It’s Diwali tomorrow (Deepavali in the South today).
Abstinence is hard but a Shubh Diwali to one and all.
Not everything is sweet, but what isn’t sweet is fried!!
All that I have to abstain from
Diwali abstinence image from facebook
Archive for the ‘Trivia’ Category
Abstinence for Diwali
November 10, 2015A shadow of a selfie
October 23, 2015Autumn sun and long shadows.
Shadow of a selfie
And one equals two and 2=3, 4=5……
October 9, 2015I haven’t seen these in a long, long time but a 12 year old reminded me of the fun available with algebra when messing with hidden zeros and square roots:
And if one equals two….
Why shouldn’t 4 be 5?
Evolution of the desk
October 5, 2015Update: I am informed by the producer of the video that the attribution of the original video below should be to Best Reviews, http://bestreviews.com#reviews
My apologies to Best Reviews.
Published on 20 Oct 2014
video courtesy of: bestreviews.com/best-computer-desks#history-of-the-computer-desk
photography by dougthomsen.tv / engineering by anton georgiev
Only problem is that my desk actually looks like this:
A port in motion
October 1, 2015Just watch. Especially the tall-ships “parking”.
Port of Amsterdam during Sail 2015
No collisions.
Another first for Sweden
September 28, 2015Sweden’s claim for a seat on the UN Security Council will of course, be enhanced by this further example of global leadership.
From Expressen:
“We want to give everyone who loves hamburgers a unique experience”, says Selma Felic, responsible for national campaigns at McDonald’s. For the first time in history it is now possible to book a table at McDonald’s. In just over 30 selected restaurants around the country it is possible to reserve a table and additionally get table service. This is due to the launch of the new gourmet burger Maestro Classic. Dinner sittings are bookable on the selected days at bookatable.se/mcdonalds.
“Now that we can offer a really good quality burger, so we want to launch it in a fun and exclusive way. Therefore, we shall let our guests sample the gourmet hamburger by reserving a table and thereby feel extra welcome to us”, says Selma Felic. The menu offered for dinner reservations is two-course – where a Maestro Classic constitutes the main course.
Table reservations can be made in bookatable.se/mcdonalds and on selected days between 29th SEP and 9 October The resrevation will be valid for upto four people at 19:00.
Hollande reaching for the heights
September 24, 2015From Kaspar von Erffa
French President Hollande with the captain of the French National basketball squad Sandrine Gruda
To each as he deserves
September 13, 2015(Based loosely on the Latin Suum cuique rather than the German Jedem das Seine with its connections to Buchenwald).
- Monarchy/ Dictatorship: To each as the King may determine
- Communism: To each, as the State determines
- Socialism: To each, as the State determines he needs
- Liberal Socialism: To each, as he desires or as the State determines he needs (whichever is lower)
- Liberalism: To each, as he desires
- Liberal Conservatism: To each, as the State determines he deserves or needs (whichever is higher)
- Libertarianism: To each, as he deserves
- Conservatism: To each, as he earns or the State determines he deserves
- Capitalism: To each as he earns
- Fascism: To each of us, a brown (or black) shirt, and whatever the whim of the State may determine and as the mood takes the State
Other Variations:
- Christian State: To each, as much as he can accumulate and hold but with the right to suffer mentally to gain eternal salvation
- Islamic State: To each true Muslim male, a road to paradise paved with the corpses of infidels
- Jewish State: To each Jew, as much as he can take or earn and hold
- Buddhist State: To each, a right to maintain the status quo for Nirvana in the next life
- Hindu State: To each true Hindu male, a white shirt, baggy khaki shorts, a staff and a night out with a Bollywood starlet
Magic is to physics as Heineken is to the human body
September 10, 2015Magic already fills all the spaces that physics cannot reach.
Take spacetime (you can just as well call it the mellifluous aether which carries gravitational waves from the sun to the distant reaches of the solar system where other beers cannot reach).
The stretched rubber-sheet analogy to explain spacetime and gravity is just that – an analogy. And not a very good one as xkcd has so well illustrated.
spacetime magic — by xkcd
“Spacetime” is a label for any mathematical model which combines space and time into a continuum. It is just a model. But why that model should apply is magic.
Spacetime is just an imagined structure of the universe and is imbued with mathematically-defined properties such that “spacetime is distorted by the mass of bodies which exist within it and these distortions, in turn, affect the motion of those masses”. A somewhat circular argument which does not explain the “why” or the “how” beyond “it must be so, because it is so”.
