I name my child: netgear
A colleague of mine has recently moved home, and was roaming the streets earlier in the week hunting for a free, unsecure wireless signal. He used his phone as the network detector, before settling down to do some work, leroy being his network of choice.
But most of the networks stumbled upon were called netgear, linksys and default. However none of these features in the top hundred babies’ names. Strange that.
The BBC’s news prioritisation
The world has gone a bit mad. Or at least the BBC has.
Yesterday, BBC News’ lead article was the suspension of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, with the 160 victims of the Pakistani earthquake playing second fiddle.
Today, Ross’s three month suspension from Radio 2 leads, with the "concern[s] for tens of thousands of people" in DR Congo being deemed less significant.
While the two presenters’ behaviour was indeed wrong and inexcusable, the stage that this story has been given is way too elevated, and the barracking that the two presenters have received is at odds with the offence they committed.
The BBC has an obligation to include stories in which it is intrinsically involved; but sometimes I feel they elevate such stories higher than their significance warrants. And no doubt, the BBC is reacting strongly to this story largely as a result of Channel 4’s unwillingness to do the same following the racism incidents in 2007’s Celebrity Big Brother.
The Elizabeth Line
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Queen, as a contribution back to all us taxpayers, provided the voice of the London Underground?
Mind the Gap. This train will be terminating at Willesden. The next station is Green Park; alight here to see my house.
Come on Lizzie. It’ll be fun!
USO8
I’m not a fan at all of the BBC’s US08 elections logo.
They appear to have used an O (the letter) as opposed to a zero (the number), albeit in a smaller font weight than its alphabetic predecessors. I’ve never seen such an elongated zero before now. A typesetting horror that grates upon at least two eyes.
Better the devil you know
This afternoon my daughter got hold of the home phone. When I grabbed it from her, she’d dialed 666. This, coupled with her penchant for launching help from my laptop. Cause for concern?
Microsoft? Who are they?
"Competition, even stiff competition from Microsoft, doesn’t bother us because it will either make the internet as a whole better or it will be irrelevant to making it better."
What beautiful arrogance from Sam Schillace, head of Google Docs, in response to Microsoft’s forays into cloud computing, quoted in the BBC’s article on the subject.
This is the world in which the killer applications will be kings. Facial recognition incorporated with photos, even videos; offering Office to the online world without a discernible difference to the desktop equivalent; and bringing file and document management through straightforward interfaces.
Underpinning all of this, the need for a near-flawless security model to give customers confidence in the safety of their data, and similarly impressive levels of resilience to allow those customers uninterrupted access.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon are well-placed to exploit the potential rewards that getting this right can bring. Others, like IBM, could join the party given their size. But they aren’t sufficiently fleet of foot nor visionary to get it right. Let’s see how it all pans out.
Matisse
We were inundated with entries to the competition to name the artist from the following clue:
There exists 55i perpendicular to all w.
After sorting through all responses (another mathematical puzzle: how many ways are there of ordering zero items), none contained the correct response. So here’s a further clue.
Anyone? Bueller?
I stumbled upon this slightly contrived puzzle in Germany in 1993, lying on a mattress in Simon Barnett’s flat in Cologne, with a Matisse picture on the wall at the head of the mattress. Reading the capitalised artist’s name upside down gave a slightly bizarre mathematical statement.
Harrison’s Child
My daughter loves watching Peppa Pig, so much so that my wife bought her a few DVDs of it. She also likes playing with the DVD player, with a particular penchant for the stand by button.
These two activities don’t sit particularly well together. Midway through watching, she’ll shuffle across to the DVD player and hit the stand by button and the episode will stop.
Over time, I expect her to learn the correlation between the button-pressing and the ensuing disappointment, a phenomenon I will be writing up and submitting to a science journal, one I will name Harrison’s Child.
After all, I don’t think anyone else has discovered this.
It’s a car. No really, it is
I was amused by today’s BBC article about Andy Green’s future attempt to beat his own land speed record by taking a "car", known as Bloodhound, over the 1,000mph mark.
It was the sentence below that tickled me.
Known as Bloodhound, the new car will be powered by a rocket bolted to a Eurofighter-Typhoon jet engine.
I don’t think I’d be keen to get in myself.
Google converter gone bad
Today I Googled "euro pound exchange rate". Google converter offered me "1 Euro pound = 0.584862002 kg U.S. Dollars"
I have no idea what this means.
