A quite disturbing video of a Camel Spider eating a lizard.
If you have arachnophobia, I’d advise you not to click on the video, it is fairly yucky. This speciman was about the size of my hand spread out, maybe 5 inches across. Camel spiders aren’t really spiders, they have 10 legs and 2 eyes and belong to an order of non-spider arachnids called Solifugae. They are aggressive and believe me, it hurts bad when they bite (taking a chunk out, story for another day) but non-venomous.
Tags: nature
A somewhat inappropriate advert for the Christmas release of The Passion of the Christ in Japan.
Christmas in Tokyo: Passion of the Christ [via]
Tags: Japan
Last month I wrote about how I pledged to refuse to register for an ID card at Pledgebank.
Well it took a little over a month for the pledge to receive the 10000 signatures required so now it is definite “I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund.”
You may still make the same pledge yourself if so wish.
Tags: ID cards
Found via Infosthetics.com, The Secret Lives of Numbers.
Ever wondered what the most popular integers are? Now you can find in this numerical equivalent of Wordcount.
13 is the 22nd most popular number just ahead of 97 which is the 23rd most popular for some reason.
Tags: mathematics
A brilliant little puzzle game created by John Tantalo, a CS undergrad at Case Western Reserve University.
Instructions: Arrange the vertices such that no edges overlap.
Tags: games
The BBC has been attacked by classical music record companies for it’s release of Beethoven’s nine symphonies on it’s website for people to download freely.
There is the obvious issue that it is devaluing the perceived value of music. You are also leading the public to think that it is fine to download and own these files for nothing.
Correct me if I’m wrong and I’m not but it is fine for the BBC to offer it’s recordings of Beethoven as performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for free.
It was a limited offer, the recordings are no longer available, and I believe that it will have introduced the excellence of Beethoven’s work to many individuals who wouldn’t otherwise have experienced it. There are likely to be people who wouldn’t normally buy classical music who would have been tempted by this offer just to see what it was like and will now seek out other recordings that are available for purchase.
The very companies that are attacking the BBC are likely to be the very companies that will benefit from the increased interest in classical music. I believe that the BBC in doing this is fulfilling it’s charter of creating greater access for the general public to a wide range of culture.
According to A Big Stick and a Small Carrot Charles Kennedy had the audacity to mention Iraq yesterday and was attacked for his naivety for what seems like a fairly measured statement in comparison to say George Galloway.
“I am not here implying some causal link between Britain’s involvement in Iraq and the terrible terrorist attacks in London last week. Not at all. The mass murderers who attacked London last week did not need Iraq as an excuse. The blame for the deaths in London falls firmly on their shoulders and on their shoulders alone.”
But it would be hard not to link the war in Iraq to the bomb attacks in London as our political leaders themselves link the war into the wider War on Terror.
If we truly are at war with the terrorists then this latest attack may be seen by many especially those who support the actions of the terrorists as a retaliatory strike. I believe that Britain would still have been targeted even if our government had decided not to participate in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and that in time the majority of population of Iraq will be a lot better off than they would have if Saddam Hussein had remained. But there is no escaping the fact that war has resulted in many innocent Iraqis losing their lives thus aiding those people who wish preach hatred of our country.
In the end we may never know why four seemingly normal lads from Yorkshire decided to blow themselves and many innocent Londoners up. But to think there may possibly a link between the events in Iraq and the attacks on London should not be considered a thoughtcrime. Most of us are thinking it anyway but I don’t think that the bomb attacks have at all changed our opinions on Iraq whichever side of the debate of whether we should have invaded or not we place ourselves.
Wasps’ Nest
Originally uploaded by electricinca.
Found this wasps’ nest a couple of days ago and had to get the man from the council to come and exterminate them all.
Tags: photography
The police and security services have managed to track down those responsible for the attacks in London and it appears that they were four young men from the Leeds area all of whom died in the resultant explosions.
It is not the result that people were expecting. It was theorized that the attackers may have been outsiders or perhaps Britons that had trained in Afghanistan and it was thought that they had planted the bombs and then left as the Madrid bombers did so that they could attack again in future.
But now we know that it was four seemingly normal young men who had somehow become radicalized in this country to the point of becoming suicide bombers. Questions are sure to be asked about how this came to be. It’s quite likely that there was some outside influence on them, who organised them and supplied them with the explosive material, but perhaps we are deluding ourselves about this just because we cannot understand how these four men could do what they did.
Computational complexity theory is part of the theory of computation dealing with the resources required during computation to solve a given problem. The most common resources are time (how many steps does it take to solve a problem) and space (how much memory does it take to solve a problem).
In this theory, the class P consists of all those decision problems that can be solved on a deterministic sequential machine in an amount of time that is polynomial in the size of the input; the class NP consists of all those decision problems whose positive solutions can be verified in polynomial time given the right information, or equivalently, whose solution can be found in polynomial time on a non-deterministic machine. Arguably, the biggest open question in theoretical computer science concerns the relationship between those two classes:
Is P equal to NP?
In a 2002 poll of 100 researchers, 61 believed the answer is no, 9 believed the answer is yes, 22 were unsure, and 8 believed the question may be independent of the currently accepted axioms, and so impossible to prove or disprove. A $1,000,000 USD prize has been offered for a correct solution.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Complexity classes P and NP”.