Interesting Links for 12-10-2014

• Bill Gates has one skill. Sadly, he's never made any money from it.
  (tags: billgates )
• The search terms that lead people to relationship advice pages are illuminating
  (tags: search advice )
• California Aquifers Contaminated With Billions Of Gallons of Fracking Wastewater
  (tags: fracking oil water usa )
• About That ‘Common Core’ Math Problem Making the Rounds on Facebook…
  (tags: math learning education )
• 53 Reasons Living In Edinburgh Ruins You For Life
  (tags: Edinburgh photos )
• Below the poverty line: slum Britain in the 1960s
  I'd certainly like to hope that we don't have places as bad as this any more.
  (tags: poverty history UK )
• The best suggestion I've ever heard for an alternative Harry Potter approach
  (tags: harrypotter funny )
• "Best quote from Clacton by-election: "Yes I voted UKIP, the Tory MP has done nothing for years"
  (tags: politics UK )
• What makes for a stable marriage? (with graphs!)
  (tags: marriage relationships statistics )
• The truth about cows
  (tags: cows funny )
• 10 things female students shouldn’t have to go through at university
  (tags: university academia misogyny )
• This is what teachers think of Tristram Hunt's 'Hippocratic oath' idea
  (tags: teaching EpicStupidity UK )

Objects in the distance may be less Arabic than they appear

On the way into town for breakfast at the Edinburgh City Cafe, I spotted a symbol on the outside of a block of flats that I didn't recognise, but looked like Arabic to me.



I posted it on Facebook, and got a bunch of suggestions as to what it might be, and who might be able to help - including a few that it might be Hebrew instead.

Hebrew looks like this:

while Arabic looks like this:


And the symbols in the image looked more like the curves of Arabic than the angles of Hebrew. But a few people also suggested Masonic symbols, so I walked back down the road after we got home and took another, better photo:
( The mystery....resolved! )

I am not enjoying writing threaded code in Java

Every time I use Java I find myself wondering whether the people in charge of its libraries are determined to make everything harder than necessary.

In JavaScript I can use promises and chain code together like so:

http.fetchSomething(myUrl)
.then(function(result){return saveTheResultAsynchronously(result);})
.then(function(furtherResult){displayTheResult(furtherResult);});

And provided the various methods return promises each "then" will be called once the previous bit of functionality has finished running, allowing them to be chained together really easily.

C# uses async/await for make things easy too.

Java, on the other hand, has "Future" as a type, which is the equivalent of a JS Promise - but one that doesn't allow for callbacks. Your options are to either poll "is it done yet?" repeatedly or to block the thread. There's no equivalent of "Then", which makes it really hard to run code when something finishes, let alone chain asynchronous methods together one after another.

You'd think that "Do X, and then when X is done, do Y" would be a basic requirement for any kind of asynchronous processing, but apparently the Java library creators disagree...