Leon is Awesome

Seems like you can avoid a looottt of trouble by keeping paint, permanent markers and nail polish locked up:

http://shitmykidsruined.tumblr.com/

I’ve heard a lot of candid reports about various UK ISPs, but these are usually based on a fairly strongly biased personal experience. I did get a general feeling that Virgin Media really weren’t very good, though, so I have employed some NLP techniques to perform objective analysis of people’s subjective opinions.

What I did was to count the number of pages on the net that Google is aware of which contain phrases in the form of “ISP is great” or “ISP sucks”. You can do this at home! This gives an idea of how much people like to express their opinions and what those opinions are when it comes to a particular internet service provider. However, this page count figure is misleading on its own – a company that has two million customers and treats the majority of them badly may still have many more positive reviews than a smaller ISP with only a few hundred customers that treats them all like queens and kings. So, we need to normalise somehow, and adjust the counts of pages that review ISPs to account for that ISP’s size. To manage this, I also counted occurences of phrases in the format “ISP review”, substituting ISP for the name of the company.

Results!

Xilo aren’t popular enough to be comparable here. But what else can we see from this?

Well, for starters, 21% of the mentions reviewing O2 Broadband are about them being great – compared to 13% saying they suck. In fact, excluding Xilo, O2 are bottom of the suck league, and bottom of the shit league too. In fact, here I may begrudge them a compliment, and point out that evidence could be interpreted to suggest that they are are the greatest ISP in this comparison. Sky Broadband are a close second “is great” ISP, and also top “suck” ISP. What we can read from this is that Sky Broadband customers are more likely spend vast swathes of time on the internet vocally expressing their exaggerated opinions to anybody who’ll appear to listen. I’m sure we’ll all encountered them and formed fond memories of the occasion. BT Broadband are truly not a great ISP (0.03% of mentions say “BT Broadband is great”), bought into by customers who like a bit of a moan once in a while (second on the suck list, third on the shit list) – but will clearly never provide a positive remark. Daily Mail readers, perhaps?

Finally, the overwhelming kings of the shit list, based on this impartial evidence, are Virgin Media; 31.44% of their mentions are of their customers saying “Virgin Media are/is shit” – compared to the runner up, Sky Broadband, who despite their vocal customer base only hit 5.7% of  ”shit” reviews. Well done Virgin, keep up the good work. You saw the facts here first!

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According to Last.fm, who know nothing, I’m into rock, funk, electronic, indie and soul, including: System of a Down, Kings of Leon, Dizzy Mizz Lizzy, David Gilmour, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Jamie Cullum, James Brown, Sarah Vaughan, DragonForce, Sneaker Pimps, Frank Sinatra, Rage Against the Machine, Emancipator, We Are Scientists, and The Coral. Who on earth are “Emancipator”?

I seem to be getting good at noticing when someone on-line is a Dane typing in English, and rather than let it slip into a non-specific skill, I will enumerate any distinct tell-tale signs here.

1. Running words together without a space so that they look like Danish; e.g., “littlebrother”
2. Mis-typing “month” as “mounth”
3. Accidentally hitting å, æ or ø next to another key; for example, “helpå!”
4. Use of prepositions that work in Danish but sound a little contrived (or downright incorrect) in English. For example, “He’s there up!”

This is the 8-power Mandelbulb fractal as discovered here, rendered with the path tracer stacy at 2400×1800 and 8192 rays per pixel.

There were some interesting comments on this idea, quoted below.

How do you determine the surface normals? It seems like at some points it should essentially be infinitely porous.

As I understand, they do a finite number of iterations. There is a problem, indeed, with it being infinitely porous — you see, with larger number of iterations it gets darker. As I understand, with infinite number of iterations it would be a black body.

What a fantastic concept: the surface is so infinitely large and complex, that light literally gets lost in it. So it should get heavier the more light is used to attempt to illuminate it?

In physics, a black body is an idealized object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that falls on it. No electromagnetic radiation passes through it and none is reflected. Because no light (visible electromagnetic radiation) is reflected or transmitted, the object appears black when it is cold. However, a black body emits a temperature-dependent spectrum of light. This thermal radiation from a black body is termed black-body radiation.

Full Reddit comments here.

It’s a winner!

The Daily Mail, oh, the Daily Mail. I wish you’d die. But seeing as you haven’t, and you published this, well, here’s an annotation:

Despite complaining that it looks unkempt and feels rough to touch, the unshaven look on a man is actually a turn-on for 41 per cent of women.

That’s what we call, a minority. The ones that want to find a man whose face feels like theirs, perhaps?

A slightly geeky personality came second, proving that women really do like a guy who knows their stuff when it comes to technology.

Yeah, you know why? Because jocks are dicks. Don’t believe me? Check out every film with jocks in ever. Is this alone going to get a single geek laid? Definitely not.

A hairy chest was voted third, followed by a man who loves to read or cries at a soppy film.

Man up, Daily Mail readers’ husbands, man up. When you don’t, you look like this: Crying Wife (that’s right, a crying girl who at least has the self-respect to be embarrassed because she looks silly. And she’s a girl!)

But almost one in five would never admit what they really find attractive in a man to other people.

Almost one in five! Holy crap, that means a meagre over-eighty-percent of women have at least one peer group that they feel comfortable in! The bitches! Pretty unusual for a statistical minority to have an unusual attitude, isn’t it? Oh no, that’s what unusual means. Daily Mail, you dicks.

It seems women really do like a guy who is able to show a softer side, or who is carrying a little bit of extra weight.

So that they don’t feel fat. Or end up sleeping with the garden rake. And, right, did everybody think that girls only hang around with men who never listen to them? Anybody who has got laid at some point and isn’t a regular topic of Daily Mail headlines will disagree.

And more than half would rather a guy who was soft and cuddly instead of toned and muscly.

What was that other thing you said about British Women, Daily Mail? “they are overweight, unkempt and lazy about grooming“. At least this profile of women that you’re building knows its league, eh.

Women also prefer a guy who doesn’t spend too much time on his appearance, with 63 per cent saying they would like a man who got ready quickly rather than fussing over what he looked like.

Because then he’d be gay, or a guido. Using first-order Daily Mail logic, can we say that 37% of British women would tolerate a guido or a gay boyfriend? Of course we can!

Fifty-eight per cent of women even want a guy who doesn’t care what he eats over someone who is watching his weight and counting calories.

See above; also,

That is all.