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This entry is part of a series, Planning Japan» So the time came, I refreshed and refreshed across 1:29 to 1:30AM, (9:30AM Tokyo Time), waiting for the tickets to fly out to Amami Oshima to become available; refresh, still not available, refresh again, and, sold out. I was expecting a rush, but not to be gutted in a single instant. The question remains what to do now? Ferry’s are cheaper, but take 11 hours either direction, and we could be stranded on Amami for days before being able to get back to the mainland. To make matters worse, I’m away on holiday when the ferry tickets become available, and the process isn’t in English either. This is gonna be a tough one, but if it really comes to it, I’m sure we’ll be able to bribe a fisherman to take us out to a visible location.
If you’re tech enough, you could probably have guessed what this topic was all about, if not, then two words: Wolfram Alpha. Despite it’s initial, general appearance, it’s not a search engine, but a “a computational knowledge engine”. Instead of gathering information from the Internet, it has it’s own internal knowledge base, and hence returns factual answers based on what you ask, rather than opinions.
This can be anything from share prices to, well, as someone put it this morning:
The integral of x^2 dx from 0 to the population of Jordan divided by the GDP of japan in British pounds per second.
And there I was surprised I still remember what an integral is from A-Level maths. In English, the question is asking, if you were to draw the graph of X^2 (which is a curve that gets steeper as you increase X, as the result goes 0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 etc for every increment), up to where X = Jordan’s population, and then work out the area under this curve, and divide that figure by the Japan’s annual economic output in terms of sterling per second.
The answer is in fact 7.569*10^14 persons cubed seconds per pound sterling, which I’m still trying to decipher. The best bit is it even gives a graph based on how the figure would have changed over history based on Jordan’s population growth and Japan’s economy (though, it’s failed to account for change in exchange rates between Yen and GBP), and then cites its sources.
As it turns out, this kind of calculation is just a smidgen of what it’s capable of. I was going to give some more examples, but you might as- well just look at the ones already on the website.
I tried a few experiments of my own, and found that the average global wage rate for each person is approximately £1.17 per hour, (the flaw here is that not everyone in the labour force is actually employed, so the actual figure is just a little higher). Furthermore, the world labour force only makes up 45.99% of the world population, meaning that if the world were communist, everyone would earn a whopping 54 pence per hour, which is still greater than my average salary between last October and last month.
This is why commy-dictator Kim Jong Il should be put in charge of the British M.o.D., we’d all have a pay rise, and on another plus-side I’m also sure he’d do a better job of brainwashing us into thinking our troops are fighting for a noble cause.
This entry is part of a series, NotMyBase.com WIP» OK, so I’m really procrastinating now. I’ve still not started any serious revision for Monday’s exam, and I just have the urge to do everything else, evident by the rise in posts per day on my site from less than one to around sixty-two.
When I first worked on this new site, I came up with a series of goals, and some of them have been fulfilled. I’ve redesigned the header, and the colour makes the search box a little more obvious then when it was purely white like the search box itself. I’d still like a status in the header, and I promise it wont be as obscene as my Facebook ones.
As for sidebar widgets, I’m still getting used to the site management so I’m still figuring out what is genuinely useful and what is just clutter. Speaking of clutter, I need to tidy the menu up a bit.
But I now have a new issue, allow me to explain. Take a look at everything I’ve posted about this years tour of Japan (I still get all giddy when I say that), what I’d really like to do is have the map stickied to the top half of the page, and for the bottom half, have a slide-show of the other posts in the topic. I already have a few idea’s on how to do this, but I really should get revising.
Don’t worry, you haven’t accidentally broken some security barrier to see this; “Top Secret” is the name of the project and has nothing to do with its level of security.
The Competition
A couple of years ago, producers of Trackmania, 2moons and other titles, announced the “Top Secret” competition, where amateur games developers were to work together and create a game based on the specifications from the design team (at the same time, the designers were also in a competition for best input etc. The prize was to become director of the project). The winning team gets an instant $100,000 and any production costs up to $1million are paid off. Acclaim will then publish the game, and the developers get revenue and more money based on revenue and time spent supporting the game once it’s released. Continue reading Top Secret: Not a Secret.
6th April 2008, as the world watches, mortified yet scarily passive about Magube’s “re-election”:
President Mugabe gives a speech on world peace. He opens up by saying “I hate guns”, as someone behind him holds a gun up to his ear and fires a blank. Mugabe’s stunned reaction reminds me of “I can’t believe you’ve done this”. After recovering from the initial shock, he bursts into tears, holding his head in his hands in humiliation and embarrassment.
For those of you wondering what “I can’t believe you’ve done this” is, here you go. The exact facial expression I’m on about is just at 8 seconds when his face comes back in view of the camera with a look of frustration:
I couldn’t help but feel angry about how we try to justify the Iraqi, Afghan and potential Iranian wars in the name of democracy and liberty, yet we let this guy so blatantly pillage his own nation.
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