Blogcoven

Astronaut-chow

There are so many myths about what products were spawned by the space race—tang and space pens to name but two. I’ve noticed before that one of the things that is counter-intuitive about space is that it often requires odd or old technology. The reason seems almost always to be certification and testing. Yes, it would be nice to send an iPhone 5S to Mars, but the infrastructure required to make sure that we could do it safely would blow several budgets. It’s worth remembering that Space is big, and hard to get to.

Ten Things an Irish Woman Could not do in 1970

This should probably say, ‘could not do before Ireland joined the EU’. It’s astonishing how our society has changed in the last few decades

http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/57301/ten-things-an-irish-woman-could-not-do-in-1970-and-be-prepared-to-cringe

7 Live securely in her family home

Under the Family Home Protection Act of 1976, neither spouse can sell the family home without the written consent of the other.

Criminals run amok in Cambridge

I would love to spend time delving into the disciplinary records of TCD to see what’s there, beyond the already-infamous cases.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/29/cambridge-uncovers-criminal-records

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the university’s remit went well beyond its academic responsibilities. Successive monarchs bestowed on it wide-ranging civil, criminal and ecclesiastical powers and its courts tried cases involving university members and other “privileged persons” – townspeople such as stationers, tailors or butchers trading with university members.

Programming without computers

There was a time when a slide rule was emblematic of an engineer. These days, it’s an obscure antiquity. I wonder what other tools of today we will evolve away from?

http://programmingisterrible.com/post/67958756030/nomography-or-computing-without-computers-are

Nomography, or Computing without Computers, are graphical devices for approximating functions—these charts and graphs allow for complex calculation and algorithms, without demanding more than being able to draw a straight line.

The Candy Lag

It seems that people are buying fewer sweet things because online stores inhibit the instant-fix of impulse-buys, and perhaps because of the economy. It’s an interesting thing, because it shows how much our rational behaviour can be undermined by our environment. I’ve not moved to online shopping, but I have curbed my impulse buying, and changed what I buy substantially. The Steam store seems to be very good at encouraging impulse buys, but that’s because of careful price/discount economics and the instant gratification aspect. I guess you’d need a steam for chocolate that gets it to your door instantly.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/27/us-retail-consumer-checkouts-analysis-idUSBRE9AQ0GG20131127

In Britain, the country where e-commerce is most popular, about 13 percent of people do all or most of their grocery shopping online. Yet this only accounts for 5 percent of overall spending, suggesting consumers spend more when they visit a store.

That is because online shoppers search for what they need, usually sticking close to their shopping lists. They don’t spontaneously buy magazines they opened while waiting to pay, or chocolate to eat on the go.

These links are brought to you via the fog of jet-lag from my recent trip to India. Suffice to say that it is a magical, enchanting and exotic place, and I was struck repeatedly by the sheer foreign nature of the country, as well as its bewildering size and complexity.

Princess, Ameera

I had a brief experience of the Middle-east through my stopovers in Abu Dhabi and my flights with Etihad. There is a poignancy to the luxury: we saw several people on the Bangalore flights who were not sufficiently literate to fill out their visa forms in writing, we also saw people who had clearly spent tens of thousands of euro on their luxury flights.

The intersection between the passé Eurotrash aristocracy and the parvenu rich of the Gulf is fascinating.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/21/gulf-tyrannies-ex-princesses-teach-eat-sandwich”

It is an interesting predicament; what does a princess without a castle do but teach strangers how to eat a sandwich for £395?

Portraits of War

Black and white photos, especially early ones, have a crispness and immediacy that sucks me in far more than more ‘realistic’ colour. I can’t quite say why.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2013/11/08/portraits-of-war/

The City of London

The idea of corporations getting to vote is intriguing. My love of obscure governmental and administrative systems is fully inflamed by this video, and the more esoteric the better. The English model of law by accrual is a much-undervalued thing. It creates bizarre technicalities, but it preserves freedom far more effectively than codification, which seems to inevitably lead to ‘what is not permitted is forbidden’.

On being a solutionist

Nudging and soft power seem to be highly effective. There is a tendency from the left in particular to want to use governmental methods to impose changes. I am instinctively cautious, as I feel that we rarely can predict the intended outcome, let alone the unintended consequences, of such actions.

https://medium.com/editors-picks/ed8de4ddb91f

In other words, maybe we instead of protesting McDonalds, or joining the board, we could convince people that it was just really uncool to eat there.

