Apparently one lone motorist slamming on the brakes can cause mile-long tailbacks. That’s the conclusion we had come to following a string of inexplicable hold ups on various motorways in various years. (For what it is worth, I think this is bad marketing of science - no one has solved anything. Firstly there wasn’t a problem and secondly, no-one has done the experimental work to see if theory and practice agree.)
Archive for December, 2007
Interesting decision by the Parisian administration to cut the amount of public advertising space by 1/3rd. I wonder a) what they think this will achieve and b) whether any other cities would follow suit.
There are some useful screen capture tools out there. CamStudio looks good, and there is a list of alternatives in the comments on the beta.
I have a regular error in our backup “tcpsvcs (2940) The backup has been stopped because it was halted by the client or the connection with the client failed.” This is either a problem (need to reregister a dll) or not a problem (a bug). We have tried the first fix, so let’s see what happens. There are some other useful pointers here.
Nice move - now they have storage, computing and a simple database available.
Interesting, and slightly scary looking new home page for the BBC (with some rationale). I have never enjoyed “my.homepage” screens, and this one is similar. The Ajaxy rapid update is good, though.
LinkedIn has finally made its move on Facebook, and Moveable Type on Wordpress. Roll on the improvements in all four of them. I currently prefer LinkedIn (for business) and Wordpress (runs this blog) - interesting to see what that looks like in a years’ time.
The team wants to video our Xmas trip to Palma, so borrowed a video camera (Sony DCR 101E or something like that). We couldn’t get the tape in it (it would pop back out again after some beeping. There was an error message on the screen (C 21:00 - I thought it was a clock) which I googled, and lo and behold, percussive maintenance was the way forward. I sent Mark to get tiny screwdrivers so that I could pretend I’d done something cleverer, but chose not to in the end.
Beautiful / strange look at a whale hunt.
Time has more lists than you can shake a stick at. Many of them are “gah” lists with not much really new. However, there are some nuggets in there. From Jonza comes the Rough Trade list (of albumclub fame) too much to investigate there, I am afraid.
Interesting thoughts on how to keep your blog alive after your death. While I have lots of stuff backed up, I don’t think anyone but me would easily be able to access it. There’s a business in here, somewhere.
Nice book summary from Gladwell suggesting that IQ is not innate: “I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in”. Given that IQ scores are rising over time (requiring ever harder tests) and that many comparators turn out to be mistaken (e.g. Asian over American), you can’t really support the use of IQ for very much at all, other than mental gymnastics.
I wasn’t properly aware of earmarking: in this case $1.8bn for defense projects that the Pentagon did not request. The table comparing earmarking vs lobbying spend is very, very interesting: it is massively cost-effective to lobby for contracts. I suppose this doesn’t take into account lobbying that fails, so might be a skewed view.
It is very big, and probably not very clever. But pretty.
The plain English campaign has released its end-of-year list of items that destroy the English language. Frighteningly, the council one is probably the most concise summary I’ve seen on what’s going on in the inspection regime for local government.
Brilliant story from AliBlahBlah. “Waaaahhhh!!! Inappropriate body contact!”
Great idea: virtual phones to see if you want to buy one. I decided against the Nokia N95 by flicking through a few menus at a friend’s house on the weekend. This should speed up some more negative decisions.
Interesting thinking about how government(s) might respond to the value created by networks like Facebook and LinkedIn and user-generated content like Wikipedia.
HomeTips is an interesting story on how you can make money online by owning a niche you care about.
Some interesting groupings coming out of an analysis of company name changes. We are almost mentioned (not).
