Blog January 2009 - AndyPryke.com
Parents: MyBlog |
Home, Index, Changes Blog RSS | |
Favourite Pages My Blog Best Of Blog 2007 Best Of Blog 2005 Birmingham, How to be Happy, Influenza Pandemic, Moseley Tornado, Misty's Big Adventure, Street Furniture Stickers, Weird Internet Animations Other People's Blogs Birmingham Bloggers Danger! High Postage, Parallax View, Pete Ashton, Silent Words Speak Loudest Please don't ask for a sidebar link as a refusal often offends. Editorial Policy |
Prev: BlogDecember2008 1 Year Ago: BlogJanuary2009 Next: BlogFebruary2009
Friday 30th January 2009Great New Videos from Misty's Big AdventureMark Locke![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sunday 18th January 2009Israeli TV Shows a Father's Grief.An Israeli TV station has been talking to an Palestinian Doctor (who used to work in an Israeli hospital before Gaza was locked down) every day of the war there. Yesterday, just before they were due to interview him, his house was bombed and his three daughters killed. They broadcast his call live (YouTube). It's quite traumatic.What Will Obama's Energy Policy Be Like?Just watched an interesting video of Steven Chu responding to energy policy suggestions on change.gov![]()
![]() ![]() Saturday 17th January 2009FondueI like Cheese Fondue, but I don't make it so often, so I thought I'd make some Notes on how to make Fondue.Friday 16th January 2009Mark WatsonI've heard Mark Watson many times on Radio 4 (home of much good comedy), and saw his Edinburgh preview back in 2005. He started his show at the Town Hall tonight from one of the side doors, rather than the stage, in order to get to know the audience better. After making his way to the centre of the audience, and several discussions with people about where they were from, he finally introduced himself and ran round to appear on stage. His prepared material was great, but what makes him really stand out as a stand up is the degree of audience interaction. The first 20 minutes of the second half consisted of conversations with the audience and an attempt to get a £5 prize he'd given up to someone in the circle. Even he seemed slightly bewildered by the enthusiam of the audience, and I was wondering if he'd actually get on to telling us what he'd planned to. He did, and it went very well. Hurray!![]() Saturday 11th January 2009BluuAfter a later afternoon look around Birmingham Museum and Art gallery, I wandered down to Summer Row to Bluu, which has quite a nice looking menu and seems like a fun place to hang out with friends. On Sundays, they only do a fixed menu roast, and some light meals but my fish finger sandwich was nice. Hoping to go back and check out something from their proper menu soon. I was going to put a link to them here, but unfortunately they've a stupid flash website![]()
![]() The Diving Bell and the ButterflyThis film's been on my list to see for a while. It's the story of a man who cannot communicate, except by blinking. His nurse comes up with a way for him to communicate and off we go. Can't say too much, but it's a fascinating film. One thing really did make me feel sorry for him - the system his nurse came up with was lousy! According to the film, it works by her reading out possible letters (in order of frequency, thank god) and him blinking when she gets to the right one. How slow is that! There are a lot of ways to improve the system, some of which would require a computer and some text analysis, but some of which just require a piece of paper. For example, you could organise the letters on a grid, blink 3 times, pause then 4 times to get the letter at position (3,4). Common words could also be included in the scheme. Now presumably his nurse did do a lot of guessing of words which speeds it up, but a simple grid could have made things so much better. I'm not sure when the film (based on a book by the lead character) was set, but surely there was some sort of best practise they could have looked up.Monday 5th January 2009BBC Four - Science and IslamThis is a great program, all about medieval Islamic scholars during the European dark ages and how they brought together knowledge from all different cultures and worked together with Christians, Jews, Persians etc. It features ancient Islamic mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, whose name gave us the term "Algorithm" and who brought us Algebra. Watch Science and Islam: The Language of Science![]() ![]() Contact me: Website (at) AndyPryke.com, try use a subject which will get through my Spam Filter! I've been having spam filter problems, so if you haven't had a response, I'm really sorry, please try again! See Also: WebChanges for other recent updates, AllBlogPages for previous blogs. You might also want to read other BirminghamBloggers This is my blogchalk: United Kingdom, West Midlands, Birmingham, Moseley |
This page linked from: BlogFebruary2009, BlogJanuary2009, CheeseFondue, |
Powered by TWiki |