It's obviously intended for healthcare professionals, but since my sister is a surgeon I've owned hand-me-down copies for a few years.
It's not the usual hypochondriac's catalogue; one couldn't readily browse it for symptoms & 'cures', but on the rare occasions I've been prescribed medication, it's been mildly useful, even comforting, to be a little better informed.

The good news is that I've discovered that it's now available online to anyone with a UK IP address (or in certain 'low income' nations), professional or otherwise. The slightly less good news is that there's a slightly odd requirement to register with the website (by sending an e-mail requesting access to a registration form...), allegedly for copyright purposes, and access for non-professionals is limited to 30-min sessions (which, to be fair, is more than adequate). Print editions are currently £28.99, and are authoritative for six months.

[Via BongBong, er, BoingBoing.]

Four rows of colour chips are out of sequence; drag-and-drop them into the correct orders.
It might be worth looking away from the screen frequently, and taking a short break before performing a final check and submitting the test for assessment; I didn't, but spotted errors when I went back to it.

With that caveat, my first result was '8' on a scale of '0' (perfect) to '99' (poor). In addition to providing that number, the results page highlighted the tonal ranges in which I struggled, which is very useful to know.

Trying again, taking time to rest my eyes, I achieved a result slightly more appropriate for a professional web/graphic designer and amateur photographer: '0', or 'perfect colour acuity'.

[Via the Guardian, so this is probably old news....]

I'm useless at naming mountains on the horizon: after 15 years I still can't reliably recognise the profile of the Lakeland Fells seen from Lancaster. I also recently made a fool of myself by 'correcting' someone's identification of Welsh hills seen from Clougha, near Lancaster: what I thought was Moel Famau, a moderate hill in NE Wales was Carnedd Llewellyn, a major peak in NW Wales. For the sake of my bruised ego, I've bookmarked this site for future use.

The genetic algorithm generates a simple vehicle, which then attempts to traverse a predetermined terrain. The vehicle has two wheels, a springy quadrilateral frame with cross-bracing, and two circular 'passenger compartments'. Success is measured as the distance travelled within a certain time, without the passengers hitting the ground. The terrain of the track is fixed, but the dimensions and properties of each vehicle are variable: the initial positions of the four circles (i.e. the shape and size of the vehicle) and length, spring constant and damping of the springs. In case you're unfamiliar with the principles of genetic algorithms (I was), evolution progresses by, according to Wikipedia:

Another lesson recognised rapidly but appreciated much later is that evolution is s-l-o-w. I've had an iteration running in another tab all morning, and though the line of best fit on the graph of average distance travelled by each generation is showing an upward trend, the rise is only very slight and many mutated individuals are still as wildly inappropriate as at the outset (two-seated unicycles, anyone?). In fact, the overall trend of the last twelve generations has been negative.

For a long time the seemingly optimum form strongly resembled a mountain bike, with medium-sized, equally-sized wheels and the rear 'passenger' slightly lower than the front one, like a bike's saddle being slightly lower than the handlebar. A road bike's profile, with the handlebar lower than the saddle, doesn't work. However, a much longer 'front fork' now seems to be superior – much like a classic, rear-engined dune buggy.
A less-intuitive success features a triangular frame and an alarmingly high centre of gravity. It seems to be constantly about to fall over, but every time it overbalances, a change in slope catches it. It'd probably be totally unsuited to general circumstances, but just about works in this very specific niche.

Here's another example of an evolutionary algorithm, which attempts to reproduce the Mona Lisa using fifty semi-transparent polygons. The objective was achieved remarkably well – in 904,314 generations.

[Update 11/12/08: I left a few iterations running on my office PC overnight, to see the longer-term result. Most stablised after a few hours, with no overall improvement or decline (but still with a huge amount of variability between individual generations), but one was interesting.

The algorithm wasn't optimising particularly well in the first couple of hours, but suddenly made a breakthrough – seemingly in a single generation – on which it very gradually improved for several hours. However, for some reason it went into decline over ~10 generations, its efficiency dropping to virtually baseline, before recovering to an efficiency still well below the iterations running in the 'parallel universes' of other Firefox tabs. Its current output is a very small, fast vehicle, many individuals of which perform exceptionally well, but the tolerances are tight, and are exceeded by about as many mutations as succeed, so the average efficiency of an entire generation (20 mutations) is poor.]

Try the eyeballing game (Flash, but not too flashy), and see if you can do better than me. I'd be surprised if you couldn't, as it's a bit early in the day for me, I'm using a CRT monitor and perhaps I'm simply not very good at it: an average accuracy of 3.20 pixels/degrees x2 is below average.

There's a 'correct result?' poll on the site, which reports 57% accuracy from almost 4,000 sites; not great.

I'd particularly recommend the aphorisms in Astley's speech on p.68.

I was initial attracted by the wonderful, expressive artwork (Trudy Cooper is guest artist at Wapsi Square today), but the characterisation and magic realist story, initially co-written by Danny Murphy, are excellent too.

The comic (which is indeed largely comedic) is published in, to date, eighteen episodes, each of ~200 pages. The first sixteen are presented online in slow-loading Shockwave (you may need to download the player), whilst the remaining two are in Flash. The Shockwaved episodes are also available in print; I'm very tempted.
I'd strongly recommend reading them in order; though there are distinct threads they're not really self-contained, and one can't join the narrative just anywhere.

