Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been looking for something like this: Channel 4’s interactive medal table. I still want to see one that I can pivot by discipline, though.

Michael Johnson’s reaction was almost – almost – better than Usain Bolt’s spectacular 100 metre victory. Watch at the BBC’s site.

Paper and demonstrations of some gob-smacking video enhancement demonstrations. The basic model is to use video to capture geometry and dynamic lighting detail, but high-resolution stills to provide the texture mapping.

Utterly, utterly amazing. Also scary, in a ‘pictures lying to me’ sort of way. Well worth a look.

(via Chairman Gruber)

Amazing Flickr photoset from photographer Eric Lafforgue, from a holiday in North Korea in April this year.

A zooming development of TiddlyWiki. Gosh.

Firstly, the breathlessly monotone narration. But hey, the guy isn’t paid to be a presenter.

No, what really gets me is the flickering. Even with colour compensation (which is very neatly done, incidentally), the edge flickering makes my eyes go funny. Perhaps it’s not as bad if you’re using the software rather watching dodgy YouTube video of it, but still… bleurgh. I think I may have to have a lie down.

“A-level pass rate and A grades up” says the BBC, noting:

“Among the subjects showing increases were the sciences with entries for chemistry up 3.5%, biology up 2.7% and physics up 2.3%.”

Hurrah!

But hang on. The Joint Council for Qualification‘s bizarrely-90s website (it has an entry tunnel?! Is this a reflection on the falling take-up of ICT courses?) links to this PDF, the press release. Which notes:

“With a record 827,737 grades published for A-level this year (805,657 in 2007) … ”

That’s a 2.7% increase in entries. So… are science entries actually up proportionately, or up overall, or …. what?

Sure enough, the Telegraph’s full tabulation of the data – which, incidentally, I can’t find at the JCQ’s site – reveals that science entries are fairly precisely static as a proportion of the total. They’re up, but only by about the same degree that entries are anyway.

This is a marked improvement over declining numbers, which we’ve seen through recent years. But it’s not really the increase in take-up we’re working towards.

Not yet.

However pointless skills like this might be, I can’t help admiring them.

Stuck at your desk? Despite having a TV monitor on mine, I’m still watching the olympics on the BBC’s aggregator page. The video is higher-quality than I get through my aerial, plus it’s widescreen… and the automatic-updating text feed thingy is pretty cool.

Recommended.

Forget whatever Alicia Keys and Mick Hucknell (or whoever) are doing, this rocks.

[oooooh, OK. It’s by Adam & Joe. That explains why it rocks.]