Status-Q

Figures are not finalised yet, of course, but these numbers strike me as revealing:

UKIP - 3.5M votes : 1 seat

Lib Dems - 1.5M votes : 10 seats

I'm not a political animal and have little interest in the overall results. And I'm no fan of UKIP.

But I am interested in algorithms, and it does seem clear that ours is rather broken.

Just over 14 years ago, in one of my first blog posts on Status-Q, I referred to the amazing fact that Apple, with the impending launch of OS X, was about to become, overnight, the largest vendor of Unix operating systems.

Unix was, up to that point, beloved of those of us working in universities and other scientific institutions, but was notoriously unfriendly to anyone not familiar with its highly-abbreviated command language. It sold in small quantities on expensive workstations, and the idea that the creator of the cuddly Macintosh was about to start deploying it on ordinary desktops seemed astonishing. In a little over a decade it would have evolved to be not only at the core of their mobile phones, but even on their watches!

Today, I fired up the Titanium Powerbook G4, the machine I was just starting to use at about that time.

For nostalgia reasons, I was revisiting the classic Mac OS, but back then I had been playing with the developer preview of OS X for a while, and when it was officially released I switched to the Mac and never looked back. I didn't realise that I had made quite such a transition at the time, but a few months later I wrote:

At CNET there's a comparison of Windows 2000 vs Mac OS X which comes out in favour of OS X. I'm a bit dubious about the higher OS X score for hardware compatibility, but it's pleasing none the less. I currently use 3 machines on a regular basis. One runs Win2K, one runs Linux, and one runs Mac OS X. They all have their pros and cons, but if I could keep just one, I think it would be the Mac. I find myself pining for it when I'm using the others and, for all its current limitations, the reverse is seldom true.

P.S. I noticed a couple of other things from those early posts. The first is that they are both called '[untitled]', because the convention of putting a title on blog posts hadn't been established back then. The second is that neither of the URLs I linked to still work now. Never assume the web is going to be a long-term reference archive unless you control the site yourself!

I had the honour of meeting Elon Musk briefly some years ago. Back then, he was just doing space exploration. There aren't very many people for whom you could write that sentence - even without the word 'just' - but for him, its inclusion is entirely appropriate.

Now, he seems to be doing... well... everything that's cool. I have since admired his orbital exploits, ridden in his cars, and, of course, bought a significant proportion of my purchases using Paypal - which helps pay for all the rest.

The latest product is apparently to be batteries - here's the new press announcement - but these are not your average AAs. They're wall-mounting.

At 10kWh, these could run a lot of LED lightbulbs for a long time. Especially if you're not also using them to recharge your model S.

They're designed to make it easier for solar-equipped households to depend less on the grid, especially by time-shifting the peak sunshine energy at noon to the morning and evening, when there's peak demand. That's not simply about being green: just a few weeks ago, visiting friends were telling us about the 'loadshedding' powercuts in Cape Town recently, where everybody got a scheduled two-hour outage each day to help cope with the insufficient power-generation capabilities in the country. This seems perfect for that, too.

Still, the next challenge Musk has to address is the really tricky one: the manufacture of solar panels which don't ruin the appearance of the building to which they're attached.

Apple recently released OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, which includes their Photos app - the replacement for iPhoto.

This is unlikely ever to become my normal photo-management and editing tool, but it does have some nice features, and it has more editing controls than you might at first realise:

Also available on Vimeo.

Tomorrow is the centenary of the start of the second biggest genocide in history.

Here's what I wrote about it ten years ago:

Who remembers the Armenians?

My wife's family, on one side, are Armenian. Her grandparents managed to escape the ruthless Turkish ethnic cleansing of 1915 by getting a boat to America, but most of the rest of their families were wiped out.

This is one of history's biggest and yet least-known atrocities, so it's refereshing to read Ben Macintyre's article What's the Turkish for Genocide?, which suggests that Turkey really ought at least to acknowledge its past before being allowed into the EU.

The question "Who remembers ... the Armenians?", by the way, was used by Hitler to reassure his generals that another holocaust they were embarking on would not be a long-term problem. It would be sad if any future dictators were still able to use the same reasoning.

The Norwegian Students' and Academics' International Assistance Fund have been making some brilliant videos to challenge the stereotypes that can creep into otherwise well-intentioned aid programmes.

Excellent stuff. The 'Who Wants To Be A Volunteer' one on their website is really nicely done, too!

Raises all sorts of interesting questions.

Many thanks to Simon for the link.

Very peaceful on Grantchester Meadows this morning.

John Naughton, interviewed by Tim Garton-Ash at the European Studies Centre in Oxford.

Holkham Beach in Norfolk is an amazing place. It's just vast.

Yesterday, the car park was packed, and the path from it to the beach a queue of people and dogs, yet when we got there and walked for just a few minutes, it looked like this:

A few more, and it looked like this:

(Yes, that's Tilly - you can click for a bigger version.)

Looking away from the sea, you get this:

And I'm fond of that, admittedly less exciting, view, because it features in the memorable closing sequence of my favourite movie.

Tilly absolutely adored it, and seemed to keep running, flat out, for about an hour and a half.

All in all, a most enjoyable stroll.

We're always amused by impressive-sounding descriptions which include sufficient qualifications to be almost meaningless. Rose just sent me this one:

"Lavenham is perhaps one of England's finest preserved medieval weaving villages"

Almost every word, after the first two, is a restriction. Let's read them backwards:

• We're looking at villages here, not cities, towns or hamlets.

• They need to be primarily associated with weaving.

• Medieval weaving, that is. Or perhaps medieval villages. In any case, other periods need not apply.

• Their character has been preserved.

• Rather well preserved, in fact.

• Only English ones, mind you. None of your Belgian weavers, for the moment.

• There may be more than one village meeting all of the above.

• Lavenham may be one of them.

• Perhaps.

Well, I think we can agree on that.