Year: 2007

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King William’s College Christmas Quiz

Or as it is more officially known The King William’s College General Knowledge Paper 2007-8.

It’s that time of year again when the obscenely difficult General Knowledge Paper is given to the students of King William’s College on the Isle of Man.

As I write this I imagine Manx families having enjoyed their Christmas dinners are now sitting around a table (or more likely Google on a PC) discussing possible answers to the questions.

I’m unsure whether or not I should post the answers here that I know or not as I may unfairly skew the competition amongst the students. But as Metafilter already has done so and they are far more likely to be near the top of the Google hits I shall do so.

1.9 During the year 1907: whose return for 1st June was 31.1 – 14 – 48 – 17? Don’t know but this is clearly a cricket question.

2.9 Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

2.10 Greyfriars. Billy Bunter.

3.1 William Henry Ireland. Forger of a play that was supposedly written by William Shakespeare.

3.3 Don’t know but the question I’m sure is about Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald and the October 1924 General Election. Edit: The Zinoviev Letter

3.4 The Hitler Diaries created by Konrad Kujau.

I’d surmise that section 3 concerns forgers.

4.1 Rorke’s Drift. Zulu is one of my all time favourite films so I couldn’t fail to answer this one.

4.3 Chaka. Zulu King.

5.2 Jim Laker in 1956. The test match England v Australia at Old Trafford.

6.2 Vyacheslav Molotov

6.3 Anton Chekhov

6.8 Dmitri Mendeleev

6.9 Yuri Gagarin (I’m guessing it’s him given the Russian theme and the name Glenn suggest John Glenn the Astronaut)

6.10 Ivan Pavlov

8.2 Captain Hook, from J M Barrie’s Peter Pan.

11.1 Hole in the heart.

11.3 Kind Hearts and Coronets. With Alec Guinness playing the parts of all eight D’Ascoynes in the film.

11.5 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

11.9 Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland.

13.1 Sergeant Pepper

14.1 Dean Martin

17.1 Paddington. Bear and railway.

17.5 The location of Cleopatra’s Needle (that being the name of an Obelisk in London) I’m guessing.

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Lagos: City of the future?

Population is unknown in Lagos but is well above 10 million and there is roughly 6000 new arrivals every day!

Third World megalopoleis like this will likely be home to a large proportion of the world’s population in this century.

The Megacity: Decoding the chaos of Lagos by George Packer.

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Stephen Fry’s Global Warming

I’ve some notes on this essay by Stephen Fry on Americans lively dinner conversation and global warming.

Jim has deliberately chosen his position due to his own undeclared conflict of interest and his point that many scientists dispute global warming is a common fallacy by people like him. It’s far more complicated than that it really isn’t a debate where there are two sides for climatologist to put themselves, there is dispute over whether it is a natural cycle, what effect global warming will have, whether or not human influence is quantifiable, issues over the fact that warming is uneven across the globe.

Fry’s position of a kind of Pascal wager is I believe the correct one because even if global warming turns out not to be a problem the steps we need to take to tackle it are ones human civilisation needs to make at some point in any case.

Fossil fuels are going to run out (actually I believe that they won’t but that we will cease to use them at some point) and so in order for us to progress as a race we need to move into a post-fossil fuel society.

Wired has some theories about what technologies we’ll be using sooner than later in the place of fossil fuels.

We’ll probably end up moving towards using ethanol or similar produced from corn to power our transportation but this will not be a solution to global warming because of the continued Carbon Dioxide release.

Some research is being done into synthetic biology to create enzymes that can produce even better products than biobutanol to replace petrol entirely and perhaps even offer a performance improvement over gasoline.

But power generation will definitely move away from generating CO2 as sustainable power generation technologies improve they become more viable and more economical than building huge coal fired power stations. We will at some point in the mid 21st century start to see Nuclear fusion power stations come online but until then it makes sense to continue to build fission based stations and the technology has improved greatly in that area also so that the modern stations are far better and safer than those in use in the US and UK currently.

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Game: Thin Ice

Cute little seasonal game from the folks at Nitrome. Thin Ice involves skating a loop around the monsters on the frozen pond to make the ice beneath them fall away.

So when I wrote cute I meant cute in the way that causing monsters to freeze and drown to death in a frozen pond is cute.

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Politics Uncategorized

Harmful internet and videogame violence

A new enquiry into harmful content on the internet and in video games was launched by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 5 December 2007, Session 2007-08.

The Committee is announcing today a new inquiry into the potential risks from harmful material on the Internet and in video games, with the following terms of reference:

The benefits and opportunities offered to consumers, including children and young people, and the economy by technologies such as the Internet, video games and mobile phones.

The potential risks to consumers, including children and young people, from exposure to harmful content on the Internet or in video games. The Committee is particularly interested in the potential risks posed by:

– Cyber bullying;
– user generated content, including content that glorifies guns and gang violence;
– the availability of personal information on social networking sites;
– content that incites racial hatred, extremism or terrorism; and
– content that exhibits extreme pornography or violence.

Very similar remit to the Byron Review which is examining the risks to children from exposure to potentially harmful or inappropriate material on the internet and in video games. Though I think the Byron Review is more concerned with videogame violence than the DCMS Committee’s enquiry.

