Also: remember Molasses?


White Molasses is now available:



P.S.:
these are real photos of real animals.
Try to guess what they are BEFORE you click through the link.

But it's still funny if it's done well.

Nice deck.

See, we have our PRIORITIES straight.

This spectacular ability to ignore extraneousoties (and to abrogate extraneity) and focus on what is genuinely IMPORTANT in life was noted just recently in the Canadian press:

Young man survives ravine plunge
An Australian man is recovering from a close brush with death after surviving a fall of nearly 30 metres into a ravine in East Vancouver on Tuesday.

The man, who had been drinking, climbed up onto a railing over the ravine near the Commercial Drive SkyTrain station, apparently looking for somewhere to relieve himself.

"I guess he was really drunk," said one witness. "He tried to grab on to the tree there, to climb down, and he fell all the way to the bottom."

Emergency officials say the man broke at least one bone, but will be OK, as branches slowed his fall.

Vancouver fire department Capt. Rick Matsen says it was obvious the man had been drinking until just moments before his fall.

"Well, it just so happens he had a beer with him when he was brought up," he said.

"Still in his hands?" asked a reporter.

"Still in his hands, yup. He held on to it pretty tight, I'm thinking," said Matsen.

See, not only did the man we're proud to call our compatriot KEEP his beer all the way to the bottom and then back up again, but, faced with the choice between plummeting 30 metres (~100 feet) into a ravine, or dropping his beer so he could use both hands to grab onto the railing or a tree, he chose the nobler path.

Which in this case was a parabola.

Surely, rather than a floppy placed in the area, that should be some sort of solid-state medium?

*cough* I mean: large.

"what do you want to eat for breakfast?"

i was searching for the text of a Royal Society lecture titled
YEA, WHY TRY HER RAW WET HAT?
a tour of the smallest projective space

It is often said that mathematics and music go together, but what does this mean?
This illustrated lecture features a small choir and instrumentalists who perform music ranging from Tallis and Bach to Bartok and Hindermith, and answers such questions as: why are pianos always out of tune? Can music have a 'geometry'? Why are there seven colours in the rainbow? and What is the meaning of the title of this talk?

and i ran across THIS little beauty, which to my mind teeters continuously between being brilliantly obscure and brilliant satire:

Configurations of lines and models of Lie algebras
The automorphism groups of the 27 lines on the smooth cubic surface or the 28 bitangents to the general quartic plane curve are well-known to be closely related to the Weyl groups of E_6 and E_7. We show how classical subconfigurations of lines, such as double-sixes, triple systems or Steiner sets, are easily constructed from certain models of the exceptional Lie algebras. For k e_7 and k e_8 we are lead to beautiful models graded over the octonions, which display these algebras as plane projective geometries of subalgebras. We also interpret the group of the bitangents as a group of transformations of the triangles in the Fano plane, and show how this allows to realize the isomorphism PSL(3,F_2)§ö PSL(2,F_7) in terms of harmonic cubes.
Comment: 31 pages

*quiet awe*

"You've thrown a Steiner set! Proceed directly to jail, do not pass Go."

"See beautiful models graded over the octonions in your area now! --> click here"

"You LIE!! Your smooth cubic surfaces and general quartic plane curves don't fool me! I can see your Fano plane and simple! Isomorphism!"

Sticky, but an important ingredient in many favourite desserts.

I love this video to bits. You wanna cheer yourself up? Click on it.

Where the hell is Matt?

In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he'd saved to wander around the planet until it ran out. He made this site so he could keep his family and friends updated about where he is.

A few months into his trip, a travel buddy gave Matt the idea of dancing everywhere he went and recording it on his camera. This turned out to be a very good idea. Now Matt is quasi-famous as "That guy who dances on the internet. No, not that guy. The other one. No, not him either. I'll send you the link. It's funny."

…
Matt dances very badly, but most people don't seem to mind.

Herebe's comments just reminded me of this old post of mine. Which I just re-read and thought about and here post again in its 18 month anniversary because I think it says some things which are increasingly relevant in the post-Iraq-invasion world.

--

Happy Australia Day

Good heavens, is that the time? It's Australia's National Day today, which we celebrate by taking the day off to forget why it's actually on that day.

