The England woman’s football team is ranked 2 in the world. The men’s team is ranked 5 and clearly has come catching up to do.
Looking at the AI industrial revolution and wondering what would be the 21st century equivalent of smashing the looms.
This might upset my American friends, but watching from afar, US politics reminds me of when I was eight years old and wanted to hide behind the sofa during the scary parts of Dr Who.
Had one of those rare moments of clarity while driving this afternoon and realised there is a link between AI and entropy. For a moment I thought it might be an original idea, before I got home and discovered many other people got there first.
What a shame he is an Arsenal supporter.
Today feels like it was the first time since 1966 when England’s football team had an important 50:50 refereeing decision go their way at the pointy end of the a tournament.
Realised that it is now exactly 50 years since, as a teenager, I saw AC/DC play at my local city. And about 30 years since I met the band in an Air NZ Koru lounge.
Have just found an archived copy of the book I co-wrote in 1982:
Usborne guide to understanding the micro
There’s a curious anomaly with Apple Maps and Google Maps that took me a while to understand.
I live in Beach Haven on Auckland’s North Shore. Travelling from here to the Auckland isthmus is straightforward for 21 hours of the day, but between 6:30 and 9:30 am, car traffic is congested to the point where it can take 90 minutes, even more in the worst case.
The same car trip at other times might take 20 to 25 minutes.
Bus trips to the central city, Ponsonby or Newmarket are easy thanks to a much improved network that whisks passengers down Onewa Road and over the bridge in minutes. It doesn’t make sense to use the car in these cases.
For travelling almost anywhere else a car is essential. Multi-leg trips on public transport are possible, but often not practical. In some cases there’s no sensible return option.
So car it is.
And that’s where the digital maps get weird. This applies equally to Apple and Google Maps.
Ask, say, Apple Maps for the travel time from Beach Haven to Greenlane Clinic. Outside the rush hour it’s 30 minutes. No problem.
In the rush hour the app tells me the travel time is 38 minutes. Yet, when I attempt the trip, 38 minutes after leaving home I’m still only halfway down Onewa Road.
Why are both maps consistently wrong about travel times for this and similar trips?
My theory is that the maps get travel time data from phones. Phones sitting in cars move along roads like Onewa Road at a snail’s pace. But these are massively outnumbered by phones whisking along Onewa Road on the buses. Google and Apple don’t know if a phone is in a car or a bus, so the aggregate data shows travel times that aren’t possible in a car.
That’s my theory. If you have a better one, please share.
Since May, Google has been removing a few of my web pages from its index every week. It seems random, although I realise there must be some kind of algorithm at work here. They’re not unloved pages… some are (or were) popular with plenty of incoming links.
I had almost completely forgotten about this other story from 10 years ago:
The oddball Blackberry Passport phone.
You can see from my face in the picture that I wasn’t convinced. Also, some bonus TV3 nostalgia.
Please don’t use the term “reach out” unless you are a member of the Four Tops. In that case you can use it as often as you like. For everyone else, the term has become a horrible cliche. Think of a more original way to express what you want to say.
Minor cognitive dissonance as brain switches between early Saturday and Sunday morning Euros football and last night’s All Black - England game.
You know what’s worse than a penalty shootout? A penalty shootout before breakfast. Before even the day’s first cup of tea. Here in Auckland, watching the England - Switzerland game, Saka’s last kick took place just after 7am.
The thing I learned this week. It is much harder to close down a solvent, but not longer needed, limited company than I imagined.
After five years of, brilliantly, NOT losing the better quality sunglasses I invested in, a feat that, amazingly, lasted all through the Covid lockdown period, I finally put them down somewhere away from home and inadvertently donated them to new owners.
The Guardian: “Analysis by the Sutton Trust suggests that Keir Starmer’s cabinet will have the highest number of ministers educated at comprehensive schools, and the lowest proportion in modern history who went to private schools.”
About time too.
The next job for the United Kingdom is to fix the electoral system. First past the post worked where there were only two or three parties, it is profoundly unfair when some parties get a large vote and next to no seats while less than 40 per cent can mean a landslide.
This looks like an interesting idea, short form audio blogging… no more than two minutes each time. I may give this a try with my website.
I was on RNZ this morning talking technology… you can listen online www.rnz.co.nz/national/…
… and criticise or otherwise comment here. I’m open to anything other than gratuitous abuse.
I watched at least part of every Euro2024 round of 16 knockout games, in most cases the entire game. Austria and Turkey aren’t the most glamorous or feted teams, they don’t have big name stars, but their clash was the most exciting game of the round.