Happy Birthday BBC News Website

The BBC news website is 10 years old this week. I know I and many others would not know how to live in a world where this invaluable time sink did not exist, partly I know this from the cool graph they have produced showing the growth in traffic to the site over time, you can see it reproduced below, click for big.


There are several interesting things about this graph, one of which is simply the number of page loads a month, right now there are over 1.3 Billion page loads per month and there is no sign of the increase in traffic slowing. Although I am probably responsible for about 1% of those, I still find it a huge number and wonder how they will cope in the future.

The second thing I like is the subtle implicatons about peoples behaviour you can see in the data, you may note for example that there are several dips in the traffic towards the end of a year, most obviously in recent years. My guess that this is the effect of Christmas holidays, when people are forced to go home, and no longer bother to check the news every five minutes as they do when chained to their desks. This of course also tends to imply that much of the traffic is still coming from the western world.

Then there is something I don't really understand unless it is simply a artifact of how they have graphed the data, but it appears that traffic had been increasing rapidly in the days leading up to September 11th 2001, before the attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. My guess is that they have simply plotted monthly totals which have tended to make it look like there was a rise in traffic pre September-11th, I would imagine that if you plotted daily totals you would see fairly smoothly increasing traffic until September 10th, then traffic would spike dramatically on the 11th before tailing off over the next few weeks, with a few superimposed bumps and wiggles related to events such as the opening of attacks in Afghanistan or new information regarding the attacks becoming available.

I'd love to see the daily totals for this period, I think this could really be useful in determining the most important events in modern history, especially when coupled with information on the most popular stories, though I rather fear that various celebrity scandals would dominate the events.

New Blog - ThreeSigmaResult

Myself and CMB have decided to set-up a new blog, this one will be a bit more focussed dealing only with science, so no politics or random distractions. The blog can be found at threesigmaresult.com. The first real post will appear some time tomorrow.

My intention is that any science posts by me will get mirrored here, but if you want to see the full effect of CMB in full flow you'll have to head over to the new blog. Apart from this announcements things should continue as before over here.

Blind Cat Challenge

Wow, I've been busy recently (and ill), work has been hectic what with more telescope time coming our way, conference talks, travel arrangements and writing a paper or two. Now I'm back and getting into the swing of things here is a link to a great time sink that CMB is running over at his blog (and here). The basic idea is that you have to draw a cat in MS paint or the equivalent (using a mouse), but do it with your eyes closed. Its actually pretty damn hard, my effort is below, CMB has now collected over 300 of these efforts and has set up a gallery here, you can submit your own efforts here. The quality is variable to say the least. Enjoy.



What the hell did we do during work hours before the Internet? Seriously, I don't know I'm too young to remember, someone tell me.

Don't Trust Your Lying Eyes

If you're interested in optical illusions head over here, where they have the finalists from the "Best Visual Illusion Of The Year Award".

The picture above shows the winner, by Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi and Elena Gheorghiu, its incredibly simple, both pictures are identical (apart from a slight offset due to some dodgy photoshopping I guess) but due to to the way the brain interprets objects receding into the distance it creates the impression that the one on the right is at a greater angle than the one on the left. For a more thorough explanation see here. My head hurts now.

See It Before The Lawyers Get Involved

For those who like a bit of schadenfreude, like for instance seeing celebrities as they actually are, check out this site. Its great, its a professional retouching company, I can't link to the actual page, so click on portfolio at the top of the page to see before and after photoshopping pictures of celebrities (just click on the thumbnails and then slide the mouse over the pictures). I'm slightly surprised to find that they put this up there, I would have thought their clients would want this kind of thing kept quiet.

My personal favourite the before and after of Eva Longoria, where they felt the need to make her ass bigger. Just more proof that its impossible for real people to look anything like celebrities appear to.

The Frustrating World of Games

I just came across this video at Break.com, it sums up perfectly the utter frustration I felt at many games as a child, many was the time I would be reduced to a quivering, screaming, swearing ball of fury at my inability to jump onto some moving block in one of the Mario Bros games. The commentary is brilliant, and vastly more polite than I would have been. Enjoy.

