degree a ghost, and hence this expression in the mediumship of the listener. Sound is transitory, ambiguous in its location in space, and it’s uncertain; it lends itself to representations of uncertainty. It lends itself to feelings of dread and fear and loss and these emotional states, these extreme psychic states. It lends itself to mysticism, all these ineffable experiences. These sensations of immateriality." David Toop

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Full Web site about an important record. Lots of reading amid the sales pitch.

'Data Magic' on Vimeo

I like this one...

Thee Moths playing in the Round Gallery at the Birmingham M&AG on Vimeo

Drone music at the art gallery. Impressive amount of noise. Looks like a radio aerial there as well - link to pa?

Harvard System of Referencing Guide

Nice use of folding outline

"Changing notions of teacher professionalism inthe Further Education sector"

paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, 1999 - useful stuff on FE lecturer agency and responses to managerialism. Bit old, but then its coming back into fashion I guess

Resilient Teachers: Resisting Stress and Burnout

Agency: depersonalise issues and moral purpose. Some good quotes. Australian secondary school

[ubuntu] FFMPEG .flv to .mp3 batch convert - Ubuntu Forums

the command line in the first post works.

GCSE Week 3 lesson handouts

This is for the majority of the class and is aimed at those doing a numeracy test in week 4. Harder stuff for the more confident in progress. Made use of stuff from skillsworkshop.org, author attribution on the handouts.

maxatom &gt; Compact Cassettes - nostalgic rubbish or digital's saviour?

There is a gentleman who collects cassette tapes... a connoisseur of rust...

Numeracy test revision notes and vocabulary guides « GCSE Maths Help

Link across to skills workshop summaries for level 1 and level 2 numeracy

* Casper Electronics » Drone Lab V2

The nice tidy face of circuit bending. A kit with a cool black PCB (genius marketing, I now want to find who makes photo-resist black PCBs). Perhaps not in the true spirit of urban angst at technology, but strikes me as a relatively straight forward construction project for a performance art course or sound tech course and a useful artefact for the participants at the end.

GentleJunk co.

Circuit bending again. I'm trying to find recipes for non-harsh sounds. Neroli style bell sounds, or an interior wind chime would be good.

Free geography and mapping resources for education from Ordnance Survey

Useful - after a fragment for scale questions

Cementimental - Experimental Music and Circuit-Bending Links - record labels, musical instruments and equipment, gear, artists, bands etc.

Some truly strange electronics here. I'm not anti-theory, and so will probably design the re-purposing of electronics junk to achieve specific ranges of sound. I like the idea of photoelectric cells to provide changing resistances.

Composition 000

Pure data basics

Pure Dataflow - Diving into Pd | Digital Artists' Handbook

Pure data background - the dataflow visual programming model

list of PureData objects and extended objects | protman makes music

object reference for pure data with ace background

PureData Tutorials

how to write the puredata output to a file. This tutorial starts with a patch to make a simple sound recorder using pure data. Works fine on the t42 with crunchbang and puredata usong the OSS sound framework. I get errors using ALSA and have not installed Jack on this system yet. Audacity works fine when you switch off the PureData compute audio so it releases the sound hardware. These two programs will get me going as I can build a lot of things in pd

Jack puredata and ardour

how to record pure data output.

PureData (en)

pure data patches for basic synthesis (sine, saw, square &c)

Music Thing: The Excel spreadsheet synthesizer

Could be useful - I'm going back to basics perhaps. NB doesn't want to work on office 2003.

Universities Scotland - Search Results

Web page below has disappeared already, so here is a link to the pdf with some quotes

Universities Scotland :: RACE EQUALITY TOOLKIT Teaching

"Scottish students have an innate advantage because they have the language and culture, they can easily build a good relationship with their [Scottish] lecturer." Nice student quote

The Ladder of Inference

Useful summary

GCSE Week 2 lesson handouts

Very full templated lesson handouts so I can have individual and pair work going for the majority of the lesson. Then I can do the ILPs and sort out additional help.

Alexander Yessenin-Volpin - A brief biography in his own words

Intuitionist - but can't find any maths

Catherine Christer Hennix, Drones and the Changing Same | In Praise of Copying

background

Unit 5 Section 2 : Mean, Median, Mode and Range

Active page for mean median and mode

Latitude and Longitude of World Cities (London, L.A., Paris, Singapore) — Infoplease.com

Useful for questions

voet cranf ∞ color synthAxis

Nice colour mixer

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

Still want a Facebook account? Animated data visualisation. Not so sure about the circular area projections.

Card catalog (sic)

Typed card index in a Library. Via scripting news. Dave Winer is creative commons licencing with 'some rights reserved' including attribution so OK for powerpoints (with a source caption)

Carr’s “The Shallows”: An Internet victim in search of lost depth — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard

"These opportunities weave exactly the kind of associative meaning Carr cherishes; if they distract us, they do so by requiring us to cut a path through a rich environment of information — just as, say, a great library does."

Linda Stone

Blog by Apple and Microsoft senior manager and inventor (or at least coiner) of the phrase 'email apnea'

Find the equivalent fractions

What I call the Z sheets. Useful for embedding fractions ideas, but also good for tables and spotting patterns

fractions worksheets

Nice puzzle sheets that involve the recognition of shapes &c. Tends to assume that cancelling down is ok

Lost World's Fairs

HTML 5 and WOFF typography. Really nice, via daringfireball

An interview with Keita Takahashi : The Setup

A fellow Numatic Henry fan. One of the best kept secrets in high technology.

Critical incident review

Adapted and used on slide 9 of lesson 2.

Prodait - Home

useful

BBC News - Commercial pressures 'will shut a UK university'

"The think tank argued that the "no-fail policy" in which no university was allowed to close meant that there was no genuine market or incentive to avoid failure." - can you imagine if one institution did close? The impact on second and first year undergraduates, and on post-graduate and part time students. Also the impact on any HE in FE work. Untying that lot would keep educrats going for years...

Discovering reflective practice

Various models, I'll hitch into Schon and Gibbs, but also Single and Double loop learning so the difficult things (feelings &c) get a mention.

Ardour 2.0 : A Brief Practical Introduction | Linux Journal

we are on 2.8 now but the basics of the interface should be the same

Seth's Blog: Why jazz is more interesting than bowling

Godin has explained why I keep teaching in two paragraphs. I'm playing the changes again starting tomorrow, like the last 23 Septembers, and always different.

Free-Loops.com | Free Drum Loops Wav MP3 Aif and Midi Sound Loops

well cheesy but could be plundered

freesound :: home page

creative commons licensed sound clips. Could be handy for workshop demos.

Making waves with Audacity

ambient music has a lot to asnwer for

Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle: Audacity

Hints including how to make multiple copies of a small loop.

Confessions of a Ubuntu Studio Developer: The State of Ubuntu Studio 2010

Ubuntustudio 10.04 installed without any media packages gives me a light ish instance of a Gnome desktop, runs in about 130Mb cf 270Mb for stock Ubuntu. I'm playing around with sound and use puredyne for that though as it has an RT kernel.

BBC News - Mountain-top grooving in Montreal

"When the winter freeze came to an end, Seguin and his Tam Tam players made their way outside to make music in the open air, and the Sunday Tam Tam began." sounds like a really nice idea

Models of Reflection

Useful summary of various models of reflective cycle with references.

2010 2011 Academic Year Planner. Academic Wall Chart 10/11 2010/11 10-11. School. Free Download.

Useful, thanks. Editable in OpenOffice Writer as well as Word.

Seth's Blog: Marketing to the bottom of the pyramid

"No substistence farmer walks to a store or stall saying, "I wonder what's new today? I wonder if there's a new way for me to solve my problems?" Every day, people in the West say that very thing as they engage in shopping as a hobby." - good post, also link to thought provoking video (d.light solar recharged LED lantern displacing kerosene lamps).

BBC News - Emerging fungal threat to historical film archives

"Cinematographic film has a layer of gelatin on its surface. This emulsion layer is where the image is formed but also provides ideal food for fungi like Aspergillus and Penicillium" - hum, where is that box full of old monochrome negatives...

BBC News - Beware the 'don't know' brigade

Useful bit on questionnaire design for maths - be careful to make your questions concrete and about things that happened recently.

Ubuntu Forums - View Single Post - [ubuntu] load grub for 10.04 lucid lynx

this worked for me when I reinstalled XP AFTER installing Ubuntu. On t42 the MBR is /dev/sda

Fractions to decimals.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

This one will help me to get the projector / IW / classroom PC sorted!

Number Resources

Just browsing these is enough to get your ideas going (flowing?). Number based activities for use in a class, some individual, some pair and some small group. Also stuff for the IW or for on the projector.

Free maths help and resources for pupils, parents and teachers, from MrBartonMaths.com!

Useful site, bosting resources, many in Microsoft specific formats though. I'll pdfise the ones I use.

Box or Table multiplication method screencast

Started doing some screencasts, this one is a short run through the 'box' or 'table' method for long multiplication. Produced using gtk-recordMyDesktop in Ubuntu Studio on a recycled laptop, works ok but takes time to render. YouTube does not like the .ogv files so I convert to .avi using the PiTiVi video editor, then upload those. The sound is from the built in microphone, so there is a bit of fan noise.

Download the cards - Design with Intent Toolkit

Cards and sheets used at a user interface conference. Interesting style as well as content. Via Seth Godin. Exercise: look at the introduction page and work out which of the 8 lenses the author is using to ensure I visit this wiki in a) the next few weeks and b) in a year or so?

Bug #570828 in gnome-system-tools (Ubuntu): “gnome-network-admin on UbuntuStudio doesnt allow to configure either wired networks or wireless”

for when you install ubuntu studio 10.04 on a laptop from thee dvd without a wired connection and realise you have no dhcp and eth0 won't pick up a wired connection. The one that worked was sudo dhclient eth0 run twice.Now to see if i can get nm-applet on this thing...

[SOLVED] How to record all audio output from sound card in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala - Ubuntu Forums

How to record sound you hear on Ubuntu based distros. You need sox installed.

Installing Flash Player 10 in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) « Rico on Flex

works on puredyne. Puredyne itself works great (Mixxx, puredata and SuperCollider with Jack) on an EeePC 10 inch web book, Atom processor. A bit crashy on the T42 laptop.

BBC News - Medieval diet aids healthy eating message

"The poor were semi-vegetarians who simply could not afford meat and social status. Wealth is very much associated with diet." The photo shows a lemon and an orange in the basket, but no tomatoes.

furtherfield review - Pure:dyne Discussion on Netbehaviour.

More on the history of puredyne. As a live DVD full of hugely complex software to explore, I can imagine this being the basis of workshops. The live disk / persistent pen drive approach means you don't have to alter the host PCs at all.

toplap uk - live coding in the UK

our local(ish) live coders

Paper on bricolage programming « Alex McLean

Levi-Strauss hits the command line.

All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses | Mute magazine

the inevitable theory paper... puredyne linux distribution

Zero Dollar Laptop Workshops

Pretty good scheme of work for a short course here...

puredyne

Live CD boots a linux operating system, a real time kernel, and quite a few sound and video applications. Arts Council funded...

Math Study Skills – How To Use Your Textbook « George Woodbury’s Blogarithm

Looks ok as a short activity. Might help if people use different textbooks as well.

Mathematics: w. ans: The Basic Skills: Amazon.co.uk: S. Llewellyn, A. Greer: Books

The 4th edition of what many maths teachers call the 'apple book' is still available second hand for the cost of postage from Amazon. The 4th and 5th editions were the last ones before the book was re-planned to fit the Adult Core Numeracy curriculum, and these earlier editions have the algebra and shape and space chapters. There is also a BASIC program to type into your BBC B+ :-)

antrix.net :: Dropbox without Gnome

Very important information for KDE and the *box users.

BBC News - Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle

"What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem" - ace

Archos announces five Android tablets • reghardware

Beginning of cheap tablets. I'm sure there will be a lot of models, and then the market will settle down to one or two sizes and specs. Could be good learning platforms if cheap enough for class sets...

In Defense of Links, Part Two: Money changes everything — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard

"If you’re on a web page that’s weighted down with cross-promotional hand-waving, revenue-squeezing ad overload and interstitial interruptions, odds are you’re on a newspaper or magazine site." The ecology of hyperlinks. Via Mark Bernstein's blog

Why is Gmail automatically playing music? - Gmail Help

This isn't such a great idea

Scripting News: A transparent change, but an important one

Here is an idea, synchronise the folder on this PC that holds the bash scripts and files that I publish bodmas.org with dropbox or Ubuntu One

Scripting News: How I do the hand-drawn diagrams

Yes, Dave Winer has had to provide people with instructions on how to draw a diagram...

