October 2009 – Denseman on the Rattis

EN · MEDIA · WEB

Make movies without leaving your computer!

2009/10/30 22:45

I found a new website today called Xtra Normal.

It lets you make movies like this, and it’s quick and easy:

EN · HUMOUR

I want to park my car like that!

2009/10/29 18:25

EN · HUMOUR · LINGUISTICS · SWG

Schwäbisch schwätza uff Youtube

2009/10/26 14:03

I was raised bilingually. However, it wasn’t Danish and standard German I grew up speaking, as some people might think, it was Danish and Swabian (Schwäbisch). These days even my dad hardly ever speaks Swabian any more, and Swabian speakers aren’t exactly ubiquitous in Scotland, so it often feels like I’m the only remaining speaker. So imagine my joy when I realised that Youtube is positively full of Swabian videos, such as the following parodies! Obama: Star Wars: John Wayne:

EN · POLITICS

No respect for engineering

2009/10/23 15:18

Abandoned factory in Lurgan Originally uploaded by slinky2000 There’s a post on John Redwood’s blog, which has comments that largely are more interesting than the article itself. Do read through the comments if you’ve got the time. Here follow a few excepts. “Bill” wrote: “There are some exceptions of course, in the aerospace industry in particular, but manufacturing does not attract the brightest and the best, they go into the law, medicine, the city. Not so in Germany […]” “Mick Anderson” wrote: “As for “careers in engineering” […]

DISCOVERIES · EN · GADGETS · JA

Folding T-shirts

2009/10/19 08:14

This is an impressive way to fold your T-shirt: Unless you’re an engineer, in which case this is the way to go: If you like that idea, but don’t want to build it yourself, it seems to be available here. However, it seems that if you’re in the US Army, you don’t fold, you roll:

ECONOMICS · EN

A different perspective

2009/10/17 15:11

Illustrations, … Originally uploaded byCornell University Library John Redwood today is trying a new approach to explaining the scope of the financial crisis: Let us look at the financial plight of an imaginary Mr and Mrs Public Sector. They are on a good income of around £50,000 a year. They don’t feel it is nearly enough, as they are spending this year £67,500, financing the extra £17,500 from borrowing. They are lucky, because they do not have to pay any tax on the income, so what they […]

ECONOMICS · ELECTION · EN · POLITICS · SCOTLAND

Who to vote for in spring

2009/10/12 18:29

Vote Originally uploaded by Dean Terry I had been planning to blog this just before the next general election, but now that the main party conferences are over, I think the picture is clear. It’s obvious that Labour is an unmitigated disaster, especially under Gordon Brown. They claim to be progressive and prudent, but they’re centralist authoritarians that waste our money. Also, they’re dependent on public-sector votes to a degree that makes it unlikely that they’ll ever be able to shrink the public sector to any meaningful […]

EN · IT · PHOTOGRAPHY

Is this iPhoto?

2009/10/28 22:51

iPhoto ’09 oddness: Broken UI Originally uploaded by Chris Devers I’ve been playing around with iPhoto on and off ever since Complexli bought the Mac mini for me. In particular, I’m interested in face recognition. It would be so nice if all your photos could be tagged correctly to show who’s in them. However, I’m less than impressed with iPhoto’s performance in this area. One thing is that the face recognition on its own is quite bad. I appreciate it’s a hard thing to do well. It […]

EN · NEIGHBOURHD

Our new local shop

2009/10/27 20:20

Waitrose, Otley Originally uploaded by reinholdbehringer They’re building a lot of houses, business premises, a school and some roundabouts on some fields between us and the motorway. (That is, they started building them a couple of years ago, but most of them seem to have put on hold when the recession started to bite.) The posters also seemed to indicate that there would be some kind of shop. I always thought it was a great location because it’s so close to a motorway onramp, but I didn’t […]

ECONOMICS · EN

If the pound collapses…

2009/10/25 23:32

Few Pounds Originally uploaded by René Ehrhardt Of course the financial problems are not restricted to the UK, but as the recent news that this country is contracting shows, it’s definitely worse off than many similar places. That means that it’s not impossible that the pound will fall even further. So it’s worth asking what the effects will be if the pound collapses, e.g., to €1 = $1.50 = £2 (it’s £0.92 at the moment). Obviously, holidays and many importing goods will become unaffordable to most Britons, […]

DA · HEALTH · PREGNANCY

Stor baby

2009/10/21 23:11

Baby scan Originally uploaded by viralbus Som jeg sikkert har nævnt tidligere, skal Phyllis efter planen føde den 9. januar. Det betyder, at afstanden fra skambenet til toppen af livmoderen gerne skulle være 28-29 cm. Men da de målte hende i dag til et rutinetjek, var afstanden 34 cm. De sagde først, det sikkert bare var for meget væske, men de sendte hente til scanning for at tjekke. Men nej, det er rent faktisk pigen derinde, der er kæmpestor: De vurderer hende til at veje mellem 2500 […]

ECONOMICS · EN · POLITICS

Should only public-sector workers own houses?

2009/10/20 18:30

Mortgage Originally uploaded by Rev Dan Catt The FSA yesterday made a proposal to make it harder to get a mortgage. While it’s clear that some people have been allowed to borrow crazy amounts, I’m not sure that their new rules would help. First of all, for those of us who already have mortgages, what’s the consequence if we can’t remortgage? We’ll be left on the Standard Variable Rate, which at times can be much dearer than the deals on offer. So rather than protect consumers, the […]

EN · FOODDRINK · REVIEW

Modern curries

2009/10/18 08:18

I’ve already written about the wonderful Curry Secret cookbook, which shows you how to cook Indian restaurant food. Not only will it give you the recipes for dishes you’ve encountered in restaurants, but it will also teach you how to pre-cook the sauce and the meat, so that you can cook two curries in half an hour after work. So when the New Curry Secret was published, I bought it immediately. I assumed it would just contain more recipes and better illustrations (the old one was a […]

DA · GD · LINGUISTICS

Dyrø, Skid, Bredvig og andre skotske stednavne

2009/10/15 18:30

Islay-Sunset1 Originally uploaded by flickrbug De norske vikinger har haft en meget stor indflydelse i det vestlige Skotland. Det kan bl.a. ses på, at mange stednavne går tilbage til oldnordisk. Tag fx den lille skotske ø Jura. Dens navn kommer fra oldnordisk Dýr-ey “Dyreø” (med den østnordiske sideform Djúr-ey), hvilket blev lånt til gælisk som Diùra, og det ord blev så til engelsk Jura (på gælisk udtales ‘di’ foran vokal ca. som engelsk ‘j’). Det samme gør sig gældende for hundredevis af andre stednavne, som fx Skye […]

EN · IT · TYPOGRAPHY

TECkit

2009/10/13 18:17

After the Mac arrived last week, one of the first programs I installed was TeXShop. That caused me to play around with XeTeX, which – although it’s also available for Linux – I had never really got around to playing around with. One interesting feature I noticed immediately was the maps: When loading a font one can specify an input mapping like this: \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Gentium} and this will cause — to be mapped to – etc. I wanted to play around with this, but there didn’t seem to […]

ECONOMICS · POLITICS · WEB

Exchange rates

2009/10/11 18:28

Most people are probably aware that the pound has fallen a lot over the past two years, but it can be hard to visualise. I was therefore very pleased when I discovered this site, which plots the movements of currencies within a user-defined time interval graphically. To demonstrate, I asked it to plot the movements against the pound of five currencies (the US dollar, the euro, the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen and the Kiwi dollar) since the beginning of 1999 (when the euro was introduced). For […]

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