Scrabulous is still there in Facebook for me. I think this just affects those of you on the other side of the water.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 9:21 AM on July 29, 2008

I only watched the German one. That's really shit. Put me off watching any of the others, anyway.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 3:17 PM on July 19, 2008

I'm in the BCSWomen group - British Computer Society's women's network.

We had a "premiere day" trip to Bletchley with one of the original Wrens showing us round, who was just amazing. This woman - Jean Valentine - was a total inspiration. She'd worked in the hut with the Bombe machine, and here we were, 50+ years later watching her work the replica. She said that when they unveiled the replica she told them it was wrong, much to the annoyance of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 9:18 AM on June 5, 2008

I saw Chris Bissel (author of first link) talking about this, along with video. Very interesting stuff, great post.

When touring Bletchley Park recently I realised what it is about these machines that is just so very very cool, and it's the noise. At Bletchley they have working models of the Collossus and the Bombe: the switches and valves of Collossus and the whirring wheels of the Bombe sound so much more... computery somehow. The water swooshing around the Moniac has... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 10:18 AM on May 25, 2008

Man, I pop back to Mefi after a hiatus and this is the first thing I read? This post sucks. Rich American teenagers taking the piss out of other rich American teenagers. YAWN.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 2:02 AM on April 11, 2008

When I visited Cappadoccia a few years back we stayed in Guzelyurt, which has carved churches and an underground village (rather than a city). A couple of small children served as our guide of the underground village in return for a few million lira, carrying lightbulbs in with them.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 8:35 AM on August 31, 2007

His mum sounds ace:

"At the beginning we were leaving earlier but we were starting before the race officials put arrows along the route and ended up going the wrong way," she says. "Now we start half an hour before the arrow men. After 15km they overtake us with lots of hooting and waving and cheering and we don't go astray.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 9:31 AM on July 26, 2007

Here in Yorkshire, it's rained pretty much constantly since the beginning of June. If this isn't some sort of record I'd be surprised.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 8:32 AM on July 23, 2007

I think this one is great. Nice find.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 5:16 AM on June 28, 2007

I'm wearing the jeans I got married in right now.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 5:30 AM on June 26, 2007

One thread that underlies the whole bloody controversy is ignorance: a host of people saying stuff like "Well I've never read any of his books but they're OFFENSIVE I tell you BLASPHEMOUS".

Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister Ejaz-ul-Haq sounds like a reasonable man...

"If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammad, his act is justified," he said, according to the translation by... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 5:14 AM on June 19, 2007

I'm no literary critic - just an avid reader - and I have to say I have really enjoyed those Rushdie books I've read (Midnight's Children, The ground beneath her feet). I would happily pick up another.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 6:37 AM on June 19, 2007

Man am I now jealous. That's 4,156 miles from here.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 7:45 AM on June 3, 2007

The Roach - that was the section I really wanted to see. Now I really am jealous. I caught Juana Molina here in the UK a few months back and was totally blown away.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 3:43 AM on June 4, 2007

Nice post! I saw Holly Johnson perform at Pride sometime in the mid 90's, and that man can really hold a crowd. For someone who's basically a short ordinary looking bloke he is mesmerising. I'd never seen the original Relax video (having been, like, 10 at the time) but I remember dancing round the kitchen to the song, and it being a big scandal. Everyone at school was talking about it, and it was cause for yet another serious "what does gay mean?"... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 4:21 AM on June 2, 2007

There's no way to date the video, apparently - fingers crossed it was recent and he's alright. As one of the last journalists to live and work in Gaza full time one of the things that has really come through in the UK news coverage is how much he was respected by everyday Palestinians. I do hope that he is OK.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 4:42 AM on June 1, 2007

The author gaby is a member here. I'll drop him an email.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 11:01 AM on May 22, 2007

I know loads of vegan kids - breastmilk aside, which their parents consider vegan. They seem damn healthy to me.

I expect their parents spend more time ensuring that they get a balanced diet than most of the local chav scum existing on pie and chips, anyway.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 9:57 AM on May 21, 2007

I had a student once who handed in an essay which was clearly a patchwork of different sources - a paragraph from here, a paragraph from there. Using google and findsame I located about half of his essay on the internet, from about 6 different sites. This was enough (obviously) to make the plagiarism charge, but I was in detective mode by now and wanted to find the rest. So I took his essay to the library and found each of the books in the reference list. In one of the books I found the first... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 11:30 AM on May 9, 2007

that cambridge video is teh aces.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 12:53 PM on April 26, 2007

Looks like my 0.04, 0, 0 is not that unusual in the context of Mefi.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 3:07 AM on April 5, 2007

I came across this site ages ago and forgot about it. I'm pleased to see that the one photo I uploaded is still there, and as it was the first for the grid square it's the geograph!
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 3:03 AM on April 4, 2007

There are a load of wild parrots in London, too.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 3:07 AM on April 2, 2007

Am I bothered, though?
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 9:06 AM on March 18, 2007

johnny novak - that Beardyman video is way cool. So's the french stuff. And the rest of it. Great post.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 10:49 AM on March 14, 2007

Cor, it works with .ac.uk addresses, too.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 7:47 AM on March 13, 2007

"Are you being served" was huge here in the UK when I was growing up.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 7:16 AM on March 8, 2007

This has got me all motivated: I'm gonna go out and paste this xkcd comic on the side of an SUV.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 5:44 AM on March 3, 2007

Isn't it easier just to press ALT?
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 9:49 AM on March 2, 2007

Eponysterical.