Sky Chart for Birmingham

That big bright star low in the east around midnight is Jupiter

Wordle - Numeracy teacher words

I fed a scheme of work I found on Maggie H's skillsworkshop.org into wordle... 'Revise' comes out huge! 'Life' is rather smaller, and 'experiments' is tiny. Wordle asks for a user name when you save a completed wordle to the gallery. These names are NOT unique, so I didn't do all the ones with Keith as the user name! I've just worked out how to convert wordles to WMFs so that you can put them into PowerPoints as scalable objects rather than bitmaps.

Dave Norgate's Wordle vocabulary activities

Very nice, especially with Wordle live demo. Recognition of all those slightly different words and phrases we use to talk about the four functions.

Handbook to Elementary Social Studies

Hilda Taba's Inductive Strategy - see below in the context of Numeracy vocabulary

skillsworkshop Blog: Hilda Taba (part 2), Wordle, and numeracy

Wordle to explore Maths words

BBC News - Tech Know: BBC Micros used in retro programming class

I wrote a simple monochrome mandelbrot set program on a BBC B+ and it took three days to plot the contour. We had 5 of them in a study centre in the mid 90s and they had thousands of self-teach numeracy skills programs on 5.25 inch disks. Some bright spark IT manager decided they were obsolete.... we got brand new RM 386s with Windows - and no software apart from Office. So I wrote a load of Excel 3 spreadsheets...

Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD

Just in case. An Ubuntu Live CD can be a useful tool even if you like windows.

Solid-state lighting: an energy-economics perspective

LED lighting may just mean more photons and not less energy use.

Grant Goddard : radio blog: Download The First Annual Not ‘The Ofcom Digital Radio Progress Report’ Report

The presentation that can be downloaded as a PDF is interesting in itself, and also raises a few issues about the presentation of information in graphs.

YouTube - NMAWorldEdition's Channel

Via Daringfireball. I wish I could do stuff like this about Maths or learning theory.

Census 2001 - Population Pyramids - ENGLAND AND WALES

Roughly 52 million people in England and Wales

Full-time nursery & primary and secondary school teachers: by sex: Social Trends 34

Around half a million teachers in England and Wales if you include the FE sector

BBC News - Audio slideshow: 'The secret of life'

Wellcome Library digitizing a large part of their collection of manuscripts including Crick's papers.

Catherine O'Flynn: brutal truths | Books | The Guardian

"Birmingham does have this complicated relationship with its past, where it's always trying to burn photos of itself," she says. "It destroyed all its Victorian heritage and now it's destroying its 60s heritage, without much sense of that being history repeating itself." - Lack of continuity in the buildings leads to 'thin spaces' (David Kolb) as well.

Presentation Zen: A long time ago, before death by PowerPoint

"If you have a large screen, use it to show visuals, not lines of text that remind you what to say. You do not have to use a screen, but if you do, use it to display visual information that illustrates or amplifies your message in the clearest way possible. Stand with your visuals, becoming a clear part of the visual experience from your audience's point of view."

Oral-History:Mitchell Kapor - GHN: IEEE Global History Network

"It empowered a whole class of people in business who were nontechnical professional people. It gave them a productivity tool for this extraordinarily wide range of uses, anything involving calculations with numbers--not just financial ones." Spreadsheet history.

College undergrads study ineffectively on computers, study finds: Students transfer bad study habits from paper to screen

"Learning occurs best when important information is selected from less important ideas, when selected information is organized graphically, when associations are built among ideas and when understanding is regulated through self-testing" - anyone surprised? Via Jerz' Literacy Weblog

Creating linear panoramas with Hugin

How to record long façades with little space in front. Parallel panoramas.

Is the web really dead? - Boing Boing

Percentage vs absolute vertical axes joke. Via daringfireball

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet | Magazine

Wired magazine about the change in the way we view and send our packets...

Hugin Tutorials

Hugin image stitching package: you can stitch photos together or correct the perspective within a photo.

"Hallowed Ground" | History Eraser Button

Photos near 'ground zero' in New York. Via daringfireball

BBC News - Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive

"The DJ has now substituted his bed for friends' couches, paper bills for online banking, and a record collection containing nearly 2,000 albums for an external hard drive with DJ software and nearly 13,000 MP3s." - Bit of a free ride issue here I think... however data recovery and cloud based backup look like good investments!

The essential beatfinger: Converting LaTeX to HTML, etc. with TeX4ht

Tex4ht can convert LaTeX documents into HTML 4.0+ with various options, this blog post shares some useful information on how to install on an older version of ubuntu

Photographer Dmitri Kasterine's best shot | Art and design | The Guardian

"He never gave me any particular instructions; he once told me that he asked me to work for him because I "stood in the right place"."

Building home linux render cluster

this is nuts... but fun looking.

GEEKS BEARING GIFTS - Chapter Summaries

Dr Theodor Nelson's reverse list being an analytical summary of his most recent book.

Miracle Device

Review with excerpts of Ted Nelson's Literary Machines

Carnivorous plague mice 'wiping out towns' in US Midwest • The Register

"So we decided to write a computer model to determine if the number of mice being trapped is consistent with driving these plague epizootics." - the mice are killing squirrels by the way.

Classic Cafes | London's vintage Formica caffs!

Open source: A hardy few do all the work • The Register

"Out of 468,000 changes committed, 65 per cent were made by the top five per cent of developers (165). This again isn't so surprising, since the most prolific are project maintainers. 11 of the top 19 maintainers work for Red Hat, two for Collabora, one for Novell, and one for Intel." - Zipf's law in a fresh context?

BBC News - Education 'helps brain compensate for dementia changes'

"A UK and Finnish team found those with more education were as likely to show the signs of dementia in their brains at death as those with less. But they were less likely to have displayed symptoms during their lifetime, the study in Brain said."

After Photography › What is next?

The transition from silver atoms to photons.

BBC - Brainsmart - Memory Mini: Remembering Pi

Mnemonic for remembering PI to 8 places:"How I wish I could calculate PI easily today"

Citizensheep » Public consultation or user testing?

"The problem seems to be that perennial one of the Web: lots of people have great ideas for layering technology on top of society, and rush to deliver them. What doesn’t seem to happen is a questioning of the underlying processes; it’s all very well encouraging conversation, but what do you do with it?" A nice analogy: consultation as a form of user testing

Urbanized

"Over half the world's population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050."

New Statesman - Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

"America, the home of having a nice day, is where two-thirds of the world's antidepressants are consumed; it is a country usually found wallowing near the bottom of global happiness indices. Meanwhile its standards of education and health care remain dismal, and inequality, violence and debt are rampant." - I'm with Boris about the olympic volunteers not being irritating.

Getting wireless network working on CentOS 5 and Thinkpad T42 « Nixadmins.net

wifi firmware for centos on t42

Academic reference management software for researchers | Mendeley

Available as a standalone desktop application as well as the cloud based account. Need to check this one out as it is brower agnostic unlike Zotero. Installs plug in for OpenOffice and a bookmarklet for whatever browser you use. Doesn't seem to import all the data from e.g. copac though

SearchCredible

Via Jane's Pick of the Day. You type a search term and then click on a source to use, and many are quality assured. I find the extended mouth metaphor for the graphic mildly odd - but that might be my problem.

Locative Hypertext

Stories about places that you listen to/read in the place. Designed for mobile devices.

BBC News - How great artists have fought creative block

Why do they always use a picture of a typewriter to illustrate articles about writing? Bit like using a boneshaker or canal barge to illustrate articles about transport. Just a thought.

Departure, arrival and first impressions | Birmingham Black Oral History Project

Interviews with people who arrived in Birmingham - one audio stream and transcriptions.

[ubuntu] The quick and dirty grub 2 list edit? - Ubuntu Forums

how to put windows first on a dual booting box

PBworks Basic Edition

Free class account. They've thought about child protection and access controls. Needs a looking at.

Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings

"Lightroom maps the 101 points in its 0-100 quality scale to only 13 different quality outputs. Setting the Lightroom quality to 70, for example, results in the exact same output as setting it to 76, or anything in between." - oddness

Op-Ed Contributor - Mind Over Mass Media - NYTimes.com

"For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting." - Steven Pinker about the moral panic over the effect of the Internet on brains. Good reading for e-learning module?

InContext » Front End Zen

"To maximize your innovation effectiveness, you have to learn to give up your need to control too tightly. You cannot be absolutely certain of innovative outcomes – you need to learn to live with the chaotic, random process that is creativity."

The Open University: Kitchen Konundrum

Tripped over this by accident. Nice puzzles.

Xsnake :: Dwm howto/tutorial

dwm good compilation guide

Newsweek Is for Sale as Newsweeklies Lose Influence - NYTimes.com

“The newsweeklies, for so long, have tried to be all things to all people, and that’s just not going to cut it in this highly niche, politically polarized, media-stratified environment that we live in today.” - Charles Whittaker. Are we in danger of having a fragmented set of interest groups preaching to the converted? No way for people to get a range of views? The BBC probably does that in the UK.

BBC News - Free schools 'could widen social divide'

"If the neo-liberal reforms increased inequality of achievement as well as social segregation in Sweden, a country with a universal welfare state and a relatively high level of social equality, then other countries could risk an even greater increase in inequality from implementing similar kinds of independent schools." - The joys of cross national studies

Mark Bernstein: Minimum Viable Product

"This is the business-side refactoring of the Agile Programming adage that one should build the simplest thing that could possibly work instead of designing things to work beautifully under all anticipated conditions."

HELP! My Kids Are Addicted To My iPad

"Again, a month after we bought it, the iPad has become so central to our household that we have to hide it." - sounds like we (maths teachers) need to be there.

IT council chiefs ditch Sadville after splurging £36k • The Register

"The council’s IT staff “rented” an island and built a virtual town hall in the hope of encouraging Tameside locals to access the authority’s services via Sadville." - User testing? Even with just 3 or 4 Tamesiders? Questionnaire in the libraries?

Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare.

37 Signals web based application for collectively editing text with other people. Might have potential for e-learning activities.

BBC News - White working class pupils left behind

"Her study isolated those children whose parents who had listed "White British" for their ethnic group, and who were on free school meals - the best indicator of social class they could find"

BBC News - Using computers to teach children with no teachers

The hole in the wall project, and a new acronym, SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments) - via Marcius

Computer History Museum | MacPaint and QuickDraw source code

"When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put "-2000" on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied." - via the daringfireball

Web Usability Patterns

pattern language day. This one is for designing dynamic web sites.

Design Problem - why is it important to teach geometry?

A Montessori answer, based on a pattern language!

YouTube - Reality distortion field remains strong with Steve Jobs after antennagate

Why can't we have news like this here? Can you imagine what these people could do with the Coalition? Milliband? Ed Balls? - via daringfireball

Roy Peter Clark's Twenty Writing Tools

ok, succinct

OOoMacros

Some nice looking maths stuff here for OpenOffice.org calc. Includes box plot and histogram, a Gantt chart generator and a graph plotter.

A Personal Electronic Notebook, by Thomas Erickson

"is article describes the design and use of a personal electronic notebook. The findings provide a useful data point for those interested in the issue of how to design highly customizable systems for managing personal information. After a description of the notebook's interface and the usage practices that have co-evolved with the interface, I discuss some of the features which have made the notebook useful over the long term, and trends in the evolution of its design."

What’s Really Going on Behind Murdoch’s Paywall?

"My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world. " Michael Wolff. I'd pay a day's subscription for a look at the server logs...

Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: What I Do

"I like writing in simple environments that don’t do anything except remember what words I’ve thought up. It helps me resist the temptation to tinker with formatting."

Text files and productivity

Cory Doctorow's notes from a talk by Danny O'Brien. I'm using dropbox at present but want some kind of version control thingy running on a web server just for one file.

Dropbox ~ CrunchBang Linux Wiki

This worked exactly like it said on the tin using #!statler alpha 1. I'll be upgrading to alpha 2 tomorrow sometime and so will need to check it still works then. +1 To corenomial, ace linux distribution for web books.

Top Ten Useful Grammar and Punctuation Points I Learned as a Techwriter and in Life in General (and Three to Ignore)

Nice. I like the diagrams.

OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas: Memory

Memory use for openoffice.org to maximise the speed and responsiveness

Installing Firefox from Mozilla on Ubuntu

The .tgz file direct from Mozilla. Install at your own risk (no Ubuntu style updates)

BBC News - End of the news romantics

"We live in fast-changing times but we are, most of us, more Velcro than silk." - Andrew Marr

Firefox 4 beta

Fabien Tassin's dialy build of Firefox 4 beta

Essential Keyboard Shortcuts for Ubuntu | Gerard McGarry

CTRL + ALT and the left or right arrow moves you through your virtual desktops...

