Interesting Links for 29-01-2012

• Have some awful, awful jokes
  (tags: funny jokes )
• New ideas sharpen focus for greener aircraft
  (tags: green innovation Technology airplanes )
• Why Newt Gingrich's ideas for a moon base are so awful.
  (tags: thefuture astronauts moon space )
• New drug may keep you sober no matter how much you've had to drink (if you're a rat)
  (tags: alcohol )
• A fantastic answer to the question "Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?"
  (tags: estimating development software )
• 3Reich.us - for all your nazi collectible figures!
  (tags: toys nazi )
• Some interesting discussion in this article of how easy it would be to replace the head of RBS for less money
  (tags: money banking pay wages rbs )
• Why Eating Fat Doesn't Make You Fat
  (tags: diet fat health )
• Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice
  (tags: IQ conservatives Intelligence Racism )

Songs in the key of Aperture

via draxar

Goes on for slightly too long, but terribly entertaining anyway.

Why you should never talk to the police

A brilliant lecture by a defense attorney explaining why it is never in your interests to talk to the police:

The bit at the end where a police detective talks about why he's right, and what they do to get a confession is also fascinating.

I didn't watch it when it first made the rounds a couple of years back, but thanks to annwfyn Julie and I watched it this morning, and I'm very glad we did. It's worth the time.

A long awaited party

Last night was ashfae's 33rd birthday party. Which is, of course, the age at which hobbits come of age, and thus involved everyone dressing up on LOTR-style (or vague approximation).

Costumes varied between Julie and I as "Some of those background people from Helms Deep":

(Julie in an awesome dress she found on Ebay, me in my brother Hugh's LARP gear)

to the awesome efforts put in by Hal (WINOLJ) as Gimli, son of Gloin:


and the delightful stylings of erindubitably as The Dark Tower of Barad-dûr:


There were lots of other good costumes too, and we both had an awesome time. Thanks muchly to fyrie for lots of organising, and randomchris for keeping lots of awesome food coming and general awesomeness.

Stupid marketing tricks

I subscribe to Daily Science Fiction, who handily email me a short story once a day. They vary in quality, but there are enough good ones to keep me going.

A week or so back they had one that I wanted to share, so I went to the website to see what the URL for it was so I could share it on.

And discovered that you can't do that - because the email subscribers get the stories a month ahead of the website. And, of course, the chances of me remembering after a month is near zero.

Why on earth would anyone do this? You're taking the people that care the most about SF short stories - the people that you want out there actively promoting your site, and making it extra hard for them to tell people about your product.

And as they don't actually send ads to the email subscribers, they don't get anything out of this barking state of affairs.

I am starting to understand why people loathe Java

In C# I can create a dictionary that has ints as keys and strings as the values. I can then look up the value of any string using the int key. Dead simple. If I want an array I can use something like myDictionary.Values.ToArray() and I get all of the values in a string[], because it knows what type everything is. That's what generics are _for_.

Providing I am using Java correctly, I'm creating a HashMap<long,string> (and it has to be a Long, because you can't use primitive types, for some bizarre reason), and then the "put" method does, indeed, mandate that I'm using a Long and a String, but the "get" takes an object, and the toArray returns an array of _objects_. What the fuck? What is the point of specifying types if the compiler is going to just ignore them?

I feel terribly spoiled by working with a language which does what you bloody well tell it to, rather than being a half-assed job to give you the appearance of doing something useful without finishing the job.