Category: Culture

Name and shame

It turns out that nominal determinism has something to it…

A news story reporting on a study of school performance in Germany reports what anybody who has read Freakonomics already knows. Names can cause all sorts of dramas.

The Freakonomics blog linked to this news story which explained a little bit about why all the staff are deserting the PM’s office.

“The name Kevin was perceived as being linked to especially poor behaviour and performance, with one study participant even writing that, “Kevin is not a name – it’s a diagnosis!””

This is a German study so these names don’t look like orthodox Australian names – but the study of 2,000 teachers found that people with normal names turn out better.

“The study reveals that the names traditional names such as Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob are consistently linked to strong performance and good behaviour. Non-traditional names such as Chantal, Mandy, Angelina, Kevin, Justin and Maurice, on the other hand, are associated with weak performance and bad behaviour.”

October 23, 2009

Why I tell the Tractor Joke

Mark asked me what the webcomic with the blackboard was. It prompted a return visit to Surviving the World. This edition perfectly sums up why I tell the tractor joke…

October 22, 2009

YouTube Tuesday: Monkeys and Segways

I really can’t think of anything interesting to say about this video. It speaks for itself.

October 20, 2009

The man of your dreams

Over at Ben’s blog during the inimitable Monday Quiz your host, Ben, asked a question about reoccuring dreams.

Kutz admitted to having a dream about a randomly appearing head that would pop up all over his parent’s home. Freaky.

What’s freakier is that people all over the world report seeing the same man in their dreams. This man. Have you seen this man? If you have you should check out that website.

October 20, 2009

ATTN: Chavez plays air guitar

Auto tune the news (which I’ll acronymise to ATTN) is my new favourite YouTube feature. It’s very clever. Though I’m sure I’ll get sick of it soon. Here’s the latest…

October 19, 2009

How to find a new favourite band

I really like Muse. I have for years. They’re at that stage though where so many people like them that it’s not cutting edge any more. And if there’s one thing I like being it’s cutting edge… Even my sisters like them now. Despite years of complaining when I played them back when I was living at home… it happened with Powderfinger too. And I probably would have liked U2 once… while it’s sad that my musical taste is so dependent on the taste of others, that’s not the point of this post.

How do you find a new favourite band? I found this post via some bookmarking service (Digg, or Reddit, or What’s hot in Google Reader – I can’t remember which). You can use mathematics to find a new band. And the results look promising.

“Now let’s see. I take a sample of 215 bands including those on top of the Billboard 200 (who are these people?) and calculate an average number of plays per each listener (via last.fm data). All things equal, the higher the average, the the more devoted the band’s fans are.”

Then you graph it…

“Each red dot is a band. Y-axis represents the total number of the band’s listeners, the x-axis represents the average number of listens per each band’s fan, the blue line is the “alien average”. The swarm in the left bottom corner is the “moshpit of doom” – your band is nothing special in the public’s eyes if you are there.”

If a band has a huge amount of listeners then it probably appeals to some common human emotion and everybody can enjoy their songs. If a band has little listeners, but plays per listener (PPL) rate is high, it must mean the band was able to appeal to some sort of less common emotion and the higher the PPL the harder it is to substitute the band by some other band.

This is a graph using Coldplay as the base…

And here’s how you find the music you should try out…

The things you can do with technology…

October 18, 2009

How to write a book

One day I’d like to write a book. With the help of the character guide I posted a while back, and this helpful plot flow chart, my dream is a step closer to reality…

October 15, 2009

YouTube Tuesday: the Auto Tune edition

Better late than never…

Some science… with Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan

Some news…

Some advertising…

And finally, a joke you can play on your minister…

October 15, 2009

MasterCh(i)ef

I made that little picture myself. I thought it would’ve been done to death, but I found no evidence of that online…

Did everyone catch Anna Bligh on celebrity Master Chef last night. What a laff. Queensland produce was centre stage… right up until the second ad break. When the Queensland LNP took out a sixty second (I think) ad calling the Labor Party a pack of liars – with a nice, intense close up of a nice, intense looking Anna Bligh.

Unfortunately they couldn’t really capitalise on their ad. The call to action was the LNP website – sadly it seems to have been hacked. If you google LNP google gives you all sorts of warnings about the site not being safe. And you eventually get to an LNP holding page announcing maintenance.

