Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-18-2010

[andrewducker]

• Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography
  (tags: infographics design inspiration visualization illustration infographic graphics)
• UK banks only profitable because of government support - and have been for quite a while.
  (tags: banking uk government)
• Living within 300m of a freeway associated with doubling your autism risk.
  (tags: autism pollution)
• Google Body Browser. Very impressive (only works in the latest Chrome Beta though).
  (tags: google body health science visualization anatomy)
• The BBC has a 4 minute 33 second video about the John Cage work. A most unusual experience.
  (tags: silence music bbc video)
• This pretty much sums up my opinion on Predator 2. (I'm the one saying "WHAT?" in the first panel)
  (tags: movies predator comic)
• Ofcom are going to tweak the way that phone numbers work in the UK. Seems like an improvement, especially for mobile users.
  (tags: Telephone phones mobile_phones uk)
• Prisoners serving fewer than four years to get vote
  (tags: law voting)
• Woman With No Fear Intrigues Scientists
  (tags: brain fear research science psychology)
• If you buy a digital file then you're not covered under UK consumer protection legislation.
  (tags: digital music technology)
• Why we need an impact assessment of drugs policy
  (tags: drugs law government uk)
• I hear the past was in Black and White - pairs of photos of the same locations from the past and present. Fascinating.
  (tags: photography scotland history)
• Mobile phone masts correlated with sharp rise in birth rates
  (tags: statistics funny mobile_phones technology science)

Comments

[fub.livejournal.com]

It is refreshing to read an article in mainstream media that explains correlation and causality in such a clear way. More people need to read this -- I've posted it on my twitter and will report in my LJ. Thanks!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's a good one. The Guardian's science pages tend to get actual scientists to write stuff, which makes a nice change.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

Just don't read the comments on the article - far too many people are missing the point!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

True, but there are some gems, like this one:
"Two possibilities

The sight of a mobile phone mast creates associations in women's brains and stimulates their sexual appetite.

It is easier to have sex when talking on a mobile phone, than when talking on a fixed line phone."

[draconid.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did quite like that one. :)

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Which article was that?

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yes, well written. It exposes the fundamental flaw in the data:

"As the population of an area goes up, so do both the number of mobile phone users and the number people giving birth."

Wha---? The birth rate figure is only meaningful in this context if it's expressed RELATIVE TO THE POPULATION DENSITY!!!!! Otherwise, it's just balls. The number of Tesco Metros is proportional to the birth rate; doesn't mean people are screwing in the aisles!

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Digital files... WTF?

Scotland in black and white: the golf course one is particularly telling.

Ofcom: hurrah. But how do we fit all the mobiles in 07, and need three digits for landlines? 03 for pseudo-local business lines sounds like a good idea.

I can't remember which Predator film is which, or which I've seen.

[andrewducker]

I believe that all mobiles are currently under 07. There's space under there for a billion or so numbers, so we should be just fine.

The first Predator movie is Arnie in a jungle. The second one is Danny Glover in New York. Both are awesome, in quite different ways.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

So how come we had to give London 02 numbers?

[andrewducker]

Good question!

I assume that back in ye olden days things were broken down more by area code, and bits inside London were assigned 01xx. Not sure how it works now.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Oh I can tell you all about how London codes went. It was a mess.

When I was a kid, it was simple: all of Greater London was (01), followed by 7 digits.
Then around the mid-90s they split it into inner and outer London, and it was 071 and 081. These were shit, and splitting London was stupid because it drove everyone nuts trying to remember whether someone was 071 or 081. They should have back then just gone to 8 digits, which was effectively what they'd done but just stupidly.
Then only a couple of years later the national change to the 1 prefix (ie 0482 to 01482) came in, so it became 0171, 0181.
Then they reunified London to 020 and 8 digits, with the new 8th digit being 7 or 8 accordingly, which was what they should have bloody done in the first place.

But why they needed a whole new code in the 2s rather than find a nice 01x code I don't know. Other than to make London feel special of course.

[andrewducker]

Apparently it's to provide spare capacity. According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Number_Change
some areas were close to exhaustion. There's a nice history of all the chances here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom#Splitting_01_for_London_into_071_and_081

which makes it clear that _all_ of the changes that happened were part of one plan, which was come up with in the 80s. Seems altogether more organised than anything we might do nowadays (IPv6 being a prime example).

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Oh right, they needed the 01 to be freed up.

I still reckon it would have been easier to have London go 8 digit with the first change -- say to 071 for all of London and add the 7/8.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, hm. I agree letting people in prison vote is probably a good idea, but I genuinely didn't think it was a problem at the moment, so I was surprised to see the change made until I saw it had come from Europe. I'm also trying to think, of all the random stories about human rights imposed from Europe, if there were any I disagreed with, and I don't think there were, which seems quite positive!

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've seen a theory (probably in The Brain that Changes Itself, a book about neuroplasticity) that autism could be caused by early exposure to white noise.

The hypothesis is that brains develop to pull signal out of experience but white noise has no signal, and brains get miswired.

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

I did a couple of comparison shots using Edinphoto's archive when I was bored one summer - have a look here for the flickr set. It's really good fun. I bet there's some sort of phone app you can use to do this nowadays.

[andrewducker]

Wow. Those are great. Thank you!

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

So, if digital files are not considered "tangible goods", and we do not get the same protection when buying them, logically copyright infringement can't be considered stealing, and the owners can't expect the same protection when we do so. It goes both ways.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Haha! Nice!

[0olong.livejournal.com]

...But of course, copyright infringement has never been considered stealing, legally speaking.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

This much I know, but I've found it impossible to convince some people of this definition.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

People are desperately stupid sometimes.

It also conspicuously falls outside most literal definitions of the word 'theft'...

[andrewducker]

Yeah, trying to define negative and positive property is usually the first step in these discussions, and then their brains turn off, and it doesn't end well...

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I always make sure to call it "copyright infringement".

And then usually throw in snide remarks about how the penalties, particularly in America, for copyright infringement are often larger than for real theft, assault, drunk driving with manslaughter...

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

"Dr. Volk and her colleagues found that living within 309 meters of a freeway (or just over 1000 feet) at birth was associated with a two-fold increase in autism risk. [....] The researchers found no consistent pattern of association of autism with proximity to a major road."

============

A freeway is not a major road? Ohhhkay. Or do I mean 'Very well.'

[andrewducker]

I assume they broke things down into "minor roads, major roads and freeways" or something like that.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

And yet the public (and arguably some members of the government, at least when caught on camera) still expect the banks to provide low interest credit (credit here meaning "people spending money they don't have") to individuals and small businesses and free banking.

Apparently the small business are "struggling" because the photogenic ones interviewed can't get credit. Whether or not they're telling the whole story (some evidence suggests they're usually not), if THEY are struggling and expect someone else to bail them out, why not the banks? If those people think that the banks should suffer, why should the banks suffer but their badly thought-out business be bailed out?

Sure, the banks are all up shit creek, and it's a mess mostly of their own doing (though not entirely, the mess was entirely government and public-backed from the lowest to the highest level), that doesn't mean you can expect things to go back to how they were.