digitaldust

hai. our kittehz haz cheezburger fame. kthxbai.

Heather and I got two cute little balls of fluff over the weekend. We hyped ourselves up to such an intense level of kitten madness that we just had to get some last week. I wasn’t too sure about these little guys when we first looked at them, but now I’m addicted to the kitty crack. Can’t stop looking in on them.

The one of the left is Flynn, he’s suave, acrobatic and has a small mustache. Flynn is a reincarnation of an 18th Century pirate. We’re still circling around names for the one on the right. Maybe Burton because he’s a gentleman explorer with Victorian sensibilities, or maybe Choo because he has a shoe fetish.

Nice picture of a squirrel here at Urban Addiction

Must be some guy who likes cities.

Back to what I was thinking about the proliferation of CRTs a couple of weeks ago…. Spurred on by this great stat’s site that Ed just sent to me.

According to the CIA worldbook (2002) there are 1.4 billion TVs worldwide. If you had that many TVs to play with you might as well build a TV wall in 16:9. So you would end up with a TV which is proably about 25 km wide and 14 km high. Which in traditional TV parlance would be a 1.1 million inch widescreen TV. Very high definition. Suggested viewing distance is 70 km.

Would need to take the Earth’s curvature into account and also wait for the perfect weather conditions before watching the Matrix again.

I just found that MSWord has Hubbard in it’s dictionary. I feel a shiver run down my spine.

I know that the dirtiest things out there are door knobs and small change. One can try one’s best to do without money but at some point one must touch a toilet door handle. Now I’m wondering what part of a door handle is the best to use? Which bit has less germs and dirt on it?

I’ve seen all stuff about cleaning hands better. I see lots of those posters that show which bits of your hands get missed when washing, those pretty pictures with colour coded bands showing topographical distributions of bacteria. I wonder if anyone can produce the same for toilet door handles? Show where is the safest bit of a toilet door handle to turn/push/pull.

Not that I’m worried about getting my hands dirty, though L Ron Hubbard seemed to be.

I wonder how many CRT monitors there are out there?

Especially as they all seem to be being replaced with LCDs. Both computer monitors and TVs. I wonder what surface area all the screens in the world would cover, how big a TV could they all be if they were put together?

There are 484 million internet users in the world. Maybe half of them own a computer? Most probably have about a 14″ screen. A 14″ screen is about 100 square inches, about 0.064516 square metres. (Err on the conservative if erred on the optimistic before, there’s lots of bigger screens, but also lots of people who are more than doubled up on computers.)

That’s about 31 square kms. Or a square computer screen 5.5 km on a side, or 7.7km diagonal. It would look quite small from orbit and wouldn’t be much use for working with from there, plus the mouse cord wouldn’t reach.

James suggested that they could be used to make the world’s largest particle accelerator.

I just found this great link on BB Jones blog.

Beautifully rendered 3D tube maps. They’re the topological tube map version with depth added. Not a rendering of the actual map, which would also be very fun to play with. Maybe make it easy to make a 3D shooter set in the Tube.

In 50 years time maybe we will need an extra dimension to make sense of London’s underground… unless we get packet transport running.

There seems to be an ever increasing amount of research around the concept of fame, or at least the New Scientist seems to be publishing more of it. Here’s a news piece about how fame is not fair.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury from the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the fame of “ace” pilots who fought for Germany during the World War I by comparing the number of web pages that now mention each pilot with the number of planes that the pilot shot down.

They discovered that rather than being directly proportional, the fame of the pilots actually increases exponentially with the number of planes they shot down. This means that fame is not distributed fairly among the 393 pilots in the sample.

I’ve had a couple of long conversations with a friend (who’s yet another new scientist reader) about this and she was getting riled about the unfair nature of this. These power law things are part of human nature, and even more fundamentally part of very basic natural science.

The BBC announce they’re starting pre-production for some new Dr Who series/serials. I hope they get Richard E Grant to play the next doctor.