I think it might have been the day of the first successful home-brew in Australia's fearsome sun. Or possibly the anniversary of the invention of the esky. There may or may not have been a boat involved. I wouldn't like to say. Actually, that's wrong; I would like to say, it's just that I don't have a clue. Or give a fuck, really. The choice of the day is not relevant, the fact of the day is.

The Ultimate Esky!
Actually, I did this myself once in london with my car's rear boot (it had boots front and back-- "where's the engine?") for a party.

Pulled up outside OddBins, and got OddLooks as I poured the boot full of bag after bag of ice. Then drove it home round the corner and backed it up to the front door and Lo! The world's best party esky.

Subject: Whine & Cheese night: Fri

Hi All,

This Friday, we're having a rough'n'ready wine'n'cheese night at our place (69 Park Walk).
We'll be bundling it with yet another in the ongoing series of L's Farewell Nights as she is clearing off on Sat.
Those of you who wish to attend are most welcome.
Those who don't, aren't.
So there.

Bring a bottle and something to nibble (cheese, biscuits, dip, swimsuit model, whatever takes your fancy), thirdparties are welcome so long as the crucial alcohol:person ratio remains in the safety zone. We will provide stainproof carpet and our extensive range of bean bags and cushions.

Due to the meticulous nature of our preparations (K. will be fluffing one of the bean bags), kickoff time is wildly flexible but probably shoot for 7-8. People arriving earlier will be forced to start earlier, people arriving later will have to start later. I will be starting at 4 just to be on the safe side. If you get there really early and can't find us, check out the Man In The Moon pub on the corner.

Sal


Directions: either catch bus to Bluebirds,KingsRd and walk 50m or else catch tube to Gloucester Rd, turn right out of tube and walk till you hit Fulham Rd, turn right and walk to Goat in Boots pub, which is corner of Park Walk. We're down by the school, easily recognised by my disintegrating red Fiat X1/9 out front. Those of you present at the housewarming will remember its boot as the beer chiller, and yes, it did short out the brake lights when the ice melted.

Australia's an odd little country. It's bigger than all of Western Europe and most of Eastern Europe combined (drop it on top and it covers the whole continent. so watch it.), with a population around the size of London and New York. It's the driest country in the world, after Antarctica. Its standard supermarket food is more organic than the achingly priced, officially organic food in Europe or the US; when a single sheep station is up to 10,000 square kilometres (Australia's largest), drenching it in pesticide or GM fodder is not economic, and all our animals are as nutritious as game, since they spend much of their lives essentially wild compared to the stationary static fertiliser-fed lives of American and EUKopean animals. Something NOT generally known is that it's actually 2 quite distinct countries culturally: south-east, and rest-of. A lot of the apparent contradictions of Australia stem from this divide. Charles Darwin's chapter dedicated to the Australians in his (fascinating) book "The Voyage of the Beagle" remains a startlingly accurate portrayal of the south-east culture to this day. The idea of a cultural difference was something which I ran across as a concept for the first time in the fiction of one of the world's more insightful anthropologists. This was the man who single-handedly shortened the Korean War by half a decade or more and whose "Psychological Warfare" remains the leading textbook to this day. His fiction described Australians but spoke of only North Australians --Norstrilians-- which I didn't understand at the time and it was only when I started working with, then in, the south-east that I realised how sharply different a culture it is, and then remembered his distinction.

("The Vice-Chairman" was the head of the government; there had been no Chairman of the Temporary Commonwealth Government for some thousands of years. Norstrilians did not like posh and they thought that Vice-Chairman was high enough for any one man to go.

That was late 50s' fiction; here's a current actual quote from our Hansard, which fer yew furriners is "the official report of the proceedings and debates of a legislature in the Commonwealth of Nations":

Last week I received a phone call concerning the member for Burnett. The caller was asking about workers compensation. I said, "Mate, according to protocol, you should go to your local member." Do honourable members know what he said to me? He said, "He's never home." He said, "He's about as handy as an ashtray on a motor bike."

