in which we get down…to the unconscious!

March 27, 2009 in music, rationality, statistics

So somebody reviewed 1,302 songs by the same number of bands, giving each one six words only. But how to centrifuge this toxic dump? Clearly there was no possibility of scraping the page and wget-ing the lot; Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is shit) applies to music as it does to few other things. I [...]

fail

March 25, 2009 in admin, hacker, Python, surveillance, Viktor

You may have noticed that the Viktorfeed is down. The server it runs on was updated last night to the new version of Debian, including a new Python installation, and Something Went Wrong involving the conversion of strings to struct_time values. If you do this on my laptop: Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 10 2008, 18:01:57) [...]

gaseous Goodhart

March 22, 2009 in China, economics, Green

China’s top climate change negotiator wants the Chinese export sector to be excluded from their targets, and “consumers to pay” instead. This is not good news. For a start, the tactics. It means accepting the principle of letting some special interests off. We know, after all, that there will be the mother of all lobbying [...]

Holbrookespeak, you listen!

March 22, 2009 in Afghanistan

This sounds a lot like sense to me. Richard Holbrooke thinks destroying Afghans’ poppy crop is stupid: “It hasn’t hurt the Taleban one iota,” he said, “because whatever money they’re getting from the drugs trade, they get whatever they need whether we reduce the acreage or not.” The US said last month that poppy cultivation [...]

Pyongyang: no carrier

March 22, 2009 in 4GW, cultures of war, hacker

HYPOTHESIS: Anyone who uses the word “cyberwar” where they could use the phrase “network security” is one or more of the following – a) incompetent to discuss the issue, b) trying to sell something to members of a), c) lying. EVIDENCE: This ridiculous drivel at the sad husk of what DefenseTech used to be before [...]

shooting bits off the zombies

March 22, 2009 in computer, managerialism, NHS, politics, programming

There should be a special term for the phase in the adoption of an idea between the point at which everyone accepts its desirability, and the point at which it wins over other ideas politically. This isn’t the same as the point of implementation; it’s quite possible for your idea to go into practice, but [...]

tearing up the astroturf

March 22, 2009 in action, fisking, intelligence and stupidity, Internet, special relationships

Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads has a hell of a story. Now, I’ve not always been totally convinced by Tim; he spends an inordinate amount of time pursuing minor politicos for breaches of netiquette I think I’d just forget. But two of the crucial principles of journalism can be summed up as the clam ethic – [...]

the Israeli occupation of Harrowell

March 22, 2009 in Uncategorized

More Dadadodo. Here’s some Daniel Davies: The rule was founded in its Allied Masonic Daniel Davies industry; completely! This seems to go on strike; the state of international Economics and philosophical heroes Subcomandante Marcos Will be done about two might be the Grand lodge of its Allied Masonic Service Association reports in, Dubai the heck [...]

The truth caught out in stockinged feet

March 21, 2009 in conservatives, hacker, ideology, language, mastur/metablogging

After some fiddling I got Jamie Zawinski’s Dadadodo, a program which analyses texts using a Markov chain and then generates random sentences based on their content, running. Obviously there was only one way this could go – straight to Melanie Phillips’ blog. I reproduce below the output from the machine, verbatim. DOCTYPE HTML public Melanie [...]

meet the new boss…

March 15, 2009 in ideology, intelligence and stupidity, politics, socialism

Ruth Sunderland of The Observer (aka Decent Pravda) is on a campaign for more women on the boards of big companies. It’s a worthy aim in itself, but I don’t believe for a moment it will address any of the things she thinks. In fact, the problem is that it’s nowhere near radical enough. For [...]