UK Political Parties Erasing Web Histories

We have always been at war with Eastasia

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/u-k-parties-prepare-for-2015-by-erasing-web-histories.html

Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party confirmed a magazine report on Nov. 13 that it had removed from its website speeches that predated the party taking power in 2010, as well as placing markers on its site asking search engines to remove these from their archives. The opposition Labour Party has eliminated all news items from before Ed Miliband was elected its leader in September 2010 from its website.

I saw many similarly-emblazoned vehicles in India. Context is everything.

Russian Police Choir Cover Get Lucky

Not since the Red Army sang It’s a Long Way to Tipperary have I been this impressed.

Sub-$1000 Metal 3D Printing

While the kiln phase is an issue for me, I think we’re so close to practicable 3D printing. It’s where paper printers were in the 80s right now—I can’t wait for the real thing.

http://gigaom.com/2013/11/12/meet-the-mini-metal-maker-a-basic-sub-1000-3d-printer-that-prints-metal/

The Pueblo, Col., team behind the Mini Metal Maker wants to bring a limited form of metal 3D printing into maker and artist homes via their Indiegogo campaign. The machine prints metal clay, which is composed of metal flakes mixed with a binder and water. Like plastic filament, the metal clay is melted and then extruded out of a nozzle. It hardens as the nozzle builds up layers to create a 3D object.

The clay then requires post-processing. It must be fired in a kiln, which removes the binder and water, leaving behind the metal.

How English Became the Dominant Language of Science

I love eavesdropping conversations between non-native English speakers. The idioms, humour, remarks and subtleties that make sense within and between cultural perspectives on common language fascinate me.

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/fyi-how-did-english-get-be-international-language-science

Once Latin was unseated as its lingua franca, scientific discourse splintered into local languages. Researchers worried that the loss of a common tongue would slow scientific progress, so by the middle of the 19th century, they had settled on three primary languages.“If you were a professional scientist,” Gordin says, “you were expected to read French, English, and German.”

Decomposing Dice

I’ve never gone in for Dice Shaming, personally, but I know some people keep their polyhedra in strict line.

http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.ie/2013/11/dice-can-dramatically-decompose.html

Touching the Japanese Emperor

Uproar in Japan, where a politician handed a note to the Emperor without permission. The status of the monarch as divine being in what is superficially such a technologically modern society is astonishing. There was a famous incident involving the Australian PM touching the Queen, and Thai lèse-majesté rules are extremely tight. On the other hand, the Dutch and Scandinavians are more down to Earth in image.

I feel one should respect and honour protocol and tradition, regardless of whether the Emperor is divine or not. I can’t help but feel that to do otherwise is to show contempt for other people and their beliefs and values.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/07/japanese-politician-letter-fukushima-emperor

A novice Japanese lawmaker who wanted to draw attention to the Fukushima nuclear crisis has caused an uproar by doing something taboo: handing a letter to the emperor.

The ruckus began at an annual autumn Imperial Palace garden party last week. As Emperor Akihito and his wife, Michiko, greeted a line of guests, the outspoken actor-turned-lawmaker Taro Yamamoto gave the emperor the letter – a gesture considered both impolite and inappropriate.

Italy

Each country brings its own flavour and perspective to the world, but there is something special about the Italians. They manage to blend sophistication with absurdity in a heady mix of emotional explosion that no others can beat. I watched La meglio gioventù and it was a perfect slice of what I think makes the country so rich: from the deep Catholicism, the bizarre government to the darkness of organised crime.

Italians are having a hard time economically, but somewhat unlike the rest of us it seems to be because of something internal, fundamental—I have a sense that they never really recovered from Empire. She breaks your heart, and crushes her young. Meanwhile Ireland has resume spitting hers out.

