Samwise rides again

From Wikipedia …

In 1998, the archaeologist B.J. Coles identified as “Doggerland” the now-drowned habitable and huntable lands in the coastal plain that was formed in the North Sea when sea level dropped. Doggerland has not caught the popular imagination, but the terrain was available for settlement. Its gentle swells remain as the Dogger Banks. Paleolithic reindeer hunters roamed the land; some traces of their encampments have been identified, but the timing of the submergence has not been fixed. The region was watered by the glacial River Rhine, into which flowed the River Thames as a tributary; the combined river flowed into the North Sea, permitting access to Britain by large mammals and humans.

… and from the brilliant StrangeMaps …

“If the extensive schemes for the drainage of North Sea are carried out according to the plan illustrated above, which was conceived by a group of eminent English scientists, 100,000 square miles will be added to the overcrowded continents of Europe. The reclaimed land will be walled in with enormous dykes, similar to the Netherland dykes, to protect it from the sea, and the various rivers flowing into the North Sea will have their courses diverted to different outlets by means of canals.”

… and, there is even a map …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrUWFYkbcmg

Please do not try to recreate any of the hilarious antics in this video, this video is for entertainment purposes only, if you hurt yourself as a result of recreating this stunt, we will laugh at you for being a dumb, or should that be numb ass.

http://optimist.geekisp.com/retro.

Previously …

You are from Yorkshire!

Aye lad.

How Yorkshire are you ?

via.

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/nanosleep/wakeup_lat_by_os.png

The above graph is taken from an article on how long nanosleep(2) actually sleeps. The linked article discusses the skew caused by aliasing, which effected Free and DragonFly BSDs, but I am particularly interested in the Darwin and Linux plots when compared to the Solaris plot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3yQyxQ8cBo

Ladies and Gentlemen, the most understated, Jesus on Es by LSD.

At the time this was pretty cutting edge, and ran in the tiny confines of at most 1Mb of memory, packed onto a couple of disks, which probably totaled all of a megabyte, together.

I forget the exact details.

When this came out, I had been coding for a few years, and knew many of the tricks to get the most out of the hardware, sometimes beyond the specification, but this just blew me away.

Tight. Long too, they really did work the disks and play games with memory to get all that in there. It’s the soundtrack though that drives it, reminiscent of those mixes from the Raves in the UK at that time, when it was established but still quite edgy and underground, before Castle Morton, before the Criminal Justice Bill. You wouldn’t normally have got a soundtrack that long, a mix as it were, obviously helped along by the fact that many of the tunes of that era were probably made on the same hardware more or less, but that said it’s quite sample heavy and there are quite a number of different parts and tunes, they did well.

UPDATE :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS-NYK-8KL0

‘Yes, Aunt Dahlia,’ I said, ‘you have guessed my secret. I do indeed love.’
‘Who is she?’
‘A Miss Pendlebury. Christian Name, Gwladys. She spells it with a “w”.’
‘With a “g”, you mean.’
“With a “w” and a “g”.’
‘Not Gwladys?’
‘That’s it.’
The relative uttered a yowl.
‘You sit there and tell me you haven’t enough sense to steer clear of a girl who calls herself Gwladys? Listen, Bertie,’ said Aunt Dahlia earnestly,’I'm an older woman than you are - well you know what I mean - and I can tell you a thing or two. And one of them is that no good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn.”

Miss Pendlebury is an artist, and, in the opinion of Bertie Wooster, a dashed good one, too. However, he may be slightly biased because at the time of the remarking of the aforementioned statement he was well-and-truly head-over-heels in love with her, so much so that he entrusted her with the heavy task of painting his Aunt Agatha’s portrait. Unenviable though the job was, Gwladys had a dashed good crack at it, but the finished work was dismissed angrily by Aunt Agatha, and Gwladys became rather huffy with Bertie. Jeeves endeavoured to comfort his young, lovesick master by assuring him that the name Gwladys was not a particularly attractive one, on a par with Kathryn and Ethyl, all of which came about as a result of the pennings of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The name Gwladys is borrowed from one of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories, another allusion dropped, in which Bertie falls for a girl named Gwladys. His Auntie Dahlia is appalled. “No good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn,” she says. “But particularly Gwladys.” You’d have to have read your Wodehouse, or The New Yorker, to know that all those ys imply an anti–Welsh slur. With Ethyl (an anti–knock gasoline additive, tetra–ethyl lead) may come a not–too–thinly veiled anti–petrochemical knock as well.

Through these names, Wodehouse shows the ineptness and unimportance of a label, such as name or class, in the defining of a real person or group of people. In essence, his choice of names serves to break down stereotypes, to show their innaneness, and assault those of the English class system in a humorous manner.

UPDATE : コンニチワ Tomokilog !

Before I start, may I just say a quick “what …” and follow it up with a rather emphatic “the fuck ….”

Yet more involuntary mass surveillance in the UK reported by Aunty …

Merseyside police are using the “spy drone”, fitted with CCTV cameras, mainly for tackling anti-social behaviour and public disorder.

The machine is 1m wide, weighs less than a bag of sugar, and can record images from a height of 500m.

Originally used by the military, it is due to be operational by June for a full three-month trial, which is the “first of its kind” in the UK.

The drone will also be used for monitoring traffic congestion and investigations are to be made into its possible role in firearms operations.

The machines, which are flown by remote control or using pre-programmed GPS navigation systems, are silent and can be fitted with night-vision cameras.

The images they record are sent back to a police support vehicle or control room.

“Our drone will be used primarily to support our anti-social behaviour taskforce AXIS, in gathering all important evidence to put offenders before the courts.

“For us, this is a cost-effective way of helping to catch criminals and supports similar technology we’re already using in our vans and helicopter.”

You have got to be kidding me.

UPDATE : Drones were used at this years V festival.