Get out

A reason why it's time for aliens to get in touch

2010-01-08T11:35:16Z

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html

Isn't science wonderful*

2009-12-21T16:56:01Z

It has been suggested that Legionella could be used as a weapon, and indeed genetic modification of Legionella pneumophila has been shown where the mortality rate in infected animals can be increased to nearly 100%.

Wikipedia

*no

Pardoned turkey

2009-11-26T13:48:54Z

It was lucky that turkey had such a patriotic name, and not something like Leftovers, or maybe they’re all named Courage. Or there’s a Pardon List that you get on if you’ve got a patriotic sounding name. Now there's a clue for turkey parents.

beep beep bebo

2009-11-12T13:55:06Z

"The interstellar Bebo spamgasm may prove embarrassing for the human race should it ever be picked up. As one might expect, it consists primarily of material related to the amusing antics of cats, boy crooners and other matters of interest only to mental cripples."

The Register

"At that time, boffinry opinion held that Gliese 581d was actually an oceanic planet, possibly host to a ravening, self-mothered pseudohydrozoan immortal Dr Who jellyfish clone vampire blobomination horror-swarm of the type already found (in diminutive form, fortunately) in the oceans of Earth"

Charlie Brooker

2009-11-12T09:33:01Z

"Walk around Comet and you're confronted by a wall of emotionless monoliths with incomprehensible names. And that's just the staff!"

Guardian

Mello!tune

2009-11-06T17:22:32Z

"After years of touring with Mellotrons, Robert Fripp formulated a rule: "Tuning a mellotron doesn't."

Mellotron

nutball consomme @ LHC

2009-11-06T13:12:53Z

"Various eccentric nutballs have claimed that this would doom humanity in one fashion or another; perhaps converting the entire Earth, everything on it and possibly the rest of the universe too into "strangelet soup", monopole mulligatawny or some other sort of frightful sub-particulate blancmange or custard."

The Register

"...we're looking here at an imminent visit from a race of carnivorous dinosaur-men, the superhuman clone hive-legions of some evil genetic queen-empress, infinite polypantheons of dark nega-deities imprisoned for aeons and hungering to feast upon human souls, a parallel-history victorious Nazi globo-Reich or something of that type"

RIP daaaan

2009-11-05T16:55:17Z

Error

This journal has been deleted and purged.

I drive the hearse

2009-11-05T16:53:56Z

And silence is another way
Of saying what I wanna say
And lying is another way
Of hoping it will go away
And you were always my mistake...

Porcupine Tree

Password reset

2009-10-02T12:58:06Z

I had forgotten the password to our work training site and so it sent me a new one. I was surprised to see it had the word 'queef' in it, a term for vaginal flatulence. Titter.

How heavy is metal?

2009-07-27T16:27:17Z

As asked in the Sonisphere FAQ: "Explain the rationale behind the lineup. There are many mainstream rock and metal acts of different heaviness on the bill"

I imagine some people like their music only a certain percent of heavy but if it goes beyond that it might be too heavy. Or maybe if the heaviness is too low then they will feel short changed.

I initially thought this could be a joke until I looked into it (clicked on the first thing I saw on Google) and found this paper:

The Match of Perceptual and Acoustic
Features of Timbre over Time:
"Heaviness" in the Perception of Heavy
Metal Guitar Textures"

Harris M. Berger, Texas A & M University
Cornelia Fales, Indiana University.

I'll be interested to compare the "Location of Energy" and "Dynamic-Temporal Envelope" between for example Nine Inch Nails and Metallica, hopefully engaging further discussion with any available keen unwashed leather clad mosher lying in someone else's sick.

Lilith

2009-07-23T12:53:23Z

Browsing Wikipedia I started reading about Islam and ended up reading about Lilith:

I do find the idea of Lilith vastly fascinating with her intolerance of inequality, malevolent power and (literally) devil-may-care attitude: "'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth", but it seems she must pay the price for freedom by permitting "one hundred of her children to die every day". In the end, it's her fault that "as the incarnation of lust, [causes] men to be led astray". This seems to be a common theme in the world that women somehow have to be "controlled" to prevent them "straying", but after all in the heterosexual world, I am pretty sure that men lead themselves "astray" equally. So finally: it's all the woman's fault. Women are to blamed for all the bad stuff that happens including tempting Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit (I always thought this was supposed to be Satan, a male figure).

