>Shouldn’t that be "Sail"…?

Posted on 30 August, 2009 by jb

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Bloody education system’s going to pot….

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>Digging deep

Posted on 29 August, 2009 by jb

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Cousin Dave reports:
After having dug to a depth of 10 metres last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the Scots, in the weeks that followed, English scientists dug to a depth of 20 metres, and shortly after, headlines in the English newspapers read:

“English archaeologists have found traces of 200-year-old copper wire and have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the Scots.”

One week later, “The Kerrymen,” a south-west Irish newsletter, reported the following: “After digging as deep as 30 metres in peat bog near Tralee , Paddy O’Droll, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing. Paddy has therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Ireland had already gone wireless.

Snap courtesy of Fish and Chips
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>They’ve got it all wrong

Posted on 28 August, 2009 by jb

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Robin (who’s too young to remember Jamuna the elephant..) over at RCB nudged me in the direction of Personas, an MIT project that

“creates a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.
In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.”

It’s a shame that I share my name with

  • The Professor of Soil Engineering at Imperial College, London, who remedied (or at least mitigated) the list of the Tower of Pisa
  • A holy-roller songwriter Christian educator and composer of music for children and adults in Australia
  • My cousin Dave who now goes by the name of John for reasons unknown. (Probably to bask in reflected glory, methinks)
  • An author
  • Various other odds and sods.

because it bundles us up together and puts us through a mincer before slicing and dicing us.

So the management/military/professional bits are probably about right, but art/design/music/books/media/film are decidedly undersized.

(And if you ask Mrs jb, online would make up 110% of the spectrum.)

Education’s a joke.
Squeezed through Universty Entrance by the barest of margins (divine intervention?) , which I took as a sign from above that tertiary education wasn’t really for me.

Although I did go on to become quite an authority in Revenue Management, which led some gullible individuals to inquire whether my degree was in Economics or Maths.

Not too sure about aggression, though.

But if you don’t like it, you can FUCK OFF before I smash yer face in.

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>Twins?

Posted on 27 August, 2009 by jb

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Got talking to a Gran and some kids – as one does – at the ice-cream parlour this afternoon (Heidesheim, main drag, the Tiramisu ice-cream is a dream…) and asked two of them if they were sisters.

“We’re twins” they piped up in unison.

Well, they didn’t look as un-twin-like as the two in the picture (the Balasco twins if the Daily Telegraph’s to be believed and thanks for the snap, btw), but “chalk” and “cheese” did drift through the cranial vacuum.

One of them had straight red hair, the other was a curly-haired brunette, one of them looked like Julia Roberts and the other one looked like Gena Rowlands, so I said

“I don’t believe a word of this. Not for one minute”

We REALLY ARE twins” they chorused “Look, we’ve even got the same earrings”

Talk about feminine logic…

“So if I saw someone walking down the road wearing the same (spiffy pair of Chucks) shoes, he’d be my brother and my twin to boot…?”

Got them on that one.

So I asked one of them how old she was.

“Eight” she said.

“And you?”

“Ha! I’m also eight” in a can’t-fool-me voice.

I can tell that they’ve pulled this stunt before….

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>Loch Ness monster revealed on Google Earth

Posted on 27 August, 2009 by jb

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Someone who appears to have even idler hands than me has been trolling Google Earth and discovered …the Loch Ness monster.

Don’t believe me? Key in 57°12’52.13″N 4°34’14.16″W and see for yourself

Appears it surfaced at the exact instant the satellite zipped overhead and I think I can barely discern a flipper (or whatever monsters have) being waved in greeting.

Unless of course it’s a couple of blokes out fishing, having just discarded an afternoon’s worth of beer cans (clearly visible to port) from the fizz boat.

In other news
Windsurfers and other water sport fans are confusing locals in Nackenheim, Germany by asking for directions to “the lake”, a new feature which Google Maps displays prominently on the outskirts of the village to the west.
(Long skinny blue bit = Rhine river; small triangular blue bit = Google lake)

Your eager local reporter took it upon himself to research the issue and found only a freshly harvested barley field at the designated location.