Firefox Keyboard shortcuts

Speedier to use than the rodent

BBC News - Charley Boorman on a childhood spent with dyslexia

"He says it was his father, the film director John Boorman, who spotted the signs - not his teachers, who wrote him off." Nice short video clip.

Powertop made my day! - Ubuntu Forums

try this one

The Global Crop Diversity Trust

Svalbard global seed vault.

Minimal Ubuntu Lucid Setup | Web2Linux

Very minimal, but includes networking and wifi works fine on my T42 thinkpad after I set up one wireless connection. Power manager comes with these packages. Had to add gconf-editor to put the buttons on the right side with the ambience theme. Installed firefox, openoffice, gimp. Had to install gnome-screensaver to make sure the trackpad is re-enabled after waking up from suspend

Doing the Polka (dot), step by step « Canonical Design

Polka dot images using Inkscape trace functions. Mentions 'The Book of Inkscape' by Dimitry Kirsanov.

Ten technologies that should be extinct (but aren't) - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - PC World - msnbc.com

"McCarthy promptly went out and bought another $20 manual typewriter to take its place. We guess that means there's still at least one country for old men." Dan just does not get it, does he? Via K Mandla's Linux blog.

Motho ke motho ka botho

"And as a piece of advice, the next time you want to heckle someone for using a typewriter, it might be better not to single out someone as successful as Cormac McCarthy. It doesn’t do much for your argument." - Go for it Mr Mandla

BBC News - Choir to sing the 'code of life'

"Human DNA is made up of just four different chemical compounds, which gave musician Andrew Morley the idea of assigning a note to each of them."

User Guides Shopping Basket

This solved my wifi driver problem that resulted from an upgrade to SP3 then a downgrade again when the wifi broke.

Black Europeans

"This work was first performed at a concert given by Bridgetower at the Augarten-Halle in Vienna on 24 May 1803, Beethoven himself playing the piano. The sonata was copied out from Beethoven’s original hurried notation, and was barely finished in time for the première. The piano part of the first movement was only sketched, and Bridgetower was required to read the violin part of the second movement from Beethoven’s manuscript." - Mike Phillips, essay about George Bridgetower

Rita Dove’s ‘Sonata Mulattica,’ Poetry About a Biracial 18th-Century Violin Virtuoso - NYTimes.com

"Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States poet laureate, has now breathed life into the story of that virtuoso, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, in her new book, “Sonata Mulattica” (W. W. Norton" - George Bridgetower's story has been told - in verse.

Kreutzer sonata for amateurs

"Although it is dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer, who never performed it, and probably was not even aware of the dedication, this sonata was originally written for George Bridgetower, a mulatto (his father was African) English violinist who was living in Vienna. Beethoven and Bridgetower gave the first performance, but they later had some sort of disagreement and Beethoven changed the dedication to Kreutzer." There is a story here...

rsync documentation

rsync -avz --delete --exclude=".*" /home/keith/ /media/Elements2/pundit-lucid-backup my current synchronise command line - keeps a mirror of my data files on the external hard drive

Firefox PPA for daily builds

Lucid and the latest firefox (4 beta, aka 3.7). Its codename is minefield. A few weeks behind as it is tested on a virtual machine first...

Web colors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Get your dark glasses out, I'm playing with the style sheets.

BBC News - Incompetent teachers 'being recycled' by head teachers

"If you took all these people out, stopped them from teaching the children and replaced them even with just average teachers, that would be something like half a grade per pupil" - Simon Burgess, Bristol University quoted on a BBC News web site report on poor teachers. So that is the total impact of the teacher, half a grade! I'll have to check out the methodology.

DESCHOOLING SOCIETY

Ivan Illich's essay from the early 1960s.

Darryl Cunningham Investigates: The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

Comics about scientific and medical issues. Nicely drawn and accessible. Comments on the blog allow for participation in debate.

Seth's Blog: The non-optimized life

"While Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, the guys at Google were inventing something totally new." - that listening to small signal thing.

Mark Bernstein

"I am using Tinderbox to help me manage a legal dispute worth £15m. For me, in that context, the price of the licence represents something of a bargain." - Ben Worthington, barrister, about the only application I miss from having moved from Mac OS to Linux.

Presentation Zen: Asymmetry and emptiness: lessons from the tearoom

"The items used to create a central theme in the tearoom are not fixed, but like life itself, will change depending on the occasion or the season." - Garr Reynolds

Core77 speaks with Jonathan Ive on the design of the iPhone 4: Material Matters - Core77

"we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material--and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is [very] essential to the way we work." - Jonathan Ive

When users first encounter Ubuntu

"These six issues – the extent of file compatibility, the lack of feedback on system behaviours, the use of jargon, challenges to the ability to use flash, access to applications in the software centre, and installing a printer – are central to whether Ubuntu will be taken up by ‘ordinary’ users" - Ubuntu Design team, user testing report

Artwork/Documentation/Software - Ubuntu Wiki

Very useful list of creative packages that are opensource and so free. Scibus looks promising for producing PDF screen books.

OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas: Tables

Useful stuff about splitting and joining tables, text flow and formatting.

We Are Eastside | Birmingham

Blog about arts events in Eastside, Digbeth Birmingham. I usually forget to look and miss things.

Command Line Warriors - Taming Firefox memory usage

"The irony is that Firefox's predecessor Mozilla, become too complicated, bloated and resource hugging. So Firefox was re-factored out of the code base as a small and fast browser. Now it is repeating the same cycle." - Zeth on his blog, I use Chrome at preset except for referencing with Zotero

Symphony No. 1 Figuratively Speaking

Composer streams music from his web site. Part of my head is saying 'film music, establishing shot, landscape'. Don't know why.

The Atlantic :: Magazine :: Big Bird, Meet Dick and Jane

"Writing is a kind of magic or deep-frozen speech, which the writer can use, day after day, to say to everyone who looks at it whatever he wants to say. It is an extension of the voice of the speaker, and since children sense their littleness and want to be larger and more potent, the idea tha through writing they can make their voices reach much further could be very exciting to them." John Holt

"Success Is Just Another Form of Failure" - PostClassic

"I strongly suspect that, deep in his heart of hearts, Phil Glass doesn't lose any sleep over whether his scores are being analyzed in some university classroom." - Kyle Gann reflecting on one of the partners in Chelsea Light Removals

Be Intentional | Mike's Musings

Be Intentional - Steve Rowe's Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

BBC News - Tom Stoppard fears for the 'loss' of the printed page

"I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects it's as fundamental to all education," - Stoppard on BBC

What is middle class? India

Median wage RS 4 500. Middle class starts around RS 9 000. Broadband is RS500 per month

WIRED 3.07 - Affordable Computing

"Use a modest color display: a 13-inch window into the Net is better than no window at all. People are always amazed by the amount of daylight let into a dark room by a small hole (witness the Pantheon in Rome). It's the same on the Net." -- Negroponte, 1995

National Statistics Online - Earnings

UK median wage for full time employees was £489 per week in 2009. The lowest percentile was £271, and the 90th percentile was £971. The shop over the road will do you a basic refurbished Dell PC for £150. The cheapest broadband connection advertised is around £7 per month. So that is £25 500 per year, and £84 per year for broadband.

Why Brazil loves linux

A few years old now, but the figures on the relative cost of common software are an eye opener. Good functional skills lesson here perhaps for business type students?

Sugar Labs - learning software for children

Studio based learning with networked portable computers.

Display fonts

40 display fonts. Most free licences of one form or another.

Amazon MP3 downloader on Lucid

These instructions work.

UbuntuOne/FAQ - Ubuntu Wiki

Ubuntu One gives 2Gb of free 'cloud' space for synchronising folders between computers. I'm having a play - bit slow and hard to see what is going on. This page contains instructions on forcing folders to be unsynchronised, the right click appears not to work.

BBC News - Taking maths to the street

"Maths busking is basically a cross between magic and maths - the busker performs a seemingly blinding trick to an appreciative crowd. Behind it all is not sleight of hand or a secret compartment, but pure and (relatively) simple maths." - I'lll have to devise some games for next year

Visuwords online graphical dictionary and thesaurus

Try 'red' to find a strength of the system. Diverse meanings of that short word are displayed as a mind map. Try 'protein' to find a weakness - only 'is a kind of' links to actual named proteins came up - no information on what a protein is or does.

Improving retention of information in memory

Donald Clark's blog post about Ebbinghaus' 'forgetting curve' and how to make sure students retain information. Via Seb Schmoller's fortnightly mailing.

Google Wave for Higher Education

"Some real exchanges took place, even with the very early pre-release version of Wave. We identified some twenty Wave tools that seemed to hold significant potential for collaboration and group work in higher education." Guest contributor Ray Schroeder on Seb's Schmoller's fortnightly mailing

An interview with Blaise Aguera y Arcas : The Setup

"The last time I wanted to evaluate a nasty integral, I did it in plain English on WolfamAlpha!" - yup, wolfram alpha takes over the world

BBC News - Four injured in Custard Factory shooting in Birmingham

I walk through this area most days on the way to work. This is a sad twist as the new refurbished main building is trying to attract tenants right now.

One-Way Street

Walter Benjamin, two sets of thirteen theses

BBC News - IGCSEs - an end to the national curriculum?

"The go-ahead for the IGCSE is a very large nail in the coffin of the national curriculum. It is also the death knell for the principle of a common curriculum and a common exam for all pupils." - this is actually quite a big issue for Maths. The iGCSE syllabus is very like an updated O Level.

Seth's Blog

"There's a hard work alternative to the magic lottery, one in which you can incrementally lay the groundwork and integrate into the system you say you want to work with. And yet instead of doing that work, our instinct is to demonize the person that wants to take away our ticket, to confuse the math of the situation (there are very few glass slippers available) with someone trying to slam the door in your faith/face"

Monitor: Stay on target | The Economist

"Launch the $10 program and it asks you how long you would like to disable internet access for: you can specify anything from one minute to eight hours. A second screen asks if you would like local network access to printers and other computers, or none at all." - I just swith the router off and take the web book into the yard if its a warm day.

Managing Disruptive Student Behavior in Adult Basic Education. Overview. ERIC Digest

external locus of control a factor in late adolescent disruption

The Vanderbilt Republic: a Non-Profit Creative Agency

Serious film monochrome photography - 1600 4 by 5 sheet film portraits.

BBC News - A bad reputation

Carbon footprints of common objects with an area based infographic!

The Great to Good Manifesto - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

"Today's great competitive challenge isn't going from Good to Great. For people, companies, and countries, it's going from great to good."

good coders code, great reuse

Amazing blog about Linux command line

lonelysandwich - iPad TV

"They've stopped short of showing it on a chest in bed, but that's where mine gets its most use." I'm not sure I want people doing maths homework in bed, but the bus ride home and odd corners of time during the day could be good.

Debian User Forums • View topic - Rip Audio CD to Flac & Burn From Flac + toc

ripping as flac, decompress to wav and burn 'all at once' to cd.

Editorial Notebook - Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader - NYTimes.com

"But most of the books I've ever read have come from lending libraries. Barnes & Noble has released an e-reader that allows short-term borrowing of some books. The entire impulse behind Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first - and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device."

Nicenet

DIY VLE free web server based classroom system.

Photo editor online - Pixlr.com edit image

Flash based image editor on t'web. Could be handy when you need some serious editing in an IT room full of PCs with just Paint... The Express version is really fast

Applying Bloom's Taxonomy

This one is useful... practical suggestions.

Anatomy Arcade

Wicked site for teaching anatomy and physiology. Lots of games and animations. Intrusive adverts though.

Erik Erikson's 8 stages

Basic description of 1959 'Identity and the Life Cycle' paper with the table of eight stages

THE ECO ZOO | ECODA!DOBUTSUEN

Flash game / interactive resource about ecology (I think).

gibbs' reflective cycle - Google Search

Calder's Updates

Nigel Calder's blog about Science in the news

Beckmesser's Rants

Antoine Leboyer's classical music blog

decision tree

I came across this one while searching for statistics materials for podiatry students. I like the layout, and I'd like to do one for sorting out what test to use with a certain kind of data.

[SOLVED] 9.04 - Add directory to $PATH - Ubuntu Forums

export PATH=$PATH:/home/yourusername

Doris Lessing: A Retrospective

Homage site of good taste. I remeber the Canopus in Argos novels with their bold cover typography and slow detonation content. I'm re-reading them in these troubled times.

BBC News - The distraction society

"According to a 2007 study by Loughborough University academic, Thomas Jackson, most of us reply to e-mails immediately - many within six seconds. Then it takes at least a minute to recover our thoughts." Note to self. Check it twice a day. Then pull the plug.

Clive on Learning: Epic evaluation shows the value of preparing students for study

An interesting application of e-learning close to home, with a demonstration of a 4 level evaluation framework.

J R Saul

"If you live in a democracy, it's very tiring to be always surrounded by great and high abstract generalisations, which are in fact the most banal and naïve cliches dug out of second rate movements of the late 19th century."

