nocto

the morning news spell out the names of the inhabitants of the us states, confirming that people from new hampshire really are known as ‘new hampshirites’. this has always sounded very odd to my english ears because i’d expect the name for a person from new hampshire to be the same as the name for a person from hampshire with ‘new’ tacked on the front. except we don’t seem to have a name for people from hampshire.

hantonians or hantsonians sound right to me, using the standard abbreviation ‘hants’ for hampshire.

of all the (old) counties of england i can only think of a handful that have proper names for their inhabitants. cumbrians, northumbrians, lancastrians and salopians (that’s shropshire). and even then i wonder if lancastrian actually refers to people from the city of lancaster and not the county of lancashire.

tha last transit of venus visible from the uk was in 1283, and the next one after tomorrows will be in 2117. (viewable from other places the dates are 1882 and 2012). the details on tomorrow’s transit:

The Venus transit of 8 June begins shortly after sunrise at about 6.20 BST, when the Sun will be about 12 degrees above the eastern horizon. It will take about 20 minutes from ‘first contact’ until the planet is fully silhouetted against the Sun, roughly at the ‘8 o’clock’ position’. It will then cut a diagonal path across the southern part of the Sun. Mid-transit is at about 9.22 BST.

Venus begins to leave the Sun near the ‘5 o’clock’ position at about 12.04 BST and the transit will be completely over around 12.24. Timings differ by a few seconds for different latitudes, but clouds permitting, the transit will be visible from any place where the Sun is up, including the whole of the UK and almost all of Europe.

further stuff from the open and
central lancashire universities.

warning: don’t look at the sun!! there seem to be plenty of webcasts about from all over europe and asia, very helpful on a cloudy day. everytime i want to look at something in the sky it’s cloudy here.

get through without touching the sides, nigh on bloody impossible!

[found via #!/usr/bin/girl]

photo friday: landscape. linn o’ dee, 12th april 2004. i like it that it’s in portrait orientation. i’m contrary like that.

i need to shake up the photo system round these parts. those dates on my photo stuff in the top right, they look recent(ish), but they’re last year. good grief! it’s not like i don’t take any photos!

priscilla’s probability pullover.

The idea here is that you’re going to be cabling on a throw of a die. So, statistically speaking, you’d end up cabling 1/6 of the ribs at any time.

newsmap gives you a neat flashy view of google news.

Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news, on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.

my hint: select the categories of news you want and then bookmark the permalink. maybe that is obvious but i didn’t pick up on it for quite a while.

mathematical knitting. knitted blankets that get into the science museum.

among my favourites are
square deal,
curve of pursuit,
counting pane (a neat representation of prime numbers if ever i saw one),
double vision and
fibre-nacci. they make me want to run off and design my own pretty mathematical blankets.

[found via my mum, who knows exactly how to distract me from work in the afternoon.]

openoffice xml essentials – lots of excellent stuff about openoffice^*’s xml files. it’s proving rather useful in my quest to produce (pretty) vat invoices and other essential bits of business paperwork from the command line.

i should probably file this under ‘reasons programmers shouldn’t be let near the accounts’. one of the things i like about being part of a small business is the need to be a jack of all trades. my approach is to take all trades and make them more closely resemble the one i’m good at.

(*) annoying openoffice fanatic bit: if you haven’t looked at openoffice lately and you ever do anything with m*cr*s*ft office, go and have a look, it’s a) excellent b) probably does whatever you want to do with office c) is free (as in beer and as in speech) and d) won’t put money in bill gates wallet, not that he’ll notice. plus it interoperates with microsoft office better than microsoft office interoperates with itself. you can’t ask for much more than that.