[insert witty title]

I realize how important it is for consumers to be aware of what they are buying, and that is why I am going to rebrand [iwt] as a consumer reviews portal.

This is my first review:

First impressions upon getting the box are that the BBQ ticks all the tight boxes (barbeque, tick. 100% steel, tick. quality in cooking, tick. cost less than a bottle of wine, tick.) so without wasting any more time I tear open the box, thinking: OK this’ll take about two minutes let’s open her u– What. The. Fuck. Is. This.

To assemble a 6 euro BBQ it appears that you require four different types of screw (over a dozen screws in total), five different types of inscrutable metal thingy and quite a few wooden bits. No problem I think to myself, I’ll just have a look at the instructi- What. The. Fuck. Is. This.

These are not even instructions, This is just a drawing of the second photo in this review, with a list of names for the weird metal bits written next to it. Also note that I am trying to build a BBQ, not the bloody terminator. Then this happened, but in real life

I noticed the other day that the Dutch words for many articles of punctuation are really literal, and just describe what the symbols look like. For example:

# = hekje = little gate
* = sterretje = little star
() = haakjes = little hooks
^ = dakje = little roof
@ = apestaart = monkey tail
: = dubblepunt = double full stop
; = puntcomma =full stop comma
& = en-teken = and symbol

I like this a lot, it’s a lot easier to remember than the unintuitive English equivalents (colon, ampersand, asterisk). I want to start using the English versions of these in everyday conversation:

“Ok so my email address is cmb, then the monkeytail button…”
“To unlock your phone press the little gate button, then 07 then the little star button”
“Yeah it’s the text between the little hook things that you’re looking for…”

I noticed today that my knowledge of hats was pretty lacking, so I resolved to fix it. See how well you do on my hat mega-quiz, Name Dat Hat!

Answers to appear in the comments section soon.

Recently, via an online newspaper column I stumbled over a fantastic argument and associated video. I’m going to quote very heavily from the aforementioned article because it’s written much more eloquently than I can manage. The video is a sort of mini-documentary in which:

The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: “I’ve never really thought about it.” “I don’t have an answer for that.” “I don’t know.” “Just pray for them.”

What an excellent question! It had seriously never occured to me, what do you do with women who have illegal abortions, as one campaigner is quoted as saying:

“How have we come this far in the debate and been oblivious to the logical ramifications of making abortion illegal?”

The US states that are drafting legislation to ban abortion (in the case that Roe vs. Wade is overturned) are mostly planning to punish the doctor and not the woman who set the so-called crime in motion:

Perhaps by ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into “victims” of their own free will. State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time.

This is really some condescending shit and it makes it all the sweeter to:

Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It’s murder, but she’ll get her punishment from God. It’s murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It’s murder, but the penalty should be … counseling?

Unfortuntely embedding of this video has been disabled, but you can:

It’s only five minutes long, but in summary:

there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can’t have it both ways.

Earlier this evening I was feeling a bit guilty and catching up with a bit of reading at arXiv. For those of you who aren’t familiar with arXiv, wikipedia comes to the rescue:

arXiv is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology which can be accessed via the Internet. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are placed on the arXiv. As of June 2007, arXiv.org contains over 423,000 e-prints, with roughly four thousand new e-prints added every month.

arXiv is broken down by subject area, and I usually confine my reading to astro-ph, where pretty much every single scientific paper in astronomy is released, for free, to the community. Today, for some reason I took a look through the category list and found physics.pop-ph, the repository of articles about popular physics. One title in particular stood out, and I couldn’t resist having a read:

Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy

I’m really not sure what to make of the article, it is all very po faced and hyper-serious, but I just can’t help laughing at the indepth analysis given to some films. For example, there is a scene in The Core where the heroes go deep underground and get out of their vehicle.

We could discuss many questionable issues with this scene: (a) Could a cave exist at such depths? (b) Could the crew afford to open and close the door of the vehicle in such a depth? This would mean the loss of breathable air from the vehicle and changes in the air pressure and temperature of the vehicle. (c) Could the flexible suits that the crew is wearing really protect them at that depth? Many more questions could be added in this list. The reader can reflect on these issues on his own. We will only discuss the sinking of a human body in lava

I can’t even tell if the authors are being serious, or wrote this whole thing for a laugh in the pub. Don’t even get them started on why time would probably not go backwards when superman flew around the earth, or why in X-Men: The Last Stand the bit where Magneto moves the golden gate bridge is not feasable (unless Magneto is powered, like the sun, by fusion).

The relocation of the bridge gave to the director an opportunity for great special effects. However, even with the acceptance of Magneto’s special powers, it is an unrealistic scene given the physical laws in our universe

The whole paper is absolutely brilliant and I urge everybody to read it.

I really like the idea of doing some movie reviews focused entirely on movie physics, think Angry Nintendo Nerd but with graphs and equations and foul language.

Finally, as a single word of advice. If you’re ever in a situation where either of the authors of this paper ask you to watch a movie with them you should respectfully decline.

(xkcd)

…this is going to hurt soon

(note the direction that the front wheel is pointing)

…so is this

(the dozens of onlookers clearly know what’s about to happen)

…and this

(el oh el)

…and this

(Clicky for big. It’s like one of those renaissance pictures of a significant historical event. Everybody in the scene is fascinated with the man getting his jaw shattered by the bat, but in the middle one little girl stares at the camera, and reaches out like an angel. It’s rather beautiful if it’s not your jaw being demolished)

A few months ago I got into a rather heated discussion about the future of entertainment. More specifically what would happen to television in the near-mid future. I argued that as soon as wireless internet connections became just as prevalent as a mobile phone signal it would be natural for televisions to learn to communicate with each other, and with the rest of the world. This would obviously signal a watershed moment in how we think about television. Rather than passively recieving whatever signals a television company chooses to send out, the television could go and find shows you wanted, when you wanted them. The possibilities become almost literally endless.

Well… As of today we have made a first step towards this dream in the form of Miro 0.9.8

Basically, you fire up Miro, select a list of channels from the ‘Miro Guide’ (searchable by category, and for any specific term you want) and then sit back. Miro goes onto Bittorrent and grabs the latest episodes from each channel. It’s as easy to use as a television. Click on an interesting looking episode, then when it’s on the computer a little green button appears, which you can click to play.

The whole process is explained pretty well by a smug sounding American guy in this video

There are over 1,500 channels to choose from, although obviously they vary hugely in quality and I’d say that like most things 90% of it is crap (although the same is also true for broadcast television…), and if you were hoping for this to make your copyright infringement even easier you’re going to be sorely disappointed as it is all free content (however, for free stolen TV go here). Here are a couple of my favourite channels to get you started:

Science Channel Video

Short professionally produced documentaries about science. The “How Bread is Made” documentary is 100% badass

Onion News Network

Brilliant news parody from theonion.com. Probably my favourite episode is “Study: Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys”

Diggnation

Weekly show highlighting the most interesting things to appear on digg.com. One of the hosts is a little bit annoying, so be careful

Newsnight Video Podcast

Daily news segments from BBC’s Newsnight

Terra: The Nature of our World

Documentary series about the world. Sometimes it gets a bit tree-huggy for me, but the documentary on chili peppers was fantastic

NASA’s Spitzer Show

Fantastic stuff from the Spitzer space telescope. DVD quality movies, I really like “Galaxy Explorer: Galactic Centre”

late edit: In other news I just opened the fridge and for some reason we have seven different types of cheese (parmesan, ricotta, halloumi, cheddar, feta, paneer, mozarella)

I don’t even like cheese that much