Super Mario Brothers Is Frustrating pt2

Serenity

After the silliness of the last few posts I think its about time to turn to weightier matters. In this case which Serenity character I am most like. This post is fairly well timed as it turns out that Serenity was voted the most popular Sci-Fi film in a poll by SFX magazine. I have to say the film is great, though I wouldn't go as far as saying it was the best Sci-Fi film ever.

If you want to have a go yourself try this link.

My results which I'm pretty happy about (except the 10% Reaver bit, unless it means 10% Border Reiver which could be true) are in the figure below.

Scientific Rivals

Over at cosmicvariance they have a post about a topic we have discussed in the group before, scientific enemies/nemesis, those people that work in your sub-field and for whatever reason you don't get on.

The cosmic variance article gives some handy hints on how to choose your own personal scientific nemesis, I myself already have one, it only took one chance meeting for me to decide on them, I'm sure that in all probability they are a decent person, just something about them rubbed me up the wrong way. I'm looking forward to many years of run-ins at conferences to come, in all probability without them ever realising I dislike them.

Does anyone else have any professional enemies?

Cool Google Maps Applications

Ever wondered how sea level rises due to Global Warming could reshape countries? Well you damn well should have. Anyway, check out this cool little applet to find out. Fortunately I don't think even the most pessimistic predictions for sea level rise are above 1m, unfortunately this is still enough to flood most of Holland, parts of Bangladesh and many Pacific Islands, displacing hundreds of millions. Still think a 5-litre SUV is a good idea?

On a lighter note here is a nice little applet that lets you use Google Maps as a Pedometer. So don't claim the internet is the reason you're unfit, get off your ass and go for a run! Or a brisk walk, or use it to work out if the walk to the corner shop is enough to burn off the calories from the Mars bar you're going to buy. Fat ass.

Note: Not exactly sure where the tone of this post came from, probably just absolute frustration at the idiocy of all those Global Warming deniers.

New Blogroll Entries

I have two new entries to the blogroll this week. I heartily recommend both for your perusal.

I stumbled across the first Strange Paths while looking for a picture of the Sun as seen in neutrinos. It combines descriptions of science and philosophy with some of the most amazing scientific pictures I have ever seen. The pictures below give a taste of whats on offer, click for them in all of their glory.



The second is the blog of (relatively) long time commentator on here, Pete, its called the view from underhill, I like it a lot because he has already picked up on several topics that I had in mind for future posts. In particular the post about the current road safety TV adverts in the UK, the statistics given always had me curious, I just could never get round to checking where they come from, well Pete has a link to someone who has done just this, its pretty interesting reading. Check it out.

Durham: Echoes Of Power

Rich has a post on his blog about a map of London made just after the great fire of 1666, the map itself is pretty cool as you'll find if you follow the link above, but I came across something much more interesting (for those of us with a connection to Durham) whilst wandering around the British Library archives online.

Click for link to a mini site on Durham: Echoes Of Power, the site has a selection of pictures and manuscripts from the last thousand years of Durhams history. My favourite is a picture (which unfortunately it won't let me link directly so click here) of the New Inn pub as it was in the second half of the 18th century. For those of you not in the know, the New Inn is a pub that its practically possible to spit on from the roof of the Physics department. To me its also rather misnamed as it is now around 250 years old.

Other cool sections detail the politics of the region in the early part of the last Millennium, in particular in the powers and intrigues of the Prince Bishops that used to rule the North with powers almost equal to the King himself. There are also many pictures made throughout the last Millennium of Durhams most famous building, its spectacular Norman Cathedral (seen above).

Internet Destroying The Planet?

A mildly interesting report has just come out which looks at the power consumption of computer servers in the US, the report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds that severs and all the paraphernalia required to keep them working, (refrigeration etc) uses up 1.2% of the energy used in the US. The figure outside the US was 0.8%. This is actually a lower limit it as it doesn't include custom built servers like the ones Google has thousands of.

