Sat 2007-01-13 Some words of wisdom from Steve Yegge:
... But I'll still take Java over C++, even without MI, because I know that no matter how good my intentions are, I will at some point be surrounded by people who don't know how to code, and they will do far less damage with Java than with C++.
As I have probably said before, Steve's internal Amazon blog is well worth reading through in it's entirety.
Sat 2007-01-13 The mathematician Paul Erdős famously used to refer to small children as "epsilons" (a mathematical term used to denote a small quantity). I think a better term for them would be "vectors", but not as directed quantities, rather as carriers of disease.
Thu 2007-01-11 It has been a long time since I last saw any deer from the train near Ascot Station. During the drought in the summer I saw them every week or two on the patch of scrubland between the current line and the embankment of the old track to Guildford. However, when the rains came in September they disappeared and I haven't seen them since. It might be that the deer were attracted to that patch of scrubland by the small stream that runs through it. If they were going there to drink then they probably would no longer need to when the rains returned. Anyhow, by the time I went back to work last week I had more or less given up even thinking about them. I was therefore surprised and a little pleased to hear an announcement that my train was delayed a few minutes by "a deer on the track" somewhere between Ascot and Bagshot. I do hope it got away safely.
Wed 2007-01-10 Me and my daughter have just watched the second episode of "Ray Mears's Wild Food" on BBC2. In it Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman (of University College London) travel around the coast of Britain investigating the sources of food that would have been available to our mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. They dig up the roots of sea kale, pick rock samphire, skin eels, gather limpets, and coax razor shells out of their burrows. And in the hour-long program they actually have enough time to go to some depth on how these foods would have been collected and prepared. All done in a non-sensational, non-dumbed-down manner.
In the first episode, last week, Mears and Hillman were in Australia finding out how the Australian Aborigines, among the last remaining hunter-gathers, went about collecting and preparing their food. That was just as good as the latest program. There are three more programs to go and I will be making sure I see each one of them. They are being shown on Wednesday evenings and repeated on Sunday evenings. Clips from the first two programs are available at the program's website.
This confirms my impression that, of all the sciences, archaeology is currently the best served by British television.
