September 2010
2 posts
Marco.org: Most common words unique to 1-star and... →
‘Simple’ at the top of the list of words used to describe 5 star iPhone apps? Take note developers.
marco:
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category (minus duplicates) and compute the most common words in 1-star and 5-star reviews, excluding words that were also common in 3-star reviews.
Keep in mind that the results are not...
The big lies we tell.
The OK Cupid blog, as ever, has done a fantastic job analysing the huge quantity of fata they are collecting from their dating site producing a curious report on the big lies we tell.
If you’re 23 or older and don’t make much money, go die in a fire.
Pitchfork reviews music. →
An oldie but a goodie.
Schreiber’s semi-favorable review, which begins in earnest after a six-paragraph preamble comprising a long list of baroquely rendered, seemingly unrelated anecdotes peppered with obscure references, summarizes music as a “solid but uninspired effort.”
I also am a fan of the end quote. Perfectly encapsulates my feelings towards half the...
Do you have a better chance of becoming a... →
Lone Gunman does the maths and concludes that:
The chances of winning the lottery (with average jackpot winnings of £2,053,984) is 1 in 13,983,816. You would therefore need to buy £64 of tickets for a slightly better chance of winning the jackpot than becoming a millionaire through winning the X-Factor.
The London Review of Breakfasts →
For when nothing else except the perfect breakfast will do, The London Review of Breakfasts is sure to guide to full english heaven.
We hate bad breakfasts. We hate nudging limp forks at greasy microwaved sausages, miserable pink bacon and the clear and runny white of an unloved fried egg. We hate beans that are room temperature and bread that’s only toasted on one side. We despise cold hard...
Reddit Asks.. →
Why are superheroes inhumanely strong and fast while the bad villains are “evil geniuses”? My favourite answers are:
Partly to appeal to the average person, who can wrap their mind around the concept of faster and/or stronger, but will never really understand genius without being one, and partly because people reading/watching escapist media would prefer to speed or smash things to...
A Unified London. →
Branding a city has always been a bit of a funny one, designers seem to panic and end up creating another shit uncontroversial brushstroke logo.
London is in the lucky but difficult position where people already have ideas of what London is. The London underground sign is far to iconic to ever be forgotten and must either be integrated into the design or left behind. With the problems that came...
Computers are faster than they were in 1995. →
The WSJ talks to Disney about the new Toy Story re-release. They discover that rendering speeds are now 86400 times faster than they were 14 years ago which conjures up an initial feeling of ‘no shit’ followed by a realisation of just how quick that is. Scary stuff.
The process of rendering the films — or translating computer data into images — was vastly accelerated by current...
The Inconvenience Threshold →
How bad do things have to get before you take action against them? Jordan Barber examines his inconvenience threshold, and concludes that Ntotal > Inconvenience Threshold (IT) when N = (R+M)*W.
Guess you’re going to have to read the article to find out exactly what that means.
Marginal Revolution considers the case for... →
Without thinking about it too much I had always assumed it was for mostly political reasons, to have a prestigious academic associated with their institution is a clear incentive for the university. MR hit the same problem as I did - why do people accept them?
…there is a saturation limit. I’ve started to turn down about half of the honorary degree invitations. I feel badly about it,...
Scanwiches →
When you are hungry and need inspiration, look no further than my new favourite website Scanwiches.
Boxers, before and after fights. →
I have an interesting relationship with boxing. I love the idea of boxing; some grotty underground club with old leather bags creaking as you deliver a right hook before prancing around shadow boxing. However the idea of getting repeatedly punched in the face, and the lasting damage that it causes does not appeal. Looks like it’s Wii boxing for me.. except I hate video games. (via Kottke)
Lego is still cool.. kinda. →
This one article has both impressed and disappointed me. Lego doesn’t have a single factory in China, and instead produced every brick in country of birth - Denmark. What’s less cool is that the majority of their profits now come one off lego kits such as a Star Wars death star.
Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn’t recognize from their own childhood....