I can well believe that kind of number having visited the room where they store the supercomputers used by the Astronomy group, most of the power actually seems to be spent trying to keep the damn things cool, there must be some way to use this energy more usefully. Perhaps using the waste heat from the supercomputers to heat the buildings or something. Does anyone have any bright ideas for how we could profitably use kilowatts of waste heat? I promise not to steal and patent the idea. (Unless its really good.)

Bumper Stickers

I've just come across a huge bunch of great bumper stickers. Check them out here. My favourites are below. Now all I need is a car, dammit.

Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique

Check out this site and see how many badges you qualify for. Mine are below, with reasons why I deserve them. As for the above average physique, well that may be a bit of a stretch, though my bmi is a pretty good 21.6, so no visits from the Awful Poo Lady Gillian McKeith, I hope.

Yes I admit it my research has absolutely no practical applications.
I have been known to freeze many objects in liquid Nitrogen, including, but not limited to: a Cadburys cream egg, banana, a pen, paper and a 3 1/2 in floppy disk.
I can get fairly annoyed and offensive towards the odd crank, see any of my posts on Autodynamics for details.
I think its our duty to fight all quakery and crankery we find.
Clearly I have a blog.

I have been known to shout about science.

More Cartoons

More great cartoons from Joy Of Tech.

All For Naught

I note that i_am_nil has posted a particularly short-but-sweet rational critique of the whole Astronaut stalker story. Check it out here.

Vista vs Mac OSX, In Cartoon Form

Click For Big.

Its funny because its true. I know that plenty of people have it in for Macs and I'll probably get a snide comment or two for this, but to hell with it. Everyone in Astronomy uses Macs so at least I won't get any grief at work.

Oh then there's this:

If you're after a bit of balance how about this:


See them all, and more over at joy of tech. Damn I wish I could draw, and also was funny.

La Lune

I've recently come across another cool website, this one is a click-able map of the moon. You can find it at inconstantmoon.com what makes this site better than say, Google moon, is simply the huge amount of data at your finger tips. As well as the usual, click-able and zoom-able maps, with overlays of craters and Apollo landing sites there are things like the map above, which shows the amount of TiO2 in the moons surface, others show the thickness of the crust or the gravitational anomalies. Unfortunately no magnetic data yet, so its not possible to search for any magnetic anomalies, especially in the Tycho region (note for non sci-fi buffs read 2001).

To have a play around click on atlas, then just press buttons on the side bar to the right.

Online Games - Part 2

As if the last batch wouldn't cause major losses of productivity here are a few more games worth at least 5 minutes "contemplation". Without further ado, onto the list:


The Adventures of Fancy Pants Man - Simple platformer along the lines of sonic the hedgehog, pretty cool looking.



Novel Concepts TD - Not sure what the real name of this one is, its really simple, you have to kill a horde of "creeps" using cannon, towers etc. It looks easy but is incredibly difficult to master, just check out the forum, there are actually loads of people in there discussing strategy ffs. Despite this I like it.


Word Shoot - Fancy some education while you kill the rampaging hordes? No me neither, but here you go anyway, basically you have to type words as fast as you can. The words corresponding to enemies approaching, if you get the word right you kill them. Improved my touch typing in about 3 minutes.

Cool Sky Map

I came across this cool bit of astronomy software the other day. There seems to be two versions about sky-map.org and wikisky.org. They seem to be identical. They allow you to slide around the night sky with or without constellations and to search for your favourite night sky objects (like NGC galaxies), so far, so like any other planetarium software. The cool thing with this software is that it also has the SDSS imaging survey built in. So you can switch to SDSS mode and look at the actual images produced by the Sloan survey. Unfortunately the SDSS doesn't cover the whole sky so many of my favourites aren't in it.

This is really only the start, we have been talking about software like this at work for awhile now, the ultimate (wet) dream for astronomers would be software like this that started in planetarium view but over layed survey areas from the various surveys, or even little symbols to show where the HST had been pointed at an object (The first steps have been made to do this in the Astro Photo section, check it out). You would then be able to click on the little links to take you directly to the data, it would make life much simpler than searching dozens of archives to find out if what you would like to do has already been done, saving time and money for eveyone, plus it would make a great toy for everyone to enjoy.

Give it a go, there's probably plenty of weird things to be seen in the SDSS images.