That single narrative is something of a problem, as the comic's moreishness far exceeds its update schedule. Episode one was published in 1994 and according to the site's forum episode 19 has been imminent for at least a year (and in 1997/8, Cooper envisaged a total of thirty episodes...). Conversely, that's something of an advantage, too, as there's nothing rushed about the artwork.

Sorry – having been at my desk and concentrating since 06:30, I'm extraordinarily tired and hence inarticulate today, so can't properly expand on why I appreciate the sexy, witty and occasionally surreal 'Platinum Grit'. I'll leave it to Cooper herself, in that 1997/8 interview:

[Update 20/08/08: Ha! In closing comments on June's posts as an anti-sp*m measure, I see that Sal recommended 'Platinum Grit' to me weeks ago, but I neglected to follow-up the reference!]

Maybe because it's my own home region, and maybe because I perceive less judgmentalism in it, I rather prefer a local version focusing on North West England, commissioned by the North West Regional Assembly and adopting the same visual style and range of parameters to ask "if there were only 100 people in the region what would they look like, and what sort of place would it be to live?"

Okay, the graphics are a bit pick'n'mix (such indiscriminate use of stock photography and Flash animations comes across as 21st Century clipart) and I'd dispute the implication that 78% of North-westerners are practicing christians, but some might be interested to see at least the NWRA's interpretation of the environment which informs this blog.

[Thanks for the link, K.]

The same applies to some 'web comics'; perhaps not strips like Dilbert, Irregular Webcomic! or User Friendly but certainly those about people, like Wapsi Square and, in a new development, Ctrl+Alt+Del. Anyone see anything comic in last Friday's?

Unfortunately, the archive seems to be hosted in an undergraduate student's University-provided webspace, which will probably expire eventually, so if you see a cutting (or twenty) you like, right-click and 'Save Image As'.

My favourite:

I don't think calculations of tide times are published specifically for Sunderland, but the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office's free 'Easytide' service does offer predictions, up to a week in advance, for four ports in the immediate area: Lancaster, Glasson Dock, Heysham and Morecambe.

Easytide has global coverage, so those interested in other (navigable...) locations might like to bookmark the site too. For a price, it also offers 'predictions for the past', which slightly confuses me.

*: aka 'Sunderland Point', though that's a remote headland some distance across muddy fields from the hamlet itself.

However, some might like to know that there's a little-publicised streamlined version, displaying just the current day's strip and access to the archive. Useful on dialup, or just to avoid the rather 'busy' main page.

At the time of writing, one can see Mario the Plumber, Homer Simpson and now Jessica Rabbit. Make sure you examine the full-size 'photos' for the complete effect, and read the follow-up posts for 'making-of' images and videos.

Why wasn't I surprised that a photo of Angelina Jolie was the primary source of facial textures for Jessica (though it ought to be Veronica Lake, really)?

At work, I have unofficial access to decent-resolution research radar data unavailable to the public (sorry) but I've discovered that the Met Office offers a low-res (5 km) version for the entire UK, updated half-hourly, I think. One can zoom into regions, though the resolution doesn't improve.

BoingBoing has highlighted a whole website devoted to such clumsy, improbable or simply incompetent image editing: Photoshop Disasters.

Some of the entries had me in tears. Of laughter, I think.

As BoingBoing says, the Usborne Book Of The Future, first published in 1979, was a beautifully optimistic look at the future (not entirely optimistic – it didn't foresee the end of the Cold War) which strongly influenced my views on technology (medical, environmental, power-generation, etc.) and many aspects of my overall character, such as my preference for hard-tech sci-fi. Some of the illustrations are far-fetched nowadays, but it's interesting to see how many projections have been achieved, if in a less grandiose manner, and how many are still valid technical aspirations.

However, after the ~10th instance, I became vaguely curious, so I used a utility others might wish to bookmark.

WhoCallsMe.com is a clearing house: post an unrecognised number to see comments from those who have encountered it before.

In my case, the caller is the retentions department of the electricity supplier I'm in the process of leaving. It seems the department has a habit of dialing several numbers and speaking to whichever recipient answers first – others report hearing general office sounds and a female voice talking to someone else. Contemptuous and contemptable.

Of course, an even simpler technique is to just type the phone number into Google; in fact, that's how I found WhoCallsMe.com.

I haven't investigated the links in depth, and suspect they may be in American rather than English, but give them a try.

Actually, that particular Visual Dictionary is rather superficial. It's worth browsing, but I don't think I'd use it when looking for something specific.

It's good to be able to examine locations from four sides, and the quality is excellent; I can distinguish the colour of the drain pipe in my back yard, and see that my curtains were open when the plane passed.

Click the thumbnail to make the plane fly closer, or zoom in, or enlarge the image, or something.

[Via BoingBoing.]

A high proportion of Ucumari's other photos are excellent, too. I'll return when I have an hour or so, as it could take time to work through 153 pages (at the time of writing) of photos, each of which would reward slow appreciation.

