MishMash

San Francisco in jell(y|o)

Thanks Heather for a pointer to Liz Hickok's jelly model of San Francisco. Sadly the earthquake doesn't test it to distruction ...

The Onion: Google's plans for 2005

Via d2r: Google's plans for 2005.

Heisenbugs, Schroedinbugs

I'm horrified that I hadn't come across these concept/terms before. From the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing:

Heisenbug: (From Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics) A bug that disappears or alters its behaviour when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialised memory, behaves quite differently.)

Schroedinbug: (MIT, from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics) A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harboured latent schroedinbugs for years.

Follow the links for more related terms.

How Yorkshire are you?

Surprising insight from the BBC How Yorkshire are you? quiz:

You are NOT SURE if you're from Yorkshire! And neither are we!

Are you a Yorkshire lad who's lost his way? Or are you a non-Yorkshire person who's fallen in love with our glorious region? Only you can know!

Structured Procrastination

Helen has just drawn my attention to an short essay on Structured Procrastination. Me. Specifically.

What could she mean?

ICE membership in decline, raises fees reverse trend

I get an email every day from NCE Plus, the online version of New Civil Engineer, the magazine of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Since I signed up for the list, NCE Plus went subscription. I haven't subscribed, mostly because as far as I can tell, stories filter into NCE Plus after (sometimes days after) they hit my doormat in the paper version on a Thursday morning, but nor have I unsubscribed from the mailing list. Mostly because I'm lazy, but also because it can take me weeks to get round to reading NCE and the headlines in the email can occasionally prompt me to go and look.

And because sometimes, something arrives which makes me laugh out loud. Yes, even in New Civil Engineer magazine. Here's one worth of Have I Got News For You.

ICE plans subs hike to halt membership decline

ICE MEMBERS subscriptions are to rise 30% over the next five 
years to fund renewed efforts to halt a decline in ICE membership.

Marvellous.

DTFG

To go with the ever-useful RTFM, Dave Beckett suggests

DTFG

Do the Google

Update: Changed to not be stupidly wrong, since Dad pointed out my mistake. Glad someone's paying attention ... *clears throat*.

GoogleRace

AKMA spotted Dave Winer's link to GoogleRace.com.

I'm sure there are all sorts of funny things in there, but what impresses me most is that apparently Joe Lieberman has already won.

To Do lists

It seems I fit some kind of pattern.

Everyone who knows me - and many of their therapists - knows that I am the most disorganised, undisciplined wretch on God's green earth. I have a 159 things to do in my todo list; he oldest ("learn to drive") is 15 years in the todoing. Earlier today I managed to slam the "snooze" button on my alarm clock twelve times. I don't know where my mobile phone is. The last I saw of it was in a cafe in San Francisco - maybe two weeks ago? I should cancel it. Hold on, let me add that to the todo list. There. It is as good as done. [Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka: Life Hacks]

And, given that pattern, a timely hint that getting a Tivo won't make the TV more useful:

I ditched my TV and my cable and my beloved TiVo a couple months back (saving money, saving time), and one of the first things I noticed is that I lost a huge amount of unconscious anxiety that I'd been lugging around: every time I turned on my television, I'd be confronted with a "to-do" list from my TiVo, all the shows it had captured that I hadn't watched yet. [Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things]

Artificial Intelligence? Pah.

Long ago Dad introduced me to a quote, which he believes to have been first uttered by a head of the AI group at the University of Edinburgh.

Artificial it may be, Intelligence it most certainly isn't. [Source unknown]

I have in the past found Google to be quite effective at locating sources of quotes for me. In this case it is of no assistance whatsoever. If anyone has any leads on this, I'd love to know. If not, you heard it here first.

Spread your wings and fly, little meme.