Yor Divorced, Lol

Yesterday evening my daughter Zoe was playing on Runescape (an on-line role-playing game).  I happened to glance over to her screen  and saw,  instead of the usual "You get some willow logs", the words "You may now kiss the bride".  I asked her "Are you getting married?" but she just laughed.  Then, as it was getting quite late, I told her to get ready for bed and this is what she typed before logging off:

gtg
yor divorced
lol

Immediately, two of the other players chipped in:

marry meeeeee!

no marry me!  me me me meeeee!

I do hope this is not what things are going to be like when she gets older.

Upgrade from Vista to XP!

Coming from someone who says of Microsoft "I like their technology and I make plenty of money from their stack",  this is quite funny.

Advice on Giving Presents

If you have a fixed amount of money to spend - and your goal is to display your friendship, rather than to actually help the recipient - you'll be better off deliberately not shopping for value.  Decide how much money you want to spend on impressing the recipient, then find the most worthless object which costs that amount.  The cheaper the class of objects, the more expensive a particular object will appear, given that you spend a fixed amount.  Which is more memorable, a $25 shirt or a $25 candle?

Overcoming Bias has recently become one of my favourite websites.  It is a joint blog run by the rather imposingly named Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.  Of the contributors, Eliezer Yudkowsky (author of the above quotation), in particular, seems to combine being fairly prolific with always having something interesting to say.  Other contributors are the philosopher Nick Bostrom and the economist Robin Hanson.

Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough town centre as seen from Roseberry Topping. A photo taken during my holiday in Cleveland earlier this year. The pointed black tower in the centre is Middlesbrough Town Hall, with two of its white clock faces showing.  The cooling towers in the background are at Billingham ICI chemical works (no longer operated by ICI).  Billingham ICI works was apparently the centre for work on Tube Alloys, the British atom bomb project at the start of World War Two.  Tube Alloys was merged into the American Manhattan Project in 1943.

Possible Human-to-Human Transmission of Bird Flu

This is a bit scarey (but not entirely unexpected).