Introduction to Black Holes
Newtonian physics versus relativity! 44 minutes of astronomy fun. Love it.
BoE cuts rates by 50bps to 0.5%…
…along with £75bn of quantitative easing which is expected to increase M4 money supply by 3.5%.
And so it begins.
Here’s a nice table from Dresdner:
Educate yourself!
At Academic Earth, Ivy League professors lecture on topics like the financial crisis, climate change, the human brain, international politics, and astrophysics (for the real nerds).
Just played a few video lectures, some very interesting topics. Found the site to have a very accessible and crisp UI which makes the world of difference to the user experience.
Here’s a short clip about perseverance in entrepreneurship:
Biblio-Text: West End Lane Books
Mental note to pop in here more often - it’s only around the corner.
What kinds of books do you sell and why?
Owner Graeme Estry: “We are a local community independent, and take pride in serving our community as closely as possible. Therefore the bookshop is the result of a 15 year dialogue with the community, and they tend to want an intelligent and literary general stock, more curated and bespoke than a Waterstones or Borders. We also try to provide as much interest in and above our community mandate, and attract ‘outsiders’ with our specialities in imported titles, deluxe editions, graphic novels, Jewish interest titles, meticulously chosen sale stock and of course, experimental and avant-garde poetry, for which we have an international reputation. We have also previously had large sections on Japanese Literature, Russian Literature, Independent Publishers and Beat and Surrealist literature. These special sections change with the seasons.”
Calendar comet
Hmm, so there are nine of these square root days each century - today is one of them… and the next one is in 7 years.
![(photo via: topherchris)
From wikipedia:
Primer (2004) is an American science fiction film about the accidental invention of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a former mathematician and engineer, and was completed on a budget of only $7,000.
The film stars Carruth as Aaron and David Sullivan as Abe, two engineers who create a device which will allow an object or person to travel backwards in time. The pair initially use the device to cheat on the stock market, but ultimately they cannot resist the temptation to meddle with every aspect of their lives. Through recklessness they create increasingly complex paradoxes, and ultimately their newfound power begins to destroy their friendship.
Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to dumb down for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that “anybody who claims [to] fully understand what’s going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar.” The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in cinemas, and has since gained a cult following.](http://28.media.tumblr.com/u69Ix9iWTkjhr6km8CL1pFTPo1_500.png)
(photo via: topherchris)
From wikipedia:
Primer (2004) is an American science fiction film about the accidental invention of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a former mathematician and engineer, and was completed on a budget of only $7,000.
The film stars Carruth as Aaron and David Sullivan as Abe, two engineers who create a device which will allow an object or person to travel backwards in time. The pair initially use the device to cheat on the stock market, but ultimately they cannot resist the temptation to meddle with every aspect of their lives. Through recklessness they create increasingly complex paradoxes, and ultimately their newfound power begins to destroy their friendship.
Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to dumb down for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that “anybody who claims [to] fully understand what’s going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar.” The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in cinemas, and has since gained a cult following.
UNIX time since…
…the UNIX epoch will be 1234567890 at 23:31:30 GMT today (Fri 13 Feb 2009).
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
— Keynes
http://www.lovelycharts.com - not bad at all for a free flash app, simple and intuitive and just what I need.
(via aja)
Got to stage 1 in Dec 06 just before I left Tokyo. Succumbed to stage 2 in Jun 08 (@flowoflight) after seeing an exponential increase in users and thought that there must be something in it. There should be a stage 2A, where tweeting is just a means of logging personal things you find interesting or significant. Well that’s what I’m doing (for now).
Twitter can be many things, much more than I can list in 1 min: ultra-micro blogging; always-on open networking; a narcissistic ‘live-node’ feed; facebook status updates on steroids; pure info overload (would I read 100 tweets per hour or even more?).
Twitter is already ‘mainstream’ in my definition, it doesn’t feel like a mid-size community anymore. I tweet via sms and it feeds to my blog so it’s handy in that respect. Am I bored of it or have I just not explored its full potential yet? I suspect it’s the latter. There’s a lot more to the Twitterverse than meets the eye.
How do you even begin to harness its collective intellect? Need to spend a bit more time on this one.
TfL
This warrants a note for posterity. So the Central line was screwed at rush hour this evening and I wanted to go from Bank to Oxford Street.
Bank tube was jammed (severe delays, usual mumble), so I re-surfaced and went to the nearest bus-stop on King William Street. Looked at the sign and there was a TfL info line (0207 code as well), so I called it expecting to be on hold and/or not get through to anyone anytime soon. Pressed ‘option 2’ and was put through to somebody straight away, who spoke perfect geezer English.
“Hi, which buses go from Bank to Oxford Street?”
“Hold on a sec… [5 seconds]… get the number 8 or 25 on Poultry mate.”
“Cheers.” </click>
2 minutes later I was on the bus, still pretty surprised that somehow this process seemed unnaturally efficient for London. If you use public transport every day in London, you’ll understand.
Fair enough, it’s a simple bus route, 20 mins in a fairly straight line east to west… but still.
That’s just great. No tube, bus or train services. London has all but shut down due to mad snow.