Just sounds like sexism to me.

Hofstede's Framework for Assessing Culture

2009-07-17T13:44:14Z

While doing some e-learning about culture in business using Hofstede's framework, the result of a test question answered:

Now while all this is nice and everything, and I am all in favour, from what I have learned is that any company with high masculinity will just say bollocks to all that and do what they like. So, the question is, do we pay people to come up with these frameworks for fun, or actually listen to them? Usually it is a case of the individual making up their own mind on a sample dataset of one (their own experience), in preference to years of research and considered peer review on the matter.

And don't get me started on speeding...

No crowd surfing. No moshing.

2009-07-13T13:04:37Z

As written on the back of my Sonisphere ticket.

Dictionary.com enlightens us further:

mosh  (mŏsh)
v.   moshed, mosh·ing, mosh·es
v.   intr.
To knock against others intentionally while dancing at a rock concert; slam-dance.
v.   tr.
To knock against (someone) intentionally while dancing at a rock concert.
[Perhaps alteration of mash.]
mosh'er n.

How will the bouncers know if I'm intentionally knocking against others or whether it's by accident?

Will they listen to my quandary (dictionary.com: A state of uncertainty or perplexity) while they're throwing me out?

Life in the jet stream

2009-06-16T11:21:46Z

Some glimmer of hope on the horizon for the world's economy, I'm thinking of buying a new run around.

7kg

2009-05-29T12:03:05Z

"seven kilograms of plutonium — enough for one or two nuclear weapons" - source

"volume | 353 mL (milliliters)" - source

"99.9% x volume of a U.S. beer can ( 12 fl oz )" - source

World Wide Military Deployments - USA

2009-05-14T12:58:39Z

140,000 Iraq*
73,500 Germany
41,360 South Korea
40,680 Japan
38,160 Kuwait
11,965 Italy
9,877 United Kingdom
8,500 Afghanistan
4,500 Bahrain
4,490 Guam
3,300 Qatar
2,306 Cuba
2,030 Spain
1,742 Turkey
1,658 Iceland
1,300 Pakistan
1,220 United Kingdom

*[President Bush] said that four combat brigades [of at least 21,500 troops] along with other support forces would return by July 2008. The President said that when these withdrawals were completed, about 132,000 US troops would remain in Iraq. Source

Number crunching

2009-05-13T11:36:23Z

Health minister Phil Hope is to hand back £41,709 ... "received to make [his] London accommodation habitable"

The house that eBay built: Family saves £43,000 by furnishing home online

No Smoking Day

2009-03-11T15:54:38Z

I heard it's No Smoking Day today when "more than a million smokers across the UK will take the first step to kick the habit and make a positive lifestyle change".

I have had a patchy past with smoking, I first smoked in pubs when I was 17, I didn't really like it at first, I think I was sick after my second cigarette (in The Sun in Leighton Buzzard). I took up the habit habitually when I was 19 and smoked about 10 Silk Cut or B & H a day until I was 23. While having advantages of sociability and "coolness", devil may care attitude, "Hey look at me, I smoke and I'm OK", I did realise that I'd need to stop to get fit for an Orienteering competition. I decided to not smoke for a month beforehand, and then just didn't take up the habit again...

...until around 2000 when I started smoking socially, only when I went out and *very* occasionally at home but rarely. Soon it was 2008 and I'd been smoking about 40 a month I reckon, depending on the month, I smoked a whole pack of 10 in one night on one occasion, it just depended. I used to look forward to going out so I could smoke. Also my definition of "going out" changed, it would be when I was with certain people who I "went out" with, even if we weren't "out". If I had a girlfriend that smoked I would smoke too so that I could be like them and they would like me (doh!). It was kind of cool, our thing, a social 'going outside for a fag', all the chat you otherwise wouldn't have. Fag and a glass of wine... Sex and a fag... On the balcony in your night clothes and a fag...