Hon. Mr PEARCE, MP. 9 Jun 1999 Legislative Assembly 2271

We have all sorts of little political and institutional oddities which you discover upon study and thought and growing age to be incredibly intelligently designed with an eye to human behaviour and the long term. Most of the socialist institutions were torn down by the Labor governments, but the political ones remain. A good example is the Queen. The Australian Queen is not the British Queen, as anyone who studies the Australian Constitution will realise, existing primarily as a concept and a reminder to politicians not to get too up themselves. Technically, the British Queen has all sorts of legislative and executive powers, but has no practical authority to ever exercise them. The Australian Queen, though having only one power, is actually more powerful than the British Queen. When's the last time the British Queen sacked the parliament and forced a new election? In Australia, the Australian Queen did this in 1974.
(The then-opposition were elected as government by the population in a landslide result with one of the largest majorities in the history of Australia. The population overwhelmingly rejected the previous government's bid to retain power. And did so again at the next election.
Interestingly, the pseudo-republicans railing against "monarchists" don't mention this very much. It conflicts with their campaign's fiction. They prefer to paint the sacking as abuse of archaic monarchial power, rather than essentially irrelevant if the population had actually wanted that government. They prefer people to think that removing a brake on politicians' power is in the interests of the thus-disenfranchised voters.)
(Australia is closer to a democratic republic than America or France, just as our legislatures are closer to the Westminster system than is Westminster, just as we used to be more socialist than the USSR. It's easier to get it right when you come in late after everyone else has shown what mistakes not to make. It's just that our "president" is deliberately crippled and we don't use the word "Republic" -- the "Republican" movement in Australia is pure political powergrab cynically attaching itself to an artificially created, faux-emotive fantasy strawman)

It's an interestingly useful powerless institution, our Queen. Useful primarily for banging her head on the backs of coins, she also has a "representative" who is the Australian president or head of state: the Governor General.

Now, the nice thing here, in the old tradition of egalitarianism and don't get your head shoved too far up your own arse, mate, is that the Notional Sovereign has all the power and the G-G merely exercises it on the Notional Sovereign's behalf, someone whom he can never be. Our head of state is not the source or the residence of the power, a legal fiction is. And you can never ever be that legal fiction, that symbol of Australia. Because it's just a legal fiction.
Nice little constant ego-pricker, that one.

The Governor General is extremely limited in authority, despite being the Australian Head of State. His/Her/Its/Thems sole exercisable power (excluding some minor accidental abilities to procedurally delay some legislation and open new shopping centres) is to force democracy. I'll repeat that, it's important. The sole power of the Australian Governor General is to force democracy. Should the government of the day get out of control, the Governor General sacks the government and calls an election: returns the authority to the population. Voting is compulsory, to prevent disenfranchisement of the jaded by the obsessed, and so the newly created government is a more accurate reflection of the actual wishes of the people they are nominally supposed to represent. And if the population doesn't agree with the Governor General, why, they just vote the same guys back in and no harm done.

Governor. I quite like the word itself, as a job title. Strong historical overtones of full responsibility but proscribed independent power: the governor always answers to a higher power. In Australia's case, a fictional one. No presidential egotisms and powerplays for us. We'll leave that to you fascists.

Governor. The primary safety mechanism on a steam engine is also called a governor. When the pressure gets too high, it lets the steam out. I quite like the consonance of this name and function with the title and function of the Australian Head of State. In both cases, the governor spends most of the time sitting on top doing nothing, about as useful as a nipple on a nun.
And every so often, he lets all the steam out of the system to stop it blowing up.
That's the only function of the governor, in a steam engine and in Australia.
Like a parachute or insurance, it's a complete waste of time and space, until you need it.

I started off this post intending just to paste in an old groaner of an email that did the rounds last night. But it was pretty poor and I've started rambling so you'll have to miss out.
Some excerpts though:

And there's Queensland. [I'm a Queenslander] While any mention of God seems silly in a document defining a nation of half arsed sceptics, it is worth noting that God probably made Queensland, as it's beautiful one day and perfect the next. Why he filled it with dickheads remains a mystery.
...
P.S We also shoot and eat the two animals that are on our National Crest. No other country has this distinction.

Difficult for Brits to do, for example, as one of their Crest's animals lives only in Africa and the other only in the imagination.

