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BoingBoing: Mugshot of man arrested for inhaling spray paint propellant
From The Smoking Gun. This guy was arrested after attempting to buy spray paint at a hardware store. A sharp-eyed employee noticed the guy's face was covered with gold paint and called the cops.
Apparently, the police said his face was covered with gilt.
BBC: Raft trip link to London attacks
Police are examining a possible link between those involved in Thursday's attacks and a whitewater rafting trip…
Photographs showed Khan, who carried out the Edgware Road bombing, raising a two-fingered peace sign, and Tanweer, who bombed Aldgate East, leaning forward and appearing to laugh.
Oh no they bloody don't!
The above photograph quite clearly shows Khan trying to give Tanweer some bunny ears, but Tanweer has realised what Khan is up to and has leant out of the way.
But I suppose peace signs from bombers make better copy.
Conversation with Jen, twenty minutes into the film Layer Cake on DVD last night:
J: Are you following this?
R: No.
J: It's totally disjointed. I can't figure out what's going on.
R: I think they're trying some pretentious, arty-farty editing. They've chopped up the storyline and reassembled it in non-chronological order. I suppose it will all make sense in the end.
J: I bloody well hope so.
R: The sound quality's terrible, though. It's all over the place. They haven't levelled it properly. And the fade out to black and fade back in again between scenes is all very clever, but the novelty wears off after a couple of minutes.
J: What's happening? Why have we gone back to the menu?
R: Erm… I think you'll find we've just watched the deleted scenes track.
Conversation with someone you don't know earlier this week:
R: Did you know that, if you write each of the first three odd numbers down twice like this, 113355, and then move the second three above the first three to get a fraction, you get 355÷113?
X: So what?
R: Work it out on your calculator. What do you get?
X: 3
R: No, don't round it down. Read it out in full.
X: 3.1415929
R: Isn't that cool?
X: What the hell are you talking about?
R: Doesn't that number ring a bell?
X: Nope. Should it?
R: It's a very close approximation to the number pi. It's miles better than 22÷7.
X: What the hell is pi?
R: WHAT?! You must have heard of pi, it's one of the most important numbers in mathematics!
X: Oh, I've heard of it all right, but I don't know what it means. I was never any good at maths at school. Why is pi so important, then?
R: It's the number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter.
X: Why the HELL would I need to know that?
R: Well, it's really important. Suppose you were going to paint a circular door, for example…
X: Where would I get a circular door?
R: It doesn't matter. Just suppose you were going to paint one. How would you know how much paint to buy?
X: I'd just buy five litres. That would be plenty.
R: …Ok, bad example, forget about the door. Imagine that teapot over there was a perfect sphere two feet across…
X: Can't I imagine a cube instead? They're easier.
R: But you don't need pi for cubes. Pi is for circular stuff.
X: Oh, I see, pi doesn't work on cubes—IT'S JUST A BIG CHEAT!
R: No it isn't. Pi makes it easier to do calculations with circles. That's the whole point! So imagine you've got this sphere two feet across and you wanted to fill it with water. How much water would you need?
X: I wouldn't need to work it out. I'd just fill it from the tap.
R: Yes, but if you did need to work it out, how many cubic feet of water would you need?
X: I suppose you're going to say pi.
R: Well, almost. You'd actually need four-thirds pi cubic feet.
X: ARE YOU HAVING ME ON?
R: NO! That's the volume of a sphere: four-thirds pi times the cube of its radius.
X: YOU SAID IT DOESN'T WORK ON CUBES!
X is right of course. I have never needed to use pi outside my school maths homework—even though I can still recite it to 22 decimal places (nerdish schoolboy's trick).
Mind you, did you hear about that Japanese bloke the other week who recited pi to 83,431 decimal places?
WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ABOUT?
Postscript:
HOLY CRAP!!! I PROMISE I didn't fix this… I just read on Wikipedia that today (22/7 in British date format, geddit?) is Pi Approximation Day.
Of course, you realise this proves that the paranormal is real, and there really is a god.
[Actually, there are two Pi Approximation Days (see Wikipedia article), so the odds of my publishing this particular item on one of them is 2 in 365 (or 1 in 182½). Hardly amazing, if you think about it—but still rather pleasing.]
For reasons I won't go into, I was wondering what the adjectival form of the word rhinoceros is this morning. I thought it might be something like rhinoceroid, or rhinoceristic, or (my favourite) rhinocerous.
I looked it up in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and was, quite frankly, astonished. The correct answer is:
Rhinocerotic
Well, I suppose they are pretty damn horny.
See also: Uncanny
BBC: Prayer 'no aid to heart patients'
Praying for patients undergoing heart operations does not improve their outcomes, a US study suggests.
A study found those who were prayed for were as likely to have a setback in hospital, be re-admitted, or die within six months as those not prayed for…
Heart experts said patients could benefit from feeling more optimistic.
That's right, a positive mental attitude really does seem to help you get better—unlike being prayed for against your knowledge. (For positive mental attitude, read placebo.)
Therapies such as prayer and homeopathy are widely used, although past studies looking at the impact of care on patients' health have had mixed results.
Prayer, homeopathy, faith healing, acupuncture, that weird shit they do by rubbing your feet, crystal healing, tai chi, blahdy-blahdy-blah…
All of them placebos.
See also: Getting beyond a joke
BBC: Former PM Sir Edward Heath dies
Former Conservative Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath has died at the age of 89.
Earlier this year, we lost another former Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan.
Come on, Maggie, we're on for the hat trick!
Oooooh! Look!! BUNNIES!!!
Jack Nicklaus, the greatest golfer in the history of the game, played his final round in a major tournament on Friday. Appropriately, it was at the Open Championship at St Andrews, the home of golf, and the scene of two of Jack Nicklaus's three Open Championship wins.
He even managed to finish with a birdie.
I'll bet my dad was on his feet in front of the telly, applauding with the crowd, as Jack walked down the 18th. Dad is a total golf nut, and tends to do embarrassing stuff like that.
My dad and his brother met Jack Nicklaus once. It was at Royal Birkdale during the 1969 Ryder Cup. They had gone into the club house to change out of their golf shoes after watching that day's competition, when Jack Nicklaus walked into the room to change his shoes. They went over and had a chat, and my dad got Jack's autograph (which he has since somehow managed to lose). Dad finished off the brief conversation by saying that he hoped Jack Nicklaus wouldn't mind if he didn't wish him good luck against the British team for the following day's play. Jack said he quite understood.
Later that week, Jack Nicklaus famously conceded the final putt of the tournament to Tony Jacklin, causing the competition's first ever tied result, with the words, "I don't think you would have missed that Tony, but I didn't want to give you the chance."
What a gentleman!
So much of a gentleman, in fact, that I have long since forgiven Jack Nicklaus for trying to kill me on the same course two years later:
I was six years old at the time, and my dad had taken me to watch one of the practice days of the 100th Open Championship. We were standing at a crowd control fence to the right of the 18th fairway, when my dad suggested that I step back a bit as the golfers tended to drive down the right-hand side to get a better line into the green for their second shots. I stepped back, and about three seconds later, a golf ball thudded into the fence post I had been leaning against. Up walked Jack Nicklaus, making jokes with the crowd who were moving the fence out of the way for him. He had a tricky lie in the rough. He shook his head, grabbed a man from out of the crowd, stood him behind the ball, and asked, "Well, what would you do?" The man said something along the lines of, "I'd probably just knock it into the middle of the green." Jack took out an iron, made a few practice swings, and struck the ball a couple of feet from the flag.
Retirement my arse! I don't think we've seen the last of Jack Nicklaus.