"There are rare words, and there are rarer words, but only a very special word qualifies as a bona fide lost word." The Compendium of Lost Words compiles a truly sinapistic* array of the extremely obscure. I'm afraid my written style isn't adequately gaudiloquent as to convey my ecstasiation at this discovery, but I love the fact that these words exist, and that someone has hunted them down. Anyone know of others?

As Stephen Chrisomalis says, a word can't really be lost, merely mislaid, or at least one fully lost couldn't be subsequently rediscovered. However, words qualify for inclusion in the Compendium by having header entries in the (full) Oxford English Dictionary and having been used in Modern, standard English (post-1650 and not regional dialect), without appearing in their proper English contexts on any readily-accessible web pages. Alternative spellings of better-known words obviously don't count.

I did briefly wonder whether the Compendium is genuine; 'ascoliasm' in particular sounds suspiciously Pythonesque, but it's a subsection of a much larger, highly-credible site, so I'll take it at face value for now.
I'd also question the strict validity of defining 'lost' as merely 'absent from the indexed web', as certain terms may be merely 'uncommon' within certain groups. For example, as an ex-academic in the field of physical geography, I recognised the word 'hyometer' immediately, and I imagine it appears occasionally in a fairly large number of journal papers, which tend to be widely-circulated in print and online behind pay-walls.

Whatever. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to return a few of these words to genuine usage – but not merely as flosculation.

I suppose this counts as my solennial reposting of User Friendly's 'Link Of The Day'.

*: Er, no, that's 'consisting of mustard'.

This is only Google Earth, by the way, not Google Maps, though I presume that'll follow eventually.

Also apparently, it was made by a sculptor called Lars Erik Fisk, who also produced a spherical tractor and a spherical UPS truck.

[Via User Friendly.]

Don't worry, I'm not attacking Second Life myself. Personally I wouldn't choose to devote time and creativity to it, but it seems harmless and if people enjoy it, that's fine with me.

Incidentally, the site requires one to acknowledge a copyright statement before viewing the images. Don't worry about it; though it's somewhat unfriendly (I'd argue it's poor design to alienate an audience so overtly), the stated terms are routine and the site owner isn't able to impose any greater restrictions than standard copyright law.
To put it another way: the site owner may wish to prohibit reproduction of images 'in any form', but there's no legal backing to that level of restriction, and 'fair use' provision still applies. I fully support the site owner's need to protect his/her intellectual property; nothing at the Ministry is released into the public domain, either, and I don't see the point of publishing under a creative commons licence. However, one can't ban fair use of content (which credits the original author), such as for purposes of review.

The advantage and disadvantage is that this is an online utility. It's accessible from any web browser without having to install software, but it also means one has to upload the source images in order to resize them. Personally, I'd be inclined to resize images in order to upload them, so there seems to be a potential contradiction!

I discovered this via Lifehacker, which cited the example of resizing a 3264x1920px photo to 200x117. For comparison, I happen to have a 2848x2136px image on this PC, which I know to be a 1.7Mb file. I suppose that's not too bad for a one-off via broadband, but I couldn't imagine using it regularly or via dialup at home.

Anyway; it's available, and may be of use. Have fun.

'Cos the site mightn't be there tomorrow, after the MS lawyers find it.

[Via El Reg.]

I don't know whether it's good that I haven't been indoctrinated or bad that I've been unobservant, but my score was low. In my defence, I only visit three of the sites regularly, and hadn't visited two at all.

'Strange Maps' is only a few weeks old at present, so it's still practical to read all the entries, but my favourite is that explaining the bizarre partition of Märkat, between Sweden and Finland.

[Via Cartography.]

I think it's wonderful; I was grinning from about ten seconds in, and I loved the climactic rainbow effect almost as much as the closing rain of pure colour.

Like its forerunner, the 'bouncing-balls-in-San Francisco' advert, 'Paint' was done for real, on a disused Glasgow housing estate, rather than as digital effects. Don't worry, hippies: the 70,000 litres of paint were water-based, non-toxic and cleaned up afterwards.

*: If I don't specify the company and product, I'm not participating in viral marketing, right?

However, there's an interesting interview with Dawkins in Salon, in which he comes across as rational and essentially respectful of individual beliefs, an approach which conveys his message very well. I wonder if my earlier impression was simply due to his words having been edited and filtered by sensationalist mass-media.

The clearly-named SayNoTo0870.Com offers a database of unpublicised, standard-rate phone numbers, which might even be answered quicker.

I thought I'd posted about this before; seems not.

Maybe it's better to be pessimistic and prepared than optimistic and damp, but it'd be even better to be correct. Today's entry in the five-day forecast simply isn't a fair summary of the conditions actually expected over the next 24 hours. How is one derived from the other – how can the 'average' be more extreme than any component interval?
Therefore, how could one plan for later in the week (surely one of the purposes of a forecast) if one has to presume the summaries of the expected weather on those days are inaccurate too?

I wish this was a one-off error, but it seems to be routine; I'm rarely happy to trust the BBC's web-based forecast in other than the most general terms. I have reasonably high confidence in the BBC Weather Centre's forecasts themselves, but there's something seriously wrong in the way they're translated to the web.

I scored something like 130 in 2003; more specifically, 133 when I took it again in 2004 (I'd forgotten the questions, so I wasn't really just retaking it!). This time, I scored 130 exactly, which is... consistent, and within the top 2% of the population, apparently.