Hmm. I have to push on and get some stuff done, but I think I'll dig out and dust off an old post that was delayed by life and a wish to actually make it decent. But I think today's a good day for it, regardless of quality. Back to normal afterwards.

But I'll leave you with a couple of excerpts from a book everyone should read who has the misfortune of suffering contact with Aussies:

"The Xenophobe's Guide to the Aussies"
"The Xenophobe's motto: Forewarned is Forearmed" A surprisingly accurate little book actually. Certain things are taken from the Book of Received PC Preferred Myths, but on the whole he only makes a couple of serious mistakes.

Class:
This is a very class-conscious society. None of this upper-class, middle-class, and lower-class stuff, though. Class is based on character. ...
How you relate to others is everything.
How you dress is up to you. ...
It is a brutally honest class system. There is nothing to blame social acceptance on but yourself. On the other hand, social acceptance is without trial or waiting period for anyone with an honest nature.
You are not likely to be addressed as Mr., Mrs., or Ms. If someone went to the bother of giving you a first name, why not use it? If this causes you any discomfort, it must be because of some hang-up of your own, and if you think that's a problem, wait till you discover your nickname.

...
Being pretentious is thus the most severe form of social bad manners. If you display such a failing, beware of the Aussie response. It's not enough for them merely to get the dagger in -- they like to turn it and turn it.

...
Xenophobes, this is the land in which to indulge the perverse pleasures of your phobia. The more you discover about the Aussies the more you will realise that all your worst fears of foreigners are totally justified.
Aussies share one common bond that binds a collection of fiercely individual and independent people together. They are all stark raving mad. ...
Never make the error of underestimating the Aussies. They love to portray a casual disregard for everything around them, but no-one achieves a lifestyle as relaxed as theirs accidentally.

Happy Australia Day, all.

FHM girls in bikinis and PVC louchely writhing under the scorching sun outside Liverpool Street Station. Half a dozen or so. No fanfare, no razzle dazzle. No apparent reason. Maybe because it's summer. Maybe because they had too many girls cluttering up the office. Who cares. A little ring of happy faces around them. Others just glancing over as they sweat their way to their bus-stop or the concourse.

Hottest day of the year.

London's air lies close and still. Glass blanket. The heat squats harder under its deadening weight.

The water pistols tracing crystal lines on their brown skin are an inspired touch.

~103 in the old money.

Lucky I'm not hungover.

Oh. Wait...

Herebe just prompted me to tidy up a Saltation post that's been sitting in draft since... *cough* this time 2004.

It wasn't new then. It was something I had been pointing out for a while in conversation. Like o-so-many, o-too-many, other posts of similar nature. But I kept meaning to tweak it so it sang, rang like poetry.

Oh well. No scope for perfection in this the twilight time.

Better out than in.

Ahh... the north Italian women. They look like a dream and their language drips from their tongues like honey.



"Can't touch this"

You know, I can't help but wonder what that would feel like mid-deepthroat...

As seen today on the BBC's "Day In Pictures":


"US intelligence chief John Negroponte addresses the US chamber of Commerce about fighting terror" in his FABULOUS new hat.

• Inside the Kopfpit- Behind the Scenes with President Bush
  (via Av!)
  
  
• Man breeds with Flying Squirrel
  (via Ninja Monkeys)
  
  
• AWESOME singer -- but think: will she sound like Darth Vader when she's 18?
  (via PreSurfer)

NOTE: This was drafted Friday before last and forgotten about.

Fri. 8:45am
"Morning!" from S. as he blearily passes the lounge, suited and booted and heading to work.

"Hiya, S.
Hey! before you go, have a look at what's sitting on the kitchen table."

A quizzical look and he clomps next door, there's a pause, then a bark of laughter bounces past the fridge.

---

Fri. 8am
Who the hell's ringing me at 8am? Missed it. Voicemail.
"Sal, it's G. here, mate. I need to ask a favour. Umm... I've got an emergency. I'll... I'll try you again in half an hour, I guess."

---

Wed. 4:30pm
"What's happenin', DOOOODDD?!?!!!" G. cries as he appears up the stairs.

"Mate! Not a lot. You're home bloody early."

