Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
I have seen many reports of a 50% chance of a mild winter. As wiffy says, this means a) precisely nothing unless you can see the rest of the forecasts and b) is sloppy reporting as the phrase is “milder” rather than “mild”.
And the (very broad brush) forecasts suggest mild but wet. So not quite as nice as it sounded in the first place.
Trailblazing is a great new resource from the Royal Society, starting with the pioneering experiments in the late seventeenth century that started to make clear how the body actually worked and showing that the institution has remained influential to the present day.
“Britain faces return to Victorian levels of poverty”: is a slightly pessimistic look at the good work that has been done on levels of child and pensioner poverty. However, the lesson that universal benefits redistribute more to the poorest than targeted ones is important: surely they are easier to administer as well as easier to explain?
The concern must be that the impending onset of chronic diseases will spread faster in poverty than outside.
The Mash’s take on broken Britain is fabulous: “most children now raised by goats“.
Females more sociable? Well we knew this anyway, but interesting that it is duplicated on the more sociable networking sites (indeed, there are often more females) rather than the more geeky ones.
Lots of excellent commentary on the controversial clause 14 (which creates a strict liability offence for paying for sex with a trafficked prostitute, regardless of the punter’s knowledge) on the Lords of the blog site.
Time for legalisation, anyone?
Lots of exciting things going on in the food world: I read about Incredible Edible in the Indy at first, but it clearly is making waves.
And secondly, we are now really close to getting in vitro meat production to the eatable level (of course not at scale, yet). Although “a soggy form of pork” doesn’t sound attractive, just think of the benefits once it can be industrialised.
Two things we should teach everyone: the nocebo effect is a very strong version of priming. How is it that people can get symptoms from a sugar pill? Because their brain is doing some clever / weird stuff. How is it that telling people they are wearing knock-off Prada specs causes them to be less honest subsequently? Because their brain is doing some clever / weird stuff.
The main thing is this: if someone works out an easy to communicate and execute method of priming for interviews or meeting decision-making, lord help us all.
Some great Daily Mashes
I have a manually triggered AutoHotKey script that gradually lowers the volume of my laptop when (e.g.) ads are on in Spotify. Sadly, to get it working in Windows 7, it has to run as administrator, and thus requires a UAC prompt, which rather defeats the purpose.
However, this neat trick: Elevated Program Shortcut without UAC Prompt has sorted me out. (I had tried and failed to get the Application Compatibility Toolkit approach to work.)
Essentially, you create a non-scheduled task that runs as administrator which runs your program (here a compiled script) and then run that task, rather than the programme.
The AHK script is this:
SoundGet, master_volume
min_volume_for_spotify = 10
number_of_steps = 20
vol_step := (master_volume - min_volume_for_spotify) / number_of_steps
if master_volume < 10
{
MsgBox, Master volume is %master_volume% per cent: too low!
ExitApp
}
else
{
Loop, %number_of_steps%
{
SoundSet (master_volume - (vol_step * A_Index))
Sleep 120
}
}
Sleep 20000
SoundSet %master_volume%
Turkey electrocution, according to Benjamin Franklin, is a way of creating the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. Not one for the faint of heart, and probably not for Ali Blah Blah.
Happy Thanksgiving to all our American and ex-pat chums.