They’ve just released Tableau Public:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/download

So, since wowblog is repository for interesting maps, and other such informative pictures, here’s a link to a blog about Victorian infographics. Enjoy?

At the weekend there was a rugby match, apparently. The great and good turned out to see Munster buried under the burning rubble of Croke park after a conflict so colossal it made the Hiroshima bomb look like a fart in the bath. It was a war to end all rugby. Leinster, victorious, each will receive a thousand virgins in paradise. Munster, vanquished, will have their souls consumed by the terrifying Limerick hell-beast. Lions glory does not await Paul O’Connell, for only his vacant zombified body will be roaming the pitches of South Africa feasting on the brains of unlucky touch judges.

Hyperbole aside, it was a good match. However, what caught my eye was the coverage in The Independent the following day, a paper that rarely arrives in our house. On page five, Willie O’Dea proclaims ‘We May Lose, but We Never Surrender’ in an article utterly devoid of purpose. I imagine the scene, wherein O’Dea asks to write it, to jump on the bandwagon and get some publicity, and the editor who just thinks that it’ll fill up a few column inches and doesn’t care what goes in it. WOD goes on to say “Ah, sure, sport’s great, and Munster are good, and Leinster are good too, we’re all pals. Good times, but do you remember the time when something else happened, that was good too….” I may have paraphrased a bit there.

On further inspection, I realised that the picture of old Wills is not, in fact, a puppet of Wille, but the real O’dle himself. Frankly, I can think of no politician more hilarious and terrible to look at than O’Dea, but this picture really brings it home. Obviously, the counterpoint of Bertie Ahern, who, it seems, had to quit high office after deciding to spend his days eating the children of his constituency, provides some gravitas.

Still, it’s a testament to the new multicultural Ireland that a super-marionette can become part of the government. No more are they blocked by the string ceiling.

Jim and I saw this guy randomly in the Mezz in Dublin a few years ago and he rocked, in as much as singer-songwriters can.

Now he’s doing a YouTube thingy from New Zealand.

Duff McKagan of Guns’n'Roses has some cool dating tips, from the obvious to the insane:

NEVER say someone else’s name in the throes of lovemaking. If you mistakenly call out your old girlfriend’s name, make some shit up, and QUICK!

Ok that was easy. Anything else?

The three A’s: Attention, Affection, and Appreciation. … Here are two examples, one good and one bad:

Bad: “Hey you, you are HOT! [Attention.] Give me a hug! [Affection.] That felt good! [Appreciation.]”

Good: “Are you wearing new lip gloss? Let me kiss you! I like it!”

Actually, both of these would work, and neither of them are stellar, but you get the idea.

Here’s my local pub, as photographed by Google with a camera on a stick on a car:

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They’ve done the whole of London, and more besides.

Here’s the car they used, reflected in a window on Holloway Road - a more inconspicuous vehicle than used elsewhere.

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I reckon it’ll provide freesheet fodder for weeks to come: the photos are so detailed tons of people will be able to recognise themselves or others, even with the face blurring on, and there’ll be no end of ‘Is this you?’ emails flying about. Sometimes the blurring seems to miss completely, such as this fellow on Bishopsgate:

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I suggest some sort of ‘Streetview Bingo’, where people get points for spotting Boris Johnson breaking a red light, Pete Doherty asleep in a doorway, etc.

Among the people who might be slightly concerned about their privacy are my next door neighbours:

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I’m guessing it was largely done on a Saturday morning, judging by the weather and crowds. Here’s Piccadilly Circus:

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And here’s a pretty good view of Westminster Bridge:

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Vastly more to follow, I’m sure.

This is based on Census data going back to 1801, and is an attempt to illustrate some key trends in the spatial development of London, such as:

- The original ‘City’, ie the square mile, starting out as incredibly dense then losing population - first gradually, as transport improvements opened up the outer boroughs, then precipitously as commerce displaced people.
- Intensive growth (packing more and more people into the central boroughs) in the 19th C replaced by extensive growth (spatial expansion) in the 20th, only for the city centre to show signs of bouncing back towards the end.

