Lucky | Good

“Better to be born lucky than good,’ goes the old aphorism. Do you think there’s an exchange rate? Because, if there is, I’d be interested in trading some ‘good’ for ‘lucky.’ I’m cocky enough to believe I’ve a surfeit of ‘good,’ but right now I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot of ‘lucky’ floating around and waiting for a moment to make me happy.

The regular reader (hello, regular reader, how are you? That’s nice. The kids? Oh, excellent. Mind how you go) will have noticed that I don’t often blog about personal stuff. OK, so I don’t often blog about work stuff either – I mostly blog about inconsequential shit, come to think of it – but I certainly don’t blog about personal stuff. This likely explains the modest audience size of this blog, but also why I’m not ashamed to admit its existence to work colleagues. It’s a trade-off, see?

In a mild break from tradition, however, I’ll make a brief note. Pretty much purely in the interests of soliciting sympathy, you understand. Here we go:

Today, after a bit of a palaver, I singularly failed to win either the job, or the girl.

Result: I’ve had better days.

That is all.

Rhubarb

rhubarbRhubarb. Marvelous stuff, rhubarb. My family refers to the ‘ancestral rhubarb,’ which has been passed down through several generations, and when I’m in Leeds I often enjoy a visit to the National Rhubarb Collection at the Royal (coughNortherncough) Horticultural Society’s base at Harlow Carr, near Harrogate. The finest rhubarb in the country, of course, hailing from the famed ‘Rhubarb Triangle,’ between Pontefract, Wakefield and Leeds (or is it Wakefield-Leeds-Morley?). At one time, ninety per cent of the world’s rhurbarb production came from this area, and it was whisked to Covent Garden via the daily Rhubarb Express.

It was with delight and, indeed, pride, therefore, that I espied the attached advertisement in Monday’s Guardian. A special reader offer for this finest of vegetables! Oh, happy day!

Be sure to check out the magnificent Rhubarb Compendium – online since 1994, no less – for a detailed history, recipe suggestions, and a guide to using rhubarb as a hair dye. Also be sure to explore the Wakefield Council Rhubarb pages, and consider attending the 2006 Rhubarb Festival, or ordering the DVD.

One of my roads is missing

road_planing

I nip down to the shops, and what happens? By the time I return, the council have nicked my road. Planed it clean off. Pfah!

The notice of work was helpfully posted on our doors seven hours after work had commenced, but luckily I’d parked around the corner and therefore my car wasn’t one of those towed away. Meanwhile, I’m even more baffled about the roadwork done late last week; two chaps turned up and dug a small patch out of every junction down the main drag, went away for two days, then came back and filled them in again. There were no cables involved – I looked. They don’t take core samples of roadbeds they’re thinking of replacing, do they?

Still, I’m looking forward to having a nice shiny new road surface. Middle of next week, they reckon, though presumably that’s only touch-dry and we’ll have to leave it for a good few days to set properly. With heavy frost forecast for the weekend, too. Hmm.

Brain training

Cabel Sasser of Panic blogs about Nintendo’s DS game 東北大学未来科学技術共同研究センター川島隆太教授監修 脳を鍛える大人のDSトレーニング. Which, he assures us, translates loosely as ‘Brain Training.’ It’s a cartridge of logic puzzles and the like that’s sold over 400,000 copies. In a week. He has some interesting observations on the demographics (which isn’t a phrase I type very often), and about the environment that’s allowed the not-game to take off.

Aside from the fact that there isn’t enough madshit Japanese lunacy in the West, I’m still fascinated by the continuing popularity of brain-teasing games. Crosswords and Countdown are well-established, of course, but my mum’s been doing logic puzzles for decades, and judging by the range of books in the local newsagent, she’s not alone. What’s surprising about the recent Sudoku craze – aside from my having missed it so totally I first noticed the game when literally everybody in my Victoria Line carriage was playing it, which slightly freaked me out – is the range of ages to which it appeals.

And then, of course, we have all the older stuff, from tamagotchi to Rubik’s cube, and de Bono’s stuff (anyone else remember The L Game?).

Hmm. Perhaps it’s time to find the next de Bono.

