There are a lot of dotcoms in this list that I’ve had my eye on for a while. (Extate, Zopa, Zubka.) Maybe I should do the VC thing? I like the look of Openads, just need to work out how to get them working on our revised work site, when it goes live.
Archive for July, 2007
Saw these guys over the weekend: a free open DNS service. Looks useful - I’m going to try them at home and at work.
We kept on being prevented from swimming in Italian lakes - mostly by snakes, but given this article on bacteria content, it’s a good thing we didn’t swim.
Mark sent me a link to Blackle, an energy friendly black front-end to Google. My instincts were to rubbish the concept that there was a substantial energy difference. It turns out I was partly right: it can make a difference for CRTs, but not really for LCDs.
Chris (a school friend who is working with us) sends a splendid Friday time waster. Except it is only Thursday!
While I would love it to be the case that John Morton’s letter to the Grauniad did destroy Biblical fundamentalism, sadly it just isn’t the case.
But it is beautifully written though.
Genetic diversity within human populations decreases as distance from
Africa increases. This is good evidence that humans arose in a small
region and later dispersed (Africa cradle of humankind, study shows,
July 19). This argument could be applied to biblical fundamentalism.
There are people who take the story of Noah’s ark literally. If it
really did happen, every species of animal should show a similar kind
of distribution around Mount Ararat. This doesn’t happen. So, biblical
fundamentalism only makes one testable prediction, and it’s wrong.
John L Morton
University of Glamorgan
Biblical counterarguments could include: “God caused the flood (and prompted the construction of the Ark, for that matter) and it just looks to our impoverished non-omnipotent senses that the genetic diversity decreases with distance from Africa. We might measure that, but it doesn’t mean anything”. “God created everything empirical (including us doing the measurements) - how do we know that we can interpret the results of our measurements?”
The problem with any appeal to God as a final mover is that it can never make predictions, only explain everything with a full stop (in an unsatisfying and frankly brain-dead way for me). That is the core difference between science and non-science. A theory that explains but does not predict is not science and can never be.
There are enough contradictory statements in the Bible stories that they can never be used as a source of prediction (unless the numerologists were right all along). Therefore it can’t be science. To compare not-science with science, or try to disprove not-science with science is a bit of a category mistake. Ask a not-scientist to make a prediction about anything based on their theory of the work (and specifically not using scientific theories like physics, chemistry, biology) and they will regularly fail (unless they are as bland as astrologers). They’ll come back to our science-based technologies before long.
Dom sends over some fun electoral practices.
Solar powered compactor bins sound like an excellent idea, so long as you have enough light to power them. Do they need sun or just light?
Should Pegasus be part of a virtual choir?
Useful online guide to the D80, given that I didn’t get one with the beast itself. The official one is also available online.
Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the links.
Take control of the web - I like Sizeeasy (only on the internet) and will try and use TidyUp on my messy music and picture libraries.
Take control of your writing: 40 tips from Purdue.
Some good ideas for making your presentation more like a story, supporting your narrative, rather than the flow of your narrative. Linked: could a business case be shown as a storyboard?
Caroline sends a link to the reason that this summer is odd: the jet stream is too low. Exam question: is this caused by climate change, or merely a one-off oddity?
There’s a computer program that can play to a draw or win in any game you play against it. I suppose you could still practice against it to improve your game against fellow humans. That’s a 1020 game space. Chess 1047, GO on a 19×19 grid about 10100.
Its official - you should sit at the back of the plane, if you are that nervous.
I cannot get my brain to see that A and B are the same colour. I have downloaded the image and checked that they are (they are). I want to work out how to train my brain to see that they are the same colour.
This Trikke looks like fun - a skiing action while you wheel around town. Hard work, I’d have thought.
Targets are set to be slashed. The number of targets, not the levels, necessarily. The need to cut costs suggests that new targets will be even fiercer than previously, even if there are fewer of them.
Looks like Transformational Government is not dead, with the appointment of a minister to oversee roll out.
If your thumbnail and image resizing isn’t quite working in Gallery (system stops before reaching the end, there are broken images around), here are some thoughts.
- Uninstall and reinstall your graphics toolkits
- Use NetPBM as the first one, ImageMagick as the second and GD third (Why? NetPBM is apparently better quality, GD requires PHP system memory)
So we were trying to go to Caroline’s parents place in Tenbury Wells this weekend. We set off at 1pm, later than we expected thanks to a torrential downpour in London. We then took an hour-and-a-half to get to Hanger Lane due to unusually appalling traffic in north London. We then sprinted up the M40 for quit a while, until Traffic-i told us that the motorway was at a standstill going up to Birmingham.
So we headed off cross-country, taking the A44 to Chipping Norton. It was getting wetter and wetter, so we decided to turn back once we got in a non-moving queue just before Salford (there were plenty of people making “turn around” gestures as they passed us in the opposite direction).
Back to Chipping Norton and then the A3400 which took us to Long Compton, where, once again, we turned around based on the fact that the village was flooded and the locals told us we wouldn’t get through.
Then to Little Compton - which was further on than Salford, but still not there. This time it was our choice - 300m of flooded road, with little visibility of road surface, and water two-thirds of the way up our wheels scared us away. A colleague managed to get from Oxford to Burford to Moreton-in-Marsh at almost the same time without a problem - the benefits of higher ground.
By the time we were at a standstill in Banbury at 6pm, Caroline made an executive decision to stay in a hotel. It was a good decision - one of the last rooms, and we had got precisely nowhere. Had some nice Thai for tea and retreated to bed.
Simple journey back, followed by a slightly different weekend than we expected. We made the right choice: Caroline’s mum had to abandon her car because the flooding was so bad and hitch a lift with a neighbour, her father only just got back in a 4×4 and her brother had his bonnet under water and lost traction at one point and floated gently towards the hedge on his way home.
