Dadblog

"But Mahler’s symphony would not let him rest. Over the next few years he attended every performance within reach, met his future wife in the adjacent seat at London’s Royal Festival Hall and, as the obsession intensified, took 18 months off work to study the score and discuss it with such leading interpreters as Leonard Bernstein, Sir Georg Solti and Leonard Slatkin. In September 1982, after an International Monetary Fund summit, he put his reputation on the line by conducting the American Symphony Orchestra in a private performance for financiers and politicians at the Lincoln Centre. A former British prime minister, Sir Edward Heath, himself a spare-time conductor, called it “a very remarkable feat”, but that was, if anything, an understatement."

"Iraq’s multiple fault-lines are especially visible—and occasionally bloody—in Nineveh and Mosul. Some towns in the province have a record of Shia-Sunni enmity. Nineveh has Iraq’s largest minority of Christians, themselves divided into various sects, some speaking Aramaic, the language of Christ. In a northern arc dwell the Yazidis, more than 500,000-strong they claim, who follow an ancient religion that reveres a Peacock Angel; many Muslims damn them as devil-worshippers. Then there are the Shabaks, who claim descent from Persians and follow various brands of religion, including Islam. There are also the Turkomens, stay-behinds from the days when Mosul was the capital of one of the three Ottoman vilayets (administrative regions) that were crudely lumped together to form Iraq when the Turkish empire collapsed after the first world war."

"Public spending is hard to ramp up quickly and harder still to cut when the economy recovers. Much of the benefit may leak to neighbours who do not bear the cost. Europe also has a more solid fiscal buttress. The public sector accounts for a much bigger slice of GDP so a drop in private spending has proportionately less impact on the economy. State benefits for the unemployed are larger than in America, so public spending rises by more in a downturn. Tax receipts are bigger too and they tend to fall quickly in downturns, providing an automatic fiscal relief for taxpayers." So is the Economist now saying a large public sector is a *good* thing?

"“THEY said you couldn’t create islands in the middle of a city,” shouts a property advertisement over a jammed Dubai motorway. “We said, what’s next?” The range of answers has become gloomier by the week, as the debate moves from whether the Dubai property bubble will burst to just how bad it is going to get. Some nervous bankers think property prices could fall by 80% or so in the next year or so. A few months ago, rich foreigners who had bought villas in Dubai were complaining about the quality of the sand on their artificial beaches or the difficulty of getting water to circulate around the twiddly fronds of the man-made island shaped like a palm. Now prices for some smart developments have been cut by 40% since September, shares in property firms have lost 80% of their value since June, and big developers are laying people off. " The credit crunch: it's not all bad.

"England won 1-0 but in the grand scheme of things the game will be remembered for only one thing: the presence of a 22-year-old Nottingham Forest footballer named Viv Anderson. Anderson, or "Spider" as he was known to team-mates because of his long legs, duly became the first black footballer to play for England and that is why his name will be remembered long after other internationals from that era have been forgotten."

"He will be replaced by Rich Riley, who has been with the company for about 10 years. His appointment will cement the switch of the firm's European focus away from its traditional base in London." I assume they mean TOBY Coppel. And they got the wrong Riley.

Describe your project: What is it? DocumentCloud is software, a website, and a set of open standards and APIs that will accelerate the daily work of investigative reporters, and will make investigative reporters out of every citizen, by improving the way we find, share, read and collaborate on source documents online.

"You could never in a million years say the same thing about a real art: Let’s say you saw GOD or a UFO and then WROTE about it. Your writing would still suck shit and be way worse than James Joyce or Jim Goad’s killer works. That’s because writing is a real art that you can’t just push a button and have a machine do for you. To recap: VAN GOGH’s oil painting of dogshit is better than your oil painting of GOD!!! The same is not true of photographs." Laughed and laughed and laughed.

"TVCatchup is a new service which lets you watch live UK television online. There are currently 18 channels to choose from, it's totally legal and absolutely free!"

So whether you are at uni, on holiday, travelling with work, away from home or are just too darn lazy to move away from your PC, join the revolution and start watching television with TVCatchup today!

"A spokesperson told paidContent:UK: ”TVCatchup has consulted with the broadcasters; they were granted full and exclusive access to the service prior to the public launch; and no objections to our claim that the website operates in accordance with current legislation were raised.” Though TVCatchup’s recording functionality proved too legally racy first time around, like Zattoo, it’s now using a legal provision in section 73 of the copyright act to rebroadcast the UK public service channels as live. Remember kids, you’ll still need a TV license to watch Countdown on your office laptop. "

A site dedicated to *a single episode* of the original Survivors. That episode stayed with me, but really? A whole site?

A site dedicated to *a single episode* of the original Survivors. That episode stayed with me, but really? A whole site?

Damnit. Another 8 years to go until my heart's back to normal.

As it is, the BBC now has a knife in its back that will be pushed in further by politicians in the very near future. It's over, boys, unless you can come up with an aggressive restatement of Reithian values and, of course, you can't.

"The most dramatic result, though, was the one that showed a doubling in the number of people who were prepared to steal in a condition of disorder. In this case an envelope with a €5 ($6) note inside (and the note clearly visible through the address window) was left sticking out of a post box. In a condition of order, 13% of those passing took the envelope (instead of leaving it or pushing it into the box). But if the post box was covered in graffiti, 27% did. Even if the post box had no graffiti on it, but the area around it was littered with paper, orange peel, cigarette butts and empty cans, 25% still took the envelope."

"Anyway, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, the ground-sharing issue is not the fiscal panacea some are suggesting. The fact is that the cost of maintaining a stadium is merely a tiny fraction of a football club's overheads. Most of the revenue they generate - around three-quarters - goes on players' wages. It therefore seems obvious to me that, if we are really intent on introducing financial realism to the game, we should not be asking Everton and Liverpool to share a ground, but to share a team."

