Things I’ve Seen

I mentioned LibriVox audio books a while back, but only in passing. Hugh appears to have hit something of a sweet spot in terms of interest; they’ve been boing-boing’ed twice now, and the blog is running at around 300 hits per day. 9 books have been completed by the volunteers; you will find my not-so-dulcet tones on a couple of them.

Reading and then editing a chapter or two can take a little bit of time, but it’s a lot of fun, and with a large group of volunteers the total output is pretty impressive. So why not head over and have a listen - or better still, do some recording…

A lot has been said recently about government advertising. There’s obviously a place for government funded advertising campaigns: at the moment there is a ‘are you ready for bushfires?’ campaign, and in the past we’ve seen plenty of welcome public health advertising and the like; it’s equally obvious that the current crop of blatent propoganda is an unacceptable use of taxpayer funds.

So, I’d like to add a little proposal. At the end of every advert, where we currently have “Authorised by”, add “This advert was paid for by the Australian taxpayer”. Then let democracy take it’s course.

This blog post was not paid for by the Australian taxpayer.

A few hours ago, a federal grand jury sitting in the District of Columbia returned a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, also known as Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff.

The grand jury’s indictment charges that Mr. Libby committed five crimes. The indictment charges one count of obstruction of justice of the federal grand jury, two counts of perjury and two counts of false statements.

At the end of the day what appears is that Mr. Libby’s story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true.

It was false. He was at the beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And then he lied about it afterwards, under oath and repeatedly.

Fitzgerald’s Press Conference

A very simple game which looks dangerously addictive: SET.

I’m a sucker for optical illusions. Mr Angry & Mrs Calm is another…

If you are near to this picture, Mr Angry is on the left and Mrs Calm is on the right. If you view it from a distance, they switch places!

A great article in The Guardian, ending with a profound question:

….poor kids will stop wanting Nike trainers only when they have another way to prove their own worth, another way to show they are valued. In other words, when society itself is changed. It raises a tricky question. Can we really protect children from consumerism run wild without changing the way the rest of us live? Is this a problem of the young - or a problem for all of us?

From the excellent the Oild Drum comes this graph of oil usage in the US:

The first set of bars is oil usage in 1970. The middle set is the 1970 values multiplied by 2.74, the increase in US GDP since 197. In other words, this is what we would be using today if there had been no change in oil usage patterns in the economy. The third set is the actual usage today.

The take-home message? As far as oil usage is concerned, it’s all about transport. Every other sector made huge adjustments during the last oil shock; if usage is to decrease again, it is cars (and planes) that we need to look at. Nothing else matters.

This is a cool optical illusion.

Apparently Lewis Carroll invented the word ‘chortle’. I never knew that.

From dictionary.reference.com

Chortle a combination of chuckle and snort. It was coined by Lewis Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson), in Through the Looking-Glass, published in 1872.

I’ve just started playing around with AJAX and DHTML stuff, and I discovered a bit of a problem with the Opera rendering engine. If you change the contents of a table cell by modifying the innerHTML inside a <TD> tag, the screen is not always properly refreshed (even though the table has been redrawn properly by the rendering engine: if you drag another window across the top of Opera it redraws correctly).

I couldn’t find anything via google about this problem, but I have worked out a simple hack fix: after updating a table cell, pass the DOM element into blink:

function blink(cell) {
    var t = cell.style.display;
    cell.style.display = 'none';
    cell.style.display = t;
}

The blink isn’t visible, but it does force the screen to refresh.