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Archives for March 2008
links for 2008-03-25
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This kind of reminds me of the Langley Schools Music Project.
links for 2008-03-20
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The first photographic image posted to the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee.
links for 2008-03-18
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What do *your* roosters say?
links for 2008-03-13
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It’s like autotune on the individual notes of a chord. I can’t wait to see how this gets abused.
links for 2008-03-10
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“Mr. Schwarz calls the top-priced goods ‘anchors.’ Anchors, he says, set the ceilings on prices of objects that don’t have a clear value.”
links for 2008-03-07
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“I gotta have my orange juice.”
Does Numbers Make Charts Like This?
I’m in the process of upgrading my first-generation Core Duo Macbook, which is getting a little long-in-the-tooth. So this afternoon I visited Apple.com and I took a little time to review the specs of the newly released models.
I eventually came across the following bar chart, which is accessible as a pop-up from this page. It compares my current notebook (coincidentally) with the one I intend to purchase.
At first glance, it was obvious that something wasn’t quite right. The percentages listed inside the blue bars don’t even remotely correspond to the visual length of those bars relative to the baseline bar at the bottom. It isn’t even close.
I took a screenshot and did some measuring in Photoshop with the ruler tool. The baseline bar is 216 pixels wide. The bars above it are 357, 362, 382, and 417 pixels wide, respectively. That would yield rounded percentages of 65%, 68%, 77%, and 93%.
I assume the numbers are correct and Apple is just being deceptive to make the performance gains look more impressive. In any case, who wants to join a class-action suit?
Annoying Crime Drama Cliché #218
Erin and I watched the premiere of New Amsterdam last night. Apparently the suits in development at FOX figured they needed their own immortal undead detective to compete with Moonlight. The pilot was entertaining enough to merit a season pass on the TiVo, despite the writers’ willingness to slip into the same tired clichés employed by most network crime dramas.
Why is it that whenever a female detective or police officer is introduced as a character, it’s somehow important to mention that her father was also a cop? Worse still, this fact is always brought to our attention with the same clumsy dialog:
Crusty Old Male Officer: I knew your dad in the (INSERT PRECINCT NUMBER HERE). He was a great cop.
Female Detective: Thanks.
Good thing that writers’ strike ended, so we can get more of this.
links for 2008-03-05
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Glad to know our public-health researchers are hard at work.
links for 2008-03-03
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Pointless hypotheticals can be so entertaining.
links for 2008-03-02
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A very well-written account of Bush’s trip to Africa by Bob Geldof (of all people).
