Earlier today, I noted on Facebook that it was sad that This article by Kristopher Schau was in Norwegian, because in my mind, it exquisitely shows how Norway is dealing with the mind-boggling tragedy that is dealing with the deaths of 77 people in Oslo and Utøya in 2011.

It bears keeping in mind that Kristopher Schau is famous for things that have very little to do with political commentary. He’s a comedian first and foremost, and if you’ve heard of him outside of Norway, it is probably for him being part of a 3-piece rock group Hurra Torpedo, who did a stirring, kitchen-appliance cover (!) of Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Without further ado..

“Court notes, week 1″ by Kristopher Schau

Translated by Haje Jan Kamps (more…)

When I was 16 or so, a friend of mine died. It was all very strange how it went; she had a heart defect, and was on heart medication to help her defect. Then, one day, she calls her boyfriend with a cryptic message. He gets worried, and travels across the town to go see her. By the time he makes it to her house, her mother has found her. They call an ambulance, but she dies before the ambulance crew arrives. It turns out she has taken around 12 of the very potent “take one every 24 hours” heart medication pills, in what appears to have been a suicide.

There was no note. There was no message. There were no warnings or problems that anyone knew of. Only she knew why she did it, but she didn’t tell anybody. (more…)

I have a huge problem with all the panic that happens every time a ‘terrorist’ manages to make a half-witted attempt at blowing up a plane…

True terrorists have no qualms about going on suicide missions, but are frequently screwed by being really bloody unintelligent. There’s are sure-fire way of getting a bomb on board a plane, which nobody would be able to do anything about, and which current detection methods can’t even track. (more…)

I recently discovered the rather interesting concept of Russell’s Teapot, an argument proposed by Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), related to religion.

Upon my discovery, I shared it with the lovely Reddit, upon which an interesting discussion broke out. Allow me to share. (more…)

Over lunch today, I was talking to Gwyn and Laurie, two of the Ruby coders from New Bamboo – I work with them on a Top Secret Web Project for work.

We started talking about geeky things, and somehow ended up discussing a compression algorithm, where you would alphabetise each character of a message, and then replacing the number of instances of a character with a number, thereby drastically compressing how much space it takes up. (more…)

Having bought an iPhone is kind of like being in an abusive relationship with an extremely attractive martial artist. You just know you should get the hell out while you’re ahead, but you always get lured back for another beating. Except in this case, you’ll be tied in to an 18-month contract, with no chance for reduced time for good behaviour. (more…)

This morning, I stumbled across a news story about how:

1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.

This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.

Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits. (more…)

Magazine Publishing is the act of putting a magazine into circulation in some way or another.

There are many different types of magazines, such as magazines published by manufacturers of goods (such as “Liv”, published by Volvo about Volvo products, promoting automotive safety and general Swedishness) or services (such as Reach, published by an UK train company). There are trade publications, which aim to inform businesses and traders (such as MotorTrader, which is distributed to car sales outlets and manufacturers in the UK). There are B2B publications, such as information newsletters or magazines published by Microsoft, distributed to their customers to keep them up to date. There are business-produced publication such as PC WORLD Magazine, for customers of the PC World chain of outlet stores. There are official independent magazines, such as official Playstation 2 magazine, which is produced under licence from Sony, but otherwise independent. And there are completely independent magazines, such as most of the ones you’ll see in a magazine shop.

Needless to say, a single write-up cannot cover all the different forms of magazines, nor all the specifics about one type of magazines, and all ways of funding them. This write-up will take a closer look at how a magazine comes into existence, how it is run, and how it all works behind the scenes. A lot of it is applicable also for newspapers and for different forms of magazines, but by and large, this write-up covers the inception, production and distribution of a large (100,000 copies plus), monthly magazine. (more…)

This is an article about the lack of a gender neutral 3rd person singular (he / she) in the English language, if this is really a problem, and a couple of words about the measures that have been attempted to solve the “problem”
(more…)

The six degrees of separation theory, while most interesting as a theory, has several major flaws – at least in practicality.
(more…)