Frankly, the test wasn't so good this time – the questions themselves were cryptic, and sometimes it was difficult to comprehend what was being asked, never mind which of the multiple choices was the answer. I suppose it's to be expected, but this and the flashy graphics seemed to be more for entertainment than efficient communication and hence accurate testing. Additionally, the mechanism for converting raw scores to age-weighted IQs seemed simplistic.

Whatever; give it a try.

Apparently, my surname is ranked 1,470th in popularity – surprising, as it's uncommon here in the UK (2,779th in 1998 – 2,095 instances in ~60 million people).
Helen's is no. 349 in the USA, and not exactly unusual here.

[Via Sonic Chronicler.]

'Serenity Rose' is a spendidly gothy comic by Aaron A: well-drawn, well-written and nicely cynical (including about 'orthodox' goths). It's not exactly a webcomic, as it's designed for the hardcopy format, but the first two 28-page issues are readable online.

Aaron also started publishing a weekly webcomic, 'Vicious Whispers', yesterday. It looks promising.

That's all. Read it.

The jokes don't always work (the hit-rate is rather low, to be honest), and some are downright incomprehensible to a non-mathematician or non-physicist (i.e. me), but when it works, it's one of the funniest strip cartoons I know.

[Known for ages, but prompted by Aardvark.]

If you're unfamiliar with 'Bad Science', have a look. The remit is to critically evaluate/debunk mainstream journalistic coverage of scientific research. Fact-checking of lazy, sensationalist articles on childhood vaccination, mobile phone radiation, etc., which cite unpublished research by under- or irrelevantly-qualified academics as fact would drive me to despair (as would disentangling this sentence's subclauses...), but Goldacre manages to keep it readable.

*: Whilst acknowledging it's because he submitted excessively lengthy articles!

[Heh. I'm publishing this one at 6:06pm on 6/6/06. Coincidentally.]

Apparently, if Nikolas Lloyd had been an official member of staff, the University would have defended his right to free speech (and initially did so), but as a visiting fellow, he didn't qualify for protection under section 43 of the Education (No 2) Act 1986, and senior University management surrendered to veggie complainants.

One side-effect is that the veggies have succeeded in exposing Lloyd's views to a far wider audience than they would otherwise have received. Now that he has uploaded the 'offending' site to his own domain, hosted elsewhere, I'm pleased to link to the essay.

And no, I have no interest whatsoever in presenting the counter-argument; it's not for me to offer a right of reply here to Lloyd's content elsewhere, and I wouldn't wish to. Contact him, not me. Comments on the issue itself are welcome here, as always, but mere veggie propaganda will be deleted without hesitation.

It's a great idea, worthy of the League of Awesomeness, but I particularly want to point out the project's Google Maps 'hack', the 'Find The Opposite' tool. Select a location on one side of the globe, and its antipode will be indicated.

The underlying assumptions are a little flawed (low-lying but totally land-locked parts of Africa are shown as at risk of flooding, and altitude is the sole considered criterion for inundation, ignoring current and future flood defences), and some of the altitude data seems odd, especially in cities, but it's an interesting rough indication.

Okay, okay; I hadn't been paying attention, so I'm far from the first to notice this – it was actually released last, er, September. Whatever; if you hadn't noticed either, visit it now.

The puzzle is the same as before: select ten items in order for them to interact in the single correct sequence, in order to make something happen.

This puzzle is midway between the fully-narrative Grow RPG and the more abstract original Grow. There is a bit of a narrative, which helps one to predict the correct sequence, but some aspects make limited sense, so there's some guesswork.

The immediate result of that burst of internet fame was that Fredo received a huge bandwidth bill from his ISP, but it also led to work producing film music ('The Sad Song' and several of his other compositions appear in 'Man About Town'), and he performed his first live concert last month, again featuring 'The Sad Song'.

Note that all the foregoing links to 'The Sad Song' lead to fairly large downloads (10 Mb+), so don't all hit his server at once, eh?

[Via Neil G. again.]

The premise is that they're photos of rooms painted with anamorphic patterns which seem random from most angles, but which, from specific viewpoints, reveal perfect geometric shapes. The photos from 'wrong' angles presumably would be difficult to fake (perhaps using 3D modelling software?), and hence are believable, but the fact that the rooms are so empty made me suspicious. On further examination, the rooms seem to be corridors, lobbies and other credibly empty public areas, so I'm inclined to think they're real.

Whatever; I like them!

[Via BoingBoing.]

[Via BoingBoing.]

[Update 23/02/05: S'gone. Transport for London's lawyers had it removed. Various people are hosting mirrors of it; at the time of writing, this one works.]

In the 1998 data, my surname exhibits a slight concentration ('3', on a scale of 1-6) in NW England, particularly Manchester and N. Cumbria ('4'), with lesser clusters ('2') extending across the W. Midlands and N.Wales, and in an arc around the fringes of London (the commuter belt). However, Shetland stands out with the highest possible concentration, '6'. I already knew my family name is Scandinavian, and I suppose the Shetlanders are predominently descended from Norse settlers. I vaguely remember reading that NW England was settled by Norwegians too, which might explain the slight concentration here but not in E. England, which was settled by Danes.

