June 2009 Archives

In the continuing series of “compare and contrast”. Aka, perspective, or as Merriam puts it:

to view things in their true relations or relative importance

news.bbc reports that UK road deaths reach record low.

There were 2,538 people killed on Britain’s roads in 2008, which is the lowest annual total since records began in 1926.

a plane holds, what? 300 people …

So that is 8.5 jumbo jet plane crashes EVERY year, where every single person died. In fact, that is 8.5 jumbo jets carrying only British people.

2,974 victims and the 19 hijackers died in the 9/11 attacks.

In 2003, 42,643 people where killed in road related accidents in America.

That is 14 events similar to 9/11, every year.

And while we are here, consider this:

• 2538 UK people, in a population of 60.9 million is 0.0041%
• 42,643 USA people, in a population of 303 million is 0.014%

You are more than 3 times as likely to be killed by a car in America as you are in the UK. (per head of population, on average, etc).

What this doesn’t account for is that Americans travel more miles by car than people in the UK. Whether that is right or wrong is another matter, but given Americans drive more it’s perhaps not suprising that there are more road related accidents.

Can anyone find any data/stats on average miles driven per capita in the UK and USA because the best I’ve found so far is Per capita car mileage in Britain in 1977 was slightly lower than in the United States in 1950. Which sadly doesn’t help much.

http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2009/06/22/8121

The Beeb is asking Iranians to risk imprisonment - and possibly worse - by uploading photos and videos to its websites. And yet the company that runs the BBC’s own IT services is a partner in the joint venture that supplied the monitoring system the Iranian regime is using

Laugh? Cry? Winking smiley?

Stephen Fry

It is nothing like as godawful as the BlackBerry Storm, but then nothing is. For the time being the iPhone 3GS and the superb BlackBerry Bold reign. I ache for Apple-busting newcomers.

If laptop/desktop computers are anything to go by, ache long and hard. Misses.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8110363.stm

Police in the Netherlands have arrested two men after a boy they are alleged to have mugged saw a picture of them on Google’s internet map service. … Because the faces of the people in the Street View photo were blurred, the police contacted Google, seeking the original image.

vs

http://www.out-law.com/page-10089

A committee of all 27 EU member states’ privacy regulators … asked Google to ensure … that original images are destroyed once they have been used to create blurred images that the public can see.

I think that we should have the European Parliament force Flickr to blur all the faces in all the pictures ever taken in Europe. And Google Images too. Yeah.

Electro House 2009 - Mixed By Meck. Track 1 is 58 minutes long and contains all the other tracks mixed together.

You can buy the entire album for £5.99, or the 58 minute mix for £0.69. Quite a bargain.

See also the last track (1 hour long) Freshtraxxx 3 Mixed by Utah Saints for the bargain price of £0.79.

Or indeed, all mp3’s sorted by duration and available on the cheap!

Winston Churchill backed by band from the future and Martin Luther King Sings.

Yay for content people can repurpose.

More of an american slant which has a certain midget in the closet vibe going on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/06/britains_media_obsession.html

So on the day that Carter’s conclusions are published, one question is why the digital industries are more deserving of ministerial attention than - say - pharmaceuticals, or defence, or motor manufacturing, or food and drink, or civil aviation

err, because the former is at best a 20 year old industry, and realistically, about a 5-10 year old industry.

It’s one of the few global industries that is really growing at a clip. And in that old fashioned sense, actually producing goods people want to spend their cash on.

It is critical to the future, and a lot of people / governments / established industries are a bit rubbish at it.

The others are all well established, global industries that are typically well understood.

I’ve previously been a big fan of camouflage which does something really simple:

• Hides all the icons from your desktop
• When you click on your desktop, opens a finder window for your desktop

Thus normally, day to day, I get my lovely desktop images without any clutter. If I need a file, I just have to click, and a window appears with what I want.

The problem is that Camouflage started segfaulting ever since I upgraded to 10.5 Leopard, using Spaces which I love (I’d used virtual desktops on KDE and GNOME before but they’d never “clicked” the way Spaces does for me).

I contacted the developer, who did a heroic effort to try and track down the source of the bugs, but we never did find a fix.

I finally got fed up with the periodic segfaults. I’ve come up with the following less than perfect solution, but it seems to work.

• Create a folder on my desktop, which I call “D”
• Move everything else, except “D” and my HardDisk into D
• Make a alias / shortcut / symlink of my Harddisk icon inside D
• Finder -> Preferences -> General and uncheck the appropriate boxes so that Harddisks, external drives etc aren’t shown.
• From the Finder Desktop, View -> Show View Options (or Apple+J), and shrink the icon size to 16x16, and set Label Position to “Right”
• Position my “D” folder top right of the screen.

Now, my desktop is clear and uncluttered with the one exception of this tiny little “D” folder.

If I want to get at all my Desktop files, I just need to (double) click on my “D” folder.

It’s not as good as Camouflage because I can’t click anywhere, and I still have that one little icon sitting around. But it’s good enough and it doesn’t crash all the time.

ps. If you have your Exposé preferences set to “show desktop” on one of your hot corners, you need to move your “D” folder in a little from the side of the screen else you won’t be able to click it when you throw your mouse to the hot corner to reveal your desktop.

I always enjoy a good “compare and contrast”. Perspective etc..

Virgin Atlantic 2008/2009

• “Annual pre-tax profits reached £68.4m” (2009)
• “nearly double the £34.8m seen in the year earlier.” (2008)
• “The carrier spent close to £1bn on fuel for the year.”

British Airways 2008/2009

• “BA reported a loss before tax of £401m” (2009)
• “The airline made a revised profit of £922m in the previous year.” (2008)
• “BA faced a near-£3bn fuel bill. “

So … based on fuel usage, BA flies about three times more than Virgin Atlantic. Perhaps Virgin Atlantic have vastly more fuel efficient planes? Or maybe BA just overpaid by judging the fuel market wrong?

Still, 922 - 401 still means that BA made more than £500 million (pre tax) over the last two years.

In those same two years, Virgin made a touch over £100 million (pre tax).

So waving hands all over the place, one might infer that BA is somewhere like three to five times the size of Virgin Atlantic.

Then again, Wikipedia says British Airways have 231 planes, with 57 on order but Virgin Atlantic have only 38 with 21 on order. Not sure what (if anything) I might conclude from that tho ….

ps. more funny numbers: A child is bitten by a dog every 0.07 seconds…