Why are people so credulous?
March 30th 2008
What a load of shit, she clearly cannot make a single correct statement.
Archive for March, 2008
Arithmetic is a great bollocks detector
March 29th 2008
Go and read Pupils to get ‘new world’ trips from the beeb.
You may think “trips abroad for kids, great” , if you are more cynical you may think “heads choose the kids, not sure I like that”.
Let us do some arithmetic, 100 kids for 6 weeks each for £1.4M.
- £1400000/100 = £14,000 per child
- £14000/6 = £2’333 per week
- Assuming a 40 hour working week, £58/hour
Of course its not that simple, the kids clearly don’t get all the money as if they had a 6 week job. I think a few marketeers in the UK, all the necessary admin by the British Council will do away with some of the money too, but I can’t imagine any way this is good value for the country or any organisation involved (I am not cynical enough to suggest that for the BC the point is to administer it.)
Hows about giving 1000 kids £1000 spend in a country of their choice, you could get them to bid for the money and report back with diaries and photos etc. All the £500′s the government paid into child trust funds for children with low-income parents could become a good jolly fund for them when they hit 18, or they could get driving lessons and a car – not a bad deal, particularly if their folks contribute anything else to the fund along the way. That or 18th birthday parties become 5 day benders in estates around Britain.
tomFS
March 26th 2008
As some of you may know I am unusually interested in filesystems. After sending John a link about HAMMER, a new FreeBSD clustered FS and joking about starting a tomFS project, his reply offered some help deciding on features it should have and marketing it.
tomfs can process a huge number of operations in parallel, just not necessarily the operations it should be processing, and it might get bored with some of them and forget about them sometimes.
tomfs stores redundant copies of anything it detects as documentaries or spoken word.
tomfs is very easy to port – a couple of bottles should do.
Cracked me up.
PS: Only perhaps 5 of my friends would get this, but I know at least 3 of them read this so no bother.
Geotaged Photos on Flickr, Macbeth
March 23rd 2008
See the flickr map view or the album.
I walked all over New York yesterday, went along the east side all the way to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. The place is amazing. Not quite as good as the British Museum in my view but still a great place, perhaps the architecture is better, I wish I had longer in there.
Macbeth was amazing, same director who did The Tempest that I saw in Stratford. It had very sinister nurses as the witches and Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth was incredibly erotic. Patrick Stewart was not great actually, his monologues – particularly the dagger speech – were not as good as hers. Go here and here for 2 more detailed reviews.
Tommy In New York
March 20th 2008
Landed at 2.30pm yesterday, went straight to our Wall St office and got on with helping them move office. Went and got a bit drunk to help with jet-lag (Being bladdered and knackered in 2 time zones is better than one… or something)
Got tickets today to go and see Patrick Stewart in Macbeth tomorrow. I saw him in Stratford in The Tempest as Prospero a couple of years ago, he was superb. It’s at BAM, I am looking forward to it.
Got the weekend to myself so I will take in the sights and go to the Guggenheim. I was not excited about being here till on my commute this morning I saw a real life NYPD car.