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

[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.