Gordon Brown Apologises. →
So online petitions do actually work sometimes. Who knew?
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different.
Nothing is private on the internet. →
A misconfigured facebook webserver has leaked notes for 16,000 accounts with privacy settings turned on. Should be common sense by now but just reiterates the assumption that anything you put on the internet can be seen by everyone.
Operation Northwoods →
In 1962 a plan was proposed that called for CIA operatives to commit apparent acts of terrorism within the US to drum up public support for a war against Cuba. It was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was sent to the Secretary of Defence. Although never officially accepted or executed (it was personally rejected by JFK) General Lemnitzer had plans for creating plausible pretexts to use...
Why Do You Hate Me? →
A gay man tries to find out why anti gay rights campaigners hate him so much. Some of the quote’s scare the shit out of me. I struggle to know how to frame my feelings on homophobes. If their fact’s were wrong, if they had somehow confused themselves and got lost in their hatred I might understand; those are problems that can be addressed. I have yet to find an approach that works when...
How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal... →
In summa: The British Governments official figures of those involved in file sharing came from UCL who got it a paper who didn’t actually mention a 7m figure but the author said he did write that in a different paper he wrote privatley for the British Phonographic Industry.
But there’s more… They only asked 1,176 people meaning it was only 136 people who were file sharers. The...
Lactic acid is now good for muscle development. →
This makes a lot more sense and I always find it peculiarly pleasant when facts are reversed like this. Reminds me of this xkcd and this video of Richard Feynman advocating taking the world from a different point of view.
Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained...
One giant slip in Bangladesh news →
Whoops.
Two Bangladeshi newspapers have apologised after publishing an article taken from a satirical US website which claimed the Moon landings were faked. “We didn’t know the Onion was not a real news site.”
The New Yorker interviewing Jonny Greenwood →
Jonny Greenwood (correctly) concludes 192kbps is good enough for anyone, however it was this snippet that sums up a lot of what i’ve been thinking the problem with my listening habits are.
The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to. People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis’ record but never think of hearing any of them...
Why Verdana, Why IKEA, WHY? →
For those who aren’t font geeks; Verdana, which was invented by Microsoft, was intended to be used on a screen, not on paper. It was designed to be legibile at small sizes on screen.
It’s tough, I get it. Any cost savings is worthy of consideration. Still, IKEA is a design focussed company. Good design has always been one of, if not chief among, their primary goals. It’s hard to...
Why I am excited about moving to Shoreditch.
My new favourite record store, Pure Grooves, lives there too.
My favourite bars Cafe 1001, The Foundry and B@1 are all within stumbling home distance.
Silicon Roundabout, home to all the best web and tech start up companies such as Last.fm and Moo.
One of the only 25m pools in Central London is just around the corner at Market Sports.
All I have to do now is find a property with a...
May 2009
1 post
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
Terrifying statistics of what happened after the protests.
Following the protests, officials banned controversial films and books, and shut down a large number of newspapers. Within one year, 12 percent of all newspapers, 8 percent of publishing companies, 13 percent of social science periodicals and more than 150 films were banned or shut down. In addition to this, the government also announced...
April 2009
2 posts
Do influential people develop more conventional...
As people rise in influence:
People “sell out” to become more influential.
As people become more influential, they are less interested in offending their new status quo-oriented friends.
As people become more influential, their opinion of the status quo rises, because they see it rewarding them and thus meritorious.
The status quo is good at spotting interesting, unusual people who...
Social idioms explained.
Not believing your ears, though, thought Espinoza, is a form of exaggeration. You see something beautiful and you can’t believe your eyes. Someone tells you something about… the natural beauty of Iceland… people bathing in thermal springs, among geysers… in fact you’ve seen it in pictures, but still you say you can’t believe it… Although obviously you...
September 2008
2 posts
New Yorker on Sarah Palin.
Talk about hitting the nail on the head. People seem to applaud Palin for being ‘one of them’. A hockey mom who acts and sounds and thinks like them. Someone they can identify with. People immediately see this as a good thing. It is not. The New Yorker explains:
I hate Elites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my...