BBC News - 'Green' exercise quickly 'boosts mental health'

I have always felt better walking through a small park on the way home. I always feel really good walking by the seaside (usually in the place where I grew up). Now some science to back these feelings up.

Mark Bernstein: visual notes

Nice list of links about visual note taking.

i hate music!

Classical music blog by Francisco Arriba of sex pistols cover image fame. Via On An Overgrown Path.

The TX Hammes PowerPoint Challenge

"But PowerPoint is only as smart as those who are using it." - this article needs to be read by all teachers in my opinion.

afghanistan COIN dynamics - the notorious PowerPoint

This link leads to a PDF file of the Afghanistan/COIN army powerpoint. When you see the complex information build over 31 slides, it begins to make some sense. I'd much prefer a connected narrative document produced by a knowledgeable staff member however.

The notorious slide

Is this single slide image really bad powerpoint or simply an honest recognition of the complexity involved in police actions of this kind? I can imagine this image printed large and kept on a HQ wall.

PowerPoint is the enemy?

"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war" General Stanley A McChrystal quoted in a NY Times article about the Army's overuse of PowerPoint. See also General McMaster's comments about bullet points (echoing Edward Tufte's).

The iPad, and the Staggering Work of Obviousness : Cheerful

"I'd like to sketch concepts with touch, but I keep running off the borders." Newton and iPad compared.

Cost of Local Authority Web sites

Some serious budgets here.

Disconnecting Distraction

"I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often." - Paul Graham. I've got students and marking to keep me honest.

CanvasMol

HTML5 and Javascript molecule modelling. Have a look at Graphite and rotate the sample lattice so the vertices line up. Makes sense of crystallography. Via daringfireball.

crunchbang linux

I've installed CrunchBang version 10 Alpha on the T42 laptop. This UK based distribution is based on Debian Squeeze, so the 'alphaness' is limited to the Openbox customisation and the packaging - a huge job in itself. Here is my desktop using a tint2 panel vertical configuration by serious_lee together with a Modigliani painting of a Cellist.

#! - vertical tint2 configuration file

Just needsa 'view desktop' function adding.

Configuring shortcuts & easy way to configure special keys for laptops (Page 1) - Tips, Tricks & Scripts - CrunchBang Linux Forums

crunchbang: no super key work around

Ten free apps to install on every new PC - reghardware

Useful list of no cost programs for Windows PCs.

BBC News - Historian admits posting anonymous Amazon reviews

"In a statement, Figes - who is now on sick leave - "apologised wholeheartedly" to all concerned." - Does anyone believe the Amazon reviews anyway? Do we need to educate students about using user content critically as part of a judgement?

BBC News - inventor of the mobile phone

"We had no idea that in as little as 35 years more than half the people on Earth would have cellular telephones, and they give the phones away to people for nothing." -Marty Cooper

Canonical Design

Where Ubuntu's themes come from...

Gemma Correll

"The Perils of Being an Illustrator with access to The Internet". Food for thought here...

Listening for Graphic Recording or Visual Note-Taking

How to really listen with a view to making a record of what you hear

Mark Bernstein: The iPad is not a computer

"The iPad is not your next computer. It's not your mother's next computer. It's not going to replace your laptop."

Akihabara

Arcade games coded in HTML5. NOTE: when the games ask you to press A to start, its actually the Z key. The B button is X key and the C button is actually the C key. Via Daringfireball

HTML5 presentation

A presentation about HTML 5 written in HTML 5 and best viewed with the Google Chrome or Chromium Web browsers. Via Daringfireball

gNewSense Wiki : Free as in freedom | ForumMain / VideoResolutionIsLow | browse

just one more go...

Where Dijkstra went wrong: the value of BASIC as a first programming language « The Reinvigorated Programmer

"GOTO considered harmful" considered harmful?

todo mundo » Blog Archive » Make smaller games

"Perhaps the missing piece causing this tension is an analogue to the short story in games. Several presenters in the Casual Games Summit hinted at this need in their calls for greater narrative "depth" in brief-playing casual games."

Grand Text Auto » PvP: Portal versus Passage

Comparison of two types of game, with counter arguments in the comments.

Playing Games with Balance - On Balance

"The gameplay, elegant as it is, almost defies expectation. Essentially, you have the choice to play ball with your child (modeled in the game after Jason's son Mez) or do "work" by collecting stars. But each decision about work or family affects the way the game progresses." Games for life coaching?

Stop Keyring on Ubuntu Lucid

How disable the keyring thing. Might get fixed before release.

Memex & Buckland - History and Future of the Book

Handout about the memex (Vannevar Bush) with links to a review of earlier ideas. By Dennis Jerz

Recipe 1.13. Escaping Characters

Useful page on regular expressions to escape strings

Martin Bean, Open University

"In my mind now the digital divide is much more about those that actually understand how to use and apply technology in their lives and their work as a necessity, rather than simply getting access to the technology per se"

Epic | Best use of mobile learning Gold award

"A traditional classroom and workbook approach wasn't working - something new was required, that better suited the needs of developing soldiers. The solution is an interactive, games-based solution delivered on Nintendo DS." - serious authoring investment

Panic Blog » The Official Panic Basketball Team

Sponsorship from the fanbois. Works for me. Via daringfireball.net

BBC News - How to brush up your debating skills

"The importance of debate as a medium for self improvement and intellectual stimulation, within these shores at least, can be traced back to the coffee house debates of the 17th Century." - 'Tis the season of presentations. I'll be using this in tutorials next week.

Dalvik virtual machine

"But Android's programs are written in Java, using Java-oriented IDEs (it also comes with an Eclipse plugin) - it just doesn't compile the java code into java bytecode but (ops, Sun didn't see this one coming) into Dalvik bytecode."

INFORMATION FILE FOR AARON SLOMAN

Lots of interesting material on this classic University style home page. Link takes you 40% into page.

Help:Applications - Openbox

How to specify that certain programs load on certain virtual desktops

Microsoft Unveils 'Social' Kin Phones - PCWorld

"Similar to Motorola's MotoBlur interface for Android, Kin is a cloud-based OS. When you capture photos or videos on your Kin phone, they're automatically uploaded to the Kin server." Could lead to some amusing situations.

Outsourced marking: Food for thought

I think there is something not quite right with this... Via Dennis Jerz

Video games: the addiction | From the Observer | The Observer

"I woke up this morning at 8am fully intending to write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5pm. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps." An extreme case but a safeguarding issue to watch I think.

How to defend the Enlightenment

AC Grayling and Tzvetan Todorov.

Cloud Culture: Charles Leadbeater

"Imagine for a moment that electricity was used only to power one kind of machine known as an electricity machine." I love that metaphor. Free PDF and podcast...

For the Encouragement of Learning

"The possibilities of creating and copying have expanded dramatically in recent years. Digital technology is not only an astonishing technical change but has sparked profound changes in the relationships between individuals, business and the public domain. " John Howkins, chair of the Copyright 1710-2010 forum. Looks interesting. Poll results fairly conclusive!

Principles for Evaluating Websites by Stephen Downes

"This is the most important principle of reading on the internet. You must determine for yourself whether or not something is true."

Aquarium Drinking - Page 23

ubuntu product placement - home made cartoons!

Bobbie Johnson

Nice personal Web site from freelance journalist.

Dive Into HTML5

I think I'm going to claim some CPD for this.

Display Microsoft fonts like on Windows - Ubuntu Forums

This works nicely

Infographic

Phil Gyford. Via Daringfireball.

Vodafone takes Opera to the masses - The Register

"The plan is to to walk the user through a browsing experience which may be their first exposure to the worldwide network the rest of us increasingly take for granted." - No copper or fibre just radio and cheap small handsets.

BBC News - Five-a-day has little impact on cancer, study finds

"But writing in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, they said they could not rule out that even the small reduction in cancer risk seen was down to the fact that the kind of people who ate more fruit and vegetables lived healthier lives in many other respects too." Confounding variables? I still like my 5 a day though.

Bug #421261 in xterm (Ubuntu): “xterm background colour used to be black, now white”

Exceptionally annoying, but using "xterm -class XTerm-color" as the menu entry in OpenBox restores things

PinkRobots: Feh: Auto change background every few seconds/minutes

slideshow!

[SOLVED] Does ubuntu started asking you for password to mount drives? - Page 2 - Ubuntu Forums

Gunge about policy change on permissions for usb mounting using usbmount. Under startx, usb drive fat32 mounts ok but then can't write to it using user rights, have to use sudo. Apparently this may depend on an obscure change in policy.

Playing Chess With Kubrick

"He looked and acted like every obsessive theoretical physicist I have ever known. His obsession at that moment was whether or not anything could go faster than the speed of light."

The Internets don't want you to improve

"Eventually we will greet the first elected head of state with a portfolio of "embarrassing" party pics indistinguishable from the voters'."

John Patrick

"In fact I see the iPad as the beginning of the end of a lot of things as we know them today. It will not immediately replace laptops, netbooks, magazines, Kindles, and televisions -- not immediately." - via daringfireball

The Ambitious Dilettante's Guide To Wordpress Site Design

This post validates my decision to stop using WordPress to publish this site.

Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth

I wish I had thought of the title

Gina Trapani

"If you've already got a smartphone and a laptop, the gap in your workflow that the iPad might fill isn't obvious, and discerning consumers only absorb gadgets that fulfill a need." Via Daringfireball

Cory Doctorow

"Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals."

BBC News - Ordnance Survey offers free data access

I'll have a look at this. Could be fun.

dive into mark

"My attempts at compartmentalization have failed. There is only one inbox" - I think I have always worked on this assumption. Might be a British thing.

Ill Fares The Land

'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay' Tony Judt's new book.

Bloom Day

John Ryan, Anthony Cronin, Brian O'Nolan, Patrick Kavanagh & Tom Joyce

Mastering Your Own Mind

"Encouragement for this new way of thinking comes from an unusual ally. Neuroscience is furnishing hard evidence that the brain is plastic, endowed with a lifelong capacity to reorganize itself with each new experience. "We now know that neural firing can lead to changes in neural connections, and experience leads to changes in neural firing," explains UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel. Violinists' brains actually change as they refine their skill. So do the brains of London cabbies, whose livelihood depends on the sharpness of their memory."

9 elements of flow [ Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi ]

Not too new age summary of the flow concept.

Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt Spotted Together Again

"The only thing that adds up is that neither felt comfortable meeting at each other's HQs, and this is the start of talks that will inevitably be tense for both sides." - Swan and Edison about the Triode?

Data: meal sizes in paintings over the last 1000 years

"The main meals grew 69% and plate size 66% between the oldest (carried out in 1000AD) and most recent (1700s) paintings. Bread size grew by about 23%."

Clive on Learning: Another perspective on stakeholder analysis

The diagram could be adapted to help DTLLS participants to understand the attitudes to e-learning among their colleagues.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The famous article. How is the Internet changing how we think and what we do with information.

Adaptation

Humans, tools, technology and the iPad

Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard

Cartesian axes and story development. Via daringfireball

Boxplot Interpretation

Nice clear page for students who ask 'what is this for?' when we cover the five number summary and box plot. I'm a great fan of graphs that can be used for small data sets.

GCSE Maths Mind Map (old syllabus)

I've dug this out to start a conversation about how you plan teaching assistant time and roles in an evening class.

چهارباغ: Some thoughts on The Pictures

music blog?

Paul Graham Archive

"The problem is that whilst you can discuss what Jeff Wall did in an elaborately staged street tableaux, how do you explain what Garry Winogrand did on a real New York street when he 'just' took the picture?"

Mortality statistics 2005

A quiz based on the grim reaper for 15 to 24 year olds, per million, broken down by gender. Aim is to tackle the 'fear of crime' safeguarding theme.

Why I Am Against Software Patents

"The reason I am against software patents is, by contrast, very simple. It's not rooted in philosophy, it doesn't involve theories of good or evil; it's not even about debating what is likely to spur more or less innovation." --Fractal solution space. Via Daringfireball

Ask H&FJ: Four Ways to Mix Fonts

Wit, energy, poise, dignity

Ubuntu 10.4

Looks OK. This is the long term release.

Eight per day

"Child casualties fell by 7 per cent. The number of children killed or seriously injured in 2007 was 3,090 (down 6 per cent on 2006). Of those, 1,899 were pedestrians, 6 per cent down on 2006. 121 children died on the roads, 28 per cent fewer than in 2006, this is the lowest ever recorded figure."

How I Review an Original Scientific Article

A how to guide that also reviews the performance of peer review: for instance, senior reviewers are reported to be less effective reviewers than less eminent colleagues.

A Guide to the Critical Reading of Scientific Research Papers

Has suggested activities and some teaching materials.

