Interesting Links for 10-02-2012

[andrewducker]

• Gorgeous ASCII fluid simulation.
  (tags: text fluid simulation )
• 'Europe is poor so should live within its means'
  (tags: europe money globalization )
• Strunk & White's Elements Of Style - Wrong, wrong and more wrong.
  (tags: grammar writing english EpicFail viaFanf )
• Microsoft confirms Windows-On-ARM will not run your desktop apps, and will be locked to its app store
  (tags: windows8 arm microsoft )
• The Graphic Canon - 130 artists take on the classics of literature.
  (tags: comics writing art )
• How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy (by giving you parasites that change behaviour)
  (tags: parasites cats ToxoplasmaGondii )
• Bideford Town Council prayers ruled unlawful - separation of church and state in the UK?
  (tags: religion uk politics )

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Loving the ASCII fluid :) Could sit and play with that all day!

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

That thing about Europe being poor now is very interesting, very true I think. Going to be a very hard sell to our populations.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

read that yesterday. very interesting. probably true.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Actually, no.

"And you can't remedy that by printing money. Money is not something you just print. It must be backed by something, either good economy or gold."

Mahathir's understanding of what money is can be approximated to that expected of a GCSE student. It doesn't actually bear any relationship to reality.

Gold is not money. Seigniorage is money. But money itself is not money -- the wellspring of money is debt.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

His point that us Westerners need to focus less on finance and more on "real economy" stuff is well-taken by me. Finance has its place in a healthy economy, but that place isn't the predominant one that it's assumed lately.

-- Steve realises that "the West" is going to turn into a service economy eventually, but has no idea how that'll happen beyond that the services can't all be about tracking and allocating money.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

"Service" includes domestic service. Which is outsourced in the modern western lifestyle; if you're comfortably-off middle class you don't have a live-in cook or maidservant but you go to restaurants (where you time-share a cook's services) and maybe pay a cleaner.

We do, as it happens, manufacture stuff. But what happened to agriculture has also happened to manufacturing; it's crashed from employing >50% of the population to around 5% while maintaining the same (or greater) output.

[chess]

Every now and again I think it would be nice if the UK got over its chronic aversion to domestic service.

There are a lot of people who are unemployed who may well be quite happy cooking and cleaning and tidying for people, and a lot of people who are employed and have great trouble with that kind of thing (mostly in the computer / tech side of things) and would cheerfully pay someone to do it if it wasn't so socially awkward to do so.

But there are all kinds of social connotations that make me feel dreadful just expressing the view - there's a massive, crushing weight of 'only elitist, abusive types keep maids, it's infantilising to have someone else pick up after you, it's degrading to have to pick up after someone else without actually being their mother and them being a child' which I'm not sure has any actual factual basis and I think might be baggage we could do with getting rid of.

On the other hand, I've never been a cleaner myself, it's possible there's some kind of intrinsic rather than societal reason that it's considered low-status work that everyone should have to pitch in with rather than laying the burden of it entirely on a specialised worker...

[andrewducker]

I know a couple of people that have cleaners.

My problem is always that I can't face the idea of someone else seeing how messy I am...

[chess]

Yeah, my husband has that too, which is why we can't employ a cleaner - a mix of 'I am territorial and don't want strangers on my territory' and 'I am ashamed that I can't clean up after myself'.

I think there's a very middle-class 'be ashamed that you haven't cleaned up after yourself' meme there which is probably actually destructive - it causes people who are crap at cleaning (and could spend their time more valuably doing more Science or whatever they're actually good at) to force themselves to clean things, whereas a specialist cleaner could do a much better job much faster and more efficiently...

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy to an extent.

[simont]

Pedantic objection! In that fluid simulation I spotted at least U+00A2 CENT SIGN, U+00A4 CURRENCY SIGN, U+00B6 PILCROW SIGN and U+00BB RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK.

I suspect it is in fact an ISO 8859-1 fluid simulation, but I'm prepared to revise that guess to full Unicode if anyone spots an even more exotic character. It isn't an ASCII one, though :-)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Good catch!

Haven't spotted anything more outré with a casual glance, but I note that the page itself says <meta charset="utf-8"> at the top. Static analysis of the likely propagation to the character set actually deployed in any given browser, locale and OS configuration is left as an exercise for the reader.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

And actually, it looks like it's using a tiny subset of characters specifically chosen to represent a gradient of density, and he's been playing around with different options - see the top of fluid.display.ascii.js

[simont]

Ah yes. And one of the commented-out options included U+2022 BULLET, which would have required expanding to Windows-1252, but the current set fits into 8859-1 just fine.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Classics Illustrated rides again.

Edit: a one line post and I get it wrong. *sigh*

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Groovy

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I speak as an atheist who lives not that far from Bideford:

Is it just me or is the atheist councillor who felt so "disadvantaged and embarrassed" by other people saying prayers to the extent that he had to leave the council nothing more than a drama queen who needs to grow a pair?

[andrewducker]

No, he needs to get them to stop holding up official meetings with their religious nonsense beforehand.

If they were holding a gay pride ceremony at the start of every council meeting I'd feel likewise. Council meetings are for getting on with council business.

Edit: particularly as prayers can carry on, provided the councillors aren't summoned. So they can gather together 15 minutes early and do all the praying they want, they just can't make it part of the actual meeting. Which seems entirely fair to me.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a Christian, I agree with you. I'm really very surprised to hear that prayers happen in secular council meetings, as an official part of the meeting.

It would be fine in the meetings of, say, a specifically Christian charity - I think even if some employees weren't Christians, as long as they understood when joining - but very odd in the meetings of a secular charity, business, or council.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Eric Pickles disagrees with you (and me).

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

I can't readily read the Elements of Style pdf on my phone, but had to note that I'd prefer an Oxford comma in the title. :)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Of course Strunk & White are crap. Fowler is the one to use.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Fowler isn't great either, according to Pullum (who wrote that article).

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I worshiped Strunk&White when in highschool, but the age of needing Absolute Rules gradually passed, especially as I observed that it contained a lot of nonsensical blither that ignored the ways real human beings actually use the English Language. To be fair, it's a pretty good guide to writing Advertising Copy... but that isn't what I want to write (or read).

The article on Toxoplasma Gondii was a bit disturbing because I've been puttering-around, for about five years, in a Community Gardens ("Allotment" in the UK) plot that is frequently visited by many Neighborhood Cats, and I can check off all too many of the symptoms described. (Mind you, the disheveled clothing dates back at least 60 years to a conscious decision that concentration on physical appearance is silly, and the caution about the nature of what food & drink people serve me dates back about 50 years to the (Toklas, as it turned out) spaghetti sauce and (Special) brownies several people served at an s-f club meeting -- at the residence, moreover, of someone who had a House Rule against external Drugs.)