“Things that are made from organic material age and decay, especially when they stop being alive. A piece of home-baked bread, say, left on your kitchen counter, will get moldy relatively fast. Lord knows what some ground beef would smell like after a week. But the artist Sally Davies has been photographing one McDonald’s hamburger and fries every day for 137 days. They look basically exactly the same.” via GOOD
Most of the examples of people doing crazy shit on an iPad are to show that said shit is possible, not efficient or even practical. If I really wanted to, I could hobble my way through a game of tennis using my iPad to hit the ball, but it doesn’t mean my iPad is an excellent or even passable tennis racket.
I don’t mean to get all ranty here, but I find the endless grandstanding about the iPad’s content creation facilities to be a little tiring.
Or to hit the issue from the other direction, there are people in this world who can bang out a kickass rhythm with a couple of spoons, but that doesn’t change the fact that the main function of a spoon is to eat delicious soup.
FlowingData posted a chart created from info from the World RPS Society entitled How Do I Win Rock, Paper, Scissors every time?, which attempts to improve your RoShamBo* (UK: Scissors, Paper, Stone) technique using psychology.
Maybe their psychology is sound, but unfortunately, their grasp of mathematics ain’t so good.
If you “know your opponents [sic] next move will be Scissors or Paper,” don’t throw Rock. Because then you have a 50% chance of winning, and a 50% chance of losing. No sir! You want to throw Scissors, with a 0% chance of losing and a 50% chance of winning.
I admit, it doesn’t give me much confidence in the rest of the chart.**
* I still can’t read the word RoShamBo without hearing Cartman shout “I’ll kick you squar in the nuts!”
** I’ll leave the analysis of the strange phrase: “a firm indication of predictability is to come out with the same throw three times in a row” to the linguists out there.
“ Tattoos are horrible and they never come off. Walking around with a tattoo is like perpetually screaming: “I should not of done this!” at the top of your voice. ”
Jeremy Hunt, the Culture, Media and Sport minister has decided that the Film Council is too expensive as has to go. Only, actually, the Film Council makes money, roughly 400% on investments. By cutting it, he is losing money.
Go read the rest of the post for operationmargarine’s hypothesis for the real reason behind the Film Council’s closure. It is depressingly plausible.
When Americans call the British newspaper the London Times, presumably due to some assumed correlation with the New York Times, or just to distinguish it from the same.
Sometimes, realising that this isn’t quite right, they call it the Times of London, which, although slightly better, still implies that “of London” is part of the name of the newspaper. cf. the way other British newspapers never seem to have the word London inserted into their names. e.g. “the British newspaper the Independent”.
