A while back I did some work looking at how people faces change with age for a medicinal application. One quite surprising thing is how little the distance between the eyes actually change, quite young children will have the the same distance as adults. On the other hand noses keep growing throughout life.

Have a look at Old Testament > The Law > Sexual Discharges. NSFW. Which starts with the line, 'When a man ejaculates semen...'.

Now in its original context I've no problem with the written version, entirely in keeping with the spirit of the book. That section was never intended to be illustrated, indeed the illustrations go against the moral spirit of book. Its intended as book of rules of conduct not as a spectacle of images to be gawped at. I'm generally in favour of using illustrations to help interpret books making them more accessible. Here its just inappropriate and Sam's Club is entirely right to ban it.

Later in the same section Leviticus 15:28-15:30, the bibles advocating the large scale slaughter of doves. Apparently women should sacrifice two doves or pigeons eight days after the end of her period. So thats 24 doves a year. Its a good thing all christians don't follow this as we would very soon rid the world of doves. I now know what I'll ask the next time the Jehovah Witnesses come knocking on my door.

But didn't we all start by writing some spaghetti code. Before we can teach good programming design they need to experiment with a print statements, and maybe a loop and an if statement. These constructs are all translatable between languages. This is really a very early stage, they are getting to grips with basic algebra at that age, don't expect too much from the average student.

I think you have just invented MathML.

Combined heat and power (CHP) schemes are a increasingly common using the waste heat from some process to provide district heating. Temperatures from a server farms might be a bit on the low side but it changes the situation when you look at the heat as a resource to be used rather than a waste item.

This reminds me of a security conference I went to. After a talk about computer forensics by someone from the UK police, I asked what they did about encrypted messages. He replied that they "normally just ask for the password", he didn't go into details about quite what "ask" involved.

If you look at the PDF you see that they have grouped the ages into three categories. Under 18, 18-49 and 50+. It looks like they have calculated the average from just three data points. As the 18-50 group is so big its skews the average towards the middle value of that group 33. A finer division of groups would probably show a greater number of younger people playing games.

I can roughly divide the books I've read into two piles: those that have left a lasting impression on me and those I enjoyed but ultimately forgot about. In the first pile there in a lot of Science Fiction and a lot of the "literature", in the latter goes a fair bit si-fi and fantasy and some more mainstream stuff.

Of the really great books I'd put Kafka, Orwell (1984, Animal Farm), Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game) and those which shaped the way I think about things. Some of these could be called science fiction, they use settings removed from the real world, but also provide some commentary on how we live now.

So much si-fi does fall into a formulaic adventure romp. There is little to learn from these, indeed they can be dangerous - as the characters can be idealised heros, setting unrealistic role models. One exception to this was Moorcock's eternal champion, initially a hero but by the end just a slaughterer of half the population. Perhaps a truer view of conflict than most.

Yes a bit of escape can be fun, but there are other reasons we read fiction. I like books which give me something I was not expecting, and shed a bit of light on life. Its been a while since I read a modern science-fiction book which has done that.

We can't actually tell it did not tear internally. It would really need to be unfolded again to ensure that.

OK, taking the dates from List of earthquakes and List of solar cycles. If we limit the range to when both sets overlap i.e. 1755 - now and split the data into buckets according to how many years the earth quake is from nearest solar cycle we find -5 years before: 0; -4 4; -3 0; -2 0; -1 5; 0 3; 1 3; 2 1; 3 1; 4 2; 5 0. The data does have highest numbers in the -1, 0, and 1 buckets. We can then use a chi squared test on these as we would expect 19/11 in each bucket ie. 1.73. Doing the chi squared test gives a p-value of 0.045. Significant at the 5% level!

Which in turn cites "Jonson G, Orremo F, Wallin C, Ringsberg K. IT, mat and miljo . En miljokonsekvensanalys av elektronisk handel med dagligvaror. Stockholm: Naturvardsverket. Institutionen fo r Designvetenskaper, Forpackningslogistik/Lunds Tekniska Hogskola; 1999. p. 102." Which is where the 3.5 traditional shopping trips figure comes from.

So we have a 2010 press release, summarising a 2010 report which quotes a 2002 paper, which in turn quotes a 1999 paper.

Actually the report merely cites a previous paper on the subject: Plepys A (2002), "The Grey Side of ICT", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 22: 509-523 PDF. That is the paper with the details.

Full Report: "Rebound: unintended consequences of transport policy and technology innovations", page has link to the PDF.

Old joke, off topic, not interesting. What are the mods playing at these days. Mod parent down.