Two hookers meet in a scrum...

One says to the other: "What the £$%* do you think you're locking at"

Search engines are funny things.

Google "sexy bums" and a post I wrote back in October last year titled "Don't ask me ... (about sexy bums)" is ranked 10th.

It's the consistently most viewed post I've ever written, along with "Rick Danko and Levon Helm" (which incidentally ranks #1 on Google.)

Let's see how popular this one gets....

The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Given that I once achieved a certain notoriety with a single digit percentage mark in a maths exam (my story: it was a bet to see who could get the lowest mark by giving obviously wrong answers, whilst avoiding 0%...), you wouldn't expect me to try and explain this.

Wired Magazine, however, does a excellent job of explaining what triggered the economic meltdown.

Apart from greed, that is...

Clever clogs

Met MMTP (My Mate The Professor) for lunch the other day.

We were talking about cerebral stuff as you have to do with professors - moaning about the wives, discussing ailments, getting pissed - and we got onto the topic of kickstarting the economy by incenting people to buy new cars.

"What's the average price of a new smallish car" he asked

"About €12,000, maybe €15,000"

"And what's the VAT/GST/sales tax on that?"

"About €2500, maybe €3000"

"And the subsidy's €2500, so the Government's not actually giving YOU anything at all - it's just getting your money out of the bank and back into circulation"

Talk about brainy.

No wonder he's a professor.

AND a Ph.D.

Precisely....

I'm having some work done in New Zealand by a quantity surveyor.

I found a couple of discrepancies in his initial estimate, so we had a phone call to clarify things and to discuss some other issues which resulted in changes to the original plans.

He makes the changes and emails them through.

Time from the start of the phone call to the email: 2 hours.

Got a bill the other day for $372.22 plus tax.

No indication of times or rates and - thinking that $200 an hour a tad excessive - I asked him to resubmit, given that at least part of the time was down to his errors.

Talk about precious.

Yes, he'd taken all that into consideration and in fact he'd generously reduced his hourly rate from $135 to $105 and worked a total of 3.545 hours on the issue.

3.545 hours.

3 hours. 32 minutes. 42 seconds.

42 SECONDS?

No-one bills with a precision of 18 seconds, not even lawyers.

Work it back from the NORMAL rate of $135, though, and you get...... 2.75 hours

I don't like it when people pad bills.

I like it even less when I'm lied to.

Precisely...

Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder

Now and again, you'll stumble across a website that's eminently worth visiting.

Fermentarium.com is one such site.

"This blog is everything about beer, wine, cider, mead and other spirits" it says.

That alone earns it a bookmark.

With a capital B

There is no hope II

These are the 10 most purchased items in New Zealand supermarkets.

Words fail me....

The Doddery Chronicles #3

Simon Lindsay was a road worker on State Highway 3 in New Zealand.

His blog - RestArea300 - was a classic. One of the best I've read

In the blogosphere, he was Doddery Old Fart. He died suddenly in May 2007

His blog's offline now, but there are some pure gems tucked away in there.

Thanks to Chrissie, Alex and Jane for letting me share them

Monday, January 22, 2007

Things I Learned Today (42)

It is not a good idea to read the instruction sheet to your new chainsaw sharpening gadget in the bath.

Chickens can climb trees and like plums.

Putting too high a wattage halogen bulb in a bedside lamp creates an art object that smells.

Pictures of walls is an interesting site.

Dinosaab

Saab drifted off into receivership today, with not much hope for a long-term recovery.

100,000 cars a year falls a bit short of the critical mass you need to make a profit if you're in the mass premium market, even if your key market segment does comprise "eccentric individualists".

(As the "Economist" so delicately puts it.)

We must be REALLY eccentric.

We have 2 - a 9.3 hatchback and a 9.3 turbocharged convertible.

When I got home from the dealer, I said "This. Is. ThenicestcarI'veeverdriven" and I haven't changed my mind in 10 years and after 200,000km.

OK, so most dealers are naff - "Well, if the air conditioning's making a noise now that we've fixed it, then the fact that it didn't make a noise before is proff that it was broken...", (and  of course "Saab" is the acronym for "Shit, Another Astronomical Bill") but now I've got Roland "I had a look at the spark plugs and cleaned them up, so you don't need any new ones" Rother as my mechanic, it's been plain sailing.

I have absolutely NO idea what to buy when they stop making them.

It must be me.

Hired a Saturn in the States once and figured that if I HAD to buy an American car, this would be it.

They've stopped making them, too.

Eccentric individualists....

There is no hope...

"American" and "cuisine" in the same sentence tends to be the definitive oxymoron.


I give you... the Slowburger: A half pound beef patty, gruyere, onion rings, butter lettuce and pickle relish. Greasy fries

At least someone's brave enough to call a spade a spade, if not a bloody shovel.

For your further entertainment...thisiswhyyourefat.com

Here we go falling all over ourselves round the mulberry bush

Portsmouth NH police log
 Feb. 14

 1:17 a.m. — Police gave a verbal warning to a man reported to be "falling all over himself" in the area of Junkins Avenue and South Street.