There are a few summary statistics, too, but I'm not entirely sure how to interpret a couple of them.

• It seems there were 2095 instances of my surname in the 1998 data (really? That seems extraordinarily low), up from 1746 in 1881, yet in terms of proportion of the population rather than absolute number, my surname dropped from rank order 2467 in 1881 to 2779th in 1998.
• My surname occurred 65 times per million names in 1881, and 56 per million in 1998.
• 99.27% of instances are ethnically British.
• My surname isn't recorded as being used as a forename in the UK (understandably).

[Update 07/11/07: Following a collaborative project, the Surname Profiler has been rebranded under the National Trust's corporate identity.]

Tip: don't go looking for Goatse (emphatically not whilst at work!), but if you absolutely must, make sure someone's pointing a camera at you at the precise moment you hit the dreaded link.

[Via BoingBoing]

That was quick – in November, a friend was considering 'buying' (open-ended renting, really) a block of pixels, so I noticed that about 30-40% remained available. Now the final 1,000 pixels are being auctioned at eBay. There's no point in my linking to the auction, as it'll be a dead link in a few weeks, so I'll simply say that at the time of writing, the high bid is $38,100 (£21,662.50), with more than six days to go.

I suppose people will have to start on the Zero Million Dollar Homepage. Or perhaps not.

[Update 12/01/06: That ended-up being the winning bid amount. Surprisingly, there were no further (valid) bids. I'd expected a last-minute frenzy!]

Hence, I was interested to hear about LookLater, via Lifehacker. It's pretty much the same thing as del.icio.us (searchable bookmarks online), and compatible with that, but not open for everyone to see one's private bookmarks.

I'm not perverse enough to go to the effort to immediately transfer my del.icio.us bookmarks over to LookLater, but don't expect the former to receive updates from now on.

Needless to say, it's not necessarily a matter of using LookLater or del.icio.us, so the services are complementary; some might wish to have both public and private bookmarks, but, well, not me.

In late August, the scale was such that 'Splogfighter' was able to itemise each splog he/she reported for deletion, whereas his/her current target, two months later, is for 2,000 deletions per day. That's not sp*am blog entries, it's entire spurious blogs.

At the time of writing, the blog is still quite 'young', so it's still easy to read the entire archive in a sitting, and I recommend doing so (just for interest, not practical tips).

One aspect which particularly concerns me is the possibility that if the sheer volume of splogs floods search engines, all blogs might be removed from the main indices of search engines and 'ghettoised' into Google Blogsearch or similar. There's a lot of valuable content in genuine blogs, which I think ought to be available via mainstream searches.

[Via Lifehacker]

For example, on Thursday I'll be boarding an Avro RJ85 to Brussels and another on to Warsaw, and now know that (presuming my choice of airline configures its planes the same way as Northwest Airlines) Row 5 may have extra legroom whereas Row 15 is at the very back, next to the toilets.

My slight criticism is that the view from the windows isn't a parameter mentioned, though it's one I value. The position of the wings is indicated on each seat plan, so one can estimate which seats only overlook the engines, and for planes with wings below seat level (unlike the RJ85, thankfully), one can guess which seats will have no view of the ground whatsoever. However, it would have been good if the site had provided specific advice.

Cross-checking against a photo of the plane, I think I'll try for something in Rows 10-14 (not 5; the engines are in the way), and Seats A or F (by the windows).

Does it matter? Yes, absolutely. I love flying, and spend every moment of the first and last ~20 mins of each flight staring out of the window; more, if it isn't cloudy. The trip out to Prague in June was slightly disappointing, as I was over the wing, without a view.

[Update 23/01/09: Seatplans.com seems better, and non- US-centric.]

The site covers the UK and USA (and hence their banking & tax regimes), and simplifies the whole process whether one is a fundraiser, a sponsor or a charity.

No, I'm not planning to actually do anything specific for charity in the foreseeable future; I'm just passing on the link and acknowledging an excellent concept.

Okay, okay; if you want a specific example, try this one. Don't forget to sponsor her.
Just to evaluate the online donation system, of course.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, is an annual literary challenge to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The quote above was Dan McKay's winning entry in the 2005 competition.

Regretably, the BLFC website is a navigation nightmare, and I don't have time to explore the labyrinth right now, but the related Lyttle Lyttleton contest (same principle, but entries need to be brief) has a much more readable site – have a look.

Incidentally, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton was the original perpetrator of "It was a dark and stormy night...", in 1830.

The puzzle is frustratingly unforgiving. My one criticism is that there's no 'undo': any one error ends the game, and one has to restart from the very beginning. As a couple of events rely on precise timing, this can be annoying, especially as it took me 3-4 attempts to get the timing right for the very last stage, meaning I had to repeat the whole puzzle to return to that point each time, without even knowing whether I was doing the right thing anyway. It's not too bad; the completed sequence takes about a minute to run through, so repeating it doesn't take too long.

It took me a couple of hours to solve, over most of this week, but I hear that the sequel, 'Hapland 2' is more intricate, events require tighter timing, and some of the clickable elements are barely large enough to spot. I'm looking forward to it!

The same site has a huge number of explanations contributed by visitors, but they'd all feel rather foolish if they'd spotted one simple fact.

