I’m not sure why I find them funny, but I do. I was searching for a bbq related one for Mark, but didn’t come across one. However, this one gets the right kind of message across!
Archive for June, 2008
How would a physicist look at getting our energy sorted? Read on.
Food for thought from Wired: what happens now we are beyond inundated with data.
- Can the standard hypothesise, model, test approach to science continue to work? (e.g. Google doesn’t understand web quality or languages, but there’s enough out there to let it model them effectively). But what if we find lots of things (patterns, clusters) that we don’t know how to understand?
- We can use satellite images to generate crop predictions (more effectively than surveys).
- The Large Hadron Collider will produce 10 Petabytes of data each second - Google processes 20 Petabytes each day.
- “We detected a gastrointestinal outbreak in Korea,” Mansfield says. “I called my boss, and he asked me, ‘When did it happen?’”. Korea is 13 hours ahead of Washington. So Mansfield simply answered: “Tomorrow.”
- Lowest airfare prices are normally between eight and two weeks before departure (based on a trawl of 175 billion US fares)
- A terabyte of text is more than all the words you’ll hear in your lifetime (unless you are married to an Italian
insert suitable stereotype).
Irony-bought a new suit jacket to replace one that had cigarette burns (not from me) only to find that moths had got the corresponding t …
Irony-bought a new suit jacket to replace one that had cigarette burns (not from me) only to find that moths had got the corresponding t …
Question: how to apply unconference / xCamp ideas to the sorts of conference that the public sector is beset by?
All the best, young man.
Funny that we don’t seem to care about civil liberties. I think this is the flip side of my “treat us like honest citizens” argument. Most of us are honest (mostly) law-abiding citizens. So we don’t notice CCTV and other tracking, because it doesn’t affect us (save in extreme circumstances).
The liberty groups are right - we probably don’t need the level of surveillance we do have (as there is no proof that CCTV decreases crime rates or increases solving rates). However, if we aren’t affected by it, then we don’t really care.
A cool and unusual thing: my pa has finished a film about the installation of a David Begbie sculpture at Wimbledon - the BBC should show extracts at some stage. Nice one, pops. We bought them a Begbie sculpture for their wedding - I have strong dibs on it!
Bozza has launched a review of the City of London’s future as the world’s leading financial centre. This must be manna for the Tories - get all the bigwigs on board, “align with” existing Labour initiatives and for an issue that will get plenty of headlines. Not surprising that Bozza has kept his head down - lots of practice for the Olympic handover, I guess.
I had forgotten that Mr Pooter was based somewhere in Holloway. And you can read the whole book online.
Given that I try and have things like email alerts turned off when I am in the office, I guess I have to agree with a lot of the thinking around multi-tasking in this article. I need focused time to work on “thinking” problems; operational issues tend to be dealt with a short, blitty sequence of emails, discussions and phone calls.
I was reminded of this Neil Innes classic today.
This song’s a protest song.
I’ve suffered for my music - now it’s your turn.
Stephen Fry talks movingly about why the BBC is important. He could well be right. I particularly enjoyed this line:
Radio 4 in particular is radically reinvented every five years or so, fortunately with no result whatever.
Lovely rant from a Cantab in El Reg (Oxford came top). I wonder why this years’ result is important? Surely you only have bragging rights if your university was the best the year you graduated? Sadly, the table has only been going for 15 years, so I can’t claim them.
How to make networking work for you. The people kind, not the computer kind.
I’ve seen this guy in Green Park!
Lovely side-on view of a galaxy and its associated star streams.
Well constructed article on how to create a good article for the web. Love the title.
I have used so many of these at work. Time to stop, maybe?