Writing Assignment: Critical Analysis of A Scientific Article

Short. Simple. Wide scope. Has grading criteria. Might be tweaked for a BTEC National or similar course.

Why HTML5 is worth your time

Eric Meyer on HTML 5. I'll need to play over Easter.

Pi Day

My kind of holiday. I especially like the Pi Approximation Day.

IDIOM Poster

Nice poster looking at inductive and deductive reasoning in Maths teaching in US schools.

New Phones Still Sold With Old Versions of Android | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

"Smartphone manufacturers have simply not been not able to keep up with Google's pace. In the 16 months since the first Android phone hit the market, Google has upgraded the operating system four times. Meanwhile, it can take more than a year to develop a new smartphone." So that is why...

Clive on Learning: Is the net generation really unique?

"...and just because they use these technologies to interact with their peers, doesn't mean they'll expect - or desire - to do the same at work. They understand the different dynamics of social and work life; their expectations are, quite understandably, contextual."

Clay Shirky on Cognitive Surplus

When I was a teenager, you could walk down the road and reach the ferry, 2 miles away, and hear a whole episode of Coronation Street from neighbourhood televisions. I'm not nostalgic...

SMath Studio Forum

SMath is a free maths calculator with plotting for windows mobile devices and also for desktop (and linux). Review soon.

American Prometheus - N.Y. Times_Daily Review

[ What did he do upon finding himself in a Capitol Hill elevator with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the embodiment of Oppenheimer's comeuppance? "We looked at each other," the physicist told a friend, "and I winked." ] My Easter reading

How to enable Plug and Play detection for parallel port devices in Windows 2000, in Windows XP, and in Windows Server 2003

needed to get the iomega zip drive playing again

Debian -- Details of package jazip in lenny

Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design

I really want to do something about the 'choose' link in Moodle's 'link to file or Web site' resource object. Choose link is too far away.

The Secret Origin of Windows

Nice images of a young Bill Gates looking calm and pitching his new operating system (Dos 2) and some of the background to Windows.

Correlation Session

Presentation on scatter diagrams, strong and weak correlation, positive and negative correlation, lines of best fit, extrapolation and interpolation. Aimed at UK level 2 students on Access and GCSE Maths courses. I've posted this to slideshare.

HackerspaceWiki

I want a hackerspace NOW

Quick number questions [pdf]

Handout: some practice to review number basics. Used to drive a tutorial.

The Philips-Miller Film Recorder

I'm listening to the CD transcription of a 1939 live recording of Bach's St Matthew Passion made using this system. Sounds remarkably clear. Only one microphone!

Bullring Shop | Created in Birmingham

They have Mother's day cards according to twitter. Go and buy something.

Assorted Experience: Web gallery with Image Magick

This works, but I commented out the mkdir command for a directory where new images are being added.

HTML and CSS Table Border Style Wizard

Handy page for styling tables in CSS instead of the table tags

PROFESSORMATRONIC

Essay about the effect of electronic submission and online marking on the dynamics of a class and the feelings that students have about their writing. Good for discussion. Via Jerz

iPhone lessons from Google's Nexus One | Phones | iPhone Central | Macworld

"Android seems different. In fact, Android doesn't seem to have been designed with the existence of personal computers in mind. You can use an Android phone even if you never, ever connect it to a computer." Mobile phone as THE computer. Probably all most people actually need.

An interview with Jason Rohrer on The Setup

"My main computer these days is a broken Dell Inspiron 4100 that my sister was going to throw away - I got it for free. It has a 950 MHz processor and 256 MiB of RAM"

Random Numbers, Probability, Perlin Noise at daniel shiffman

Getting a little more computational

Trying To Be Random in Selecting Numbers for Lotto

Students asked to pick 6 numbers at random compared with a simulated random sample

KrazyDad » Blog Archive » Mayor of the North Pole

Confessions of a web site hacker. Seriously, this is hilarious. Via Dive Into Mark

An Explosion of Mobile Patent Lawsuits - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Guess whose missing? How the mighty have fallen. Will we end up with an Ediswan for the 21st century?

Books in the Age of the iPad - Craig Mod

Less dreck, more high quality books, links with rich CD packaging from the likes of Alia Vox. Via Daringfireball

Confidence Interval on the Difference Between Means

Uses the sigma symbol for sample standard deviations but apart from that its nice and has an online calculator

Frank Coffield

Frank Coffield spoke at a lecture at Wolverhampton University this evening on the theme 'Prioritising Teaching and Learning in a Time of Austerity'

Teacher Training Resource Bank

Haven't explored this one much. Does filter papers and web sites.

Education Evidence Portal

Thanks to Louise! A searchable database of educational papers

Why DRM Doesn't Work

I've been trapped in sequences like this in Linux and Mac OS. Its the drm not the OS. Via Daringfireball.

Microsoft: Don't press F1 key in Windows XP

"Microsoft told Windows XP users today not to press the F1 key when prompted by a Web site, as part of its reaction to an unpatched vulnerability that hackers could exploit to hijack PCs running Internet Explorer (IE)" Is there any limit to this?

Coin tossing data

Confidence interval of the proportion! Real coin data in the hundreds of tosses region!

rsync home directory to external HD

Works well. I'm using the --delete option to keep a synchronised backup June 2012 --delete option stopped reliably deleting files from backup that had been deleted from hard drive: trying again with fresh backup

Nicht diese Töne!

Conductor blogging about music.

What Startups Are Really Like

"The best way for a startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to fork off separate processes to deal with them."

IntelliCAD unlimited version from ProgeCAD

IntelliCAD was orphaned wheb Microsoft bought the company that made Visio graphics. The IntelliCAD source code was made available through a licensing body, and a number of campanies make improved products based on that code. Progesoft distribute a free unlimited version, which is greatly appreciated. Review soon.

March desktop image

Here is my desktop for March. I didn't find a photo that really jumped out, so I scanned this opening from an old sketchbook. A zone system exercise on some air conditioning ducts.

lftp.1

--exclude-glob *.extension results in files of a given extension not being uploaded

Seton Hill University "Technology Advantage" - Jerz's Literacy Weblog

"Today, computers have automated so much of the work that once went into finding and citing sources, that we need to teach students to slow down - not to trust the first link that pops up on Google, or statistics that appear on activist web pages. And the best way to do that is to be with them, guiding and advising, as they conduct their online research." - I like 'creative literacy'. I'm wondering how many assignments will allow multimedia responses.

BBC News - Slimming sixties not a myth

Pictograms! 60s typography! Comparisons. screen grab these.

Steve Reich: phase action | FACT magazine: music and art

"...but there's a certain energy that goes into teaching people, it seems to me, and if you don't give them that energy, then you're immoral." -Steve Reich via On An Overgrown Path

iPhone Development: Nexus One from an iPhone Developer's Perspective

"The Nexus One hardware is so close to being a home run that it's painful to have to bash it around a little bit. But, it misses in a few really major ways. If Google and HTC can solve a handful of annoyances, the Nexus Two could be pure awesome from a hardware perspective." I think I'll wait for Nexus 2. Via Daringfireball

Sentenc.es - A Disciplined Way To Deal With Email

A magic idea

Stickies

Desktop Post It notes for Windows. On ubuntu we have Tomboy. This is for Windows...

SSC - Instat

INSTAT is a free (to individuals) package for doing serious statistics. It has built in templates for most of the standard statistical tests and reports. Runs under Windows from 2000 up, with an installer for earlier versions of Windows.

Fortnightly Mailing: The mobile Internet will be bigger than most think - giant document (but only a taster) from Morgan Stanley Research

A very large PDF file with lots of nice discussion points about the mobile web. I guess cost per packet instead of 'eat all you want' connectivity is bound to happen soon.

blog 2008 :: Charles Leadbeater

Not a blog :: fine by me. What surprises me is Mr Leadbeater's assumptions about blogging tools. 'The Street finds it's own uses for things' would be my argument. Google and wordpress.com provide tools to solicit traffic and page views, we can use the tools within the acceptable use policies any way we want.

Aftershocks - Junk Charts

Commentary on the charts in the BBC article mentioned below. Good lesson starter here.

Constructing a Logical Argument

This one has a few symbols in it. Implication arrows and truth tables.

Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do: Amazon.co.uk: Kaiser Fung: Books

Looks a useful book. I'll buy it when it actually appears and post a review. US source material likely.

BBC News - Why did so many people die in Haiti's quake?

The charts used in this article earned a whole post in Junk Charts. Good lesson starter.

The Noko Blog: Enterprise wiki and blog example use cases

Could be useful for getting teachers interested in web 2. Teachers need to communicate!

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials

Useful starting point. I'm a bit rusty on the CSS and know nothing about XML really.

papamike.ca -- lftp: a better FTP client

Good tutorial on using lftp as a batch client in particular how to mirror a local directory to a remote directory.

BBC News - Nap 'boosts' brain learning power

Computer analogies used to explain aspects of cognitive processing. Might try to find the paper as there could be a paired t-test or anova going on somewhere! The experimental design should be comprehensible as well.

20 Years of Adobe Photoshop | Webdesigner Depot

Its that code dna

awk is a beautiful tool - Eric Wendelin’s Blog

awk might be what I need for the : splitting the web address and link text example.

Get sed savvy – part 1 - Eric Wendelin’s Blog

might help

sed basics

the s/stuff/replace/g syntax applied to html tags

sed and Multi-Line Search and Replace – Il Filosofo

Could be useful

Extracting HTML/XML tag text data using sed « Firing on All Eight

how to print just one of the matching elements in a sed command line. Could be an easier way of doing the title extract

Tapping RSS with Shell Scripts - O'Reilly Media

This one looks useful and shows grep in use with sed and a glob

HTML Hacking with Regular Expressions - The Perl Journal, Spring 1996

I would rather have a sed expression for this but perl will do at a push

Sed script to print the title tag or to fall back on any heading tags if no title tag defined

doesn't apparently match anything

Regular Expressions

Example 36 String pattern = "(?i)(<title.*?>)(.+?)(</title>)"; String updated = s.replaceAll(pattern, "$2");

TalkingPad Project: TalkingPad Project wiki

funkatron.com : We're the Stupid Ones: Facebook, Google, and Our Failure as Developers

"There is LOADS of anecdotal evidence that most users simply use search engines as a sort of natural language CLI. Shouldn't we be designing interfaces that work in the way most natural for the majority of users?" Nicely put. Simple interfaces for common tasks.

Find and Replace with Sed

Doing a sed pattern on multiple files

Bash Shell Loop Over Set of Files

how to loop over all files of a given pattern

Arch Linux Forums / Bash, Sed, taking lines from one file and stick them into another.

code for listing image files.

Respectfully redesigning Jakob Nielsen's useit.com | I mean business

Ask permission to use the redesigns. Nice CSS and semantic mark up.

Using RSS News Feeds - Webreference.com

Perl scrip works. I had to take out all the narrow table gunge and add in a $description field into the section that prints the html. I recast the thing as a definition list.Produces an html formatted fragment ideal for generating an inc file for use with Cugley's sed script.

xsltproc(1): XSLT processor - Linux man page

I've already got an xslt processor installed!

A List Apart: Using XML : Setting up XML Tools for Linux

XML tools for transforming xml documents

Making RSS Pretty

I'm thinking of a script that will wget the rss feed for this page on pinboard and pull it down as a text file, then using Cugley's sed filter script to render it in html and then have it uploaded as part of the web site...

PATH Debian Etch - Linux Forums

Debian: gnome-terminal sessions need to be set so that they use commands like a log-in shell. Then you can add folders to your path in the .bash_profile and they will appear in a gnome-terminal session run under X. Last post is the key! Applications | System Tools | Configuration Editor | Apps | Gnome Terminal | Profiles | Default | check the login_shell option.

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 5, 020105 (2009): Tale of two curricula: The performance of 2000 students in introductory electromagnetism

2000 students and two schemes of work, with a common test. A statistical approach to seeing which maximised test score. You can download more statistical details from the abstract page - click the supplementary materials page

When will Symbian compile? • The Register

Acorn Risc Machine rules. No where did I put that old A4000?

Unixmen - Openoffice.org 3.2 Final is released! Install and upgrade instructions for Debian Lenny|Ubuntu9.10|Fedora12 | Unixmen

I'm tempting fate by installing oOo 3.2 on Debian stable. I've got time to reverse the damage if it goes pear shaped. I'm after the new graph types in the spreadsheet. oOo 2.4 opens fast on Lenny so I doubt there will be much of a speed up. NB: not a chance, lots of unmet dependencies

Steps of the Scientific Method

Scientific Method essay again soon. This is a handy starter.

R Graphics Gallery

Another R gallery with code. Not as visually arresting as the first one but still pretty useful.

