What a strange thing to want to do, but class, nevertheless. Down a 200ft escalator on skis. Bootiful.
Archive for March, 2007
Lovely barred spiral for today.
I started ranting about consumers rejecting the enforced bundling of products (such as songs they didn’t want on an album) in 2001 (including music - see Courtney Love - and mixed media). It sounds like my prognostications of doom are coming true (even DataWaz will serve up individual data points now - something they swore they’d never do when I was on board).
How a tiny subset of the brain is being modeled on a serious supercomputer. I love the idea that it started working spontaneously. Put a sufficiently sophisticated system together and you get thought-like activity? Who needs a creator?
Lovely idea from Mumbai. You get an Rs200 fine for travelling without an Rs8 ticket. This is sufficiently high to deter most of the 6m people travelling each day. Given that there is no system able to check everyone, random checks are the order of the day. Along comes an entrepreneur who says “pay me Rs500 a year and I’ll refund your fine if you get one”. Genius.
I need a new Oyster wallet–the old one is cracked and seeping. These look good.
I wonder if the good burghers of Navarra think that their wind farms ruin the scenery? Interesting that they have over 70% of energy from renewables and that Spain recently had its biggest day of wind energy–at 27% the largest contributor to the national grid.
Confirmed that Gus O’Donnell has written to smaller departments pointing them towards DWP and HMRC for their finance and HR needs.
It was interesting to see the Indy come out for prohibition of cannabis. I don’t have a problem with their changing their mind on whether the drug is harmful or not (although badscience seems to debunk this pretty effectively), but flipping on prohibition seems extreme.
I’m pretty convinced that legalisation of drugs is the only sensible option left to us. No industry wants to kill or impoverish its customers (yes, even smoking) and a regulated, legal drugs industry would want to keep us all in work (to continue buying) rather than cleaning us out ASAP (as the illegal drugs industry will).
The local government shared services movement is taking off. Announcements that IBM will be preferred partner for Somerset and Capita for Southampton show that there is real traction in value creating public-private partnerships. Sandwell is going with BT and Liberata (interesting that BT is one of Liberata’s major clients).
In other news, Communities and Local Government has released the business improvement pack, as promised. Nice to see the business architecture we helped create at the heart of it.
And the OGC has started its work to modernise the procurement profession.
Caroline saw one of these on the motorway. Thankfully I was driving.
I still don’t think this is real, but I can’t see how it is faked. I also love the l33t comment on Londonist (unsure as to whether it is appropriate for this blog). It appears to be in Chad.
Looks like China is moving to install something like property rights. This is a major change (and the left wing ideologues hate it). Granted, it is no where near a functional democracy (assuming that’s a good thing), but it has to be healthier.
It sounds like commuters are much the same all over: Dubner asks why not walk 200 yards to a bus stop up the route to raise your chance of sitting down? For my own part, why not walk ten minutes across the park rather than going to the crowded mainline station?
My guess is that a number of factors conspire:
- most people seem to exist in bubbles with very little sense of what is going on around them. This is most obvious in the regular bumps, swerves and knocks that people take from other people while walking the streets. If you look even three feet ahead and apply some simple trajectory calculations you can usually avoid these.
- People who are on their second mode of transport are far less likely to walk in between modes. Is this laziness or frustration? Maybe it is just that they are in “travel mode” and have turned off some critical faculties to get through the stressful situation they are in.
- Common sense and the herd instinct prompt us to assume that if there are a lot of people standing there, they probably know what they are doing. “I mean, if there was an easier way, wouldn’t they all be doing it?” It takes a bit of work to challenge the herd rather than to follow it.
Interesting piece I read today having just worn coat and suit for the first time this year to get through the cold sleety snow in London:
Up, and it snowing this morning a little, which from the mildness of
the winter and the weather beginning to be hot and the summer to come
on apace, is a little strange to us.
Who’d have thought this was from 1663/4? QUESTION: is this year an aberration (e.g it is the hottest winter in the Alps for 70 years) or is this a new ratchet up in our climate change expectations. I vote for the former, but I get a lot of stick for saying so.
Funny that Windows Media plugins aren’t installed by default on Vista (or is it deliberate?)
Anyhow, the instructions on Mozillazine worked well - I needed to put the downloaded plugins into the installation directory, not WMP.
For reference, you need npdsplay.dll, npwmsdrm.dll, npdrmv2.dll.
Must watch for later: Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep.
The Swiss are doing yet another massive tunnel under the Alps. After our happy accident in finding the Lötschberg tunnel, I’d certainly do the Zurich to Milan route, should I ever have need.
Very useful tips if you meet a large animal like a moose. “You really don’t want to stress a moose out. They’re much bigger than you.”
