Variable names fail/win

This is a good paper but the choices of variable names are making me sad :(

v is not the same as nu :(

Ah well... at least sometimes variable names lead to happy consequences.  This is from the same paper:

poop!(ehehehehehehehe.........)

Circus

Oh, man.

1 image used on 9 front pages
via http://politicalscrapbook.net/2010/11/nus-protest-front-pages/

See what I mean? This is just gross... And you know what? All but one (which one? lol.) cropped out the encircling press photographers. What a fucking circus.

Seeing the full picture?

Window smashed during 2010 student protests in London. Image "courtesy" of BBC.
Window smashed during 2010 student protests in London. Image "courtesy" of BBC.


I can't help seeing this image like this — a lone protestor doing something crazy and anarchistic surrounded by a semicircle of a hundred professional cameras — and wondering if this is anything like good journalism.  Sure, this event happened. But it sure looks like a stunt for the cameras, rather than an organic protest event.  Would this have happened were the cameras not there to see it?

Graph sketching

Oh god, I'm going to talk about maths for a bit. Ignore me. You might find this interesting if you know what a derivative is and what it means.

This is a curiosity that my friend Anupam came up with. I'm not claiming any credit for noticing it but I thought I'd still share it with y'all.  It only requires very rudimentary calculus, but it produces a result which, the more I think about it, the less intuitive it seems.

UK stop and search powers are illegal

The Guardian reports:

The Strasbourg court ruled it was unlawful for police to use the powers, under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to stop and search people without needing any grounds for suspicion.

The widely-drawn ruling said that not only the use of the counter-terror powers, but also the way they were authorised, were "neither sufficiently circumscribed, nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse".

Vindicated!

Clinton Cards

At least Clinton Cards now caters to the more Oedipal members of society.