Think about it: how could one guarantee that any one card chosen from the first page will be absent from the second?

The primary project is to construct a huge twin-tower Tesla Coil, but I discovered them via a side-project: the Taser cannon. That's Taser cannon, a 30-barrel monster firing 110kV, 15,000 amp plasma. Damage to the target "can vary widely", but Wikipedia records that though a typical stun gun fires 200–300 kV (for skin penetration), a 0.06 amp current is generally fatal. It's probably enough to say that most spectators experience discomfort from the plasma explosions.

Oddly enough, many elements of the site, particularly the FAQs, seem to be clever satirical references to other Google activities over recent months. Surely not. For example:

For example, a house three doors from mine sold last November for £37,000 more than I paid in August 2003. Four days after I bought mine, someone bought another at the far end of the street for £1,550 more and three weeks later, another went for £22,000 less than I paid (must have needed work!). I don't know any of the purchasers or previous owners, so it's not really an invasion of privacy, but it could have been.

When one starts or reset the grid, the pattern is practically random, many individual lines joining to form circles or long, composite 'snakes', with few isolated individual segments. By definition, when activity ceases, it's because there's no line linked to the last tile to move. The result is a very ordered pattern of individual segments.

Click on one of the composites and activity is likely, but it tends to be very localised and soon ceases.
Click on an individual and there's often no activity at all, as there's a high probability of there being nothing to react with.
Click on an individual in an array of identically-aligned individuals, and if they react, it's in a simple chain: activity proceeds along the line then stops. It's difficult to start, but once triggered, it goes a long way, in a predictable manner.

However, click on a composite next to an array of individuals and the brief burst of chaotic activity can trigger activity in multiple rows/columns of the ordered section, which can rapidly propagate across the entire grid, in turn triggering 'chaotic' clusters, which feed back into the 'ordered' arrays. This is a neat reminder that life flourishes best when there are balanced proportions of order and chaos!

That'd be absolutely fine for an ad campaign (which was the way the images were used), but at least to me, the (potential) lie that these are genuinely the dogs' owners diminishes any trust I might have had in the company, so I'm actually less likely to buy the advertised product than if I hadn't seen the adverts.

Not that I have a dog or eat dogfood.

It's USA-based, which rather reduces the relevance to fashions here in the UK, but it's mildly interesting to know that Helen was the second most popular female name 1900-1919 and in third place for the 1920s, but had become more exclusive ;) (241st) by the 1970s when 'my' H was born. Likewise my mother, who was named towards the end of the peak of Jean's popularity in the 1940s (18th in the 1930s, 934th in the 1990s). Me? 194th in the 1970s, though I don't like my given name, so it's of limited interest.

[Via Superflicious]

*: I feel it more appropriate to give a meaningful amount to a small number of charities I particularly support, than to give pennies to a wide range of causes, having a negligible impact on any.
Hence, I actively support certain medical charities, but will almost always decline to give to charities focusing on children, animal welfare or the homeless. Unlike the categories mentioned below, I don't oppose these causes, but I do feel one has to prioritise, according to one's own conscience and concerns.

I don't support charities addressing concerns which I feel should be addressed by the state.

I never support charities with religious affiliations e.g Cafod, Salvation Army.

I don't support the objectives, and certainly not the methods, of environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace or Friends Of The Earth.

As Che, at Octopus Dropkick (found via Boing Boing) says, the images of the scheme look like something from a computer game. I think it's a combination of the slightly abstract, huge shapes, seen in slightly misty lighting, with industrial surfaces which haven't seen much wear yet - there are patches of discolouration, as might be added by Photoshop, but negligible actual damage; it's subtly too perfect.
Yet this is explained by the fact that though the project is 12 years old, it's only just finished (or is it still under construction?), so it hasn't experienced wear and tear. The images aren't photo-real CGI, they really are photographs. Impressive engineering aside, they're just great images.

Well, no. Cat's bunnies are a bit... different. Open the package, which might be be packed in leaves, wrapped in an odd length of fabric, a placemat, joss paper or even just yards and yards and yards of string without paper, and you might find a bunny with three eyes. Or two heads. Or one head but two bodies. Or one head on one body, but the head is a real rabbit's skull. Or a head pierced by pins; remove the pins to find the head opens to reveal eyes (or teeth) sewn into the velvet lining. Or (my favourite), not a bunny, but a penguin in a bunny suit. Want!

Via Neil Gaiman, as is so much that's cool.

For example, the best time to visit Stavanger, Norway, is apparently between May and October. I'd probably agree. However, that period is also the best time to visit Mars, so there might be a scheduling conflict.
The best time to visit H is May/June; her birthday is in there, which could be good or bad! The recommended time to visit me would be April/May. That's as good a time as any.

Apart from the comedy value, I suppose my criticism isn't entirely fair. Tourism websites are likely to genuinely state suitable times to visit destinations, so the results of a sensible enquiry should be meaningful.

[Via Neil]

Part of the fun is in the juxtaposition of words, apparently revealing hidden messages. An example given by the site is the sequence: "america ensure oil opportunity".
"Ministry" is followed by "knowing", which is rather appropriate considering the name of this blog!
The sequence "vehicles profession neil killing" might be read as a prophesy of my death, so I'm glad it proceeds: "alleged perspective".
H does better: "infection helen cleared survived".
Considering my sister is a surgeon, it's worrying to read: "experimental offences kate suspended".

