Cool things I found this month

Unfortunately, I feel like I haven't improved over the past month.... So here are some cool things that I learnt and links that I found instead.

How to commit electoral fraud

I voted in the election this month but I didn't have my polling card and they didn't ask for any ID either. When my mother went to vote with hers they said she had already voted but I hadn't. So there you are, if you want to commit electoral fraud at any point in your life it's very, very simple. You can also just take someone else's polling card and use that. Again, you don't need ID.

Various links

How will the market and conversation around death change?

If you believe in capitalism, you should believe in feminism

You can send a link to the person next to you via sound

A visualisation of the trillion fold increase in computing power

The LightPhone is the best featureless phone I've seen

The Snoopers Charter

(Source)

Video: secure messaging and credible news

If you worry about the security of your messages, try Bleep. It even gets around how people can just screen grab the conversation. You don't need to sign up with an e-mail and the chat is secured. Seriously! It's pretty cool!

Did you know that eating chocolate helps you loose weight? Thank's to a study in Germany we can now eat chocolate and stay healthy! Or can we? As this long article details you can't trust every new study that comes out. I like to think of this as the next dihydrogen monoxide scandal. I bet you'll see people quoting this study for years to come. Thankfully, the internet is forcing us to be sceptical about what we see online and the iO9 article notes that many of those that commented on these 'news stories' asked the questions that the journalists in question should have asked themselves.

The video above is kinda related, it was commissioned by a Brazilian news company to demonstrate why you should get your news from a reputable source. Interesting video and great artwork.

Inspired by the... Sky?

I took some photos of the sky! My finance got in the way. He's pretty cool though so it's okay.

Read More

Week 2 in Japan

So, unlike last week nothing has really happened! We've had a few drinking parties to meet friends of the family here but otherwise we've been working on the farm cutting eggplant and boring things like this!

Yesterday (13/11) we went to Sawarda after work. I didn't really understand what we were doing there ( all we were told was 'we're going for a drive!' ) but in the end it was pretty fun! The area we went to was full of old looking buildings.

The leaflet says that Sawarda was recognised officially as a distinct area 300 years ago by the Tokugawa Shogunate, the new merchant class then self governed the area. Most of the buildings along the Ono river (which you can see in the picture) were storehouses which then took goods to Tokyo/Edo by boat. The area grew really prosperous which led to 'Sawara Culture' of trying to outdo Tokyo/Edo culturally.

One of the places we visited was the house of Inoh Tadataka who wanted to measure the size of the earth. He created the first accurate map of Japan by travelling on foot for 15 years around the country. He started from his house and the monument here translates to 'From this first step'.

Tadataka's house was really dark and plain, the person that took us, and the person who owns the farm said that when he was younger he lived in a house like that and he really hated it because it was so dark. 

This was only a small part of Sawara, if I can muster the energy on my next day off I'd like to go back again and see the rest!

Also, fun fact:

Hokkaido was called Ezochi in the Edo period!

江戸時代に北海道は 蝦夷地と言う。

This is the view from the smaller greenhouse around lunchtime. I thought it was warm in the UK! It's snowing in Hokkaido and amazingly sunny here. 

That's what I said but it's pretty cold here in the evening since we're in a traditional Japanese house. We're still going to bed early because it's warmer to do that! Also, it's nice getting 8 hours sleep! Since I haven't done that since university it's strange...

Day off in Sawara! Not much going on but there's lots of nice views and it's very sunny today! Boyfriend thought it would be cold so we're both wearing lots of layers! 

The above are Google 'Auto-Awesome' photos. We visited the shrine and walked around there. There was lots of empty coffee cans which we picked up and put in the bin. Later on I wanted to walk back to the farm from the station but we only got so far before one of the friends of the family pulled over and offered us a lift! Boyfriend thinks that this was our thanks from the god of the shrine. Probably not but it was pretty good luck for him! (I still wanted to walk)

Attempt to take photo of food. I don't think I'll do it again... It was yummy and looking at it now makes me hungry. We went to Denny's for lunch although despite what you might expect I don't think they sold a single hamburger! We've been eating lots of Japanese food so it was nice to have something we recognised from the menu! Saying that, all the food had a Japanese twist. This is my dessert (not a main meal) and the ice cream is green tea flavour and it has sweet red beans from Hokkaido as the side topping.

I also found this at the drugstore... These are Sailor Moon branded sanitary towels? I've since been informed that it's not uncommon for girls who grew up in the 90s to call their menstrual days 'Sailor Moon's visiting day' so rather than this being a random campaign it's a company picking up on trends. Still a little strange... The towels have little moons and starts printed on them and they come in different sizes and with or without wings! They're actually a full range.

In other news Dia from The TaxPayers' Alliance will be on BBC Question Time this week so you should watch it and be amazed at the TPA's awesome stance on everything. I'm also physically incapable of staying away from the new website now that it's launched.... So far I have not logged into the admin console but I now have a page in my notepad called 'Things to add to the website to make it more awesome!'

Also. Finally hit 25,000 words on my novel for National Novel Writing Month. I took 2 days in a row off so I'm actually behind but I'm slowly catching up to where I should be.

As last week, if you want updates as I post them please follow me on G+ unless you only want to see my pretty photos (none this week!) which you can find on Tumblr (along with other pretty reblogged things) .

See you next week! 

Read More

INSPIRATION: VISIT TO BLETCHLEY PARK

I was sceptical before we left because although I'm sure you could spend the whole day in a museum you can’t be interested in everything. I was pleasantly surprised when we got there because it isn't just a small but dedicated computing museum, it was a great big museum surrounded by other museums.