Histogram Applet

Effect of bin widths on the shape of a histogram. Based on the Old Faithful data set (bimodal). Java applet.

R Graph Gallery :: thumbnails gallery

Move mouse over the thumbnails and find the graph. Gives some idea of the range of graph types that R can do

Producing Simple Graphs with R

What is says on the tin. Shows the immense flexibility of a command line / script approach over mouse clicking on a gui

Junk Charts

The misleading graphs blog. Does everything have a blog?

Mark Pilgrim on The Setup

"Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening -- really listening -- to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and -- if you can manage to get anybody's attention -- get near-instant feedback." --watch out for the anglo saxon in other parts of Pilgrim's The Setup page.

Contents | Web Style Guide 3

Good to see the Yale style guide is still available online. Smart new edition as well.

Flickr: modomatic's Photostream

nice urban photos in and around New York. Creative Commons licenced with some rights reserved. OK for PPTs in college I suppose as no printing and not republished.

Wikidot - Free and Pro Wiki Hosting

Does maths mark up.

Lung function testing - FEV1 - forced expiratory volume in 1 second, FEV1%VC

Explanation of one of those measurements doctors like to make. Typical value is around 3 to 4 litres for male adults.

Revolutions: 10 tips for making your R graphics look their best

More stuff on the canvas size. Also pdf and eps.

Creating Charts and Graphs with GNU R | freshmeat.net

Does what it says in the HTML title. Has commands for graphic export as well

Statistics Part 1: Average and Standard Deviation

Mean height is 75 inches with a standard deviation of 3 inches for US male height according to this page. Use that as a basis for simulated data

freeforums.org

The Antix linux distribution has a support forum running on freeforums.org and it appears to be very solid, all be it with some load throttling. I'm thinking of diy e-learning toolkits and a good solid forum with attachment support is one way of doing things.

Stats4Schools > Large Datasets > Fruit and Veg

Nice large survey response sheets. Good for teaching research skills.

Selected Data-sets from Publications by Martin Bland

Data sets collected from various medical statistics text books. Very handy.

Tma04 : Stroop effect

This one actually has a data set. 16 people did the test.

Tallest Coast Redwoods

Height and diameter of redwood trees, but a selected sample for being the tallest. Good for illustrative stats teaching.

The Case of the Living Dead Women - The Radium Dial Case in the newspapers - The Case of the Living Dead Women - The Radium Dial Case in the newspapers

Newspaper reports of the radium women cases. Compiled by Grossman as his father had some involvement in the court cases.

Closing the Circle « The Ordinary Potato

Grossman blogged as 'the modem junkie' for years, and recently started this new blog.

Get Great Gadgets. And Keep Them. - Last Year's Model

Brilliant idea.

Op-Ed Contributor - Microsoft’s Creative Destruction - NYTimes.com

Mule Design Studio's Blog: The Failure of Empathy

YouTube - Five Number Summary

Latest screen cast - just waiting for it to stop processing. Five number summary with even and odd number of data items.

Gnumeric and statistics

"The open source spreadsheet package "Gnumeric" was such a good clone of Microsoft Excel that it even had errors in its statistical functions similar to those in Excel's statistical functions. When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2, has largely fixed its flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions. Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perform statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel. "

SSC - Statistical Games

Sophisticated statistical games from University of Reading. Also a statistical package that is free for individuals to use (NOT open source or GPL)

BEEP BioEthics Education Project: Discussion online through BEEP

Simple stuff on discussion based online work.

Size of a Human: Body Proportions

Forearm working definition

Hand Span Measurement

How to measure handspan

Bodwiki: Search for: pdf

UK FE ICT skills audit for students - Google Search

eBMJ -- Statistics at Square One

Statistics at Square One on the BMJ web site. Good exposition, but at quite a high level.

HyperStat Online: An Introductory Statistics Textbook and Online Tutorial for Help in Statistics Courses

Looks very comprehensive but kind of busy pages with lots of adverts

[ubuntu] mp3-player - Ubuntu Forums

amazingly, this works

Writing tools - Charlie's Diary

Editors and version control

Using Markdown and Make to maintain a bunch of documents

another one that uses make. Used in Webconvert. Could use the make bit to automate the indexes.

Webconvert

getting closer

Writing shell scripts - Lesson 3: Here Scripts

some more stuff about html from bash prompt

Create Web Pages with the Linux shell

How to add a header and footer...

“The two cultures” in classical music | Slover Linett Strategies

via Sandow

Attic #42: The Era of Black Boxes

More on closed platforms

Tinkerer’s Sunset [dive into mark]

This article condenses concerns I have about iPad like systems, but I think there will always be open computers. I'm more worried about the learning that children do by foobaring Dad's laptop. The tweaking and fiddling. Without that, teaching IT is going to be harder in the future.

Ogori Cafe: Service With a Surprise - PSFK

there is a teaching idea in here somewhere... Via seth godin

Human height - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

more average height figures but still no percentiles or standard deviations

WikiAnswers - What is the average height of men worldwide

national height averages but no indication of spread or ethnicity of sample make up.

Stepping Datafile

Step test data of some vintage (1993).

SpringerLink - Journal Article

get athens access to this one. I'm after relevant data sets

Favorite Datasets Index

A set of datasets about drug trials. Looks useful

Favorite Datasets - Blood Pressure Study - Part 3 - Table 3

A data set that could be useful. Random two period crossover design.

Cruft: A message to the Internets regarding the iPad

The importance of using something like the iPad before writing about it. We are wired up for motor learning - makes sense when you think about it.

tantek / CommunicationProtocols

Tantek Çelik has this really strange page about how he likes to communicate. Me? I just talk. e-mail is fine.

Hello World (Robert Brook)

a personal web site containing essays that are redrafted and is not organised like a blog. Unicorn. Via Bernstein

The Death of Fiction? | Mother Jones

End of magazine short stories

A Browser Is a Search Engine

Yup: I've seen three colleagues find a local University web site by typing the domain name into google recently. The browser address bar appears to be foreign territory to most people.

The OLPC XO laptop [printer-friendly] • Register Hardware

i missed this one

Apple iPad spanked with Defective by Design protest • The Register

Another view

Health care utilisation by older people with non-traumatic foot complaints. What makes the difference?

Use of statistical reporting in a paper relevant to podiatry. Statistics example

BBC News - A-level Facebook protest widens

Amazing. Interesting quotes as well. Wouldn't mind reading all the comments - meta analysis of students theory of learning?

Community of practice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Useful summary of a powerful idea - this wikipedia page is a good summary. Wenger's web site is good too.

Create a Crossword Puzzle!

Scroll towards the bottom. You can type words and clues in. You can back up and change the number of rows and columns, but its a random fill each time

AQA Key Skills - Basic Skills Assessment Material

40 question multiple choice exam papers with answer key downloadable as pdf for level 1 and for level 2. Three versions of each so 240 questions in total.

Richard Stallman on The Setup

one computer with a nine inch screen, and a foss bios.

Read Write Plus, DfES, Learning Materials Numeracy

Page to download pdfs of paper based teaching material for numeracy at various levels. I've used the level 1 packs with students, they really encourage deep learning, and force students to ask about vocabulary. Some of the instructions in some of the activities make quite heavy demands on language skills.

Linux coders do it for money • The Register

75% of linux code (kernel) comes from paid programmers.

The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail | Lessons of Failure

Apparently random behaviour has a rational explanation - example for stats module

Pen v keyboard v Newton v Graffiti v Treo v iPhone (Phil Gyford’s website)

There has to be a lesson activity in here somewhere.

The VLE is Undead! – Ms E-Mentor

Glad to hear it :-). Review of an event where web2 type systems were compared with VLE as platforms for e-learning. I think we need both.

Welcome : Measuring Diversity

Available as web site with a rather last century interface that means I can't pull down the whole dataset. These people should be made to have a look at the BMJ...

BBC News - 'Deep ethnic segregation' mapped in England's schools

Good stuff for statistics project work. Checking to see if report is openly available

BBC News - Pupils forced to listen to Mozart

You could not make this up!

TextMate Blog » Working With History in Bash

The Terminal Window That Never Forgets

Deeplinking » The Paper Version of the Web

Photos of the design sketches for some famous web services. Twitter could have been called stat.us. Close call there.

Auto index html bash script « Alec's Web Log

Add a few arguments to ls in this script and we could be away with automatic indexing. The -c argument works and produces a list of files in order of the modification time. Use the *.html wildcard to limit indexing to html files. Chop out the html page head and body tags so we get a fragment of clean html for use with Cugley's sed script. We are away.

Linux Terminal: Simple Bash HTML Gallery generator « notbanksy's blog

Building html lists from a directory listing. On Debian, ls defaults to three column lists, so to get a list ordered by modification time so the most recent is first, you would use ls -1 -c.

The Source of Europe's Mild Climate » American Scientist

Looks like the mid atlantic current isn't keeping us warm after all. Interesting.

Back Home, with Debian! - Bradley M. Kuhn ( Brad ) ( bkuhn )

Planet Debian

Comment from Debian Forums member 'some noise in strange languages' so I had to have a look...

Bash scripting Tutorial

A series of annotated examples including reading a text file into an array one line per element.

My no-server personal wiki—Part 3 - And now it's all this

Python implementation of something very close to what I'm after. He's using make to glue a series of programs together.

LFTP Mirror script...sigh - Ubuntu Forums

LFTP uses the modified date to decide which files to upload to a server. Can use a script file. Would need to ensure that old pages were not 'touched' by the local publishing script. Wordpress and similar no good. MT might be ok if you didn't 'republish all pages' too often. LFTP is in the Debian repositories. rsync needs ssh, can't work over ftp.

Low Power PCs - Energy Saving Computers and Low Energy Computer Gadgets

Sometimes useful site. Infrequent posts

Quandary Tutorials & Examples

Bloody hell, the man behind hot potatoes has produced an application called 'quandry' that appears to produce skinner teaching machines in html. Pity its windows only, and not in a Java version.

Main Page - FreeMind - free mind mapping software

Free java based mind mapping tool. Get the v0.9 release candidate, and get the 'full' or 'complete' package so you can export to svg/pdf. The svg format loads into Inkscape on linux really well and allows editing. PDF ensures your access to the Windows everyday world. I use mind mapping a lot both for planning lessons and for getting students organised and past the 'blank sheet of paper' syndrome

Nvidia gets biological with life sciences nerds • The Register

"The idea is not to replace the wet labs, but to home in on the interesting compounds more quickly," says Gupta. "So instead of taking the shotgun approach with the wet lab, you do it in the simulation."

that Young philosopher

writer blog, has links to newspaper columns (retro)

flash runtime written in javascript

It works on this debian box where I have not installed flash yet. Can't be slower than flash on a mac :-). The name betrays a sense of humour.

Cheat Sheets : Work by Julie Cloutier

The sad thing is I recognise all of the formulas and could teach a lesson on most of them given an hour or two to think of some examples! Still can't get through (or even start) The Road To Infinity. Site is published on Indexhibit which is another script I'd like to use locally and copy static files up to server space.

Seth's Blog: Amplifying complaints

This actually works. I've tried it. Admin people and commercial companies.

apache friends - xampp for linux

A simple development package including apache and mysql with phpmysqladmin. I'll try getting a local word press working with this and then see if I can set the mod rewrite rules that wordpress needs to make 'sensible' urls. Then I might be publishing bodmas.org as static pages. EDIT: installs fine, easy to install wordpress script to /opt/lampp/htdocs, easy to set up a local wordpress database using phpmysqladmin, easy to export from real wordpress blog, harder to get http paths right due to paths being hard coded into the wordpress database. I'll crack that one. My particular server uses a version 4 MySQL and Xampp uses a version 5 one, so need to use a legacy install and latin1 encoding. A few errors due to symbols found but corrected. Need to find a way of increasing the 2Mb upload limit! Edit2: modrewrite just works.

use wordpress offline and copy the site up to your web space

How to use wordpress to publish to a web site that does not allow scripting / have a database / or just because you are tired of updating the thing when they gte hacked again. Edit: I've reached step 5 now. The local version of word press does not run especially fast, so the wget stage could take a bit of time...

Tea-Driven Development :: Saving Your Wordpress Blog to CD

How to use the linux / mac os wget command to save an entire blog or web site. It works, and the main drawback is that the links between pages in the site are 'absolute local'. I'm going to try using a multi file search and replace to make them all relative links. The other glitch is that the cascading style sheet is not saved (but my own site uses only a couple of style sheets for the whole thing, so I can save those manually). I was impressed that all the images and linked pdfs and hot potatoes quzzes came down as well. Back up your blog now! Via daringfireball and pinboard. EDIT I was wrong about the local absolute links, they are actually relative links and it fetches the style sheets. Magic.