Unfortunately I think 1801 is about as far as we can go back. I’m also looking for data on the number of dwellings in each borough over this period, but figures I’ve seen for Islington indicate huge levels of crowding until roughly the second world war.

Try distance on the X axis, pop on the Y axis and bubble size, and density for the colour. Or whatever takes your fancy really.

Not quite the same as that film, but close. This time the corporations save the day.

I wonder if it’s just a PR job after the Eircom downloading settlement.

Tacheles iis one of the few surviving artist squats in East Berlin, although the ones that last probably aren’t that visible or slap bang in the middle of Oranienburger Strasse, Berlin’s kind-of equivalent of Temple Bar crossed with Leeson Street.

It’s been ‘being closed down’ for years, but it looks like its number might finally be up

The first notable thing that springs to mind is this horrible story about a young woman who jumped out of the window.

The second is that in Tacheles in 2000 Jim, Caroline and I saw what I am going to confidently call the most amazing gig of all our lives and your lives too, the world’s only living rock’n'roll star, British-born Darryl Reed.

There was a screening of his film Remember A Day, in which he played a character based on Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett. I can’t remember if that was before or after the music. There was fire coming from the walls and you could smoke inside. It was like being in heaven.

I’ve never seen someone that drunk on stage. He kept brushing his afro combover across his thinning scalp and calling for straight vodka from the bar, which arrived eventually. Meanwhile, the backing musicians, The Black Cats (earlier The Black Dudes - they were black, but, apparently thought it politic to change the name) smiled and nodded and kept the whole show on the road.

Until I come across something better, Darryl’s words, shouted repeatedly from the stage to the half-full room, are going on my grave: “Fuck the government, fuck them from behind!”

I was there, baby.

In keeping with my habit of noting pointless errata, just as one should on a blog, I will recount today’s experience.

As I approached the local supermarket, not twenty yards distant, I was accosted by a ruddy-faced chap. I caught his eye, and he sidled up to ask “Can you get me a plastic bag from the Supervalu?” I declined, baffled as usual. He wasn’t a child looking for some kindly adult to buy booze. He may have been mad, or disabled, but surely if he had the capacity to ask me for this favour, he had the ability to buy a bag. We will never know, and civilization is the lesser for it.

Here’s a great way you can get your hands on a brand new Ferrari…

Plenty more of this on YouTube.

Irish comedy sketch show done by the writer of A Film With Me In It and brother of David O’Doherty, Mark Doherty, and Barry Murphy, I dunno when.

Heady days.

That’s right, it’s AIDS.

1. Found Magazine. I like this one:

2. Sarah Palin is … Head of Skate. I predict that we’ll look back and view the fact that this wasn’t an actual film as the greatest Palin-related tragedy of all.

3. Oh and of course

This headline on the BBC grabbed me

Designer vagina trend ‘worrying’

Indeed, the prevalence of knock-off designer vaginas is a cause for concern. Only this week Customs anti-piracy officials seized at least 100,000 counterfeit designer vaginas hidden behind a consignment of duvets on a lorry that arrived in Dublin Port.

During tonight’s Newsnight on BBC2, during a Paxman interview of a couple of politicos (gentleman and lady, sadly I missed the introductions) at the Labour party conference. He was gauging their reaction to a speech by the foreign secretary, David Milliband. Paxman enquired of the lady as to her opinion of the timbre of the speech. She replied:

He didn’t give it the fortissimo.

I found this on The Chancer, an apparently ‘banned’ clip from Star Trek TNG wherein Data muses on the IRA and terrorism. I bet it’s even more banned now. Of course, the ma was Irish.

Interesting article in The Irish Times about cycling in Dublin compared to Copenhagen.

If they love bicycles so much in Denmark, why don’t they MARRY a bicycle.

Oh, they can, you say…

Take that, Pat Kenny

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0701/1214857997611.html

Spring Break are an ’80s covers band in Dublin.

Check out their descriptions of their songs and also their promo videos.

I saw this story in the Daily Mail last Tuesday

How a home in the suburbs can add 12 years to your life

A home in the suburbs can add 12 years to your life, a startling new council study has found.

