Right now you absolutely cannot get me out of the man cave.
The midst of GCSEs
I am so impressed at the sheer graft our kids are putting into their revision.
Up a tree in the sun
Another brilliant climb in the wonderful weather. A huge (and very familiar) London Plane in King George V Playing Fields in Exeter. Just great!
Brilliant Steganography
FontCode is an ingenious system of tiny font adaptations to hide messages in printed (or screen-text) documents. It would be perfect for watermarking, for example, while the video demonstration uses it as an elegant (though undetectable?!) alternative to QR codes.
from Wired.
Mohini and Marco
Mohini Dey is the most exciting bass player in the world at the moment, and if a phone-quality video of her with Marco Minneman is all I can get, it's all I am going to watch. This is just great.
More...?! OK.
More wisteria.
Shut up. You're just jealous.
Top Cache Award
I just received two more Top Cache awards for my treetop geocaches. I'm absurdly pleased with all of these. Thanks to Amberel for his awards, and his craftsmanship!
Blue Angels 360
Some 360 video is better than others....
Almost at peak Wisteria
Westonbirt Arboretum
Arb Show 2018 is very good. But not as good as the entire rest of the arboretum!
Jim's Ukulele Songbook
Goodness gracious me, Jim Carey has updated his 2000+ song songbook for ukulele. You can get it from his amazing website here in pdf form.
(Though if you are online it is worth looking at them on his website because you can transpose any song into any key, change the chord diagrams if you are left-handed, change what instrument you are using etc. It’s a real piece of work.)
Facebook's T&C Reading Level is College-Age
I thought I'd run a reading-age checker over Facebook's Terms. I did not include the onerous "other terms and policies" because they are only available as separate documents. (It is curiously tricky to just get all the terms you sign up to in one place.)
The Flesch Reading Ease level is 39.6. This is the middle of the "College Age" range (30-50).
It seems to me that any Terms document should be written at the reading-age of the youngest people you allow to create accounts. Facebook's is currently thirteen. (I am assuming of course that all people over college age have a reading level that reflects that. They don't.)
Fingle Bridge
How to Fight Climate Change: Figure Out Who's to Blame, and Sue Them
There is a (miserable but) brilliant article in Wired today.
“In a climate “tutorial” that was part of the California cities’ lawsuit in March, Chevron’s attorney Ted Boutrous didn’t attempt to deny a single thing about the physics and chemistry of climate change, or even that human activity caused it. He just said it didn’t make sense to blame oil companies. Burning hydrocarbons doesn’t kill people; people burning hydrocarbons kills people.”
“We don’t know what will happen, but no one thought tobacco litigation would succeed, and that completely changed public health policy”
““The future is here,” Herring says. It’s a future of terrifying disasters—and a future where scientists know more about the underpinnings and mechanics of those disasters. But maybe most importantly, it’s a future where you can attribute a cause. It’s a future where you can ascribe fault.
And that means you can sue the people responsible.”
What was I thinking?
WAS I thinking?!
How to Strike
Wow - this is absolutely the way to do it...
Okayama buses strike by continuing to run and refusing to take anyone’s money
“In cases such as this, management may use the labor stoppage against the drivers, appealing to the public that they are putting their own needs before the community’s. So to show that isn’t the case, Ryobi drivers are continuing to clock in, but without performing the part of their job that requires them to accept payment during certain times. In other words, free bus rides for all!”
Read the whole article in Japan Today (02/05/18)
Who Gives a Crap?
“We started Who Gives A Crap when we learnt that 2.3 billion people across the world don’t have access to a toilet. That’s roughly 40% of the global population and means that around 289,000 children under five die every year from diarrhoeal diseases caused by poor water and sanitation. That’s almost 800 children per day, or one child every two minutes.”
Read the rest here.
Kevin B Parry
Kevin B Parry is an absolute genius. I first saw him (unwittingly) in this tremendous video of walking styles, all of which he completely nails, and which is over six minutes that you will certainly gawp at to the end and wonder where the time went.
Then it turns out he's all-over talented, as this
and this
demonstrates.
Oh, and this.