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The RSS feed for this site has moved to

http://www.insidecolinshead.com/?feed=rss2

, so if you could repoint your feed reader there, that would be best.

posted at: 16:26 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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The popular press has never really been able to paint the small collection of academics, minor aristocracy and football-obsessed billionaires who are how the general public sees the Russian community in Britain into an identifiable enemy, such as they have been attempting to do with Muslims, Sikhs in the 1960s, Czech Roma a few years ago, Poles last year and Romanians and Bulgarians at the moment.

What if the people suspected with poisoning Litvinenko had been Muslims? I don't mean here the government in Chechnya, of course. I imagine the tabloids would very quickly start to look even more like Der Stürmer or Jyllands Posten than they do at the moment.

posted at: 10:51 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Since the fall of the Byzantine Empire or so, Western education has mainly been concerned with preparing parallel corpora in Latin, Greek and the various modern vernaculars. We've been able to do this very cheaply by employing schoolchildren.

So where, given this huge resource, is the option to translate from or to Latin on Google, or any other search engine?

posted at: 23:11 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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As motorists get wealthier, they spend their money on ever bigger cars. This makes it harder and harder for people on bicycles to see where they're going.

Therefore, I have followed David Miliband's example and set myself a target. A target of growing four inches by 2050. This overrides my 1986 commitment to be six foot tall by 1994, which I have not yet, admittedly, achieved.

I have not yet worked out what sort of width commitments I need to be making to cope with the increasing thickness of car door frames.

posted at: 18:04 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

You can offset the cost of a flight from the south of England to the north of Germany for the cost of 200 ml of red wine in a Jena pub. There's something missing here, and I think it might be that you're only paying for your share of the emissions. Since almost nobody else on the flight will be offsetting, mightn't it be more sensible to just pay the amount you've paid Michael Ryan instead?

If you had to offset the entire flight yourself, it might make the train look rather cheaper.

posted at: 14:32 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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I've got it. We can make people realize how expensive carbon is by making them pay for it through parking meters. People who think nothing of paying GBP 1.50 for a cup of coffee will have fits of the vapours if Muckborough charges them the same for an hour's parking, and probably spend a fiver on fuel driving to Sharnley where you can park for nothing.

Fuel is still amazingly cheap, though. You can get nearly half a gallon of the dearest non-renewable petrol for the same as a pint of renewable beer. How is that fair?

posted at: 20:23 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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Every so often in the current press enthusiasm about free newspapers, someone says something along the lines of "But there is concern that advertisers could unduly influence editorial lines". Does anyone keep a list of this somewhere?

Searching the web for this, I was amused to see:

"€œMoradvertisers ask us to blur the lines between advertising and editorial,"€Nina Lawrence, publisher of Bride and Modern Bride, told Advertising Age.

as if wedding magazines weren't utterly and irremediably complicit in the wedding industry anyway.

Some time ago, I compared the Independent to taz. This is extremely unfair, because die tageszeitung carries practically no advertising, relying instead on personal subscriptions.

posted at: 12:24 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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There's an amusing bit of yesterday's Times on the floor over there. It says "TARGETING ASIANS: Is it common sense or racist?" for all the world as if 'common sense' didn't consist of prejudice, ignorance and misplaced certainty. I have no confidence in anyone who plans security on the basis of common sense.

posted at: 21:18 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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I thought I could keep separate languages apart in my head, but it took me ages to notice that the Gammel component in Gammelfleisch didn't use to be standard German, rather being familiar to me as a Scandinavian word for "old". Gammelfleisch, I assumed, was meat that was too old for human consumption.

According to de.wikipedia.org (translation mine):

"Gammel" is a Low German word, which means "old". Colloquially, according to Duden, Gammel indicates "cheap, worthless, unusable things of many sorts". Officially, the expression stands for food not fit for human consumption - the part of the catch which is used to make fish meal or fertilizer.

posted at: 19:30 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry

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Turing's original imitation game paper, which I'd never read until the other week, gets very strange indeed towards the end, but this may just be a product of my post-corporal-punishment schooling.

He says, after proposing a genetic algorithm (is this the first appearance in the literature?), of 'unemotional' methods of communication:

If these are available it is possible to teach a machine by punishments and rewards to obey orders given in some language, e.g., a symbolic language. These orders are to be transmitted through the "unemotional" channels. The use of this language will diminish greatly the number of punishments and rewards required.

There is a well-established field of machine learning. What could machine punishment look like?

posted at: 14:20 | path: /imitationgame | permanent link to this entry