"Dude! Gotta be done! I've gotta pack for Roskilde!"

G.'s a good bloke, but loud and excitable, and in line with those traits he has the stereotypical messy disorganisation. And he's keen as fuck about the Roskilde music festival in Denmark.



He's been talking about it for months now. He even bought a self-standing hammock specifically to take along to it. Which we've been helping him test on the roof terrace, now that summer's well and truly here.


He's keen as hell. And he flies out tomorrow night, Thursday night, to spend the weekend camping in Copenhagen with mates then heading out to the festival on the Sunday evening. He's there for the whole festival, till next weekend.

He's packing the day before? And coming home early for it? Eh? I'd have done it on the day or else the day before last thing before I went to bed. I packed for a 3 week South American trip in 45 minutes, including lashings of unrelated emergency kit. Oh well, I suppose my own travel history is a little unusual -- I could pack for a week-long business trip in 5 minutes, and did, frequently.

And he spends the next 5 hours running up and down stairs and piling things on the terrace and adding a bit and taking a bit out and running up and down stairs and...

And he elects to leave his purpose-purchased hammock behind because it's too heavy.

And I have to show him how to strap large bits onto the outside of his pack.

And he runs up and down.

Eventually he brings his loaded pack into the lounge.

"Finished!" he cries, triumphantly. "Now, where can I put this..." And he sits down and suddenly looks stricken and jumps up and shouts "Passport!" and runs upstairs while I chuckle behind him.

There's various rummagings and bumpings upstairs and about 20 minutes later he wanders back in and sits down. I don't say anything. Just look at him. Then raise an eyebrow. "Passport!" he shouts and jumps up and runs upstairs while I laugh out loud behind him.

"Gottit!!" he beams as he thunders back in flourishing it high and jams it into his pack. "Jeez, I nearly forgot."

I grin.

"Got your ticket?"

This was supposed to be a quick note re the proof-reading before I buggered off for a mate's birthday drinks last friday. But it got too hot and then I forgot.

Following on from the amusing embarrassment of Piers Morgan's book's acknowledgement of perfect proofreading facing on to 2 proofreading errors in the first page, I kept a note of any other errors.

There were only another 10 definite errors in the book, plus 1 error which could be chalked up to poetic licence and 1 error which may just be sloppy description.

I explicitly excluded the "try and" constructions as being simply part of the conversational tone of the book and reflecting the way most people speak. I also explicitly excluded the split infinitive, as this is a false rule created in the 19th Century by people seeking to create rules for English which match Latin's. And it doesn't. That is, the unsplittable infinitive is cod-Latin grammar, not English grammar. You may have troubles understanding this if you can't work out why it is literally impossible to end an English sentence with a preposition.

And this is them:

1. "that that"
   
2. "unsettlingy bare"
   
3. "apologia" (Vinnie Jones's: should have been "apology") (at this point I realised I might as well note down page numbers)
   
4. p.92: "called the circulation department at 8am to ask for the News of the World's sale"
   
5. p.149: "prompting an immediate press released"
   
6. p.242: "following enquires from The Mirror"
   
7. p.286: "There's nothing so disarming for a columnist than having to meet your victims"
   
8. p.332: ", referring to Zara's jockey boyfriend" is repeated. Presumably, the first one re Beckham is erroneous.
   
9. p.347: "permantely"
   
10. p.395: "with barely a rusty old AK-16 raised in anger" - if this isn't a deliberate joke, should be either AK-47 or M-16. In context: AK-47.
    

Poetic Licence vs Error: the foreword's "year in Lloyds" turns into "nine months in Lloyds" on p.89.
Possible sloppy description vs Error: Murdoch's cycling machine appears to move from the back of the gym to the middle or front of the gym on p.367.

But overall, despite being better than the first-page error implied it might be, a dozen errors is not real flash for a book only 468pp long-- 2 or 3 in that space would be a jolt, normally.


Of course, if the Acknowledgement's Marina really DID pick up manifold errors with an eagle eye, I am very glad I didn't see any of the earlier drafts...

CAN Hindus eat yak? Ask me how.

AKA 97° F for the backward among you.


Not a breath of wind and no air conditioning anywhere in London.


Just thought I'd mention it.