I’ve written a post on the BMI (Body Mass Index) of the candidates for Germany’s next Top Model and I have been mentally bugged ever since. Not by images of thin girls, but by the formula of BMI: weight(kg) / length(m) ^ 2. Why the square of the length?
If it were weight/length you can attach a mental image to that: if you took horizontal slices of the body, how much would a 1m high slice weigh? For weight/length³ you can have an image too: kg/m³ or density of the body. But BMI is kg/m² or something like ‘pressure’ (multiply it with gravity 9.81 m/s² and you get the unit of pressure: Newton/m² or ‘Pascal’).
Continue reading ‘BMI is not perfect’
(trailer aflevering 3)
Sofie tegen An: “Steffie heeft in hare brief gezegd dat gij iets hebt gehad met 1 van de beste vrienden van Jan” (op foto #5)
Dat belooft weer voor zondag: An met Lucas, of An met Guido? An met Dick?? Steffie met Jan?
Ik heb al een paar theoriën gehoord: Continue reading ‘Parelvissers aflevering 3 komt er aan’
One of the reasons why I have been posting less the last couple of days, is because I was working on a migration from Blogger to Wordpress. I was still working out some DNS stuff (don’t let me get into that, it’s complicated stuff , to do with how Bluehost’s -my hosting provider- DNS management works).
So I was just writing a piece on how Google bought Writely with my w.bloggar local client, and when I publish I get an error: “Post was saved as draft, please log in to http://www.blogger.com/ to publish it“. Weird, never have that normally. Anyway, I log in, get the Blogger CAPTCHA ‘word verification’ box and I publish. But I see no changes on blog.forret.com. I publish again. Nothing. Then I click the ‘View Blog’ tab in my Blogger interface. This is what I see:
Apparently:
- my blog is now published to some new awkward blogspot location.
- my template is gone
- the new template advises me to discover wordpress.org
Continue reading ‘Blogger snafu: emergency migration to Wordpress’
Google has just confirmed to have bought Upstartle, the creators of Writely (Writely Blog/GoogleBlog via Om Malik). Apart from being good news for the founders of Upstartle, this also indicates Google’s determination to make the fat client history and allow users to do all their business through on-line services.
Now buying Writely is in line with Google thinking of using browser for everything. I mean an online word processor, and online excel spread sheet make a lot more sense than making people switch to OpenOffice.
Om Malik
Om started making a Microsoft office/Google Office comparison matrix, and I took the liberty of adding some stuff to it:
Productivity on-line
I will list a number of (’productivity’) application types, with the current (’fat client’) most used software, and the on-line web2.0-ish (’thin client’) applications that are trying to take over (although for some areas the online applications are only just at the beginning):
Continue reading ‘Google buys Writely’
In November last year, Doc Searls published a lengthy article in LinuxJournal: “Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes“. It is an essential piece of reading.
This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future.
The topic of the essay is this: the big (telco/media) corporations are dying to take over the Net, manage it the corporate style and charge for any use of the Internet. At the same time they want to get rid of the wild, pioneering spirit that brought us avalanches of innovation and the occasional disruptive force like Amazon, Ebay, MP3 and BitTorrent.
Continue reading ‘Saving the Net (Doc Searls)’
I wrote about digital cinema earlier. I want to focus now on the distribution of movies to theatres.
FILESIZE OF A MOVIE
The movie’s video signal is compressed and encrypted into a bitrate of max 250 Mbps, which translates in 31.25 MB/second or 112.50 GB/hour footage. So a ’short’ 90-minute movie is something like 170GB, and a 2h30 movie, with some audio thrown in, is more like 300 GB. The estimates from the DCI specification are even higher: around 140 GB per hour running length (video, audio and subtitles together) or around 38 MB/s.
Continue reading ‘Digital cinema: movie distribution’
Published on
March 1, 2006 in
Society.
A number of influential international writers, journalists and intellectuals have just released a manifesto: “Together facing the new totalitarianism”, stating that we need to protect the universal rights (freedom of expression, equality of man and woman, …) from attacks by militant muslims.
After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.
(…)
We reject «cultural relativism», which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.
Jyllands Posten via michellemalkin.com
The authors are the following 12 people: Ayaan Hirsi Ali (NL), Chahla Chafiq (FR), Caroline Fourest (FR), Bernard-Henri Lévy (FR), Irshad Manji (CA), Mehdi Mozaffari (DK), Maryam Namazie (US), Taslima Nasreen (SE/US), Salman Rushdie (UK), Antoine Sfeir (FR), Philippe Val (FR), Ibn Warraq (US).
Continue reading ‘Together facing the new totalitarianism’
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