Hulleye Comes By!

ok, so apparantly this large UK booze store Thresher, gave its employers a voucher that is valid from today till the 10 December offering 40% off ALL their wine (red and white, french, spanish, italian) and champagne (incl. pink). All of it!

There was no promotion, no ads, no annoying jingle, no nothing! Just simply a voucher given to a few select employees. So to get your hands on one of these coupons you needed to know someone who had one or you have to download it here [PDF file]. Hah! Somehow its found its way online and only a few million people have downloaded it!!

So with the party season coming up, this is uhm quite a lucrative discount to get your hands on. The reason I am blogging it here - gosh, you didn’t think that I was being unscrooge like … charitable type! - hell no, the reason is because its just a great example of the power of the internet. With millions having downloaded it, it will be interesting (for want of a better word) to see how this pays off and if the company (which has stores on almost every high street corner) can withstand such a discount - for now its impossible to access their site as they couldnt cope with the traffic online! So do download the coupon or pass it on and lets see what happens…

Cheers!

From the security guru Bruce Schneier,

There’s new software that can predict who is likely to become a murderer.

Using probation department cases entered into the system between 2002 and 2004, Berk and his colleagues performed a two-year follow-up study — enough time, they theorized, for a person to reoffend if he was going to. They tracked each individual, with particular attention to the people who went on to kill. That created the model. What remains at this stage is to find a way to marry the software to the probation department’s information technology system.When caseworkers begin applying the model next year they will input data about their individual cases - what Berk calls “dropping ‘Joe’ down the model” — to come up with scores that will allow the caseworkers to assign the most intense supervision to the riskiest cases.

Even a crime as serious as aggravated assault — pistol whipping, for example — “might not mean that much” if the first-time offender is 30, but it is an “alarming indicator” in a first-time offender who is 18, Berk said.

The model was built using adult probation data stripped of personal identifying information for confidentiality. Berk thinks it could be an even more powerful diagnostic tool if he could have access to similarly anonymous juvenile records.

The central public policy question in all of this is a resource allocation problem. With not enough resources to go around, overloaded case workers have to cull their cases to find the ones in most urgent need of attention — the so-called true positives, as epidemiologists say.

But before that can begin in earnest, the public has to decide how many false positives it can afford in order to head off future killers, and how many false negatives (seemingly nonviolent people who nevertheless go on to kill) it is willing to risk to narrow the false positive pool.

Pretty scary stuff, as it gets into the realm of thoughtcrime.

The LHC, or the Large Hadron Collider is being developed and built at CERN, in Switzerland and is now almost complete. Those were the guys who developed the world wide web that you browse on the internat’s today. Wired magazine gives us a superb photoset for a peek inside. That thing is quite a machine. Wired also does a three-part series on the collider exploring the engineering, science and politics of high-end theoretical physics in the 21st century.” Thanks Hugh.

Looking down the length of The Machine itself. The Large Hadron Collider will form a 27 km ring, which protons will circle about 11,000 times per second.

Have you ever wondered: Where does fart gas come from? What makes farts stink? Why do farts make noise? Why are stinky farts generally warmer and quieter than regular farts? What is the best position for farting?  Well here are all the flatulence answers that you ever required.

And of course, what all can’t YouTube teach us. In this case, how to escape your own farts. The Japanese never fail to provide us with such invaluable information.

I obviously cannot end this post without Wikipedia’s entry on flatulence.

From the website AskPhilosophers:

There is a paradox surrounding philosophy that AskPhilosophers seeks to address. On the one hand, everyone confronts philosophical issues throughout his or her life. But on the other, very few have the opportunity to learn about philosophy, a subject that is usually taught only at the college level. (Why? There is no good reason for this and plenty of bad ones.) AskPhilosophers aims to bridge this gap by putting the skills and knowledge of trained philosophers at the service of the general public.

If you have a question that you think is in some way philosophical or relates to philosophy, feel free to ask it here. If you are not sure whether your question is appropriate, send it in anyway.

Here’s an example question, and an excerpt from the response by Peter S. Fosl:

Is homosexuality ethical? If so, what differentiates it from incest? More specifically an infertile incestual relationship that has two consenting adults.

….what’s the moral difference between (a) an infertile (heterosexual, I take it) incestuous relationship that comprises two consenting adults and (b) a binary homosexual relationship? I suppose I would say that the crucial moral difference is that the infertile incestuous relationship involves close family members while the homosexual sexual relationship (assuming it’s not incestuous) does not. The moral weight here is born by the moral prohibitions built into the idea of family.

I’m not an anthropologist, but I’m told by them that every organization of family involves some sort of incest prohibition. Could there be families without incest prohibitions? I don’t know, but I have my doubts. Could there be homosexual families? The existence of many homosexual families makes it abundantly clear that there can be.

More here, categorized and alphabetized for your convenience.

via 3quarksdaily

An incredibly detailed description of the eight different timelines in the three Back to the Future movies.