the corner office

I've blogged about doctor and statistician Hans Rosling before. This is a fascinating article about his work to help track (and stop) the spread of Ebola.

However, my attention was most taken by a slightly tangential comment from his earlier career in Africa:

A South African submarine had been spotted in a nearby bay a few weeks earlier. "It was fully possible that it was biological warfare."

In mid-November, amidst much press hooplah, our corporate parent amazon.com began selling videotapes and DVD's online.

That from the January 1999 IMDb newsletter, more. I hadn't realised that you can still download raw IMDb data.

Nicotine is a drug with which I have no desire to resume an acquaintance, but I occasionally walk past a vaper and get a puff of cherry fumes and my senses go 'aaaah'.

The problem with e-cigs is that they're kinda klunky and don't look cool. The problem is that most vapers taking a drag look not so much like a rugged Camel Man, or suave intellectual waving a fag about, as they do like a kid eating a stick of licorice.

Now if e-cigs started looking like pipes, on the other hand...

And then we were 4. Young Max was born beginning of the month, happy and healthy, and now an adorable bundle of eatery, sleepery and poopery. We're still a bit shell-shocked, but in the best possible way.

If you want to compute the circumference of the observable universe to within, say, the width of a human hair, you'll need to know about 35 digits of π, though this never seems to deter a certain sort of person from memorizing the first 100, 200 or 500 digits.

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Look, Jimmy Savile always looked dodgy as hell, there's no getting away from that. But Rolf Harris, well, he used to look nice and friendly and cuddly. Now he just looks like a malevolent paedo.

It's not so much that I've lost interest in blogging, it's more just that between being very busy doing All Of The Things, I also discovered Minecraft, and it's been downhill ever since.

I can imagine it's a bit how heroin addicts feel. You know it's wrong and you sort of hate yourself as you're doing it, but you fire up the PS3 and head down into the caves anyway, and before you know it, it's days later.

The habit hasn't been helped by me being on leave during half-term, and the son being as addicted as I am. The past week has, um, disappeared. But I have built a rather nice hill-top house, plushed up another home, cleared out a huge cave complex, a mine, and fortified a village. So not entirely unproductive.

Where people go to walk, slowly. Much worse with brollies.

From an interesting argument that Net Neutrality, which sounds like a great and egalitarian thing, actually hurts poor people. My goal is to try and squeeze this into a conversation in the following week:

While I am saddened by their I-want-a-pony understanding of economic tradeoffs, one has to admire their determination.

(via)

He said 'listen this isn't North Korea, this is England, we live in a democracy so I'm afraid you're going to have to get out of my salon'

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