Hours of fun!

One feature I'd never used is the ability to overlay the locations of schools, restaurants, etc. onto maps as clickable links to websites/directories and hence further information. Richard Rutter, one of the site's developers, has just added a new category to this functionality: weblogs.
Submit a blog's location (as a button or in a blog entry) and it will be added to the database within 24 hours. Richard only announced it today (see that announcement for further details), which might explain why I can't find any working examples yet, but this posting is both to inform people and to submit the location of The Ministry.

[Via Neil]

The bike, in Houston, Tx., doesn't have a saddlebag - the object under the saddle is a bees nest.

Ow.

The image is hosted by the US Navy at their Naval Safety Center website, so is unlikely to be photo-manipulation or a joke, but a little scepticism is always advisible, and there are other examples on the website where a faked image is used to make a serious point about safety.
If you're tempted to browse the site, I'd better mention that a couple of images are genuinely disturbing, showing serious injuries and deaths.

It seems that the M53 motorway, running the length of the Wirral, was originally designed to link Liverpool with North Wales, terminating at Ewloe. This is the, well, 'populated road junction' some 2 miles (3 km) from Northop Hall, where I grew up. Various delays and revisions meant the M53 ended at Ellesmere Port by 1972, and somehow never continued along the planned route. There's still no true motorway connection to North Wales, though the A55 expressway serves much the same purpose.

It might have been different, though. If the M53 had continued to Ewloe, that would have intersected the A55, possibly inspiring the upgrade of that, the primary through-route linking Chester and Holyhead, to a motorway.

Even with a slight revision to its route in the 1980s, the A55 passes within a mile of my mother's house, and is very audible from the garden. I can only imagine how my childhood might have been affected by living so close to a full, 6-lane, Liverpool-Holyhead motorway, and how it might have influenced the development of the whole region.

The sanitised, partial information is apparently intended to tell members of the public what to do in the event of an emergency such as a terrorist attack (Don't Panic. Behave. Follow Orders. Trust the Government. The Government is your Friend. Vote for Us).
Even the government's own announcement acknowledges that the necessary measures are 'common sense' and 'instinct', so why the **** throw away millions of pounds?

Refreshingly, 'HM Department Of Vague Paranoia' has treated this with, well, rather less contempt than it really deserves, and has produced a parody website closely mirroring the appearence and subtext of the official one.

That's 'preparingforemergencies.co.uk' for the parody and 'preparingforemergencies.gov.uk' for the original. Clear? The government didn't think so, and demanded the removal of the parody. It hasn't been removed, but the letter of objection, further reinforcing the humourless arrogance of Westminster, has been added.

It's almost as if the government intended the original utter waste of public money to be taken seriously. How bizarre.

Mary Mycio, writing at e-Poshta, reposted at the UER online forum:

In another UER posting, Tony Brown mentions visiting the area with Rimma Kiselitsa, the same tour guide as had taken Elena:

Starting from a view of the Milky Way, this java applet begins to zoom in, each successive image being an order of magnitude smaller than the previous one. The first is a view 10 million light years from the Milky Way (10²³ m across the width of the image), the next is 1 million light years away(10²² m across the image), then focusing on the western spiral arm of our galaxy (10²¹ m), and so on.
From one light year away (10¹⁶ m), the sun is barely visible; from 10 billion kilometres away (10¹³ m) the Solar System fills the image. At the 1 million km mark (10⁹ m), the Earth and orbit of the moon almost fill the view.
From 10,000 km (10⁷ m), the applet starts to zoom in on terrestrial features, centred on the USA (surprise, surprise), specifically North Florida (10⁵ m), SW Tallahassee (10⁴ m), the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (10³ m, or from an altitude of 1 km), and an oak tree in the grounds (10¹ m).

The next, (10⁰ m) is the view of a branch from 1 metre away, then leaves (10^-1 m) and a close-up of a single leaf (10^-2 m is 1 cm away). Unsurprisingly, the applet continues into microscopic detail of cells on the surface (10^-4 m), a cell nucleus (10^-6 m), and individual strands of DNA (10^-8 m).
At 10^-10 m, the outer electron cloud of a carbon atom is seen from 100 picometres away; 10^-14 m is the nucleus alone and 10^-15 m shows a single proton from 1 femtometre away. Finally, quarks are seen from 100 attometers, a unit of which I'd never heard, but which equates to 10^-16 m across the standardised width of the image.

To spell it out, the first image has a width of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 m, whilst the last, forty orders of magnitude smaller, is 0.0000000000000001 m across.

A great way to popularise science, inspiring even those who just like pretty pictures!

However, when split into categories, I don't entirely agree with the interpretation:

No. This implies a strong awareness of social standards and a deliberate, even pretentious, effort to act against them, merely to be perverse. I don't acknowledge that as being in my character. My world view is my own; if it corresponds to some cultural norms and differs from others, that's simply irrelevant to me.

No. I respect the standards of others, and don't deliberately offend, but that's basic courtesy, not a wish to conform to others' standards, about which I'm simply indifferent.