Spacetime does not explain the existence of gravity. It merely shifts the need for magic to explain magical attraction (labelled gravity) to another place where physics cannot reach. In a universe where motion is not independent of time, and where the very duration of time can vary as a consequence of motion, even the magnitude of the 3 physical dimensions become variables subject to the observer and his motion. Not to mention that mass can be energy and some of both can be dark. Neither mass nor energy nor momentum can any longer be conserved, because phantom dark energy can be called upon and injected into the equations whenever it is needed to explain the unexplainable. And to have a “phantom” class of undetectable, unobservable dark energy which is doubly undetectable, does seem to go over the top. Rather than just put dark energy and dark matter, and even phantom dark energy into the category of magic, intrepid physicists have invented new classes of unknown, unobservable, undetectable, sub-atomic particles. Some have charm and some have spin. Some have properties which are as yet undefined but will be sufficient to the explanation required to be constructed. Why not just call them “magic particles”?
Physics no longer goes for the parsimonious explanation. Big Physics seems nowadays to be based on introducing complexities wherever possible rather than looking for the least complicated explanation which is sufficient to the explanation. For every ultimate, fundamental particle that is “found”, but found wanting, two further magic particles have to be invoked.
Of course, there is a Grand Unified Theory which explains electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions and naturally there is a Theory of Everything which even explains gravity. It is quite simple and sufficient to the purpose. It is called Magic and it occupies all the spaces that Physics cannot reach.
It is time for a Heineken. Now if I could only remember the right spell and the right incantation to go with it, ………
Good breeding, wrong result?
September 7, 2015The success of any breeding program must, in the first instance, be measured by the numbers of descendants and whether the line continues or not. Any line of descent which ends with an individual, no matter how successful or useful a particular individual is (or was), is then a failed line of descent. In terms of survival of the breed, each of the 7 billion people alive today is equally successful. It is all those who leave no descendants who have – from a breeding perspective – failed.
Each living person has much the same number of preceding generations and preceding ancestors as the next. From the beginning of modern humans (say 120,000 years ago) each person alive today is the product of around 6,000 generations. And so I am a little amused when some claim a “superiority of breeding” – or “good” breeding – just because they know the names of 10 or 50 or 83 individuals along one of their lines of descent. Even 83 out of 6,000 is fairly insignificant. From a breeding point of view the only point of significance is if a line continues.
There is even a claim in China that a direct descendant of Confucius was
K’ung Te-ch’eng (23 February 1920 – 28 October 2008) was a 77th generation descendant of Confucius in the main line of descent. He was the final person to be appointed Duke Yansheng and the first Sacrificial Official to Confucius –Wikipedia
But considering that Confucius’ genes would have been diluted by the order of at least 1/ 230 (one in a billion) in the following 77th generation, it is of little consequence genetically. But “Confucius’ family, the Kongs, have the longest recorded extant pedigree in the world today”. The father-to-son family tree, is now in its 83rd generation (2,600 years) and it does at least signify a successful and continuing line of descent. There are thought to be about 2 million descendants of Confucius alive today.
In comparison some of the British aristocracy can identify father-to-son family trees perhaps back to the 13th century but more usually from about the 15th or 16th centuries.
But knowing the names of some of ones ancestors – and even 83 out of 6,000 generations seems quite trivial – says very little about “good breeding”. Even the poorest, most miserable, most unintelligent person alive today has as long a pedigree as any British aristocrat or any of the descendants of Confucius. The key point, of course, is that a person knowing none of his ancestors – but alive today – has been just as successful in the breeding stakes as anybody else alive today. And that person’s breeding has been more successful than all the blue-blooded aristocrats whose lines of descent are now extinct.
And that is why I found this story in The Telegraph both trivial, interesting and amusing:
Rift at Longleat over ‘racism’ towards Britain’s first black marchioness
It is known as one of Britain’s most eccentric aristocratic estates, where elaborate murals of the Karma Sutra adorn the walls and the head of the family, the Marquess of Bath, cavorts with his mistresses, or “wifelets”.
Now family relations have become even more fraught at Longleat, the vast Elizabethan seat in Wiltshire, after the heir to the estate accused his mother of racism towards his half-Nigerian wife.
The rift between the marquess’s son and heir Ceawlin Thynn, Viscount Weymouth, and his mother, the marchioness, is so bad that she was not invited to his wedding, …….
The marchioness, who has spent more time at Longleat since the death of her long-term lover in France, is said to ignore her son’s wife when they cross paths in the grounds of the estate.
Emma McQuiston, who married Viscount Weymouth in 2013, is the daughter of a Nigerian father, oil tycoon Ladi Jadesimi, and British mother, Suzanna McQuiston. She will become Britain’s first black marchioness when her husband inherits the title from his father.
McQuiston has known the Bath family since she was a child, but when the couple announced their engagement, Viscount Weymouth, 41, claims his mother asked: “Are you sure about what you’re doing to 400 years of bloodline?”
The viscount told the Sunday Times that his 71-year-old mother has no contact with their baby son, John, because, “I don’t want him contaminated by that sort of atmosphere and those sort of views”. …….
I note that the Marchioness is Hungarian and that the current Marquess of Bath has had up to 70 “wifelets” living on the estate.
Good breeding, wrong result?
The k2p blog 