Status-Q

My friend Martin pointed me at a rather unusual and rather delightful web page. Take a look...

Davina Bristow has a few nice optical illusions in this Telegraph article.

Here's one.

The faces of this cube are, in fact, the same colour. Davina suggests a way to confirm this by cutting holes in a bit of paper which hides the surroundings - on my Mac I used the Digital Color Meter utility which shows the top actually to be slightly lighter in this rendition. It's the edges of the faces, and the appearance of a shadow, which causes us to deduce that the top is grey and the bottom white.

Thanks to Claes-Frederik for the link.

It’s uncanny. Just last night over dinner I was commenting to Rose that the flowers on the table were still beautiful even though they were wilting.

And I then went upstairs, looked at John’s blog and saw his lovely photo of the ageing roses on his windowsill.

So here’s my contribution to the genre…

Excellent...

If you, or a friend, are a new Mac user, you'll appreciate Adam Pash's Guide for switching to the Mac, which introduces you to things like the most important keyboard shortcuts. Nicely done.

John quotes from Joel Stein's lovely rant in the LA Times. Here's another bit:

Huge portions of my e-mails come from people who haven't even read my article. They're just assuming, based on a headline or an excerpt on a blog, that I'm unpatriotic or irreligious or lecherous. Sure, they happen to be right, but it would have been nice if they had clicked on my column and moved me up on that "most-read articles" list. A lot of e-mail screeds argue that, in return for the privilege of broadcasting my opinion, I have the responsibility to listen to you. I don't. No more than you have a responsibility to read me. I'm not an elected servant. I'm an arrogant, solipsistic, attention-needy freak who pretends to have an opinion about everything. I don't have time to listen to you. I barely have time to listen to me. Part of the problem is that no etiquette has yet been established for the hyper-interactive world. And I, born before MySpace and e-mail, don't feel comfortable getting a letter and not answering it. And then, if I do, suddenly, we're pen pals, with all those pen pal responsibilities.

Full piece here. (Free registration needed)

I've written before about some of the great talks available online from the TED conference. Here are a couple I've just watched, and would definitely recommend:

• Dan Gilbert talks about what really makes us happy, and the research that shows how bad we are at predicting what really makes us happy.
• Oxford Statistician Peter Donnelly explores the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics, and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials.

Both good stuff. And the wonderful thing about having a Mac Mini sitting under my TV as a PVR is that I can use iTunes to subscribe to the RSS feeds of things like this and watch them from the comfort of my sofa...

Paul Bissex has a lovely example of the power of Python - a Quicksort implementation in 99 bytes.

>>> q=lambda s:s if len(s)<2 else q([x for x in s[1:]if x<s [0]])+[s[0]]+q([x for x in s[1:]if x>=s[0]])
>>> print q([9,7,5,3,1,8,6,4,2])
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
>>>

If you unwrap it to make it a bit more readable, it's doing this:

q=lambda s:
   s if len(s)<2 
   else 
      q( [ x for x in s[1:] if x<s[0] ] )
     +[ s[0] ]
     +q( [ x for x in s[1:] if x>=s[0] ] )

Very nice! Needs Python 2.5. If you don't know the Quicksort algorithm, here's how it works.

2007 is starting in an interesting way for me - with jury service.

I can't, of course, say anything to anybody about the cases I may be involved with, but I can still communicate with the outside world thanks to the 3G connection on my phone, at least while I'm in the jury lounge waiting to be called.

I wonder if this is the first blog entry to be posted from within Cambridge Crown Court?

...here's a story about some of Apple's problems, too. One lawsuit...

...is over Apple's use of a copy-protection system that generally prevents iTunes music and video from playing on rival players. Likewise, songs purchased elsewhere aren't easily playable on iPods.

The claim is that they're creating an illegal monopoly. It's certainly true that songs purchased from Apple can't easily be played on non-Apple devices or software. But there are numerous routes which make it far from impossible. And songs purchased elsewhere in CD or MP3 form can, of course, be played on an iPod. Of the 3000 or so tracks on mine, only about 200 came from Apple, so I'm hardly 'locked in', and I knew when I purchased them that I would need to use Apple stuff to play them. Songs purchased from other places in other formats are often not playable because they employ the copy-protection technologies of an earlier illegal monopoly. Actually, it's amusing to contrast this complaint with Microsoft's strategy - their content doesn't even play on their own player! The "PlaysForSure" copy protection used by services like Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo, Movielink and CinemaNow is not supported by Microsoft's Zune, and users who purchased content expecting ongoing support from Microsoft are now disappointed. Napster, Rhapsody & co are probably even more disappointed. But PlaysForSure doesn't play on the iPod either. This seems like a lesser offence to me! The moral of the story is, of course, that proprietary formats are dangerous, and whenever you buy anything in some non-standard format you should think of it more as a lease than as ownership. Buying all of your music in Apple's Fairplay format is like storing all of your documents in Microsoft Word format. It's very convenient now, but you must bear in mind the fact that access to this data may be denied you in future, so you need to take steps before that happens to make sure that anything of value is backed up in a non-proprietary manner.