It found that people in middle class estates on the outskirts of a market town can typically expect to live until they are nearly 90.

But those on the council estates closer to the centre of the same country town are likely to die before they reach their late 70s.

The two districts with notably different life expectancies for their residents lie on different sides of the same road in Ivybridge, Devon.

Those with homes in the Woodlands district, where most property is privately owned and incomes are buoyant, can expect to live for 88.8 years.

But neighbours living on the other side of Cleeve Road, in the Central district of the town, can only expect to live until they are 76.5.

That sounds pretty silly. But there’s more!

Olive Peters, 70, who lives in the Woodlands side of Cleeve Drive, can expect to live approximately 12 years longer than neighbour Mike Stebbing, 68, who’s on the Central side

The gap in quality of life between people separated by just one street brought surprise among some of the town’s residents.

Barry Jury, 56, who lives on the Central side, said: “I’ve just lost twelve years of my life. I’m devastated.

“Perhaps I should see if anyone else on the other side of the road wants to swap houses.

“The weird thing is a lot of the homes on my side are full of old people.”

It’s at this point that I think “Yeah, nice try, Daily Mail, but I know an April Fool’s joke when I see it”. Clever, though, mixing up classic Mail themes like suburban paranoia, sly digs at the welfare state and good old schadenfreude.

Then today I saw the same today story in a housing magazine. And a Google search turned up this. Crumbs.

A car near Christchurch, earlier.

It’s not a bumper sticker. It’s just common sense.

I’m not sure that the commander-in-chief proves his mettle by getting everyone at his rallies to set their signs in the same typeface, but as someone who knows how hard that is, I’m very impressed.

That’s graphic designer Michael Bieruit on the typographical choices of the Obamanauts. It’s an interesting article overall.

We were at the Black Francis (AKA Frank Black, ex The Pixies) gig in Dublin on Saturday night and, outside Vicar Street before the gig, Mark heard the ticket tout say: “I thought this was a Frances Black concert. Now I don’t know what I’m going to get for these tickets. I thought I could get 50 quid for them but now I don’t know what I’ll get.”

The answer to that question only a woman’s heart can know.

Only a woman, only a woman, only a woman’s heart can know.

(Sorry)

Fionnuala castigates me:

It’s the old “skiing makes you wealthy” phenomenon again. It’s not NECESSARILY that the more cyclists are on the road, the safer it becomes. The more intuitive and obvious explanation is that the safer it is, the higher percentage of people who will cycle.

So rather than saying that Copenhagen is safe to cycle because so many people per head of population choose to do so (thereby changing driver behaviour), we could say that huge numbers of people choose to do so because there are safe, wide, separate cycle lanes separated from both pedestrians and traffic by raised curbs.

Of course there’s also the element of high cyclist-demand leading to better safety facilities. That’s quite different to hoping that sheer numbers of cyclists on the roads will lead to more careful driving by would-be cyclist-killers.

She’s right, of course - correlation does indeed not prove causation. And I’m sure it’s true that safer cycling facilities persuade more people to cycle. I was going to write a longer post talking about how there was probably causation in both directions and measures to boost cycling could set off a virtuous circle of increased cycling -> safer cycling -> increased cycling, but decided not to bore you with all the details. Well, never again.

Fionnuala says it’s more intuitively obvious that “the safer it is, the higher percentage of people who will cycle”. Sure, but I can think of good reasons why more cyclists on the road may change driver behaviour. At the most basic level, larger groups of cyclists make each individual cyclist more visible. With more cyclists around, drivers become more aware of how cyclists behave and better able to predict their movements (see the ‘Shared Space‘ concept, based on the idea that the more visible pedestrians are the more carefully drivers drive). More cyclists on the street can also mean that car drivers are obliged to actually respect facilities for cyclists such as green boxes, staying safely behind a group rather than crowding dangerously around an individual. And drivers in areas where cycling is common are more likely to know cyclists personally or be occasional cyclists themselves, which should create a less oppositional climate than one in which cyclists are mostly younger men.

