IMS_Blog

Nottingham, land of Robin Hood, the Sheriff, a castle long gone and, well, Dr Perkins. I visited for a bank holiday weekend. There was beer, and a river, and beer, and movies, and beer, and games, and beer and stunning images.

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I happened to find myself in London (not precisely there to see the queen, but it’s not that bad a descriptive title either). In London with a few hours time to kill (because the rail system of this country is broken I had a choice between coming back on a 9 pm train—and only that train—or paying about three times the amount. It’s been a while since I’ve been in that position, so I went a bit touristy!

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Via New Scientist Feedback (soon to get a new name, incidently) the Intelligent Design Sort. Genius! I wonder if things may have been placed in this obviously divine order by his noodly appendages?

Most of David’s stuff’s good actually; his is one of my favourite esoteric programming languages, Ook (OK, it’s basically BrainFuck, but it’s for orang-utans—what more do you want!). And I, er, regularly read Irregular Webcomic.

While I’m on the subject, which I almost was, any layman (and not so layman come to that) about to be made to deal with statistics in an important way should be made to watch Peter Donnelly’s TED talk which politely shows that you’ll probably get it wrong and carries a wonderfully clear example of the prosecutor’s fallacy (which has a direct bearing on the usefulness of DNA databases, biometric testing and other surveillance society techniques by the way).

When looking at a league table it is occasionally useful to see the home and away form (number of wins, draws, etc) split up. It’s almost always useful to view the totals though. I’ve hence never understood tables which leave you to do the mental adding yourself, inevitably forgetting some of the numbers. soccerbase.com is one such table provider. Well, I’ve fixed things with a greasemonkey script.

Quite an interesting write actually. I got to use XPath (there’s a nice wrapper function) and had to wonder about finding computed styles of an element, until I discovered Gecko gives a nice easy way.

Now what can I do…

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Decrypt Text (If you're: You holdeth the key)

OK, it’s not an exact repost, but I couldn’t resist using the same title at least.

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