Coffee flux

Kottke has a discussion here (a year ago, but roll with it) on the number of Starbucks within a five-mile radius of any given point. Bash your postcode into that store locator and see what you get – in my case, a maybe-the-world-hasn’t-gone-mad-after-all ‘8’, but there are places in the world where the number rises to over 160. No, I didn’t add an extra nought by accident.

Next up, some chap called Cory has calculated the centre of gravity of all Starbucks in Manhattan. That is, he’s found the spot that’s equidistant from all Starbucks franchises on Manhattan island (between 5th & 6th and 39th and 40th, since you’re wondering). At least, I think that’s what he’s done – the methodology isn’t entirely clear.

See, I’m wondering if Starbucks averaging should be calculated by a straightforward distance measurement, or if what you should really be considering is coffee flux – which presumably follows the usual inverse-square law? In which case, the centre is likely shifted. Indeed, there may even be several zero-points distributed over Manhattan island.

This, dear reader, is a breakthrough concept.

Coffee flux appears to be a vector quantity, with the initially-surprising property that Starbucks stores are – by inspection – sinks rather than sources. Further, coffee flux appears to interact with humans, drawing them along flux vectors towards the aforementioned franchises.

So if we can calculate the local minima for Starbucks coffee flux, based on a (presumed) inverse-square distance function from each sink point, we will have found positions of zero net Starbucks coffee flux. Effectively, Starbucks Lagrange points, where the pull of each nearby Starbucks store exactly balances that of all others.

I present the hypothesis that such coffee flux minima would be excellent locations to establish a chain of tea shops. Now: how do I present this as a business plan?

Building jet engines

Amazing article at FastCompany about building jet engines. General Electric’s Durham assembly plant is… well, unusual. It makes 400 engines a year, and there are 170 technicians, but only one manager.

The article’s a lengthy, but fascinating, insight into the radical working practices and methodologies employed. It reminds me of two other circumstances: first, the ‘flat pyramid’ management structure employed in the ThrustSSC supersonic car programme. And second… well… oh, people are going to take this the wrong way however I dress it up: it appears casually similar to the ideal of soviet-era factory planning.

Fascinating.

Bloody Daleks get everywhere

DSC00087Jack gave me a dalek bottle-opener for Christmas, which has a delightful twist: every time it opens a bottle, it yells ‘EXTERMINATE!’, in a voice that, oddly, sounds less like a dalek than it does like Jack doing an impression of a dalek. Since I like my beer to be exterminated before I consume it, the opener (also known as the best thing ever) has a place in my utensils drawer.

Only, this particular dalek has a problem with its targeting system, in that it recognises any metallic object as a bottle cap. Thus, every time I open said drawer it bellows ‘EXTERMINATE!’, sufficiently loudly to scare the willies out of me.

Bloody daleks.

CoverFlow

Recently, I was accused of there being insufficient Mac geekery on this site. No, really, I was. Ingrates.

Shuffle on over to CoverFlow, then, download it, run it, and gawp at its gorgeousness. It’s yet another iTunes front-end thingummy. I’m still using and loving Clutter (and still bereft at the demise of Sofa), but CoverFlow might just usurp all others simply by being outrageously beautiful. Plus I’m something of a traditionalist and, you know, I like listening to whole albums.

Right now I’m using CoverFlow to page through my iTunes albums, then Clutter to do Amazon searches for albums that are missing artwork and to copy the results back to iTunes, then reloading that artwork into CoverFlow. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s strangely satisfying and feels productive, though I’ve a sneaking suspicion I should be doing something else with my time…

Bootlegged!

I was so excited about this, I plain forgot to blog it – The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures 2005 (AKA ‘my most recent series’) appeared on the bootleg file-sharing networks. I’m so proud.

I found them at the ever-handy UKNova; here are the first four lectures, and the fifth. They’re torrents; if you’ve not done that before, you’ll need a BitTorrent client like (Java, cross-platform) Azureus or (Mac users) BitsOnWheels. Feed it the .torrent file, and wait… it’ll take a while.

To view the video, you’ll need a player like VLC. I’ve not quite got my head around the whole DivX video thing – I thought it was just an open-source MPEG4-compliant encoder, but quite often the files don’t play in supposedly-MPEG4-compliant viewers like QuickTime Player or RealPlayer. VLC usually copes, thankfully.