There’s also better evidence around than the simple cross-national averages I posted about. In “Safety in numbers: more walkers and bicyclists, safer walking and bicycling” P.L. Jacobsen cites two interesting studies comparing accident rates at individual junctions in the same city:

Research at specific sites has shown that collisions between a motorist and a person walking or bicycling diminish where more people walk and bicycle. Ekman examined numbers of pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists, and serious conflicts among them at 95 intersections in Malmö, Sweden. He found that after adjusting for the number of bicyclists, the number of conflicts/bicyclist was twice as great at locations with few bicyclists compared with locations with more. In fact, the number of conflicts/bicyclist decreased abruptly with more than 50 bicyclists/hour. With pedestrians, Ekman found that although the number of conflicts/pedestrian was largely unaffected by numbers of pedestrians, the conflict rate was still affected by numbers of motorists.

Leden also reported a non-linear relationship in two examinations of intersections. In a before and after study, he examined changes in numbers of bicyclists and collisions between motorists and bicyclists in response to changes in physical configuration at 45 non-signalized intersections between bicycle paths and roadways in Gothenburg, Sweden. The total number of collisions increased with the 0.4 power of the increasing use of the intersections by bicyclists. He also examined police reported injuries to people walking at approximately 300 signalized intersections in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The number of collisions increased with the 0.32 to 0.67 power with increasing numbers of pedestrians.

I find this pretty persuasive, because (a) cycling facilities are unlikely to vary as much within a city as between countries, (b) the incidence of cycling at a particular intersection relative to others in the same town is to some extent a given based on its location and independent of its characteristics - in other words, it seems unlikely to me that quiet intersections will suddenly become busy ones just because they are made safer.

All of which is not to say that intervening to make cycling safer isn’t a good idea. It’s a very good idea, especially because it can give a big boost to the kind of chain reaction that appears to have taken hold in Denmark and the Netherlands.

Yo!

If I was less lazy I’d find a way to cut this down to the bits I want you to hear, but I’m lazy, so here.

Caoimhghín ó Caoláin’s “analogy” doesn’t quite match up to Martin Mansergh’s Beef Tribunal

Go to http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0131/news1pm.html and click on

“Ahern insists no special treatment for Turner - Caitríona Perry reports on this morning’s colourful Dáil proceedings”

Do it! Do it!

A scientist has made the following smug and, I suppose, terrifying announcement:

We’ll be able to synthesize the voice of anybody saying anything, based on hearing just a sentence or two of them speaking…This gives rise to a notion of what I call vocal terrorism as a possible scenario in the future and we should be thinking about that now

Well I am thinking about that, now. And according to my copy of The Best of Myles, he was thinking about that then:

The trouble I referred to the other day began like this. A lady dumbbell hired out what she took to be a genuine WAAMA Leage Escort, and went with him to the Gate Theatre. Before the play and during the first interval dozens of eavesdroppers were astounded at the brittle cut and thrust of the one-man converstaion. The lady herself, who barely knew how to ask for her porridge, was pleased at the extraordinary silence that was won by her companion’s conversational transports. Quite suddenly he said loudly: ‘By the way old girl, is that your old woman’s dress you’re wearing tonight?’

Simultaneously, the unfortunate client found a printed card shoved under her nose. It read:

‘Don’t look round, don’t move, and don’t scream for the police. Unless you sign on the dotted line promising to pay me an extra fiver for tonight, I will answer in the affirmative, and then go on to talk about your wretched tinker-woman’s blouse. Play ball and nobody will be hurt. Beware! Signed, the Black Shadow.’

This is my new favourite fact. There is an association, in Britain, for plastic surgeons (of the aesthetic kind). It’s called the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. Or, as everyone prefers, BAAPS.

I think there’s some sort of catch.

NCTS is currently sending NCT Booking letters to eligible customers, offering them a provisional booking for their NCT test.

If you do not hear from NCTS and think your car may be eligible for the NCT… you can check our on-line service by simply typing in your car registration number + Booking I.D. number (which can be found at the top of your NCT Booking letter).