7:50 a.m. — A woman on Broad Street reported that a large truck had run over a 120-year-old mulberry bush on her property. Police determined it was a civil issue.

Looks like I got out just in time.....

Due to the current financial situation, Management has decided to implement a scheme to put workers of 40 years of age on early retirement.

This scheme will be known as

RAPE 

(Retire Aged People Early).

Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to management to be eligible for the

SHAFT scheme

(Special Help After Forced Termination). 

Persons who have been RAPED or SHAFTED will be reviewed under the

SCREW scheme

(Scheme Covering Retired Early Workers).

A person may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as Management deems appropriate.

Persons staying on will receive as much

SHIT

(Special High Intensity Training) 

as possible.

Management has always prided itself on the amount of SHIT it gives employees. Should you feel that you do not receive enough SHIT, please bring it to the attention of the supervisor.
They have been trained to give you all the SHIT you can handle.

At the tone.....

the time will be

1,234,567,890

 

If you've got a UNIX watch, that is.

UNIX time started at 1 January 1970 and ticks merrily along at a digit per second.

So at some stage, you'll run out of 32 bit digits.

In about 29 years, actually....

Calder

A mobile is an abstract sculpture made chiefly out of sheet metal, steel rods, wire, and wood. Some or all of these elements move, propelled by electric motors, wind, water or by hand…When everything goes right a mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise

Couldn't have said it better myself.

When I was at school mumblemumble years ago, we used to have cinema days.

A local cinema - usually the Bridgeway - would be requisitioned, kids herded into chartered buses and told to "BE QUIET AND WATCH THE FILM"

Usually Jacques Cousteau, infrequently a National Geographic film (snake eats mouse, cheetah catches gazelle..) and very rarely (and probably only for seniors) something like "Hamlet".

The Russian version with electricity lines in the distance.

Or a film about modern art.

Alexander Calder was one film we saw - probably as a short before the main feature.

All I recall at the time was this American guy cutting, welding and painting amoebic metal shapes and balancing them on a structure.

My interest grew and grew over the years as I become more and more exposed to art and culture in general and walking into a WHOLE ROOM of them at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington was almost an epiphany.

A mobile is a piece of poetry that dances with the joy of life and surprise.

Absolutely

The Thinking Machine

In 2002, artificial intelligence pioneer Hans Moravec made an interesting slide showing the evolution of computer power and cost, and the trajectory toward a thinking machine comparable to a human brain.

At this rate, it looks like I'll be overtaken in 2010.

If it hasn't happened already.......

Too good to miss - Spike Milligan

Why "why" is dangerous....

Sarah is 3.

Dad is a chemistry professor

SARAH: Daddy, were you in the shower?
DAD: Yes, I was in the shower.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: I was dirty. The shower gets me clean.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does the shower get me clean?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because the water washes the dirt away when I use soap.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why do I use soap?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because the soap grabs the dirt and lets the water wash it off.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because soap is a surfactant.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why is soap a surfactant?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does soap form micelles?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Soap molecules are long chains with a polar, hydrophilic head and a non-polar, hydrophobic tail. Can you say ‘hydrophilic’?
SARAH: Aidrofawwic
DAD: And can you say ‘hydrophobic’?
SARAH: Aidrofawwic
DAD: Excellent! The word ‘hydrophobic’ means that it avoids water.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does it mean that?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: It’s Greek! ‘Hydro’ means water and ‘phobic’ means ‘fear of’. ‘Phobos’ is fear. So ‘hydrophobic’ means ‘afraid of water’.
SARAH: Like a monster?
DAD: You mean, like being afraid of a monster?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: A scary monster, sure. If you were afraid of a monster, a Greek person would say you were gorgophobic.
(pause)
SARAH: (rolls her eyes) I thought we were talking about soap.
DAD: We are talking about soap.
(longish pause)
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why do the molecules have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because the C-O bonds in the head are highly polar, and the C-H bonds in the tail are effectively non-polar.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Because while carbon and hydrogen have almost the same electronegativity, oxygen is far more electronegative, thereby polarizing the C-O bonds.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why is oxygen more electronegative than carbon and hydrogen?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: That’s complicated. There are different answers to that question, depending on whether you’re talking about the Pauling or Mulliken electronegativity scales. The Pauling scale is based on homo- versus heteronuclear bond strength differences, while the Mulliken scale is based on the atomic properties of electron affinity and ionization energy. But it really all comes down to effective nuclear charge. The valence electrons in an oxygen atom have a lower energy than those of a carbon atom, and electrons shared between them are held more tightly to the oxygen, because electrons in an oxygen atom experience a greater nuclear charge and therefore a stronger attraction to the atomic nucleus! Cool, huh?
(pause)
SARAH: I don’t get it.
DAD: That’s OK. Neither do most of my students.

Sure beats Weight Watchers..

Rigor mortis in turdis...

Or:

Gravity ate my hard drive.

