Miscellanea

[undyingking]

Does anyone know of a tool that scrapes LJ poll results and converts them into CSV or some other readily-analysable format? If not, I'll write one, it surely would be too useful for words.

Sainsburys trolleys have strange powers! There's a whole bunch of new ones at our local one, and they all say "This trolley will stop suddenly if taken beyond the red line". I didn't test the truth of this assertion, as for one thing I couldn't see where the said red line actually was, but maybe it's better that way -- the prospect of a sudden unexpected seize-up would add a real thrill to trolley-jousting. If it works on a RFID or similar basis, I wonder if there's a way to jam all the trolleys in the shop simultaneously? Experimentation needed.

I'm officially fed up with the bitching about the Olympics logo (unless they're bitching about being driven into epileptic fits by it, in which case fair dos). I don't mind people saying they don't much like it, etc, but it's the numbing predictability of comments about the gazillions / time-spent ratio, the my-three-year-old-drawability, the cat-sick-up-ability -- which would all have been made no matter what it had looked like, because they're always made about any new design for anything that anyone ever draws. For gosh sakes, have some more interesting criticisms, Mr and Ms Phone-in.

I was though impressed by the Tory nugget who says: “Bright pink is certainly not the colour I would have chosen to represent the United Kingdom. I suppose it sums up the politically-correct world that this Government appears to inhabit.” Back in the days when cartographers used to depict half the world in bright pink, it was of course in honour of the empire of the dear old Queen, so maybe he has a point.

On which note (roughly), this is a fun Flash animation about rebranding various national flags.

I love languagelog, which recently alerted me to RSPB website bans use of the word 'cock' -- being the Torygraph, it's only the second sentence before they ceremonially unroll of ""taking political correctness too far". The RSPB say Microsoft are to blame, but aren't they for everything? More amusing, this slightly older piece about the farcically inept automatic asterisking on iTunes: "One wonderful result of all of this is Lil' Kim's track listed in iTunes as 'S**k My Dick'."

Also from there, a great study about the relative blindability of different levels of neuroscientist by injection of irrelevant brain-waffle into psychological arguments. "Skolnick et al. observe that neuroscience has a number of properties that make it especially effective as a rhetorical distractor, beyond the previously documented (and more general) "seductive details effect" -- it points to reductionist and materialist explanations, it provides an almost unlimited source of jargon, it sits at the intersection of several high-status occupations, and (though not in this experiment) it offers pretty pictures."

Muhammad the second-most popular boys' name in the UK, when you aggregate the different spellings? Apparently so. But I would imagine they're pretty strongly socially clustered: how many Muhammads do you know on first-name terms?

Out of the top 20 listed there, apart from Muhammad I make it 7 Old Testament origin, 5 New Testament, 3 Celtic / Anglo-Saxon, 1 Greek, 2 Germanic, and 1 (Oliver) which I don't know where it came from before French. I guess OT names were popular when I was a kid too, but it was mostly differnet ones: David, Jonathan. And where are Paul and John? Not to mention Ringo.

Lastly, I see that while I was on holiday, Last.fm became evil. Anyone recommend a good alternative, other than Pandora, which I hear has had its own problems with the American copyright system?

Even lasterly, I thought this was quite good:

Has anyone seen one in the wild?

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

I always thought the trolleys reacted to a wire cast into the tarmac of the carpark.

I know one Mohammed, an American.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

reacted to a wire cast into the tarmac of the carpark

With some sort of inductive loop in their axles, which triggers a relay to put the brakes on? I guess so, although that's not vey exciting.

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

I'm officially fed up with the bitching about the Olympics logo... For gosh sakes, have some more interesting criticisms, Mr and Ms Phone-in.

Such as: "What IS Lisa Simpson doing to that poor man?"<sup>1




[1] - mercilessly filched from absinthecity who I think mercillesly filched it from rirekon</sup>

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

That so needs to be virally marketed...

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Also from there, a great study about the relative blindability of different levels of neuroscientist by injection of irrelevant brain-waffle into psychological arguments.

What a crappy study! I don't believe a word of it.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

That is just too meta for me to respond with anything other than a feeble ;-)

[triskellian]

Does anyone know of a tool that scrapes LJ poll results and converts them into CSV or some other readily-analysable format? If not, I'll write one, it surely would be too useful for words.
No. And I will not permit you to write one unless you also invent a time machine, and deliver it to me in April 2005, while I was doing this: metatext, because that involved manually and semi-manually converting over 8000 data points from LJ-poll format into something useful in Excel. <pout>

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of you, I must admit. Sadly I didn't know much about how to screenscrape stuff back then...

Well, at least you can help out yous of the future by telling me how you would have liked it to work? My thinking at the moment is that it exists as a web form on my server somewhere, you type in the poll # and it goes to that page, trees down through the individual question results, putting each into a separate CSV, then comes back to you with a list of them for you to download. One problem is that I think if the poll is concealed, it would need your login details to get the results, and I don't think people will be too keen to submit those.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

The trolleys aren't new - though your particular sort may work in a new way. They are, however, immensely annoying, because people keep ignoring the warnings and breaking them.

Small had 1 Mohammed in her class, but we're not a Muslim area, more African/Caribbean, where the opposite applies. To use a literary metaphor, if Muslim parents are like Tolkein fans, always voting for a single book, and WASP parents (at least the broad swathe of the middle classes) are like Rowling fans, clustered around a predictable handful of favourites (ditto Poles and Portuguese, just a different cluster), then African/Caribbean parents (some British, some not (yet)) are like Pratchett or Agatha Christie fans, not clustering at all and often giving their children names which are literally unique combinations of syllables. According to Google, there is literally no-one else in the world who has the same first name as either of Small's two best mates. (It's not just a Lambeth thing, according to Freakonomics it's a Black US thing).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

You mean the trolleys don't start working again when they go back over the line? That sucks!

Mm, I remember the Freakonomics bit on variant Jasmine spellings ranked by level of mother's education attained. Interesting stuff.

Although I think that in the actual West Indies, forenames aren't half so diverse as they are among children of West Indians in the UK. I suspect US black cultural influence has hit here more thoroughly than it has yet there.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

It's also of course partly an illusion caused by the fact the African families represent huge numbers of languages about which I know damn all. Dagmawi, for example, baffled me completely, but it's reasonably common in Ethiopia - he'll be spelling it out for the rest of his life in London though.

[a-llusive.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't mind the logo being crap; the problem is that it is vile and crap. Trolleys don't work cos when they go over a grid it tips some mechanical bitty, so if you lift them over the critical point they will still work.


Muhammad - and how many of them use their middle names on a day to day basis.
What was good?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Hmm, there was a picture there yesterday, I'll swear. Let me see if I can find it again.

[t--m--i.livejournal.com]

Three? Old dev boss, a testing manager, bloke who runs the takeaway (who calls all the women "darling" :D).
I may have forgotten some...