Rory – Page 15 – Rory Parle

December 19, 2008

Shared Items – December 19, 2008

A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:

"I Love You, Man" trailer: Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. I’m not sure that any sensible film fan needs more info than that, but watch the trailer nonetheless.
urban knitting: the world's most inoffensive graffiti: I may have to learn how to knit.
Dilbert Comic for December 13, 2008: Is Scott Adams following the Irish pork crisis?
Jason Lee Totally Looks Like Ryan Reynolds: I’ve been saying this for years. Pictorial evidence proves it better than any amount of my “You know the guy from Mallrats? No? Have you seen Van Wilder?”–style floundering.
Attenborough receives honorary degree at Trinity: Nice to know that while I’ve been slogging over getting some work finished by tonight’s deadline, just down the road people are getting to hang out with David Attenborough, Terry Pratchett, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, among others (I regret to admit I have no idea who the other two mentioned are).

December 12, 2008

Shared Items – December 12, 2008

A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes | Overthinking It: Now let’s all jump up and down punching the air…

December 4, 2008

Shared Items – December 4, 2008

A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last week:

Real Advice Hurts | 43 Folders: “A subscription to a magazine about taekwondo will only be as useful as your decision to drag your fat ass into a dojo and start actually kicking people. Over and over. Otherwise, you’re just buying shiny paper every month.”
Iraq's 'Chemical Ali' gets second death sentence: Awesome headline. I guess the last execution didn’t stick?
AddressBookSync | Facebook Picture Synchronization with OS X Address Book: Sync your Facebook contacts to your address book (OS X only). Great little app.
Does the broken windows theory hold online?: Jason Kotke ponders the application of the broken windows theory to websites like blogs and forums.
Oldest Ever Lolcat Found *gasp* (Iz From Teh 1905): I hope she now has her dinner.
For the first time in history…: “For the first time in history, a Panda volunteers to mate in captivity.”
Louis CK on Conan O'Brien: “You’re sitting in a chair… in the SKY!”
New Video Game Designed To Have No Influence On Kids' Behavior | The Onion – America's Finest News Source: “With Stacker, the player interacts with an environment full of boxes—lightweight, uniformly brown boxes with rounded corners—and uses diligence and repetitive hard work to complete his mission.”
Cute Cat Picture with No Annoying Caption: The last one on the Internet?

November 30, 2008

Migrated Soylent Red Content

The trouble with writing your own content management software is that there are no tools that know how to interact with your content unless you write them yourself. I’ve just hacked together some scripts which I’ve used to migrate al the old Soylent Red posts to this blog, but the combination of how ugly Soylent Red’s content manager was and how lazy I still am means that it was too much effort to bring the old posts’ tags and comments with them.

I may get around to migrating those other bits at some point in the future, and setting up the correct redirects from soylentred.net to here. I may even sanitize the old content to fix up broken links and get them pointing to the right places. These are all things that it would be unwise to hold your breath waiting for.

November 27, 2008

Shared Items – November 27, 2008

A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last day:

The Large Hadron Collider: Shedding Light on the Dark Universe by Prof. Rolf-Dieter Heuer: Sadly this lecture had no more tickets available by the time I asked for them, but the whole thing is now online.

November 26, 2008

Shared Items – November 26, 2008

A brief list of interesting things, culled from the items I shared in Google Reader in the last day:

YouTube – Chicken Head Tracking: Video demonstration of chickens’ awesome ability to keep their heads stationary while moving their bodies. I for one welcome our new chicken overlords.

November 25, 2008November 25, 2008

Shared Items – November 25, 2008

Apologies for the formatting of this post. I’ve installed a new plugin to automatically post my Google Reader shared items and it’s suffering some teething problems as I sort out the correct style to present everything.

November 19, 2008

World’s First Lab-Engineered Organ Transplant

Woman given lab-engineered organ transplant – The Irish Times:

A woman has become the first person in the world to be given an entirely laboratory engineered organ in a landmark operation.

Claudia Castillo’s stem cells were used to create an artificial airway which replaced the bronchus to her left lung, which had collapsed after she suffered a serious tuberculosis infection.

Two things:

First, I don’t want anyone saying, “I’d give her a lab-engineered organ, if you know what I’m talking about!”

Second, I think this technique is going to re-shape how we perform not only transplant operations but also cosmetic surgery, which is about adding things as much as it is about taking things away.

November 17, 2008

New Star Trek Trailer

I’ve gone all giddy. There’s a nice new, shiny Star Trek trailer for us all to drool over. It’s still pretty firmly in teaser territory, giving no real hint about the story beyond what’s already known (essentially that it’s an origin story revolving mostly around Kirk and Spock, and the villains are pointy-eared rather than the possibly more expected point-foreheaded).

The extra good news, which I hadn’t noticed before, is that it will be out in time for my birthday.

November 17, 2008

Ireland’s Proposed New Surveillance Legislation

I’ve just shared an item in Google Reader with an attached note that seems substantial enough to merit re-posting it here. The note concerns an article in the Irish Times about a surveillance bill that is to be brought before the cabinet tomorrow. Here it is:

It strikes me that this whole push is flawed in two major ways.

The first is that it seems to be very emotionally motivated: every news story about it makes a big deal about a single, recent, high-profile murder. But the plural of anecdote is not data, and extrapolating from a single event to try to demonstrate a trend is at best ignorant and at worst dishonest. The only useful statistic mentioned in this article, right at the bottom, indicates that gang crime in Limerick is falling dramatically. That’s not to say that that interpretation is necessarily correct either, but I’d like to see more fact and less emotion in the drafting and reporting of legislation.

The second major flaw is that no-one in the news media, as far as I can tell, has tried to discover whether or not this proposed legislation will expand the powers of the Gardaí to surveil without warrant, or whether it will simply allow more types of evidence to be admitted in court. This is the difference between a large potential infringement on individual privacy, and a small but significant alteration to judicial process. That strikes me as a large enough difference that it should be possible for an interested citizen to discover which is being proposed.