Things came to a head in 2008 when on a holiday weekend in Whitby and I ruined a whole weekend, ill because of smoking and drinking. I finally admitted to myself that smoking made me feel rotten, especially the next day after a session. In fact it gave me a headache pretty much straight away, the benefit of the 'high' quickly squashed by an almost immediate headache and sick stomach. Why was I doing it?

You may know that I am active in terms of outdoors activities and sports, I cycle everywhere and play squash regularly. Every time I'd been on a smoking 'binge' I could feel my body 'pushing back' during exercise, high pulse, over heating, not to mention shortness of breath - and it would ruin my squash game. Losing all the time is not a good feeling.

So I decided to stop, I decided I didn't need to feel rotten all the time, having to spend a week recovering one night's smoking. I have not smoked for coming on 5 months and feel a lot better for it. Yes I am tempted sometimes, but it's all the habitual reasons, the social reasons, not the addictiveness of it (or is that the addictiveness...?). I would like to think that this is it this time and I can keep off them for good but I can't tell the future. That may be a statement active smokers are comfortable with, "You see, it's not easy and that's why I carry on" but that's up to them, I'm gave up for me. Prospective quitters must find their own method, I have my way, they have their way, using my way will probably fail anyone else.

Nowhere on a fag packet does it say, "Smoke responsibly".

Pew pew

2009-03-11T12:46:31Z

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pew+pew

Complicated Excel formula of the day

2009-03-10T12:06:00Z

=IF(OR($AX16<AZ$9,$AW16>AZ$10),"",IF(AND($AW16<AZ$9,$AX16>AZ$10),AZ$8,IF(AND($AW16<AZ$9,$AX16<AZ$10),$AX16-AZ$9+1,AZ$10-$AW16+1)))

Mountainous catastrophe

2008-11-10T16:07:27Z

Myself and Dan were carefully crossing the glacier, snow bridges are always difficult to negotiate, will they hold our weight, will they collapse? As we tentatively made progress Dan put his foot through the snow, up to his thigh, revealing the huge chasm below, glowing darkly blue, not really able to see the bottom. This enclosed space of frigid slow death beckoning us to its icy depth. Resistant I looked further down and decided we should hurry across while we still had some confidence. The snow was becoming slushy, we were almost sledging with our own bodies as we slid down an icy channel to the clear other side - terra firma, what a relief! Almost immediately, a large muffled bang, looking up across the other side of this icy wide 1000 year old formation I could see a huge boulder in mid air, spinning down the mountain, moving impossibly fast for something as large as a house. There were many climbers in the path, seated tourists rose to their feet en masse, looking around at this imminent danger, not knowing where to look, where to run, where to hide. The whole mountain side seemed to explode, what was happening, a volcano? - some massive natural event casting aside bodies like polystyrene packing chips, flying everywhere, the dusky smoke within which many rocks and boulders flew determined to raze irresistibly anything in its path.

A pressing issue

2008-11-10T00:57:53Z

Bite force of various animals:

Human	80 kg
Scarlet macaw	80 kg
African lion	425 kg
Alligator	1360 kg
T-Rex	1370 kg
Megalodon	1800 kg

What I could have said but chose not to

2008-10-21T01:56:22Z

I close my eyes
Cover my ears
Conceal my mouth
I awake when we party

Generally overheard at work

2008-10-14T14:45:47Z

Actual conversation* is generalised to make it more interesting:

*for extra fun, the reader is invited to ascertain the gender of the same sexed conversationalists

Gossiper 1: "they do that"
Gossiper 2: "yes, they do that, don't they"
Gossiper 1: "yes, they do"

Gossiper A: "did you see that sporting contest?"
Gosspier B: "yes, you were very lucky to obtain that objective"
Gossiper A: "yes, we were"