The people who led us on the tour were really knowledgeable and I liked the way the displays weren’t just displays. You could interact with most of the items and everything in the museum works, every single bit of it! Of course, having that many computers and other devices connected to the power supply every day would be wasteful so not all of it was on, but it was amazing to know that if you wanted it to see something in particular in action, they could just flip the switch.

Of course we had to go and see the rebuilt Turing Bombe machine which works, it’s much bigger than I thought it was. Close-to the Bombe was a wealth of information about Alan Turing, centred on a sculpture of him made of stacked slate shipped from North Wales. It was very detailed, down to the mug that’s chained to the desk highlighting his high work ethic. A section of the hall was dedicated to the events leading up to his suicide and the social ramifications of being homosexual in the 20th Century. There is a personally signed copy of the famous ‘Apology’ by Gordon Brown from 2009 and I was very moved when I read it and the other documents on display.

One thing that sticks in my memory very well is the wealth of Acorn computers. Not because they were particularly amazing, although they were very difficult to look at with their small, bright screens. The reason that I remember the Acorn so well is because we had the opportunity to copy a page of code from paper into the machine by hand in order to make a game that was a little ‘snake’ appear on the screen.

On the tables in that room they had all these old magazines that you used to be able to buy in shops and kids would copy out pages of code so that they could play games on their computer. It must have been very frustrating and time consuming, one comma in the wrong place and you’re done for. And you can’t use the backspace key; if you notice that you’ve got a bit wrong you have to copy out the whole line again!

Going back to the bright screens of the Acorn, there’s one set of displays that makes very good use of those colours. I don’t know what to call that display but there are lots of techni-colour 80s computer games set up on the screens and music that sounds like it’s from the one of the original Nintendo games by a group called ‘Pixelh8′. There’s a time-line of computer history which also shows world events and I was surprised at how the two time-lines tied together.

We also played with some newer technology, like the BBC Doomsday project with the touch screens. There were all these photos of my home town from 1986 and maps showing the changes to the landscape over the past 30 years.

I learned a lot about the history of computing today and the things I already knew have been put into context for me. I wouldn’t mind going back to the computing museum. Even though we were there for the whole day there was much more to see. And Bletchley Park in general has a lot of stuff going on.

Originally Written for University of Buckingham Blog: http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/appliedcomputing/news/bletchley-park2012

Read More

INSPIRATION NOVEMBER

Today's inspiration in not Exeter as I previously thought it was going to be. That's because when I opened my Google Reader feed today Google told me something amazing.

The glasses allow you to see the virtual world"

I'm a big fan on augmented reality, mostly because I watched Dennou Coil and thought that it was a vision of the future I could fully subscribe to and although Google's announcement today isn't really to do with augmented reality in that way, it is bringing the internet, or 'the wired', and the real world closer together.

This is a Street View Trolley!

What Google have done, is taken their Google Street View Trolley, and pushed it around lots of different museums and retailers. They've also taken their Trike and Snowmobile around parks, snowy and green, so that you can enjoy those from Google Street View. You can check them all out here.

So, you can now go and see these places from the comfort of your computer. You're not really seeing them for yourself but I find this pretty amazing. The only thing left is for you to be able to interact with your environment.

Of course there are some places missing, I doubt places that charge a fee have let Google poke around in them but in the future maybe you could pay a smaller fee to the website that then be able to look around interactively? You also can't read more about the exhibits unless you zoom in on the little plaques. It would be amazing if you could click them and have the information appear!

There are so many possibilities it's exciting to think about! I wish there was a list of the different places you could visit so that I could explore one place every day or something. For now I'm just going to have fun exploring I think!

Finally, here's a video that I found a little while ago. It's not really to do with Google but here's Microsoft showing us their own vision of the future in a world where technology works perfectly and there's nobody trying to steal your identity

Read More

INSPIRATION: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Yes, my mind is still in the lake district I'm afraid!

This post is going to be a little different, because rather than me being inspired; this is about William Wordsworth being inspired.

There are a few things that inspired Wordsworth.

The first, was family.

Wordsworth's 'Dove Cottage' was tiny, I wasn't allowed to take photos but there were about 3 bedrooms, all of which were pretty dark. One is on the ground floor and William and his wife's room didn't have a roof when they were first married! The Guest room was the nicest room and the Wordsworths' had lots of people staying in that room. Most  notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge , another of the Lake Poets and admirer of  William's sister Dorothy Wordsworth, the author of The Grasmere Journals and others who also lived there.

Other people who stayed include Walter Scott and Thomas de Quincey, who stayed a very long time.

The Gravestone

So the house was pretty crowded, I didn't even go into where the 3 children slept before they decided to move; it was very small and very cold. So the other thing that inspired Wordsworth was, of course, the landscape.

William Wordsworth was actually born in Cockermouth, Cumberland. When I was a child and we would drive up to see the family, my brother would always ask how close to Cockinmouth we were. He left for a long time to travel and then decided that to create the best poetry, he needed to live in seclusion so that he could focus on his writing.

William Wordsworth became so successful that Queen Victoria asked him to become poet laureate.
He refused, saying that he couldn't write on demand the way that the job description would ask him to. She kept asking and eventually he agreed; Queen Victoria loved his work so much that she made a special condition for him. He was to be poet laureate but didn't have to write any poetry for her unless he was inspired to do so.

Wordsworth agreed to this but was never inspired to write and remains the only poet laureate never to have written any royal poetry.

I like that story, because Wordsworth felt strongly that he wanted his worth to be natural, and unforced. Of course, he had inherited a rather large fortune previously so I guess it's alright for him.


So that's it really! To the right is a picture of Glencoyne Bay, where Wordsworth wrote 'I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud'.

Read More