There, that's better.

This afternoon in Normandy

This week-end has some high tide coefficients, so we cam to check if the caslt built last week would survive. So far, it has, even if was a real fight today.

Bu no grey anywhere.

Wind power

I habe just watched some of Lelouch's work which I hadn't seen before.

My visitor/best friend didn't get to see any snowfall, then flew out of Munich on Friday and, of course, the snow immediately began to fall and has hardly quit since. And people don't think nature has a sense of humor.

Nice to be back; won't leave again until early March.

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher

As for the tropical part of my excursion, let's just say I was here.  I'm currently back home and at the office getting absolutely nothing done! ;-)

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

Unwired Planet, formerly Openwave Systems, said in a regulatory filing today that it has received more than 1,900 patents, including 753 US patents, from Swedish telecom company Ericsson.

There's not much to Unwired Planet beyond its patents. The operating parts of Openwave were sold off before the transformation to Unwired last April. In September, Unwired launched patent suits against Apple and Google, following a time-tested recipe: use patents on old, unsuccessful technology to ask for royalties on new, popular technology. It also had cases against Apple and RIM at the International Trade Commission, but dropped them in October.

Unless something is done, fairly soon, this nonsense is going to smother new product development.


Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

https://jobsearch.direct.gov.uk/GetJob.aspx?JobID=634623&JobTitle=Wolf+Boy%2fGirl&q=circus&a mp;rad=20&rad_units=miles&pp=25&sort=rv.dt.di&vw=b&re=134&setype=2&AVSDM =

Twitter / MarkJLittlewood: Latest ComRes poll: Lab 35% ...

Latest ComRes poll: Lab 35% UKIP 23% Con 22% Lib 8%

Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped to develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment, an apparent suicide.
....
At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous software that allows users to subscribe to online information. Later, he became even more of an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library.

Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz's death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

"Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world," said Susan Crawford, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz "a complicated prodigy," and said "graybeards approached him with awe."

I managed to join in the afternoon but am now in bed

keep to the Fen Causeway

It was a favourite Parisian haunt of Hemingway and Picasso, and today is a hive of painters, street artists and cartoonists.

But defenders of Montmartre's Place du Tertre warn past artistic luminaries would be turning in their grave to learn that the Paris district's fabled square is about to become home to a Starbucks coffee shop.

"The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:"

They neglect to add that building a Death Star would require the disarmament and enslavement of the whole American people so that they can be compelled to work on the project. This would require the organisational skills of a person capable of levels of evil previously unimagined. Sadly Mr Cheney has chosen not to make himself available.

keep to the Fen Causeway

No, really...

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Daily Kos: House broken: How the GOP legislative machine turned into a doomsday device

The upshot of all this is that the House of Representatives--one of the two heads on the shoulders of our bicameral congressional beast--has been rendered largely irrelevant. The GOP majority can't even negotiate with itself, much less with anyone else.

How did we reach this point? And can a broken House be put back into some kind of working order in time to head off a fiscal disaster? I have serious doubts.

I'll admit that the first week the Dutchlands were a drab messy affair, particularly weather-wise. But the winter queen has now arrived here in full majesty.

Below picture is a little rough, as I'm still adjusting to smart phones, but here's yesterday's announcement of clear skies to come:

I'll add today's glorious, cloudless sky - after I come back cycling. It's a crisp minus two C - and I'm off.

Despite being mercilessly mocked by the MSM for suggesting armed police officers be put in schools -- a program the NRA dubbed the National School Shield program -- the idea has quickly taken hold all around the country. From Texas to Virginia to Staten Island to Sandy Hook Elementary itself, parents are demanding that their children be afforded armed protection rather than trust their luck to gun-free zone designations that determined murderers tend not to comply with.

Speechless.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

As we set out to re-check sources with renewed enthusiasm, we discovered that the genealogy-fanatic Mormons, who put church records all across Europe on microfilm (something both of us learnt about years ago), put a large part of their insanely big database online.

I spent every night last week browsing it, but I'm far from finished with the records of just one location (among about half a dozen relevant to that branch of my ancestry). Still, I could already confirm every detail of a letter written by a then over 90-year old woman about her grandparents to great-great-grandparents in the 1960s and go back one further generation; and found that all the encyclopaedia are wrong about the birth dates of two of my more well-known distant relatives.

This is difficult detective work: in the period I'm intested in and the site has sources for (18th and early 19th century), the pastors who kept the books had script of changing quality, all of them preferred different spellings for the same names, some of them made several errors (like baptising a son under one name and burying him a year later under another name), most parents had 8-10 children (more than half of whom died early and their names were given again to younger siblings), and parents used the same 5-6 male resp. female given names (so there were several name-sakes even in a single village). I think I'll be at it for months at least.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}