The caption attached to Kim Jong-il is brilliant:

Bet he is.

This e-mail may be confidential and privileged. Do not open it if you are in any doubt that you are the intended recipient. You must scan this e-mail and any attachments for the presence of viruses or any other unwelcome content. This e-mail must be read in conjunction with the important legal notice at …..

I don’t understand the complete misunderstanding of email/technology you need to deem silly things like this legally useful.

I was a little disappointed nobody matched the heroic efforts of Catherine Taylor-Dawson, of the Vote For Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket Party, who managed to get just one vote in Cardiff North in 2005, apparently a record low for any candidate in a general election since universal suffrage. And she wasn’t even registered there!

Gaddafi certainly knows how to woo a crowd, particularly at important junctures such as this. This was after all his big chance to cement Libya’s re-entry into the bosom of the international community after 20 years in the wilderness.

The technique he chose to do so – cunningly – was to blatantly insult his audience. The representatives of the 192 nations assembled in the assembly hall were no better, he told them, than orators at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner. “You make your speech and then you disappear. That’s all you are right now.”

Rejected by a natural language processor! That’ll teach me for being sceptical.

The Conjugate Gradient Method is the most prominent iterative method for solving sparse systems of linear equations. Unfortunately, many textbook treatments of the topic are written with neither illustrations nor intuition, and their victims can be found to this day babbling senselessly in the corners of dusty libraries. For this reason, a deep, geometric understanding of the method has been reserved for the elite brilliant few who have painstakingly decoded the mumblings of their forebears. Nevertheless, the Conjugate Gradient Method is a composite of simple, elegant ideas that almost anyone can understand. Of course, a reader as intelligent as yourself will learn them almost effortlessly.

Its keywords are conjugate gradient method, preconditioning, convergence analysis and agonizing pain, and it has a chapter called ‘Eigen do it if I try‘ which (brilliant and awful title aside) is the first intuitive explanation of eigenvectors I’ve read, hurrah.

Life in the Stencil Buffer

One way to create this game using OpenGL is to use a multipass algorithm. Keep the data in the color buffer, one pixel for each grid point. Assume that black (all zeros) is the background color, and the color of a live pixel is nonzero. Initialize by clearing the depth and stencil buffers to zero, set the depth-buffer writemask to zero, and set the depth comparison function so that it passes on not-equal. To iterate, read the image off the screen, enable drawing into the depth buffer, and set the stencil function so that it increments whenever a depth comparison succeeds but leaves the stencil buffer unchanged otherwise. Disable drawing into the color buffer.

Next, draw the image eight times, offset one pixel in each vertical, horizontal, and diagonal direction. When you’re done, the stencil buffer contains a count of the number of live neighbors for each pixel. Enable drawing to the color buffer, set the color to the color for live cells, and set the stencil function to draw only if the value in the stencil buffer is 3 (three live neighbors). In addition, if this drawing occurs, decrement the value in the stencil buffer. Then draw a rectangle covering the image; this paints each cell that has exactly three live neighbors with the “alive” color.

At this point, the stencil buffers contain 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and the values under the 2’s are correct. The values under 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 must be cleared to the “dead” color. Set the stencil function to draw whenever the value is not 2, and to zero the stencil values in all cases. Then draw a large polygon of the “dead” color across the entire image. You’re done.

http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~jciehl/Public/OpenGL_PG/ch15.html#id5553768

New flat is coming along, I need lots of posters to fill the walls – I only have five at the moment and three are the same :\ We have hot water, so we can shower, and sharp knives, so I don’t have to use a junior hacksaw to chop chicken breasts into small pieces. And internet, so I can post this, scrobble and restart downloading from eMusic. Though it’s still a flat, not a home.

And finally: In the news today.

“Very unfortunately Mrs Coles was locked into our public toilets overnight which was extremely unfortunate.
“We’re very sorry that this happened.”

But just a bunch of flowers in apology?

And: Why is GMail recommending me menstrual cups?

Righto.