Archive for the ‘random’ Category

Wikipedia circle

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Sometimes I just like to meander through Wikipedia. A while back I did this and found myself going around circles. My route was as follows:
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The eleven basic colour names in English
The history of the crayola company
Prussian blue
Prussia
The first world war
Warfare
Christopher Columbus
Leif Ericson
Newfoundland
World's largest islands
Devon Island
Hypolith
Cyanobacteria
Cyanide
Prussian blue (again)

Concepts I have got mixed up in the past

Monday, April 2nd, 2007

Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry
Macrame and Macaroni
Valium and Vaseline

I'm sure there are others, but those are all I can think of right now.

Dilemma

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

I have been invited to watch one of the football world cup quarter final matches next Friday lunchtime at the house of one of my colleagues. I have absolutely no interest in football but on the other hand I am flattered to have been asked and it might be fun to hang out for a while with the guys eating pizza and drinking beer.

I am torn between listening to the voice in my head that says "life's too short to spend doing stuff you're not interested in" and the other voice that says "go and do something new - it might be fun".

If it was the final and England were in it I think I'd definitely go, but as neither of those things are true I'm less sure. I will leave it up to you, my readers, to tell me what I should do.

Mongol Rally

Wednesday, June 21st, 2006

From that perennial source of entertainment, the Welcombe Village News:

3 people were banned from Turkmenistan for a year. 1 person was detained by police in Azerbaijan and threatened with a beating from a dwarf. This followed an incident with a cow.

Those guys really know how to have a good time.

Scavenger hunt, hard version

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006
  • Nobel prize
  • Fields medal
  • Turing award
  • Oscar
  • Pulitzer prize
  • Booker prize
  • Knighthood
  • Olympic gold medal
  • Citizenship of a foreign country

Chiral houses

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

Some years ago, I went to a talk about Feng Shui (well, really I was dragged along by some friends). It was moderately interesting, but half the things they said were common sense (when planning how to arrange furniture in your home, think about how you will be moving about the space, what times of day the sunlight will be coming through the windows, that sort of thing) and the other half of they were saying were clearly pseudo-scientific nonsense.

One of the things they claimed (that I disagreed with) was that the ideal layout of one's home would be a great deal less ideal in mirror image, and that the ideal layout for a man would (all other things being equal) be the mirror image of the ideal layout for a woman. This seems quite illogical to me - people are for the most part symmetrical (at least on the macroscopic scale) so I'd have thought that left-handedness verses right-handedness would make far more difference than gender. No explanation was given for this, and I was too shy to challenge the expert.

It might be an interesting experiment, though. First, find a pair of houses or apartments in the same neighbourhood which are each others' mirror images, fit and furnish them identically but oppositely (even down to switching the positions of the hot and cold taps, and putting the hinges on the opposite sides of the doors). Then, populate each with one half of a pair of identical twins of the same gender and opposite handedness. Let them live there for a year and then quiz them in great detail about which elements of their domiciles work and which are annoying. I think they would find the same things annoying, but according to this Feng Shui expert, the differences would be quite pronounced.

Three cool videos that have been doing the rounds

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

The Boston Big Dog
Spore computer game
Real life Simpsons intro


I'm just sayin'.

Toothpaste

Friday, March 10th, 2006

Did you know that the main ingredient of toothpaste is wet sand? They call it "hydrated silica" on the ingredients list but that's actually what it is - a suspension of very fine grained silica (sand) particles in water. It's an abrasive - it gets into the tiniest cracks and scrapes out left-over food.

A while back I was cleaning my keyboard (a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro):

There was a rather unsightly stain on the front part which had arisen through using the keyboard one too many times with hands greasy from cheese sandwiches. It didn't come off with soap and warm water. I thought to myself "I need some sort of fine abrasive, combined with some kind of detergent that is good for removing organic matter - ah, toothpaste!". I scrubbed at the stain with some toothpaste and an old toothbrush and it came right out.

Charity cold calls

Wednesday, March 8th, 2006

Is my karma going to hell because I hang up on charities that phone me asking for money? I always feel a little bit bad for doing so (which happens about once a weekend), but I logically I know I really shouldn't. If everyone donated money to every charity that ever called them, then charity cold calling would just explode and everyone's phone would be continually ringing. The amount of money these charities received would probably increase at first but then fall back to normal levels as people found themselves having to donate smaller and smaller amounts per phone call.

On the other hand, if no-one ever donated money to charities that called them, the calls would soon stop, the people employed to make the phone calls would be able to put their energies towards more constructive uses (such as promoting that charity's cause in less invasive ways, or working more directly to help the people that the charity is trying to help) and I could go back to expecting to speak to family or friends whenever I heard the phone ring.

I figure the best thing to do with charity phone calls is just to hang up as quickly as possible (without even saying anything) after discovering that it's not somebody I know or some kind of emergency. That way I have used up as little of that charity's money/time as possible (not to mention my own valuable time). Doing this feels kind of rude but it really isn't - the call in itself is rude so the social contract of politeness has already been broken and there should be no expectation of politeness from me.

I'm not against the concept of charity altogether (I donate money through work so it gets taken out of my paycheck before the tax withholding, my employer matches my contribution and I don't have to remember what I donated when I come to file my taxes).

Man prepares for hardware store

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

As a man, I am always a bit nervous about taking my car to the garage or going into a hardware store because I am expected to know about such things. I went into a hardware store last weekend and was afraid that they were going to ask me if there was anything they could help me with and then laugh at me if I said something like "I need some grease for my garage door" instead of something like "I need a type 2 metallic lubricant with a polarization ratio of less than 7 diflurges per snoof". Women, I am sure, generally do not have this problem as they are not expected to know about these things (though knowing about which sorts of shoes are currently in fashion sounds more difficult to me so I think I prefer being a man on the whole).

The problem is exacerbated because lots of bits of hardware have different names in this country. Who would have though that a rawl plug would be called a "wall anchor", for example? (Okay, in this particular case it would probably be more difficult for an American living in England).

Wasn't there a TV comedy sketch which had a salesperson in a hardware shop tried to narrow down exactly what type of flange his customer was looking for by asking lots of nonsense questions? (Did you want a screw type flange or a plain flange? How many legs?) I think it might have been a Two Ronnies sketch, but all I can find on the internet is the "four candles" sketch which (while hilarious) is not what I was thinking of.