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…
Read More in which we get down…to the unconscious!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)[GCC 4.2.1…
Read More failChina’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…
Read More gaseous GoodhartThis 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…
Read More Holbrookespeak, you listen!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…
Read More Pyongyang: no carrierThere 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…
Read More shooting bits off the zombiesTim 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 –…
Read More tearing up the astroturfMore 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…
Read More the Israeli occupation of HarrowellAfter 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…
Read More The truth caught out in stockinged feetRuth 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…
Read More meet the new boss…