It wasn't from a great height and I don't think it even hit the ground, but the rapid deceleration

a) buggered the drive spindle
b) severely stuffed the surface of the disk
c) probably shagged some sectors
d) undoubtedly bollocked the file structure

€2000 to fix (or rather try to retrieve what's retrievable.)

No big deal.

Just 180GB of hand-chosen music.

So we start from scratch.

Hans-Willi from across the road - good lad that he is - kicked off with "For what it's worth", iLinkPod helped me drag back 4GB from the iPod and I think I've still got an iTunes library (2006 vintage) on a mothballed PC.

So the digitised Mix'n'Match tapes might be OK, the Stop you in your tracks² certainly aren't.

Ditto (i.e certainly aren't) podcasts, Peel stuff, video clips that I saved from an untimely "Removed due to terms of use violation" death, radio recordings, the entire Billboard Top 100 from 1957 to 1976, Jefito's "Friday Mixtapes" dating back to 2006. And so much more.


And the worst thing is that I KNOW what's gone up to mp3 heaven, because my old iTunes library shows me everything.

But with an exclamation mark next to it that says"Sorry, can't find THIS track. Or THAT one, either"


It does tend to get one thinking (a rare occurence these days) and focuses the mind somewhat and I've finally realised that I'd probably be quite happy if I only had Joe Walsh, (Lowell George-era) Little Feat and David Lindley on the Mac.


All the rest is pretty much nice to have.


Especially when you see a clip like this:





It's got it all - , the Alvin-Lee-School-of-Facial-Expressions grimaces, the raw passion of doing a song that you've only recently written (just look at the polished, almost-studio-album-perfect version just 5 years later with his new band), all of Pete Townsend's moves (apart from the windmilling) and then - at 2:47 - one of those magic moments:


Joe's got the reverb on, he's squeezing impossible sounds out his guitar, the guy turns to his bird and goes something like "Ohwowthatwasjustamazingdidyouseethat?" and the bird gives him this blankly disdainful look and pointedly wipes the side of her mouth, as if to get rid of the bad taste.


Been there, done that and I'll bet you a hard drive full of music that they're no longer an item.....

Cool stuff

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies.....

... and statistics..

These people must be so tragically thick.

This is an advertisement in the Economist - educated, influential and affluent readership (apart from me that is - I just look at the pictures) - and definitely not the sort of place where you can get away with waffly thinking, let alone blatant attempts at data manipulation and plain lies.

Abengo, a Spanish biofuels conglomerate, asks the question

"Should biofuels also be blamed for the economic crisis?"

and proceeds to truncate (and use utterly inappropriate) scales, suggesting a causality between the 100% increase in European biofuel production and the halving of cereal prices.

It doesn't really matter where you stand on this issue (I tend to be against massive deforestation, causing hunger in poor countries and the logic of pumping 30% more energy into a process that you get out, but that's just me...), but this argumentation is specious to the extent of being propoganda.

Let's get this into perspective.

The world production of biofuel in 2008 was 60 billion litres.

An extra 1 billion litres in Europe (diverting 300,000 hectares from food production, if anyone's interested...) won't make a blind bit of difference to the price of cereals.

Speculation in grain future
s is what whacked the price up.

Stocks were no good, the oil market was too volatile, where do we put our money?

Other commodities.

Like cereals.

The day the music died...

Bit of a problem.

My 250GB external drive fell off the desk the other day.

In fact, EVERYTHING fell off the desk - Mac mini, USB and Firewire hub and 2 other drives.

I managed to grab the monitor...

Variations in the geode, as far as I can work out.

Everything works fine. Except for one drive.

It just goes "beep, beep, beep, beep" and then stops trying to boot.

It had about 180GB of music on it.

That's around 35,000 tracks which isn't really a big deal, but there's a whole bunch of really good stuff from bloggy friends plus all the Mix'n'Match tapes and old vinyl that I've digitised. Podcasts. Videoclips from YouTube.

Got the forensic folk assessing the retrievability at the mo and it poses the obvious question: Just how much is this stuff worth?

They've given me a bandwidth of €600-€2500

For what it's worth.

Queue for a song - Buffalo Springfield, 1967 off the eponymous album.

I'd play it for you.

If I had any music left.....

True stories - Ron Wood

Ron Wood's in his dressing room with whichever band it was at the time - Jeff Beck Group, Faces, Stones (where he's still "The new boy"..).

Manager pops his head around the corner and says "Oi, Ronnie. The police are here. Bloody hell..."

Frantic activity. All the good stuff disappears down the dunny and in walk.....


..Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland.

 


Here's "Sure the one you need" off Ronnie's first solo album with Keef helping out.

Sounds like the Faces after a blood transfusion...

Not that I understand it...

 

1 Legendre's constant
2 "An infinite number of mathematicians..."
3 A Unicode character as a HTML entity
4 Modular arithmetic
5 The Golden Mean reworked a little
6 Three Factorial (3*2*1)
7 6.99999.. Though a different number than 7, still equals 7
8 Graphical representation of Binary code
9 An example of a base-4 number
10 A Binomial Coefficient
11 An example of Hexadecimal encoding
12 The cube root is the inverse of 12^3