This is very cool – an interactive demonstration of the scale of the universe, from the smallest unit of quantum length to the total estimated size of the whole shebang.
I’ve just about got my head around how big the universe is, but at the other end I had no idea that the Planck Length was so small. Now my brain hurts.
I don’t usually pay much attention to the big NZ political blogs. At best, the usual suspects are occasionally insightful, but more often they suffer from varying degrees of simple minded egotism and/or outright vileness. However, like the million monkeys writing Shakespeare that they as a group resemble, every so often someone hits one out of the park:
It’s hard work at the best of times for political parties to attract good candidates. But it’s doubly so for the two main parties, because all the smaller parties are so quick to secure the urine-drinking bank-robbing identity-thieves, leaving National and Labour only the boring and sensible candidates to choose from.
Apart from the woman-bothering expense-rorting ones, those who end up in Parliament for the Nats or Labour often lack colour, but that’s probably because they’re not drinking their own piss…
The rest of it is well worth reading as well.
This election is going to be like the Rugby World Cup – pretty much a foregone conclusion but the also-rans will provide much entertainment.
This is Enterobacteria Phage T4. More accurately, it is an amazing glass sculpture of the Phage T4 made by a group of glass blowers in the UK that specialise in such things.
Of all human endeavours, I think glassblowing might be the one I find the most astounding. There are a whole bunch of other works in the Glass Microbiology gallery which are well worth checking out. It looks you can even buy some of the works should you want give somebody AIDS for Christmas.
My friend Aaron has been working on an iPhone game for ages, and now it has finally been released. It is well worth the NZ$1.29 being charged (there is no demo version available).
You can see more about the game at the TrapIt official site, or jump straight to the App Store page.
I must say I am a little envious. I have been an Apple Registered iPhone developer for 3 years and haven’t managed to produce anything.
I haven’t been doing anything terribly exciting lately, which means no blog entries. But there is a lack of whimsy in the world, so I am posting this link:
I Write Like is a website that analyses a sample of writing and finds the closest match to a famous author’s style. Running through a couple of my favourite entries from this blog gives the following result:
Could be worse. I did read an awful lot of Arthur C. Clarke’s output when I was younger so I supposed it rubbed off on me.
You find the most interesting things trawling through the “Incoming Links” section of the WordPress Admin Dashboard. According to this page at halfdone (I’d never heard of them either), Life of Andrew is the 151st in their list of NZ blogs that are “about something”.
I am not entirely clear how they calculate the rankings, but I am happy with 151 – surrounded by other blogs handling the big issues of the day: 150 (MENZ Issues: Promoting a Clearer Understanding of Men’s Experience, example post: “Feminists in denial about how they are failing girls“) and 152 (Web of Evidence: What They Don’t Want You To Know, example post: “Numerous Long Fibers Seen Floating Through The Air In Whangarei, NZ” )
And people say that bloggers are just weird malcontents.
Boost is a excellent resource for C++ programming, but suffers from inconsistent documentation and a daunting array of sub-projects. Trying to make sense of it all is a fairly serious undertaking. I tried to get my head around it by writing my occasional series of boost blog posts, but now I see that somebody has done a much better job.
The Boost C++ Libraries is a free book that clearly explains some of the more generally useful boost libraries, with lots of useful examples. It even covers advanced libraries like ASIO in an approachable way. I highly recommended bookmarking it if you do any C++ programming.
It is not everyday that I awaken to the radio telling me that Civil Defense has been activated due to the imminent arrival of a Tsunami.
Luckily the effects of the Tsunami on New Zealand were slight to non-existent, but not totally unnoticed. The following chart is from the excellent GeoNet web site. GeoNet (amongst other things) maintains a system of tsunami gauges around the country for just this sort of event.
The graph on the GeoNet site is a moving window so I have copied a static version here. I took graph snapshot at about 11pm, you can clearly see the waves hit different parts of the country in succession start from about 9:30am at Raoul Island (I didn’t know where it was either). Luckily for us there was nothing over a metre.
Samoa was not so fortunate as we were in NZ, with many fatalities in low lying areas despite a very speedy evacuation.
I have quite a lot of books. I am not a book hoarder, I quite often do purges of books I don’t intend to read again, but my bookcases are always overflowing. I have tried various methods of keeping track of what I have read, but nothing really seemed that useful.
A friend at work just hipped me to LibraryThing, a website that seems tailor made for people like me. It is a little like a book-oriented facebook – you join and set up a profile (here is mine) and then start adding books. Books you have added can be given ratings and keywords, you can even write reviews if you are really keen. Once you have registered a few books, LibraryThing starts recommending other books you might like.
The website works pretty well for something claiming to be a beta. It is very text-heavy, but I don’t think that will be a problem for its target audience. The one thing that could be smoother is the interface for actually adding books – at the moment it is a bit of a pain to add multiple books by the same author, even if they appear together in the search.
In true Web2.0 fashion, LibraryThing offers all sorts of RSS feeds and blog widgets to publish data to other sites. As an experiment, I have added the LibraryThing widget to my blog theme. You should be able to see a random selection of books I have read to the right. I removed this, unfortunately it doesn’t work very well with my theme.
So I was talking with the team at work and conversation drifted (as it so often does) to My Little Pony.
Just a bunch of guys talking about My Little Pony – nothing weird about that.
But then, mere hours later, a link to this collection of modified My Little Ponies shows up in my RSS reader.
Spooky.
My Little Chewbacca is the best.
It has irked me for a long time that although the President of the United States wields great power over the rest of the world, only US citizens get to vote. To be brutally honest it irked me a lot more when Bush II was in power, but I approve of the way our USAian cousins have voted this time. Obama seems exactly what the US and the rest of the world needs – someone thoughtful, honest and willing surround himself with actual experts instead of cronies. That fact that he can string two words together without stumbling is an added bonus.
And its not just me. The action figure industry thinks Obama is pretty cool. This Obama figure is way more bad-ass than the old George W Bush doll.
One of my favourite things about browsing the web on Mondays is seeing what is new over at coverfreak.com, a weekly blog with links to interesting covers of (usually) familar songs. Normally I wouldn’t mention it, but this week they have a selection of songs with a New Zealand flavour.
The links to songs usually disappear within a couple of weeks, so be in quick if you want to listen.
A picture for those who like astronomy and/or have a very large monitor they want to test:
All (known) Bodies in the Solar System Larger Than 200 Miles in Diameter
This is a screen shot of Splashback, a game where you clear levels by making explosive chain reactions with what appears to be snot. I made it to level 17, can you do better?