Howto Replace multiple file text string in Linux -- Debian Admin

The comments are better than the article. I'm going to try the grep piped to sed method. I want to change an absolute local web address to fully relative so I can burn a pile of linked web pages to a cd. See next bookmark...

Typotheque: Gore’s choice

The fine points of typographical design for scientific information.

Vintage Ad Browser

old magazine ads with search engine - great for humour in powerpoints. Via Seth Godin.

Stop the panic on air security - CNN.com

I sometimes think the biggest threat we face is what is between our ears. A cognitive landscape that fitted the neolithic (just) might not be so useful today.

Kickingbear» Blog Archive » Software Sea Change

"The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At one time, especially on the Mac, we’d see people chose software based upon how well it suited their requirements to get a job done. This new generation of software consumers isn’t like that – they’re less likely to shop around for something rather they shop around for anything. These are people who want to be entertained as much as they want to have their requirements met. " -uses a bit too much bad language for direct use in college but makes a point. Could we be adding educational apps?

Things You Really Need to Learn ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes

Downes is going for the deep learning and learning skills approach.

How to Change the World: Ten Things to Learn This School Year

Really about surviving at work. Sort of depressing.

Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Via Jerz. More alike than different. Critique of a VARK based learning style differentiation.

howtowritegood (ivarspeterson)

I wish I had thought of this. Typically recursive thinking.

assignments (ivarspeterson)

Ivars Peterson runs a course called 'communicating mathematics'. This page lists his 'assignments' (UK translation, weekly homework tasks). Quite interesting (and generous).

BBC News - Pi calculated to 'record number' of digits

I love the photo caption! Fabrice Bellard did ffmpeg and qemu.

Grep tutorial and examples

Surprising what gets asked on forums. I forget that most people don't go near a terminal prompt these days.

Proper backup and the loss of ma.gnolia.com – GDV Data Protection Blog

Pneumatic Networks.

Another low tech (actually quite high tech) data transfer method. The Famous Army and Navy Stores in Liverpool used one of these to centralise till operations in the basement!

Low-tech Magazine: Truckloads of hard disks

mental arithmetic opportunity

Folding@home - Main

leverage interest in pcs and web social media to provide cheap computing for scientific research?

FR: Gendarmerie saves millions with open desktop and web applications —

"Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority"

Free Printable PDF 2010-2011 Calendar - 1 Month on 1 Page - PDFCalendar.com

Really handy right now

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Odds of Airborne Terror

Numbers for plane flights in the US, love the rounding (nearest one) and the final sentence. Could estimate some carbon load figures from this as well. Via Daringfireball.

24 ways - web design and development articles and tutorials for advent

Walls Come Tumbling Down presentation slides and transcript | Stuff and Nonsense

Corby lad makes good. About creativity in Web design, but with a nice strong historical opener.

24 ways: Make Your Mockup in Markup

I used to use tinderbox on the mac, and I've been looking for an alternative. This isn't it but useful. Via daringfireball.

The Technium: The Reality of Depending on True Fans

lots here about how internet is making new ways of culture production possible, but then also changing the rules in ways that are hard to predict

[all variants] The Chromium Browser? - Ubuntu Forums

chromium ppa for the asus

How to Bulk Rename Files in Linux (Terminal or GUI) | Webmaster Tips

rename -v 's/\.JPG$/\.jpg/' *.JPG very useful for when f-spot is playing up again in Karmic. Also, rename 's/\d{1}(\d{2})\.mp3$/1$1\.mp3/' *.mp3 very handy for renumbering the first _number_ in a set of file names

Astronomical Applications — Naval Oceanography Portal

The new page for the Astronomical Almanac (alas, not full text online) and some data including the various sunrise and set calculators.

Panasonic Lumix GF1 Field Test — 16 Days in the Himalayas

Essay and review. Via daringfireball.

Please Scroll

Music Listing - with preview images

homework

Rescue Geography

When they demolish the buildings how long do the memories remain?

ISO50 - The Blog of Scott Hansen

design blog. The url is based on the photographic film speed rating.

Fine-tuning: composer reinvents the piano | Music | The Guardian

A piano where the pitch of each note can be altered using a slider control up or down a whole tone (or there abouts) allowing different tunings to be explored. I guess digital pianos ought to be able to do this (perhaps using the midi interface and software on a computer) but this one is the first acoustic piano design that can allow change in tuning.

One in 200 success rate keeps phishing economy ticking over • The Register

Every crowd has a silver lining... The 1 in 200 statistic lends itself to probability sums.

May need to actually teach mathematics

This should get some arguments going. It reads like a telegram from Mars to anyone who works in the UK educational system.

The Atlantic Online | December 2009 | The Science of Success | David Dobbs

Genetics and behaviour: orchids and dandelions.

How to losslessly concatenate / merge MP3 files | lyncd.com

How to get rid of those annoying gaps between tracks when playing opera on your mp3 player (sacrilege, I know, but its a question of time).

LAME command lines

How to set the LAME command line in your linux cd ripper so you can listen to your opera on the train without hearing the mp3 quantization. If this gets any more complicated I'm going back to a portable cd player.

Communities of practice

Theory page. From this page, you can download a one side poster and a three page handout about communities of practice.

Savage Minds | Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog

Group anthropology blog

John Cage Trust

Cage Blog

Renewable Music

Soho the Dog

another classical music blog

Glass Notes

stats notes

nice stuff

Books, Publishing, and Ideas

design blog. Useful links.

Animated time lapse map of unemployment in America

Nice example of a flash animation - simple, hardly any interface, just a timeline.

CrunchBang Linux - A nimble Openbox Linux distro

does this work better on the web book?

The Philosophy Shop - philosophy for children, training philosophy consultants to teach philosophy in primary schools, INSET for teachers, philosophical counselling and adult philosophy courses

Jobs for the grads or really important? Fourth R (reasoning?)

Log in or sign up? - Leah Culver's Blog

How to design the log in/sign up page with thoughtful discussion in the comments. There is (to quote john cleese) more to this than meets the eye.

Mr Eugenides: On Google, shortening attention spans, the pleasures of a good book,

Is the Web shortening your attention span

Research Randomizer: Free Random Sampling and Random Assignment

This is what we need!

Rolling dice for normal samples — The Endeavour

Approximate a Normal distribution using 5 dice and some arithmetic. Error against a true normal distribution is no worse than 5%

Normal, Chi-Square and Kolmogorov-Smirnov Statistics Functions in JavaScript

Javascript page - looks ok

Das Lied von der Erde

The sources of Mahler's text - original Chinese, Bethge's German, Mahler's modifications, English and French translations.

Landscape of open source games

open source game creation systems and tools.

Cell Size and Scale

Nice

Airbag - Spaceman.

Ouch

RealityStudio » Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer

The computer as literary metaphor

Margin of Error

Where did the 4% come from?

Op-Ed Contributor - Wall Street Smarts - NYTimes.com

On An Overgrown Path

Fixed mind is a stiff mind. Stiff mind is a dead mind, like dead wood. Flexible mind is a living mind like a living tree - Satish Kumar

Shockingly low memory use! - Ubuntu Forums

memory use in xubuntu karmic

The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful

Magic

92Y Podcast: Kurt Vonnegut Reads Breakfast of Champions - 92Y Blog - 92nd Street Y - New York, NY

Vonnegut reading aloud in 1970. Slow link, 14Mb download

RPN Calculator in JavaScript

Ace page with a RPN expression evaluator written in JavaScript. It works well and uses a few lines of code.

The List of N Things

example of writing form

Harry Belafonte and the Herring Girls - A Soundwalk | Soundmarks - Blog and Works of Dan Scott

Belafonte and the price of Herring

Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » John Moe: I Did Not Read Infinite Jest This Summer

big book, essay about author

Microsoft pimps bogus Windows 7 'launch parties' • The Register

I can't wait for the YouTubes of spoof parties. Astroturf type example

In Memoriam: My Manual Typewriter: Observatory: Design Observer

via jertz

Idea to Implementation « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction

e-learning like games design? Iterative adjustment of challenge levels?. Via Jerz who picks out the section headed "Write the through-line first". Looks very like extreme programming.

Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

nice

The Medium - Facebook Exodus - NYTimes.com

Here we go...

Tubes 201 - How Vacuum Tubes Really Work

Sound Advice - noise at work in music and entertainment

This web site together with my sound meter will provide a lesson

Noise at work in the music and entertainment sectors

Regulations specific to music

Noise: Employers responsibilities - legal duties

Working up a Maths lesson for students working with PA equipment. Cheap sound level meter and some arithmetic with dBs which is a logarithmic scale.

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce

Tom Wolfe on silicon valley pioneer "So Carter arrived at the tilt-up concrete building in Mountain Vlew in the back of a black Cadillac limousine with a driver in the front wearing the complete chauffeur's uniform? the black suit, the white shirt, the black necktie, and the black visored cap. That in itself was enough to turn heads at Fairchild Semiconductor. Nobody had ever seen a limousine and a chauffeur out there before. But that wasn't what fixed the day in everybody's memory. It was the fact that the driver stayed out there for almost eight hours, doing nothing. He stayed out there in his uniform, with his visored hat on, in the front seat of the limousine, all day, doing nothing but waiting for a man who was somewhere inside. John Carter was inside having a terrific chief executive officer's time for himself. He took a tour of the plant, he held conferences, he looked at figures, he nodded with satisfaction, he beamed his urbane Fifty-seventh Street Biggie CEO charm. And the driver sat out there all day engaged in the task of supporting a visored cap with his head. People started leaving their workbenches and going to the front windows just to take a look at this phenomenon. It seemed that bizarre. Here was a serf who did nothing all day but wait outside a door in order to be at the service of the haunches of his master instantly, whenever those haunches and the paunch and the jowls might decide to reappear. It wasn't merely that this little peek at the New York-style corporate high life was unusual out here in the brown hills of the Santa Clara Valley. It was that it seemed terribly wrong."

Russian Wall-E Case Mod (110 pics) » AcidCow.com - videos, pictures, celebs, flash games

timdeparavicini

Stereophile: Listening #25

Ajaxload - Ajax loading gif generator

hummmm

YouTube - Douglas Engelbart : The Mother of All Demos (1/9)

The famous demo of a mouse to a hall of thousands of people with the strange sound caused by the microphone on his headset picking up the audience. This is a sequence of 9 short videos due to YouTube's limit of 10 minutes. This was 1968, so years AFTER sketchpad

Ivan Sutherland 2005 - mprove.de

"I like to try and review what the lessons are of the fun that I’ve been describing. There is an argument I can make that I have never done a days work in my life. I have always had the luxury of doing things that I find to be fun. And when the fun goes away, so do I." --Transcript of a talk and access to a video of the whole talk

YouTube - Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad

Video demo of sketchpad with commentary by Alan Kay

Ivan Sutherland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland."

Linux desktops

Linux desktop 'design' in a time line from Englebart onwards

Design is Kinky

Point of View

Idries Shah story. Saadi of Shiraz, in his Bostan, stated an important truth when he told this miniature tale : A man met another, who was handsome, intelligent and elegant. He asked him who he was. The other said : 'I am the Devil.' 'But you cannot be,' said the first man, 'for the devil is evil and ugly.' 'My friend,' said Satan, 'you have been listening to my detractors.'

GET LAMP: THE TEXT ADVENTURE DOCUMENTARY

Infocom gets a film!

The Great Flu: Pandemic Education for the Masses

Review of a game about a 'flu virus. The game is at http://thegreatflu.com/. Via http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/ The production values of the game make my point about why we changed the uTSL module to a more Moodle based one requiring participants to devise, implement, run and evaluate e-learing activities. No teacher could match this unless they had significant Flash skills and a lot of game design knowledge. The points made in the review also raise issues about the design of games for educational uses

BBC NEWS | Technology | 40 years of Unix

John Resig - Eulogy to _why

Twitter / Inbox Zero: Joining a Facebook group a ...

"Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging."

BBC NEWS | Magazine | The problem with PowerPoint

simpler than Tufte and should provoke discussion

GNU Screen: an introduction and beginner's tutorial || kuro5hin.org

Opaque Wi-Fi laws 'damage UK economy, social inclusion' • The Register

is it legal to share a wifi access point? Context is personal systems but may also apply to 'free wifi' cafes and so on.

CoachDANNY's Blog

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule (via Nick...

Implementing the next GNOME shell « fishsoup

The future of Gnome? Not sure I'm into a desktop that needs mode change to change windows (as if you HAD to use expose every time you wanted to switch a window on a Mac. I'll build this and see what it looks like when its a bit more stable

Profiles: Secrets of Magus : The New Yorker

Stasisfield.com : Stasisfield mp3 releases : Current Releases : Elementals : mysterybear

the impossible cool.