That's a fair statement.

I do deplore the idea that having given one's partner a folded piece of shiny card and a quantity of vegetation, any hint of romanticism can be ticked off and forgotten for another year. It's a cop-out, and an example of herd mentality which primarily serves the manufacturers of greetings cards.
Rather than standardised tokens on a predetermined yet arbitrary date, how about something one's partner would really appreciate, at a time of personal significance - and more frequently than each February?

Thankfully Helen is similarly scornful of Valentine's Day; indeed our shared dislike for society's petty rituals is something that draws us together. Don't worry; we'll do something, just at a time and in a way of our choosing, and by choice, not external 'obligation'.

Incidentally, answering the questions in exactly the same way, but claiming to live in the USA, my footprint expanded to 11ha.

Also incidentally, my offering that link doesn't mean I support the parent organisation or recommend reading the rest of their website.

On a graph of 'Economic Left/Right' (Communism at one extreme, Neo-Liberalism at the other, or collective management versus free market) on the x-axis against Social Libertarian/Authoritarian (aka Anarchism/Fascism) on the y-axis, I score -2.50, -4.87 which makes me comparable to the Dalai Lama, as a libertarian on the economic left. Apparently. However, the missing z-axis is more important in my case: degree to which the individual cares about wider society i.e. degree to which the x and y- axes are even relevant. I'd achieve a negative position on that one, too.

Incidentally, as the site's FAQ takes care to mention, the term 'Liberal' does not refer to the commonly-understood US political definition:

Likewise, the terms 'left' and 'right' could be misunderstood:

That could be phrased better, but essentially means that views on economic matters are independent of social values. The same economic solution might be achived by either extreme of social dogma, and two people sharing the same social ideals might feel very differently about the role of economics in achieving those ideals. A blanket definition of 'left' or 'right' is inadequate.

I'd go along with that, on the whole.

[Update 24/05/06: I've repaired the broken link, and taken the test again. The result was the same.]

Greens annoy me in exactly the same way as religious evangelists - if you believe strongly about something, that's great; good luck to you. But don't try to impose your beliefs on me - I won't play.

There's a person I see around Lancaster and the University occasionally; a work colleague of a friend, but not someone I know particularly well, nor who knows me well enough to tell me how to live, but that's exactly what she does. On meeting her, her opening words are rarely a greeting, but "You shouldn't be doing that". Maybe she (totally) mistakes me for a fellow 'believer' who'd appreciate a quick pep talk, but I find it a challenge to avoid telling her to go **** herself.

As one might expect, someone has used the algorithm to generate an online test; a 'Gender Genie'. Have a go. I tested it with a few blog posts, which overwhelmingly confirmed I'm male; some of the 'male' totals were nearly double the 'female' counts.

The 'Nature' article explains that, to oversimplify, men speak in terms of objects ('informational' style, focusing on categorisation), and women in terms of relationships ('involved' style, focusing on personalisation).

I was gratified to recognise a flaw for myself, before reading that it's something that the researchers considered too ;) The subject of the text must matter - the parameters that categorise (oops) males and females might also distinguish between factual and opinion pieces, or between narrative fiction and non-fiction; the algorithm might be dissecting the content rather than the author. Indeed, the program can tell fiction from non-fiction with 98% accuracy. However, when told the genre in advance (and hence invoking a further weighting, presumably), the algorithm separates male from female with 80% accuracy.

Having run this entry through the Gender Genie, the 'male' total is 1077 against a 'female' total of 253, defining me as distinctly male, or maybe just distinctly impersonal in my writing!

That's after I told the Genie that this was a blog entry. I'm curious about the basis of that division, as it had a radical effect on the totals. Defined as 'fiction', the totals are 'male': 577, 'female': 366, and the same as 'non-fiction': 577 to 366; still male, but by less of a margin.

Interestingly, when I tested it with a couple of Helen's e-mails, it was ambiguous e.g. 283 'male' to 291 'female'. Perhaps it's that the test text was descriptive rather than discursive, but H's degree is in linguistics; perhaps that's skewed her written style.
I know that from the age of 15 my education focused strongly on report-writing and essay-based exams in factual subjects, where the impersonal tense ("It was found", rather than "I found") was the only acceptable mode of writing; it's difficult to throw off a certain precision of phrasing.

What I meant to say:
Have you noticed that online translation software, though useful for individual words or phrases, is spectacularly useless for longer blocks of text, incorporating proper grammar? Have you ever tried using an online translation tool to convert sample text from, say, English to Danish, then used a Danish-English utility to change it back? Have you ever wondered what would happen if one repeated that exercise for five different languages? Well, you're reading the result of doing exactly that - visit the multibabel page!

NP: Genesis, 'Live'

For what it's worth, I scored above average for consistent logic, according to the creators' (no, not the Creator's) interpretation. I don't entirely agree with the sole alleged inconsistency, so would have given myself full marks ;) but I can see what they mean: I accept evolutionary theory as correct without absolute proof (no science gives absolute proof), but refuse to believe in a God without absolute proof.

Okay; put like that, I see their point, but it's a question of degree - the balance of evidence and, yes, logic, overwhelmingly supports the case for evolution, whereas the case for the existence of a deity doesn't have anything like the same weight of evidence.