Partially Attended

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/31711/response/79454/attach/html/3/1%202181984%2020100407%204th%20Tier%20List.xls.html fast food in hackney http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/27794/response/68154/attach/html/3/1%201952373%20Information%20Sheet.xls.html ... (more)

I don't post my poetry often, indeed I don't write often, but I thought this one came out OK. Written over the past weekend for a good friend on the occasion of her birthday. Edinburgh, first draft, 01/05/2010 for andrea. Was it in Summer, when I lost myself among the graveyards? The moss covered steps of Greyfriars green and gleaming. Or was it someone's winter night along cobbled streets, where buildings wear a sharp puritan cut to their overcoats? ... (more)

Here is a comment I've just posted to a comment thread about LaTeX over here: http://blogs.nature.com/farhat/2010/04/16/collaborative-editing-with-latex. One of the commenters asked "Why not just use a word processor" Just using a word processor simply does not cut it when it comes to expressing complex mathematical ideas. LaTeX, and it's precursor TeX, have evolved to be the only tools that can currently express the richness of the ideas within advanced mathematics. ... (more)

After a few conversations with @zzgavin, I've come to the conclusion that there is a place for a tumblog in the toolkit of those who like to post content onto the web. There are often pieces of content that I want to call out, but don't have either the time or the interest to write a longer blog post about. For a while I thought that would be a ... (more)

potato_3stagesElvis 004 Originally uploaded by gioia_On Saturday we went to a party thrown by some friends of ours. It was kind of a delayed St. Patrick's day party, and everyone had to bring along a potato dressed up as a celebrity, or some such. We created our potato after the Father Ted episode "Competition Time", in which Ted, Dougal and Jack dress up as the three ages of Elvis. ... (more)

Reading though the excellent introduction to Kierkegaard's philosophy in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/15/kierkegaard-philosophy-existentialism), it is pointed out that one of the key underlying principles of his philosophy is that we have forgotten what it means to exist, and that the cause of this forgetting is the ever growing amount of knowledge in the world (a state of affairs that is now ever more apparent even than in his time).I am dubious about this claim. ... (more)

I just stumbled across this http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonGraphApi. I think it's great. The discussion has actually been going on since Aug 2004, so I don't know what the status of this PEP is. I would love to see something come out of it eventually.tags: graph, PEP, python ... (more)

Probabilistic language models, auto-correction tools and scientific discovery. "Durgesh Kumar Dwivedi":http://network.nature.com/people/U56CB3E51/profile over on Nature Network just asked "Does anyone have any software or web address which corrects English grammar, preposition, edit and shortened the paragraphs?". This question brought to mind and idea that I had a few years ago. The idea is simple enough, use a large corpus of pre-vetted grammatically correct text as a training tool to compare sentences against. ... (more)

You have a couple of options for setting the height of your gadget. I'll run through four methods that seem to work. First two words of caution, if you are using the eclipse plugin to develop on, you won't see the second method described here working. I don't know why, but the code works in iGoogle, so it must be something to do with the eclipse OSDE env. The second word of warning is that the syntax hilighter I'm using on this post chokes on CDATA tags, so the CDATA tags in the code examples are wrong. ... (more)

Via Bruce Schneir's blog there is a link to a paper about a new security system that credit card companies are rolling out; a single sign on system. The paper is here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/fc10vbvsecurecode.pdf. The bottom line is that the system is pretty insecure, but it is incentivised by making the customer sign up to additional terms and conditions that puts more liability on them than on the banks or ... (more)