Month: December 2007

King William’s College Christmas Quiz

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date December 25, 2007

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?

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date December 11, 2007

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

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date December 11, 2007

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.

Tags science

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Game: Thin Ice

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date December 7, 2007

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.

Tags games

Politics Uncategorized

Harmful internet and videogame violence

Post author By Matt Wharton
Post date December 7, 2007

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.