Here is the graphical evidence…

October 15, 2009

Bookkeeping

It’s been a while since I plugged booko. It’s very handy. You can price match on books from online retailers. And it’s an Australian site…

I bought a batch of books last week – including Ratio – the conceptual cook book Simone was looking for many months ago…

October 14, 2009

Pay it forward Japanese style

Kottke.org linked to this guy’s Japanese holiday story about a cool cafe concept.

They guy bought an orange juice – and was given an apple cider and bag of lollies… he was confused, and asked the cafe staff what had happened. The cafe had this rule”

At this cafe, you get what the person before you ordered. The next person gets what you ordered.

Which is pretty bizarre.

Before they left the guys who found this place got into the spirit of things.

“Mike went up to the cafe, slapped down a couple thousand yen (~$25), and ordered a little bit of everything: some ice cream, some snacks, some candy, some drinks, a Japanese horn-of-mysterious-plenty intentionally set up as a shocking surprise for the next lucky customer. (After his order, Mike received single iced coffee.)

As we walked away from the cafe, with just the right amount of delay, we heard an extremely excited “arigato goazimasu!! thank you so much!!” yelled in our direction, from an ecstatic mom and her equally excited young son. They truly appreciated the surprise.”

Here’s a translation of the rules from the cafe…

  1. Let’s treat the next person. What to treat them with? It’s your choice.
  2. Even if it’s a group of friends or a family, please form a single-file line. Also, you can’t buy twice in a row.
  3. Please enjoy what you get, even if you hate it. (If you really, really hate it, let’s quietly give it to another while saying, “It’s my treat…”)
  4. Let’s say “Thank You! (Gochihosama)” if you find the person with your Ogori cafe card.
  5. We can’t issue a receipt.

October 10, 2009

Magic fail

Or is it? At the very least it made me laugh.

October 7, 2009

A question of gravity

In the spirit of pointless science here’s an exploration of the gravity of Super Mario’s world in each Mario release.

First, you must find the time it took Mario to fall from the edge of the ledge to the ground in each game. To do this, we opened each clip in Quicktime movie player, and using the frame by frame option, found the total number of frames it took Mario to fall. We then used the formula:

Time = (Number of Frames) / (Frame Rate)

To find the time of each of Mario’s falls. Once we knew the time, we needed to figure out the distance Mario fell in each game. We used a screen shot of Mario next to the ledge he fell from in each game, and found the height of Mario and the ledge in pixels. According to Wikipedia, Mario is “a little over five feet tall.”, so we used 5 feet, or 1.524 meters, as Mario’s height.

Turns out they’re getting closer and closer to real world conditions – which is a shame – because Mario’s success depends on his ability to leap tall pipes in a single bound. Read the rest of the study here.

“We determined that, generally speaking, the gravity in each Mario game, as game hardware has increased, is getting closer to the true value of gravity on earth of 9.8 m/s2. However, gravity, even on the newest consoles, is still extreme. According to Wikipedia, a typical person can withstand 5 g before losing consciousness, and all but the very latest of Mario games have gravity greater than this. Also, with gravity that great, it is a wonder Mario can perform such feats as leaping almost 5 times his own body height!”

October 7, 2009

Gold diggers

We (Australians) ain’t nothing but a bunch of gold diggers. It turns out Australians are all rejoicing about our golden soil, and the national wealth for work equation.

Australians, according to the Economist, have the most positive self image.

It’s with good reason because figures just released show that we’re also the second most desirable country to live in, based on the range of factors considered by the United Nations Human Development Index… behind Norway.

October 6, 2009

YouTube Tuesday: Kid ay?

If the North Queensland lifestyle had an iconic album it would not be Kid A – despite the reference to an endemic verbal tick. Ay.

Pitchfork has just listed the top 20 albums of the decade. And Kid A was number one. Here’s a nice little paragraph from their review.

“Radiohead were not only among the first bands to figure out how to use the Internet, but to make their music sound like it, and they kicked off this ridiculously retro decade with the rare album that didn’t seem retro. Kid A— with its gorgeously crafted electronics, sparkling production, and uneasy stance toward the technology it embraces completely– feels like the Big Album of the online age.”

And here’s a live version of the first song from the album…

October 6, 2009