Googol Zimbabwean dollars
Zimbabwe is on its third dollar. Its first dollar, introduced in 1980, replaced the Rhodesian dollar, and was valued at USD1.47. Its second dollar was introduced in October 2005, and was worth 1,000 first dollars. Its third dollar, introduced in July 2008, was worth 10bn second dollars, or 10 trillion first dollars.
Assuming the current inflation rate of 231,000,000% holds, then the currency should be revalued in February 2021 such that 1 new dollar equals a googol first dollars. (That’s 1 followed by a hundred zeros.)
Inflation has increased from 2,200,000% in July to 231,000,000% in October. That’s a 43 percentage point increase in monthly inflation each month, from July’s monthly inflation of 248%.
If the inflation rate increase continued linearly to the same extent that it has between July and October 2008, then the googol note would be introduced as soon as June 2014.
28<42
A quick reminder of Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner Andy Hayman’s letter to Charles Clarke, then the Home Secretary, asking for 42 days to interrogate terror suspects. And my interpretation of the rather weak arguments therein.
I’m glad that the plans have been rejected, both from a civil liberties perspective, and because of the lacking in the Met’s original argument of the fundamental point: why stop at 42?
Ringo you cock!
Ringo Starr uploaded a video to his website today confirming that as of 20 October, he will too busy to sign any more autographs, respond to any fanmail. This among repeated declarations of peace and love, five of each in the space of the 44s video. No mention of understanding, though.
Watching the video, it would be difficult to tell him apart from a slightly deranged person who’s forgotten to take his medication.
Tosser.
What are the odds?
Tonight’s winning lottery numbers were 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28. The chances of all numbers appearing in the same set of ten are 0.0066%, or 1 in 15,134. One lottery every 145 years. The likelihood of them all being in their twenties is 0.0015%, or 1 in 66,590. One lottery every 638 years.
Of course, the likelihoodof those specific numbers coming up is 0.00000715%, once every 19,142 years.
It could be you!
Carriage return, line feed
I read with interest and some amusement today’s news of Luc Costermans breaking the world blind road speed record.
My favourite part of the article was the paragraph-hungry BBC’s decision to separate these two sentences into two paragraphs.
Two years ago Mr Costermans completed a tour of France piloting a light aeroplane.
He was accompanied by an instructor and a navigator.
Surely the second sentence is a sufficient qualification of the first to negate the need for the carriage return, line feed.
Artistic conundrum
There exists 55i perpendicular to all w. Name the artist.
6 August, 1928–22 February, 1987
My colleague thought she saw Andy Warhol at Wagamama at lunchtime today. I have to question whether she did indeed see him.
Department of _________________
To save cost and effort whenever the Prime Minister does a re-shuffle, how about the signage for all government buildings is from hereon in made from a white, A2, printed laminated piece of paper sporting the organisation’s name?
Or better still, why not put a fridge outside the front of each government building, complete with magnetic letters with which could be written the department’s name? Saves dumping them in landfill.
Just a thought.
Bus driver buttons
The number and range of automated warnings, requests and general snippets of information that are piped to me while on the bus of a morning has increased significantly of late. As well as telling me where I am before every bus stop, and telling me where I’m going after each, my fellow passengers and I are graced with requests for people to stand well clear of the doors, not to stand on the stairs or upper deck, and indeed confirmations that the bus is going to wait here for a few moments to "regulate the service."
I can only imagine that the driver has a plethora of buttons at their disposal, much like a Jean-Michel Jarre set-up, one for every eventuality imaginable. Maybe this is at the expense of the traditional, driving-related instruments. Maybe windscreen wipers had to go, and indicating is now a thing of the past.
"At the third time of asking, would the ugly bald man please understand that there aren’t any seats free upstairs, and that this bus won’t be budging an inch until you haul your ass off the stairs."
"And kids. Yes you. No, not you. You. Would you turn that fucking music down? Have you ever heard of the concept of headphones?"
Out of order: Facebook people search
Why doesn’t Facebook people search order results by social distance? It would be a lot more useful:
- Your friends’ friends
- Your friends’ friends’ friends
- The rest of the world who share the name of the person you’re looking for, but are unlikely to be the person you’re looking for.
Would make more sense from a user experience perspective.
Or does finding someone’s social distance from a random individual involve too many calculations to make it possible?