Managing UI Complexity | Brandon Walkin

netpoetic.com

Presentation Zen: Typefaces give us signals

vimeo and YouTube on typefaces

Presentation Zen: 11 ways to use images poorly in slides

Title says it all: one for the uTSL and staff development.

Skype spoof phone calls

"He is part of that young male subspecies that does not have a job or a girlfriend, passed on college, and spends hours a day playing so-called first-person shooter games like "Counter-Strike," "Halo," and "Crossfire." [He] addresses everyone--including the Pranknet audience itself--as "Dude." He steals his Wi-Fi. And he'd certainly be living in his mother's basement if she had one." OK, so how do we get them out of the basements and doing something useful? VIA Daringfireball

Seth's Blog: The bandwidth-sync correlation that's worth thinking about

synchronous/asych axis and bandwidth axis. Good for uTSL discussion once I get over a continuous variable representing synchronousness! Either something is simultaneous or it isn't, so I guess I'll use 'time lag' or something when doing the ppt.

Daring Fireball: Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple

iPhone (and iPod Touch under wifi) is a closed platform, so Apple need to approve all software submitted. There are 'issues' with the approval process. The latest is that Apple have decided to censor the English dictionary. Apple is the new Microsoft, or is this all diversionary skirmishing over a minority device (a posh mobile phone) while Google are, really, taking over Microsoft's role?

Ninjawords - a really fast dictionary

It IS really fast and no adverts. One for Moodle link on front page?

Jazz Profiles: Enrico Pieranunzi, Part - 3

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

maker = teacher? Via daringfireball

In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police

Role of crime reporters in US. Also a good argument against routine arming of the police.

Daring Fireball: Pay Walls

daringfireball.net Gruber replying to David Simon

Build the Wall : CJR

David Simon arguing for pay walls for newspapers.

Apple has 91% of market for $1,000+ PCs, says NPD | Betanews

From daringfireball.net. We already know that Mac OS X's market share in laptops sold to home users (i.e. not companies) in the age range 19-25 is huge. Ubuntu and related open source (ubuntustudio) is only one step sideways from Mac OS X. Notice the clever statistical spin here, "9 out of 10 dollars". So maybe only 70% or 60% of volume.

Scripting News: 3/12/2009

"I saw this effect first hand by being here for the rise of blogging and then the rise of podcasting. The latter grew much more quickly because we had blogs to promote podcasting with. The slow part was the building of the network, once it exists, new ones that build on it boot up much more quickly." -Dave Winer

Scripting News: 4/24/2009

"The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc" -Dave Winer This is the title, but it gives me a slide and a reason to do some IT history.

Scripting News: 6/2/2009

"As I build layers of software, the simpler I make each layer, the higher I can build. If you don't design to hide complexity behind interfaces, you get overwhelmed by the complexity sooner, and your project can't do as much."

Scripting News: 6/5/2009

Interesting way of looking at the internet, protocols, and companies. "If you're looking for something that will die, look at the companies, not the formats and protocols. They're like cockroaches and microbes, and the trees -- they'll be around long after the companies are gone. They get the last laugh." -Dave Winer

Jorn Barger, the NewsPage Network, and the Emergence of the Weblog Community | Tawawa.org

Document that contributes to history of blogging. Link blogs were the first apparently, then people started to publish diary like blogs. Well, pinboard makes a pretty good link blog.

Mark Bernstein: Flames

Early history of blogging and personalities - I suppose we need to record what happened.

Talking Points Memo | Breaking News and Analysis

A news publication that is actually hiring journalists and expanding. Source; Daringfireball

Bash batch markdown conversion

bash batch markdown conversion. for i in ./*.markdown.txt; do perl markdown.pl --html4tags $i > $i.html; done;

File::Find::Rule - Alternative interface to File::Find - search.cpan.org

Browse a directory tree looking for files that match a pattern

JetBrains onBoard Online Magazine :: Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm

purple prose version of DSL essays by Martin Fowler

An Introductory Example

Domain Specific Languages with GraphViz as an example. Idea of Language Work Bench as end user programming tool. Also spreadsheet as the most common programming system (program = formulas, illustration is the values)

On Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar - NYTimes.com

nice piece by project apollo reporter who covered original flight to moon.

Seth's Blog: How to make graphs that work

Nice summary of Tufte's main points in an easy to swallow style. Must blog this one.

Duchess of Malfi full text

"FERDINAND: I'll go hunt the badger by owl-light: 'Tis a deed of darkness."

Home - Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group report part 2

report part 2

Home - Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group report part 1

report part 1

MAAWG Press Release July 15, 2009 - Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group

800 US e-mail users in a survey about spam mail. This is the press release with a summary of findings. For reasons I can't fathom, there isnt a page on the MAAWG site that links to both sections of the report, so I'm tagging direct links to the pdf and zip files with the tag maawgspam

Royal | Jason Santa Maria

Typecasting is becoming popular. I used to use a manual typewriter on a regular basis 20 odd years ago, and I will say that I tended to think more about what I was going to write.

1900 (JPEG Image, 1920x1200 pixels)

This is really nice. Might use it as a desktop wallpaper to attract questions at work. We can't run to a big paper one alas...

Remembering Apollo 11 - The Big Picture - Boston.com

I just love those consoles in the Mission Control Room. Real 'chunky buttons' (as a former colleague used to want on every web site).

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Indian contest for rupee symbol

I wonder which symbol won?

united kingdom outline map

Handy for worksheets

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Just what is a big salary?

OK stuff on averages (average wage should be a median &c) with examples including the Mayor of London who has just put foot in mouth again.

An Effective Poster :: Creating Effective Poster Presentations

Could be handy, but am I the only one who finds the home page confusingly over full? The actual contents is in a small list on the left hand side of the page under the heading Create Your Poster. Once you get there, it is nicely done. Each stage has a suggested layout (visual) with some bullet points (verbal) and there is a 'counterexample' or wrong version for each stage, also with visual and written explanation.

Maths for science and technology - OpenLearn - The Open University

Proper maths. Looks like a repackaging of the 'mathcentre' materials.

Study Skills - OpenLearn - The Open University

Guest access to lots of study skills materials on one of the largest Moodle installations currently available. Bit wordy, but that is the Open University way.

The University of Hull - Study Advice Service -

Lots of handouts on aspects of study skills at HE level, e.g. essay writing, but also how to avoid information overload. There is a handout on scientific report writing and one on time management. All available in Word or PDF

Math Bar Charts (with worked solutions)

OK for bar charts outline, there is a commercial video at the bottom of the page that is good, but has adverts at the beginning.

Unit 10 Section 1 : Basic Probability of One Event

Basic probability of picking a sweet of a given colour from a bag of sweets. Only one playing card question out of 10. Only the probability formula at the top, no other information, so this is an exercise.

Project Euler

Web site with semi-computational problems for you to solve. You have to write an algorithm for most of them, and apply some maths. When you get a solution, you get access to other people's solutions. Nice example of the Laurillard idea that we need online systems designed for learning as opposed to re-purposing social learning spaces.

International GCSE Mathematics

Harder than UK standard Maths. specimen papers and textbooks might be good for more advanced access students.

Birmingham Social Media Cafe / Next Meet

Birmingham UK meet up. I might go just to see what these people are like. The attendance lists give you a good idea of what is happening locally.

Brooklyn Fare’s Packaging and Graphic Design - Eat Me Daily

Very funny photograph illustrates 'calling a spade a spade'.

Practice QTS numeracy skills tests - Online maths skills tests - TDA

Nice stuff, above level 2.

TDA - Numeracy glossary

Thanks to the Teacher Development Agency for a useful starting point with a maths word list

Significant figures and rounding off

Some nice examples, bit ponderous, science oriented.

YouTube - SLEP Changing improper fractions into mixed numbers

Good enough.

Adding Fractions: traditional approach

using my own ppt for adding, need to correct the symbol a few slides in and maybe add a sound track

YouTube - SLEP Subtract fractions with similar denominator

'similar' means mutual factors. Handy as students get confused when this happens if they have worked through examples with harder denominators.

YouTube - SLEP Multiplication of fractions

maths

BBC - GCSE Bitesize - Factors and multiples

Bitesize four mini-pages with question and hidden answer on basic HCF, LCM definitions.

PPT - Venn diagram for LCM and HCF with prime factors from factor trees

Very brief ppt file on HCF/LCM and Venn diagram. Slides a bit crowded but could save time

YouTube - rebeccanewburn's Channel

Lots of alternative arithmetic methods and videos that introduce harder maths from easy examples (e.g. why does x^0 = 1?)

YouTube - Find the LCM & GCF Using A Venn Diagram

Someone else who uses the Venn diagram approach AND the repeated division method for finding the prime factors. Approach suitable for mature students as well, stresses the links to wider curriculum &c. Alas, poor video (compression artifacts make the whiteboard layout hard to see) and not so clear sound.

Prime Results

handy prime factor calculator. Poor notation used for powers of repeated factors. Uses a CGI script (I'll hack a javascript I think)

YouTube - SLEP Find Prime Factors

Prime factor trees, needs setting up with what prime numbers are and the vocabulary of prime and composite numbers

YouTube - MATH LESSON: Finding Factors of a Number

maths- calculating fractions of a number

YouTube - Long Division of Numbers - Arithmetic Basics

Calm presentation of US origin. Shows a single digit division long division just to confuse everyone. Not useful for my particular purpose.

YouTube - SLEP Long division

Just one example. Explains need to do the times table by repeated adding before starting the division. Uses the carries in the bus stop presentation.

YouTube - psychosides's Channel

Pretty good range of arithmetic and maths videos. Haven't looked at them all. Get the students to vote for best.

YouTube - SLEP EXTRA long division part 2

Second part of advanced long division

YouTube - SLEP EXTRA long division part 1

Extra video does decimal division of difficult long numbers, and says 'why would you want to do this without a calculator'. This is stretch material for the Access course

YouTube - SLEP Short division

Nice 'home made' approach with fluent presentation and good vocabulary. Relatively clear sound with a bit of hum. Starts with an exact division and then goes onto 5 into 847 so remainder (I'd have pointed out that 847 does not divide by 5 myself). Does remainder and shows how to write as fraction. Then moves into decimal answers... Good example.

YouTube - How to multiply 2 digit numbers together using the grid method

UK origin grid method video. Jumpy framing and horrid whistle on the sound track. Good uTSL example for need to get sound sorted. The presentation itself if smashing, good pace and links to place notation &c

YouTube - Lattice Method

This is how to do it. Careful use of words ('digit' and 'number'). Low tech set up so good discussion point for uTSL. Does carrying at the top of the diagonal method alas and this would be better at the bottom with the two rows strategy.

YouTube - multiply big numbers (Standard method)

Brit works through the 'standard method', sounds like he is from Worcester. Very well set up grid. Starts with one digit by one digit. Hasn't edited the PowerPoint number sliding! Three by two digit a bit confusing, with backtracking around times 30. This has CPD project written all over it, but useful.

YouTube - Making Multiplying Fun fast illustration of many different methods

Very fast illustrations of many different methods of multiplication. Best used with uTSL and not directly with students as no actual step by step demos.

YouTube - Math Video: Multiplication of Whole Numbers

Breaks down into very small steps. Problems with vocabulary (e.g. 'ones column' instead of 'units column') and the layout of the two digit by two digit multiplication. Use as critical discussion example in uTSL?. Starts with repeated addition and then goes forward to two and three digit by one digit, then ends with two by two

YouTube - SUBTRACTION OF WHOLE NUMBERS - crossing off top

This video is a 'home made' one by a teacher. Contrast with the adding video that is a commercial product. Crossing off the top method.

YouTube - Watch Video on Adding Whole Numbers - Pre Algebra Help

OK presentation but has adverts on the front! Good for discussion about how YouTube can be useful but also a pain

Numbers, units and arithmetic - OpenLearn - The Open University

Open university materials that approach the basic skills from an advanced standpoint. The contents are arranged in typical academic form (terms defined first, then examples of use later in the contents list).

Test your Multiplication - Times Tables From 2 to 15

multiplications tables with timed tests

Warping Text To Bézier curves

Nice application of mathematics to a design problem.

Font Squirrel | Handpicked free fonts for graphic designers with commercial-use licenses.

Paul Constant Reviews Twitter - Features - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper

An essay about twitter written as a series of twits. Magic. I want to write a perl script to dump this into power point as a series of slides in Times New Roman, white on black, each displayed for 7 seconds, with a two second fade to black. Then I want to screen cast it to YouTube and to broadcast it over the plasma screens at college

Clive on Learning: Ultimately it’s line managers that determine the success of learning and development

So true it hurts

Adult Basic Skills Resource Centre for students and tutors. Home Page

Tonnes of worksheets linked to the UK Skills for Life basic skills standards.

bodmas blog

Keith Peter Burnett’s blog about Maths teaching and ILT

Daring Fireball

Mac and iPhone