Didn’t even get his feet wet.

(Well, did, in fact, splash the boots, but that was down to an unpredictable gust of wind…)
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>Well, what’s wrong with having a hobby?

Posted on 27 August, 2009 by jb

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Posted in It must be me | Leave a comment

>Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data. Eh?

Posted on 26 August, 2009 by jb

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Some brainy buggers in America have made an amazing discovery.

They say:

Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals.

This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 95% of friendships based on the observational data alone, where friend dyads demonstrate distinctive temporal and spatial patterns in their physical proximity and calling patterns. These behavioral patterns, in turn, allow the prediction of individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.

So does that mean that people are quite blurry about when they met someone a) who isn’t that important to them and b) it happened a long time ago?

And if people call each other frequently and if they’re often…ahem….physically close to each other, there’s a fair chance that they’re friends?

Thought so.

Then again, you could get them to walk around with their heads stuck in a picture frame.

No guesswork needed at all….

Thanks to Frau Professor Doktor Fish and Chips (who appears to be a really smart cookie and an ace photog to boot) for this one.
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>Just what were they finking……

Posted on 24 August, 2009 by jb

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Mrs jb has had some winter ankle boots for about 10 years now.

They look as good as new (pat on the back for jb the Shoe Cleaner..), but the rubber sole’s getting a bit crumbly, so a new pair’s on the immediate horizon.

And given that the summer fashion turned up while we still had snow on the ground this year and the winter models have been around for a couple of weeks already (and we didn’t have a day below 30ºC last week…), the immediate horizon was last Saturday.


French brand, only a couple of stores around here stock them, they’re HORRENDOUSLY expensive, but at €30 a year over 10 years, that’s less than 10c a day.

Finkschuhe is one of the major shoe retail chains around here, they stock the brand, doors are open, we walk in.

“We don’t open until 10”

Not “I’m sorry, we aren’t open yet, would you mind coming back in “x” minutes?”

Effectively: “Go away”

“x” was 12 minutes, which is fair enough, so we do some other stuff and we’re back just before 10 and wait outside while the staff set up their pavement displays.

They’ve got this down to a fine art, because they’re finished at 9:59.

They then PULL TWO DISPLAYS ACROSS IN FRONT OF THE OPEN DOORS and retreat inside.

“Forget it” says Mrs jb “Let’s go”. (Which is normally my line, with an expletive thrown in for good measure)

I pop my head inside the door and let them know (which I think is fair enough) that they just lost a €300 sale.

“Well, you could have come inside” says a salesgirl.

By clambering over the barricade. Yeah right.

“Bit difficult” I said “Putting up a barrier sends a pretty clear message to someone you know is waiting to buy something”

And then someone (who’s obviously more senior) chips in (and this I still don’t believe)

“Ich habe ja AUCH was zu tun!”
(“Well’ I’VE got things to do as well, you know..!”)

Maybe.

I would have thought that – in the middle of a recession – serving customers might be pretty high up on the list of priorities.

Or “things to do”

But – then again – what do I know….?

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>Insanewiches

Posted on 22 August, 2009 by jb

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Mrs jb had a tenant who worked for Subway.


On the apartment rental contract, she listed her profession as “Sandwich Artist”.


Yeah, right…


(Marginally better than “Sandwich Mechanic”, I suppose..)

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>Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless emergency of poverty – Seth Godin

Posted on 21 August, 2009 by jb

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Anything Seth Godin writes is worth reading.


Excerpt:

Multiply the population of the US by three. That’s how many people around the world live on about a dollar a day.

Do it again and now you have the number closer to $2. About forty percent of the world lives on $2 or less a day.
What’s that like? What happens to you when you have two dollars a day to live on. It’s almost impossible to imagine. I mean, $2 is the rent on your apartment for about 35 seconds. $2 buys you one bite of lunch at a local restaurant…
And yet, two billion people survive on that sort of income.
The key issue is ‘survive’. Subsistence income means that you have the barest possible cushion, that every penny is spent and you are on the edge at all times. It makes life an emergency.
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