Partially Attended

Shaun Edwards <a href="http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/02/22/bonus_is_the_carrot_that_leads.html">writes</a> in The Guardian today that introducing the bonus points system to the Six Nations rugby tournament could help make it more entertaining (not that it needs much help in that regard, as it is a fantastic tournament as it is). I wholeheartedly agree. At the moment you get 2 points if you win a game, and 1 point if you draw. Under the bonus system you get an extra point if you score 4 tries and you get a bonus point if you are a losing team and you hold you opposition to a gap of 7 points or less. ... (more)

Ever since Ian Clarke mentioned the potential delights of python to me whilst passing me in a corridor back in 1999 I've been tinkering around with that language. Christ, that's almost 10 years. I like python, it gave a great sense of freedom after spending a heavy five years working with various flavours of FORTRAN, from FORTRAN 90, through to High Performance Fortran. Well, now here I am ... (more)

I was in, of all places, Godalming, at the weekend and ended up browsing in a book store for a few moments. I saw what looked like a very interesting book, href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Predictably-Irrational-Hidden-Forces-Decisions/dp/0007256523/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211186399&sr=8-1">Predictably Irrational. The book looks at the processes behind bad or irrational decisions. The author is an economist and it seems the aim of the book is to help us to see the emotional effects that influence ... (more)

If you are interested in the progress of my bet you can follow here: hmm, my embedded image is not showing up here, shame, well, the link is here: http://www.bellygraph.com/graph/view/300 Read and post comments | Send to a friend ... (more)

So the question of the day is if Hillary Clinton becomes Vice-President, would she be more or less evil than Dick Cheney? Now Dick Cheney is evil Inc. but the guy has never really pretended to be anything that he isn't, whereas Hillary would obviously lie and make policy in any way possible to win votes, which means that though she might not be as intrinsically as evil as Dick Cheney, she ... (more)

I have been liking using vox to blog, mainly because I can email a blog post from any email client. This significantly reduces the effort involved in posting a blog post. I've just discovered that vox has enabled snap previews. I don't like them. OK, so, some people may like them, and that's OK, but I can't turn them off on my blog. That's not good. In addition, when I email a link the link is now broken in vox, so if I type ... (more)

Scribd has rolled out a very nice interface to pdf documents. It is neat and slick, but I think what it is missing is support for getting at data or meta-data in the document. It would be a great boon to be able to click on a table in a document and have that tabular data open either in excel or in some online document tool. Likewise for entities in the document that might have associated metadata. ... (more)

There is a tension between the providers of social software, and the way we behave. When I move from one city to another my social network changes as that's very location dependent, but when I do have that network set up for the most part, I don't expect restrictions on where I can go in that city with my friends. For sure, some friends of mine might not be caught dead in the palace bar, they only drink in the ... (more)

The following paper "Soft peer review: Social software and distributed scientific evaluation" was passed along to me by alf today. I think another copy has been haunting my file system for a few days, but this seemed like a good reason to sit down again with it. It's by Dario Taraborelli and the abstract is as follows: Abstract: The debate on the prospects of peer-review in the Internet age and the ... (more)

"The modified tactical standard missile 3 (SM-3) hit the satellite at an altitude of 150 miles (247km) while it was travelling at approximately 17,000 miles per hour." I find this somewhat scary. Read and post comments | Send to a friend ... (more)