What I like about this image is that, though it could come from various parts of the world, it very clearly is not in a British suburb.
Transport and housing, Italian style
April 26th, 2016
The joy of gender
April 21st, 2016
Quite often, when I have a meeting scheduled with a Chinese person, I don’t know their gender in advance, because I can’t guess it from their name.
This just adds to the fun, but I had assumed this was simply because I was an ignorant westerner. It appears, though, that it is in general more of a challenge in Chinese than it is in some other languages, and fortunately there are technical solutions to help you out if you need to know, based on the statistical usage of certain Chinese characters in male and female names.
A nice way to play with this, for any language, is to construct a URL of the form:
http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gender/<firstname>/<lastname>/
and you’ll get back a JSON string telling you, for example, that Jean Renoir is probably male, while Jean Smith is probably female. There’s a -1..+1 scale showing the confidence.
If you know the country, you can add the ISO code on the end, so it will tell you, for example, that Jean Smith is rather likely to be male if he/she comes from France:
http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gender/Jean/Smith/fr
Quite fun.
Act your age
April 19th, 2016
Is growing up really necessary? If so, I hope one of my friends will tell me before it is too late.
Yesterday, I caught myself putting on my reading glasses to tie up the string on my yoyo…
Motherhood is a universal language
April 17th, 2016
David MacKay
April 14th, 2016
Very sad to learn that we have lost Prof Sir David MacKay today.
David was a good friend, but I only realised quite recently that we were almost exactly the same age, a fact which I found exceedingly humbling.
If I should be granted twice as many days, and achieve half as much, I would be very happy. And very surprised.
The world is poorer for his passing. But much richer for his having lived.
Pronto?
April 12th, 2016
The bus services that connect the little hill towns around here with the larger settlements on the Amalfi coast are quite remarkable. The bus drivers not only manage to squeeze their special, shortened buses through the sometimes tiny gaps on these small mountain roads with less than an inch separating them from the nearest wing mirror, but also to negotiate the tight hairpin bends without making the passengers feel sick. All the normal jokes about Italian driving don’t apply here. I have nothing but admiration for them. The ticket pricing is also pretty good.
But there’s a problem.
They’re too punctual.
We missed the bus back up the hill from Positano this evening: we arrived about 30 seconds late and so had to wait another hour. But we had also missed the one going down in the morning, when we arrived about two minutes early, to see the bus just departing about two-and-a-half minutes early. We didn’t want to wait for the next one, so we walked down by the steps. All 1700 of them.
What I want to know is, why can’t they be more like other southern-Europeans and take a more relaxed approach to timing? Me, I blame Mussolini…
Local residents
April 11th, 2016
I’ve seen dozens of these little chaps over the last few days, but few that have let me get as close as this.
After the rain
April 9th, 2016
The view from our balcony just now. And yes, it really did look like this…
The welcoming committee
April 7th, 2016
We’ve moved from a British coastline to an Italian one, for a few days.
In the words of Chris de Burgh…
April 5th, 2016
“There’s nothing quite like an out-of-season holiday town in the rain”
Hiking into the future
April 3rd, 2016
Today I realised there was yet another reason why I want a self-driving car.
It’s for when I’m walking.
The challenge with going for a good long walk in the country is often finding a nice circular route that will bring you back to where you parked the car.
But imagine you didn’t have to do that. Imagine that you could just walk from point A to point B and the car would be waiting for you when you arrived. You could then ride home in comfort, or, perhaps, enjoy lunch from the picnic hamper in the boot before setting off for the next reunion at point C. You could do this for days.
What’s even better is that you wouldn’t need to know your destination in advance! You could wander lonely as a cloud, floating o’er hill and dale, until you spied a welcoming tavern. While enjoying a pint of their finest ale, you would summon the car, and it would be parked outside by the time you wanted to leave. (And take you home, of course, if the ale had been particularly fine…)
An aerial view of the past
April 1st, 2016
Queens’ College in 1947, before the modern architects got their hands on it.
The Britain from Above website is fun to explore – you can search it for archive images.
Here are views of Cambridge, starting in the 1920s.
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