One of the best Retsupraes yet, and certainly one of the weirdest.
“Do you think we’ll see a level in this video?” “Y’know I kinda hope not.”
“You don’t remember the part of Whomp’s Fortress where there were cannons shooting you out of the sky, and your Nintendo 64 would blow up?”
Dear Mr Coombe,
You recently let us know that you don’t need a TV Licence. Our records have been updated and you won’t receive any more letters from us for almost two years.
That’s exactly what you said 6 months ago!
I just stumbled across The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Oddly I was searching for “The Golf War”, an weird little TV show with Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher, but Google insisted on correcting it to the above. It was intriguing so I clicked.)
Now Baudrillard, the author of the articles, seems very much like the stereotypical French “philosopher”. However they do make a fascinating statistical claim: “fewer US soldiers were killed in this ‘war’ than would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home”. For no reason I decided to investigate.
Looking into it further, there were a total of 294 US casualties in the Gulf War. However only 114 were due to enemy fire (35 were killed by friendly fire, 145 in accidents).
According to nationmaster.com, the total number of US troops deployed in Gulf War I was about 697,000. And thankfully Wikipedia has an article for everything, including “List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year” (note to self – clean this article up!). That even helpfully gives deaths as a fraction of the population per year; for 1990 it was 0.000178779. So that gives an estimated 125 deaths among the troops, had they all remained at home for a whole year.
Obviously there are a whole host of confusing factors here: different lengths and timings of deployment, soldiers being an age/sex skewed section of the U.S. population and so probably having higher traffic death rates. But although the precise statistics may be debatable, the overall point is a valid one: the Gulf War had a remarkably low fatality rate for the U.S.
Of course this is only deaths, it doesn’t count injuries, PTSD or the mysterious “Gulf War syndrome”. Ironically whilst Googling for analysis of this claim, I found a study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16484030) apparently showing that in the years after the war, veterans suffered significantly more traffic fatalities than non-veterans.
Anyway, I should do some real work now.
I’m a sad lonely single and haven’t had a Valentine’s card in years.
So I was mildly excited on receiving a plain envelope through my letterbox today, and even more excited when it turned out to indeed be a Valentine’s card!
“Who could it be from?” I thought. “Could it really be possible that someone out there actually LIKES me?” For a brief moment I actually felt a rare burst of self-esteem. With trepidation I opened the card.
Inside it said “from Jesus”.
I feel like I have been trolled by Christianity.
Whilst I’m posting customisations, here’s my new desktop. Must play with it some more, but now I need to get to bed.
Edit: Here’s the updated one. Rainmeter with a modified 10-Foot HUD skin, and a custom skin that shows random quotes from a text file. Font is Eras Light ITC.
Just realised I never posted my facebook profile hack here. Done a) because I was bored, and b) because I hated having my photos up the top. Anyway I think it turned out pretty well.
In the absence of anything interesting to say, thought I’d just post the wallpaper I whipped up tonight in Photoshop, as I’m quite pleased with it.
Also I have been playing Gratuitous Space Battles, and can confirm that it is indeed gratuitous. In a good way.
Good grief, Winamp for Android is awesome. MixZing was certainly clever, but was getting increasingly buggy and frustrating. Winamp runs smooth as anything and has a wonderful interface, yet it’s still in beta! Only thing I miss is being able to swipe on the lockscreen to skip tracks, but that’s a minor quibble. Haven’t yet got the wireless sync to work, but if it does then this moves into killer app territory.
So I installed Winamp on the laptop to try and use wireless sync. Had it scan my library, then popped on the “Top Rated” playlist. Eerily it started playing my favourite songs – from about 2 years ago when I last used Winamp – on a different computer! It must save rating/playcount information in the files I guess. Kind of nice, I haven’t listened to some of these songs in a long time and it’s evoking some serious nostalgia.
Amusingly in my library this is just titled “That Music From the Dancing Car Advert”:
It got me thinking, a lot of music listening history is stored on last.fm. It would be nice to be able to say “take me back to 200X” and cue up a playlist of stuff I was listening to then. Maybe pull up some timely photos from Facebook/Flickr to add to the experience, and some old BBC news headlines. Automatically lower the screen resolution to a suitable level – ok, maybe not that.
Been browsing stock photos (yes, I know, hardly the coolest thing to be doing on a Friday night). There seems to be an entire bizarre sub-genre of businessmen riding things:
Also: best cloud ever!
And yes, this is precisely what Internet shopping looks like:
Ah, my sad neglected blog. See the post title for the reason. Anyway here’s a fun little cover by Skindred – the best Welsh raga metal group around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1cL5J9bW2U