And the article missed out

The sprayer, a teenaged girl who is so embarrassed of her body that she does not shower at all, but sprays herself and all around her with deodorant then walks out in the clothes she's worn to the gym. This character is closely related to The contortionist, who is capable of putting her gym clothes on underneath her work clothes and then taking of the work clothes (on the way into the gym); and doing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 2:01 AM on February 28, 2007

Just as an FYI: If you're in the UK it's the Anthony Nolan Trust. I registered a few years ago (after a friend with leukemia had a transplant, and I thought it would be good to do something in his memory other than just hand over cash). I don't think it cost anything. I just had to go to my GP and get them to take a blood sample.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 1:42 AM on February 15, 2007

Jesus H Christ on a bike. That eskimo clip is remarkable.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 7:48 AM on January 18, 2007

I saw James Anderson talk once. That's half an hour of my life I'll never get back. The audience were entertaining though. Watching the facial expressions of twenty academics transition from "This is novel, and could be interesting" through "WTF?" to "Batshitinsane" is really quite funny.

And yeah, Reading University. Physics? Nah, don't need that. Perspex machines? Give the man tenure! They also employ Kevin Warwick, who is at... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 2:35 AM on December 8, 2006

Didn't the B52's sing about mock lobster?

I'll get my coat
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 6:16 AM on December 7, 2006

Not arf!
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 4:50 AM on November 28, 2006

I once got in a taxi that had, like, 15 magic trees in it.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 2:45 AM on November 19, 2006

I think Optamystic's point earlier explains why he had to use a real country - if he's interviewing real people, and they're not all "random bloke in bar", he's going to get far fewer respondees if the country is completely fictitious.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 5:22 AM on November 16, 2006

Atreides - Borat started on a UK comedy show. Sometime in the late 90s. I for one had heard of Kazakhstan when I first saw it. Whether or not Americans have any idea about central asia is irrelevant.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 5:54 AM on November 16, 2006

I was in the audience at ICCV when they made the first presentation (as I said in this askme answer a while back). It's a great example of existing computer vision techniques being used in sequence to do something useful. Yes, it is memory hungry, but if you read the paper you'll realise that it takes some serious mathematics to find the features in each image, then find the matches in other images, then align them, estimate camera parameters, and then smooth the boundaries. A lot of these... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 2:15 AM on October 23, 2006

Another login for those who can't get the metafilter/metafilter to work: mefi2 pw:cameras
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 5:29 AM on October 19, 2006

blag you are so right about Bill Bailey. I thought about putting together an FPP of UK comedy moments from Youtube (Bill Bailey, Eddie Izzard, Coupling, Gervais, Black Books, Spaced) but got distracted by a video of kittens falling over. Or something.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 7:40 AM on October 18, 2006

I'm guessing that it's not worth going to a windows machine to view this... damn Flash 8.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 3:28 AM on October 17, 2006

I expect that the contraption the in-thread americans are slagging off isn't just aimed at the US market.

Cycling in parts of northern europe is totally pervasive. There are huge bike racks at all the stations. There are underground cycle parks. There are aboveground cycle parks. There are paths everywhere. This is true of the Netherlands, northern Germany and Belgium, also Sweden. Maybe other places, these are just the ones I've seen firsthand. Folding bikes are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 8:59 AM on October 2, 2006

mano says: im seriously curious how many of you avidly use a folding bike? ok, its the internet, so im not suprised that there are people out there who want to engage in sophistry, and take the other side of the argument just to demonstrate skills honed on some high-school debate team. but how many of you advocates actually own an unstable, unsafe folding bike with tiny tires? eh? use it regularly? in traffic?

I don't own a folding bike (but I'd like... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 1:49 AM on October 5, 2006

mano, Nobody's saying it's going to be the next big thing. They're saying that in some situations for some people it will be useful. Why do you have such difficulty seeing that?
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 1:04 PM on October 11, 2006

mano, Nobody's saying it's going to be the next big thing. They're saying that in some situations for some people it will be useful. Why do you have such difficulty seeing that?
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 1:04 PM on October 11, 2006

so, er, what are the keys on tunnel rush then?
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 8:00 AM on October 9, 2006

Forget that last comment of mine. I sat there like a muppet pressing random keys and getting nowhere. Then I moved the mouse...
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 8:02 AM on October 9, 2006

I dunno about in schools, but here at Uni there's a real issue with women showering. Postgrads and staff seem to shower after exercise, undergrads mainly just spray themselves with chemicals. Apparently this is not the case in the women's changing rooms, but as an asthmatic, during term time, it's quite an ordeal wading through the fog of "deodorising" chemicals to get to the shower.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 3:19 AM on October 8, 2006

I love the way that one of them uses chalk on a blackboard rather than computer aided or high resolution or any other form of technogically mediated imagery. There's something really cool about old-school coloured chalk.
posted to MetaFilter by handee at 4:09 AM on October 5, 2006