Runnign a Government Department, Victorian-style

One remarkable thing about early administration was the fact that the office and the person were much more unified. People would handle their departmental money much more directly, I suppose often because it was actually money rather than electronic transfers. It’s very noticeable in Pepys that he has large sums of cash which need to be moved about for work. The opportunity for temptation must have been enormous.

https://history.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/25/running-a-government-department-victorian-style/

the monotony of constant writing persevered in during 9 or 10 hours every day on Task Work tends to stupefy and to destroy the senses of those employed on such never ceasing work

Five questions that (should) keep chemists awake at night

I don’t think Chemists are different from other researchers, so it’s probably that very little sleep has been lost over these questions. More likely candidates include “Why isn’t my code compiling?”, “What the hell did I forget to do today?” and “Why do I drink so much coffee?” The Last one is the current problem facing all research: how to show value and impact. It’s a thorny and misery-inducing issue.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/11/05/five-questions-that-should-keep-chemists-awake-at-night/

5. How do we sell chemistry to the public?

Over the last two hundred years or so the chemical industry has really transformed human life. The products of chemistry –drugs, plastics, textiles, fertilizers, foods – underlie the very foundation of modern civilization. They have saved and improved billions of lives around the globe. And yet chemists are confronted with an increasingly wary public whose reactions to chemistry range from mildly skeptical to wildly hysterical.

Statistics Done Wrong

The worst thing about statistics and the empirical approach is how bloody hard it is to unpick causation, correlation and other errors. It’s pretty tough even when you have pure intentions at heart, let alone devious design. The only course of action seems to be a constant state of vigilance, paired with an aceptance of the limitations of what we can actually say, though that last part has done for some great men.

http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/index.html

If you’re a practicing scientist, you probably use statistics to analyze your data. From basic t tests and standard error calculations to Cox proportional hazards models and geospatial kriging systems, we rely on statistics to give answers to scientific problems.

Statistics Done Wrong is a guide to the most popular statistical errors and slip-ups committed by scientists every day, in the lab and in peer-reviewed journals. Many of the errors are prevalent in vast swathes of the published literature, casting doubt on the findings of thousands of papers. Statistics Done Wrong assumes no prior knowledge of statistics, so you can read it before your first statistics course or after thirty years of scientific practice.

Please do comment below, I hope you find (some of) the links interesting.

Should I be using XLIV? or XXXXIIII? I leave it to future scholars to decide.

Boys’ names in the USA over the years

The evolution is fascinating. You can also see similar information for England and Wales. Freakonomics also has some interesting information about the trickle between different demographic strata.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/americas-most-popular-boys-names-since-1960-in-1-spectacular-gif/280852/

Economics and Space Travel

The two most prominently ignored rules of the real universe in science fiction are relativity and gravity. This make sense, since they are probably the latter makes it much harder and expensive to do interesting space battles, while the second makes the mechanics of story-telling even more complex, since it can be hard to account for not only the point of view of the people in the scene, but also the relative position of the observer.

I love to see articles which explore the technical ramifications of the ‘small’ changes of revolutionary effects. Take, for example, the effect of space travel on interest rates, one of the examples in this article below. It just shows how the world is fundamentally changed in such intricate ways, like what we are experience with automated trading on capital markets.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21588350-dismal-scientists-also-speculating-about-space-flight-starship-enterprises

It is not just scientists who enjoy technically rigorous speculation, though. Economists have investigated interstellar travel as well. One of the best-known papers was written by Paul Krugman, a trade theorist, in 1978, in between his duties as an “oppressed assistant professor”. “The Theory of Interstellar Trade” describes itself as “a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics”.

Exhibits from the Software Museum

I could easily devote the rest of my blogging ‘career’ just to pointing to amazing things that the internet archive holds. It is one of the truly great knowledge institutions. This time I will restrict myself to the set of exhibits on early software, which are provided in usable form, via emulation. The hands-on aspect transforms the experience for me. It’s amazing to be able to ‘try out’ something like visicalc, which had such important ramifications; it’s like being able to experience working a spinning jenny from the comfort of my own home.

https://archive.org/details/historicalsoftware

This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive’s software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software)

Fully Reconfigurable Electronics?

I was highly sceptical about the phobnebloks, inspired by articles like this, and my own natural pessimism.
Perhaps I will be proven wrong?

http://phandroid.com/2013/10/29/motorola-project-ara/

Kings of Pastry

The notion of Meilleur Ovrier de France seems a marvellous and intrinsically French thing. It’s actually a third-level qualification, and you get a rather spiffy collar to wear, the wearing of which is controlled by law.