"No matter how distributed and redundant the architecture or how rigorous the backup system, when it comes right down to it, there's a complex series of hoops through which the data has to jump to travel between the user and where it actually resides on a piece of physical hardware. And when a segment of that process fails, all the benefits of the cloud suddenly seem all the less magical."

"The map on the left shows the South during the early Cretaceous, about 115 million years ago, and the map on the right shows the South during the Late Cretaceous, about 85 million years ago. These shallow, tropical seas, teeming with marine life, laid the deposits that would eventually become the rich "black belt" soils. Note how the crescent of cotton farms in 1860, and of Democratic-voting counties in 2008, also follows the crescent of these ancient shorelines."

""I think there is a strong tendency for broadcasters to go and interview young men outside mosques to find out what Muslims think. In our survey, we found that 48% of British Muslims do not actually attend mosques. Therefore you wouldn't get an accurate picture of what people think," she said."

"The essential message can be summarised in three sentences: if an entire nation decides to cut spending and increase saving at the same time, the result is not an increase in saving but an increase in unemployment. This means that households can only increase their savings or reduce their debts if someone else spends and borrows more to keep the economy afloat - and in a recession that normally has to be government. And finally a government that spends and borrows in a recession can usually repay much of this borrowing without raising tax rates, because recovery automatically yields higher revenues and reduces spending on the unemployed."

"Israel is a democracy and it is an ally. It is a beacon of freedom and it is a historical necessity. For me this is a given. But that doesn't mean you have to present solid support for Israel in a a way that alienates and rejects the feelings of other peoples in the world. And I thought my husband did a pretty good job of that. I thought he had a rock-solid commitment to Israel, a guarantee of Israel's security. The Israelis believed it. We were last there in November and people were saying to him, "Come and run for President here,' because he has such a deep connection and empathy, and I feel it and share it. When he had a process going that kept Israelis and Palestinians talking to each other, people didn't die. There are those who say that that doesn't resolve the issue, so big deal, people didn't die, big deal that for a couple of years not a single Israeli was killed, big deal that the Palestinians were actually starting businesses. Well, I think it was a big deal. A process is

The real thing. From the python's mouth. And a test case in how to do this kind of thing.

"Think about how often it is that a sentence leaves you amazed, unless because it is bringing you a piece of startling news or is appallingly constructed. Yet this critic thinks this writer 'throws down' (!) sentences - in the plural - to leave the reader amazed. I loved the book and by some of its sentences I was, just possibly, struck; but I was never amazed."

"There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses," Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

"Today C, for changing requirements…which are a fact of life — certainly if your life revolves around developing software. During R2 there was a 40% churn on requirements. That means by the end of the project 40% of the work we had done had not appeared in our initial plan — some things were dumped, new things were introduced, and much was significantly altered. The Agile way is to embrace change, and more than that it's to structure your working practices around enabling and encouraging it. There are several ways we make this happen. One is to make sure that every task has tangible value to the end-user. Another is to prioritise the tasks so that the highest value work is delivered first. The second follows from the first: only if the tasks are individually valuable can they be arranged and rearranged."

Great intro to the actual code you need to "go social." Which raises the obvious question why it took Y! so long to do it, and why it was so crap when it arrived. Find the answer to that, and you find the Answer To Saving Yahoo!

"The basic reason is that we can be pretty sure that no matter what we do, we don’t need to worry about this exact thing happening all over again. Investors will be extremely reluctant to get involved in the exact kinds of products that recently crashed, everyone will worry that the first sign of housing price increases is a bubble, and regulators will be keenly aware of everyone’s pet theory of what went wrong. But the crux of the matter is that though the phenomenon of financial crises repeat over time, but no individual crisis repeats itself. The trick, if you can pull it off, isn’t to prevent a repeat of the current crisis, but to prevent (or mitigate) the next crisis which is something else entirely."

'His heart is still beating somewhere'

"The UK economy, which had previously looked more vulnerable to the global recession than any other G7 country, is now likely to suffer less than the rest of Europe, as a result of unprecedented policy stimulus from the lowest interest rates in history, a super-competitive currency and a big reduction in tax. Meanwhile, the Conservative Opposition in Britain has been confused, discredited and splintered by the financial crisis as badly as John McCain's campaign." Pow!

Looked like this was enormous fun. And how nice to have a platform that *can* be hacked.

"The preview for the upcoming J.J. Abrams-helmed movie looks pretty good, but the shot of the speedometer early on seems to imply that we’re still not on the metric system in the 23rd century, long after the USA has been subsumed into the United Earth government and then the Federation. My understanding is that Abrams doesn’t really care for Trek fans, and no doubt remarks like this won’t change his opinion of us for the better. But still!"

"But the bedrock strength of Tindle Newspapers is the opposite of lunches with the London mighty: all 225 titles are sacredly local. Editors print lists of funeral mourners and flower show winners in a way that once gave the weekly Somerset Guardian Standard 125% penetration in Frome. That's a quarter of the town buying more than one copy a week. Tindle's favourite story is how he gave the Tenby Observer a second chance in 1978, when it was so bankrupt that he had to use a call box to phone the receiver because the lines were cut. "They'd tried to save it by expanding and turning into the West Wales Observer. That was exactly the wrong thing to do. I asked the staff if they could get the paper out that week, they said 'yes' and I said: 'I'm in then, but throw out anything that isn't Tenby. We're not interested in Carmarthen and Haverfordwest.'""

"But there is another, anthropological, point of view. Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done. " via Russell Davies