taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Culture: Five killed in separate road crashes. Donncha notes ‘There were 2 terrible road accidents this morning. One of them was just outside Cahir, in Co. Tipperary. I drove past there dozens of times in the past and I was shocked to hear the news.’

It’s interesting to note this cultural difference. In Ireland, a road crash with multiple fatalities is national news, on the 6 o’clock news; in California, as far as I can see, it’s pretty much an everyday fact of life – unless there was a juicy ‘road rage’ story attached, it won’t get reported.

Are there more deaths in the US than Ireland? It seems not. The US department, NHTSA, notes that California had 3,956 fatalities in 2001, which works out at 11.47 per 100K population. The Irish dept, NRA (heh – that’s National Road Authority) notes a 2001 rate of 10.7 per 100K population. (However, Ireland’s rate has dropped since then, due to an increased emphasis on road safety; the 2003 rate is reported to be the lowest since the 1960’s. Not sure what it is now, though.)

So, interestingly, the death rate is comparable — so where’s the difference? I reckon it must be simply a PR issue; Ireland’s road safety authorities have made it a PR priority, so that public awareness of road safety is heightened. As a result, road crashes are headline news.

Tags: cahir, crash, culture, difference, donncha, morning, news, population, rate, road, safety

Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Tags: beauty, country, image, lest, making, party, playboy, politics, population, teapot, traffic

Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Tags: beauty, country, image, lest, making, party, playboy, population, teapot, traffic

Just taking a look around blogs.linux.ie to see who’s set us up the blog recently; here’s the results:

• unfortunately quite a few folks seem to have got bored and left off around mid-April. Ah well.

• Quite a few lively blogs to add to the blogroll.

• There’s also a burgeoning population of teenage Malaysian blogs, bizarrely enough! planet_aiie, whoelse and corexified. Big slipknot fans it seems.

• Malaysia’s not alone in this — here’s a Jamaican guy. Must be the flag on the favourites icon; green and gold on a black background — that’s more linux.jm than linux.ie. ;) Unfortunately for my patois, he stopped updating in April. Sufferation! Oh well, I’ll just have to stick with the Sizzla for my lessons.

• a Phillipino blog, too!

Just figuring this one — it seems linux.ie is free and easy to set up a blog at, doesn’t have ads, and does decent RSS with full <content:encoded> blocks. All in all, that makes it a pretty good blog platform when you think about it. Fair enough!

Tags: aiie, april, blog, blogroll, linux, look, mid, planet, population, whoelse

Wired: Hackers Put ‘Bane’ in Shadowbane:

‘Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.’

The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.

Tags: bottom, control, god, hackers, population, sea, shadowbane, town, wired, world

Yahoo: Guinness brews up African recipe.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Guinness is brewing up an African-style version of its famous stout to quench the thirst of Ireland’s growing immigrant population. Tests are under way to replicate Guinness manufactured in Nigeria at its St. James’ Gate headquarters in Dublin. The African version of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout tastes sweeter and heavier than the traditional draught popular in the west, and is almost double in strength.

A Guinness spokeswoman said the new brand was a result of consumer demand from Ireland’s growing African population. ‘This is the home of Guinness and so we’re seeing if we can brew the African recipe here and produce it at St. James’ Gate to the same recipe as in Nigeria,’ she said. …

Guinness Foreign Extra Stout was first exported from Ireland in the 19th century to British colonies. The first Guinness exports to Africa were to Sierra Leone in 1827. The stronger alcohol content helped preserve it during the long sea journey.

I can’t wait to try it out. I used to continually overhear conversations on the bus between Dublin locals and Africans regarding whose Guinness was best — time to settle the argument! ;)

Tags: extra, foreign, gate, guinness, population, recipe, reuters, stout, version, yahoo

Returnadores: a New Life in the Old World. ‘Imported from Argentina to help save the village from a decades-long decline in population which threatened its very future, the Paez family has travelled backwards along the path of the first conquistadores and the generations of Spanish emigrants who followed them.’

Tags: decline, imported, life, new, old, paez, population, returnadores, village, world