W.B. Yeats - He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven
HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
March 2008
76 posts
“Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.”
– Laurence J. Peter
Barack Obamas A More Perfect Union →
The speech he gave earlier today. Which he wrote himself. Let that sink for a moment. Turns out the last President to write their own speech was Nixon.
I think I'm a Liberal Democrat. →
I was reading through various manifestos of political parties from around the world and was comparing the politics to those in the UK. As I read through them, I realised I knew very little about the Lib Dems, a 2 minute browse on wikipedia suddenly turned into an hours long research into the history of the party and everything they stand for. I’m not yet certain, but as of today - I may be a...
“Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an...”
– Sidney J. Harris
Americans used to be the world's most skillful... →
You got fat and you elected Bush.
George Clooney Interviewed. →
A different take on the standard interview script. George Clooney is interviewed while browsing the Internet looking for stories about him.We are logged on to a Facebook group called “George Clooney is NOT the sexiest man alive.” ”Ninety-four members,” says Clooney as he looks at the photo of himself with a red X through it. “What the fuck?” He reads the...
The Best 50 Albums of 2007 →
The Hype Machine has created this great output from all the data they have collected over the last year about music bloggers listening habits. They have created an average bloggers best band/song/album list for last year. Just thought. 2007 seems miles away.
I must be more careful. →
I just read this on reddit and instantly agreed.Listen, I don’t give a shit about politicians’ sex lives, let them fuck whoever they want. The only disgrace is that this is the only political issue that ever causes an uproar. But within the first few comments I realised how quick I had been to form an opinion without considering the implications. Here are a few issues to examine. He...
Current Sexual Teachings of Religious Groups →
Something to be noted: Roman Catholicism is more conservative than Islam when comparing sexual ethics.
Someone to watch over me. →
All those years reading ‘The Hardy Boys’ were wasted. Everything they taught me was wrong. If you must check for surveillance, don’t keep glancing over your shoulder. Appearing to suspect you’re being followed suggests you’re doing something to merit it. Anyway, if you’re being tailed by a serious outfit they won’t only be behind you, but ahead and to the...
How effective is priority seat signage? →
David Airey looks at the various signs in place encouraging people to give up their seats. 92% thought that people sitting down should offer the seat to a pregnant woman without having to be asked; 85% think pregnant women should ask for a seat if she needs one; 78% of currently pregnant women stated that they never ask for a seat when they need one.
What are the most stolen books? →
Amusing that such a list exists, and that the high calibre of books being stolen indicates educated people are stealing them.But independent booksellers, understanding that the line between profit and failure is so fine, take it personally, and sprint after thieves all the time. On the rare occasion when a shoplifter would run faster than I could, I would shout at his back as he escaped into the...
The ideological migration of David Mamet. →
An interesting read, specially if you were rooting for Ron Paul in the US elections. Nicely explains where any why Libertains and Republicans converge.Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware...
On Waterboarding. →
Interestingly, McCain has pledged to stop waterboarding as a form of torture. Knowing him, he’ll have changed his position next time someone calls him on it. However it’s more than Billary or Obama have done thus far.I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and...
It's easy to miss something you're not looking... →
Do the test.
Improve your CV. →
Today I was looking for nice CV layouts to help a friend out. I was unimpressed with everything I came across, so I designed one for her myself. Just stumbled across this one, and I love it. I need to see how it prints, but it’s clear and nicely stylised.
IQ reference chart. →
According to the IQ test I had to sit when applying for Mensa, I am in the high end of Moderately Gifted (143). If I’m honest, that scares the shit out of me. 1-19 Profound Mental Retardation 20–34 Severe Mental Retardation 35–49 Moderate Mental Retardation 50–69 Mild Mental Retardation 70–79 Borderline Mental Retardation 80-114 Average Intelligence 115-129 Bright 130-144 Moderately Gifted...