Talking of videogame violence a new bloody trailer for Ninja Gaiden II is out

It seems like there’s almost nothing you can do in this game that doesn’t result in an enemy losing an appendage and spewing forth a geyser of blood.

and Rubbish Pixels has listed The six biggest arseholes in games

The King of All Cosmos, Katamari Damacy
Nothing’s ever good enough for this bearded, carpet-headed bell-end. No matter how big your Katamari is he’ll complain about it being too small. Maybe you shouldn’t have accidentally destroyed the entire cosmos then, you giant regal fuck.

The last character on the list is a bit of a surprise. but on reflection I think I do agree with the assessment.

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Movies Reviews

Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

I’m practically at a loss for words. Beautiful bleak melancholic portrait of an amiable sociopath and the man who killed him.

Wonderful score, beautiful cinematography with fantastic portrayals of the characters by the two leads make this my film of the year.

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TV

The Wire: prequels

All you folks who like me are waiting eagerly in anticipation of the start of Season 5 here’s a little something to whet your appetites.

Young Prop Joe (1962, Baltimore, Maryland)
Young Omar (1985, Baltimore, Maryland)
Bunk and McNulty (2000, Baltimore, Maryland)

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The saga of cleaning the cinema.

Since Michael died earlier this year we’ve had real difficulty finding a decent cleaner to replace him at the cinema.

We’ve tried two different cleaning companies but they both turned out to be unreliable. You’d think that if the cleaner was ill or wasn’t able to work for some other reason that the company that we’d hired would find a replacement to do the job for that day as it is the company we have a contract with not the individual cleaner. But no.

So we gave up on them and tried to hire and employ some cleaners directly. We had no trouble in hiring a couple of people to do the job (let’s call them Bob and Margaret, not their real names) splitting the week between them , they both seemed reliable and keen and so we thought our troubles were over.

Until the ghost.

I got a text message yesterday morning informing me that Margaret wouldn’t be able to come in as she was ill. So I ended up having to come in early to give the place a quick once over before customers arrived for our free morning screening of The Assassination of Jesse James.

I come in today to discover that the real reason why Margaret didn’t come into work was that she was afraid of our ghost. But all is not lost as Bob upon learning about Margaret’s fears has decided to exorcise the ghost by burning incense and will accompany Margaret for her next shift to alleviate her fears.

I find that the place is spooky when no one else is around at night, it’s a creaky old building, but it shouldn’t be that bad during the morning because at least it is light outside.

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Let’s Do Lunch – Logic puzzle

Coudal Partners have published yet another fiendish logic puzzle after their previous doozies such as Einstein’s fish and Which Porn Star Ate the Most Hot Dogs?

However I’m convinced that Let’s Do Lunch is missing some information as I’ve come up with four viable solutions.

The Set Up

Four movie actors are in a cafe, sitting together at a square table, like the one shown here with the seats numbered. They are discussing their most recent projects while waiting for their salads. Each has just returned from a different location where he or she was shooting a different type of film, one of which is a costume drama.

From the information provided can you figure out where each person sat, his or her full name, the location he or she had just returned from, and the type of movie each had shot?

The Details

1. York (who isn’t sitting in seat #1) shot a science fiction movie.
2. The person sitting in seat #2 didn’t just return from Tokyo.
3. Julia is in seat #3.
4. Hannah (who isn’t sitting in seat #4) is across from the person who just returned from Hawaii.
5. Marks is sitting next to the person who just returned from Spain.
6. Moon did not shoot an action thriller.
7. Glory and Robert are sitting next to each other; one of them is surnamed Smith and the other had just returned from Ireland.
8. Robert (who isn’t Moon) shot a romantic comedy.

My solutions
The words in bold are the ones I’ve managed to fix down as being the only possible solution but the rest are variable to some extent.

Seat 1, Glory Marks, action thriller, Ireland
Seat 2, Hannah York, science fiction, Spain
Seat 3, Julia Moon, costume drama, Tokyo
Seat 4, Robert Smith, romantic comedy, Hawaii

Seat 1, Glory Marks, action thriller, Ireland
Seat 2, Hannah Moon, costume drama, Spain
Seat 3, Julia York, science fiction, Tokyo
Seat 4, Robert Smith, romantic comedy, Hawaii

Seat 1, Robert Marks, romantic comedy, Ireland
Seat 2, Hannah York, science fiction, Spain
Seat 3, Julia Moon, costume drama, Tokyo
Seat 4, Glory Smith, action thriller, Hawaii

Seat 1, Robert Marks, romantic comedy, Ireland
Seat 2, Hannah Moon, costume drama, Spain
Seat 3, Julia York, science fiction, Tokyo
Seat 4, Glory Smith, action thriller, Hawaii

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Sport Uncategorized

England lose and so goes McClaren

After the England football team’s abysmal performance against Croatia last night resulted in them failing to qualify for the Euro 2008 the coach Steve McClaren has been sacked.

Croatia played for and got the win even though it was irrelevant as they were guaranteed to qualify and to top the group unless convincingly beaten by England.

A series of defensive errors cost England the match and apart from a short spell of good play at the start of the second half the players’ underperformed.

England shouldn’t have really been in the position of needing a draw from last night’s match but failing to win matches against lowly ranked Israel and Macedonia earlier in qualifying set them up for the possibility of failure.