Squishy Circuits

Fantastic and fun-looking play to learn idea for kids. Squishy Circuits: "The purpose of this project is to facilitate electronics education to younger students. Our hope is that through the use of this tool, students will better understand electronics concepts, become more interested in engineering, and ultimately participate in playful learning techniques. This page is dedicated to sharing out research and guiding the further use and creation of squishy circuits."

The 2010 New Zealand Ice Cream Awards

The New Zealand Ice Cream Manufacturer's association has called for entries to the 14th New Zealand Ice Cream Awards which are to be judged in Auckland from Monday, 26th APRIL 2010.

The specific objective of the Awards is the raising of standards and promoting the quality of New Zealand Ice Cream.

They have 12 separate categories including Standard, Premium, Low Fat, Gelato and Sorbet. Last year’s supreme award was won by a Licorice Gelato.

The closing date for entries is Wednesday the 14th of April 2010

Full information at The New Zealand Ice Cream Awards:

Frasers Café - Great Customer Service

7 PM on a Sunday night and Tessa and I felt like going out for breakfast. Tessa really felt like bacon and eggs while for me there was no special reason, but on a day that started with cheese and tomato sandwiches, and had cupcakes and Easter biscuits for lunch, having bacon and eggs for dinner seemed somehow logical.

We went up Mt Eden Road and ended up at Frasers Café where we've been several times before and always enjoyed the fare, but it was well past the time when they stop the day menu and switched over to the night menu.

When we asked if they could do us the meal from the day menu, the waitress immediately checked with the kitchen and agreed to our request. So it was a "Power breakfast" at 8PM, cooked to their normal high standard and greatly enjoyed by both Tessa and I.

Full marks to Frasers, both for the food and for the excellent service.

Hush my dear, the bunny's near

It seems like only yesterday were doing Valentine's and now we are only 2 weeks out from Easter. This year seems to be vanishing even faster than last.

It's the first full year of my fiancé, Tessa's, gourmet baking business Sweet Expectations and as each special occasion comes around she needs to do a brand new special page on her site for Les petites gâteries de la saison. Tonight we added the page with her list of Hand made gourmet Easter treats.

 So if you're in Auckland and want some delicious hand made Easter treats,

check out her web page and get on the phone.

Remember, there's only 14 shopping days 'til Easter.



Photos by Tessa Clement (née Shoebridge) and Copyright © 2010. All rights reserved, used by permission.

Musings on change

On Saturday Tessa and I went up to the top of Mt Albert and looked across to what had once been my teenage home, just as I had stood there and looked across a many times when I was a teenager in the 1970s, before I moved away from first home, then Auckland and now back. The trees are taller and it is harder to pick out the house among the trees, but the mountain is the same and in many ways the house. All around there is change, the new motorway, changed buildings, but the basic layout of the roads is unchanged and so is the geography.


Businesses aren't like that, many of the iconic businesses of my youth and early adulthood are still around but merged or changed beyond recognition. I have a life insurance policy taken out in the late 1970s with Norwich Union, this afternoon out of curiosity I visited their web site to discover they are now Aviva and I vaguely remembered hearing of some merger, perhaps it's middle age, but I feel nostalgic for the old name.


Tonight Tessa and I went to another of my old haunts, Albert Park, for the Chinese lantern festival which I really enjoyed. Again things had changed, when I was in my late teens and early twenties and frequently visited the park it was different, Central Auckland was very much a city for the English descendants, now it is a much more vibrant, truly multi-cultural city the festival was attended by a truly multi-ethnic mix of people, another change that has made Auckland better and stronger, just as the business changes make them better and stronger. While we were there we saw the first fresh durian I've seen in Auckland (canned and frozen don't count) we bought some and ate it as we walked ... a middle aged Asian couple stopped and remarked that they thought Europeans didn't like durian.

The mountain and the stream remain, the people change and those of us remaining change with them.

Cool pictures of feathered dinosaurs from New Scientist

Ten artist's drawings of feathered dinosaurs discovered by Chinese Palentologist Xu Xing ranging from the 34cm, 4 winged, Anchiornis huxleyi to Guanlong, a feathered ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex and the 1.5 Tonne Gigantoraptor, Fossil finds by Xu Xing and his team have helped show the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. See gallery at New Scientist

Chocolate eggs threated by witches' broom

With Valentine's day this weekend and Easter just around the corner, I Ggoogled a bit and found out that New Scientist reported a year ago that supplies were threatened by a fungus named witches' broom and a virus called CSSV (cacao swollen shoot virus). Cacao is the plant that grows the beans that we grind, ferment and roast to make cocoa ... the raw stuff of chocolate.

Site Cloning Experiment

A few months back I had a few of my domains developed into mini-sites, but for various reasons I didn't switch on Adsense monitoring until a few days back so I didn't actually understand how well or poorly they were doing – silly mistake that I always advise other people against.
Because there's some related keyword pairs I might go after, I've decided not to publicly say exactly which domain name I'm talking about.
While doing some research last night I noticed that one of my better performing minisites that has it's name formed CompoundnounNoun.co.nz (XxxyyyZzz.co.nz) was receiving a lot of hits for the search term Xxx Zzz. It was on the front page of Google for this search but near the bottom.
For an experiment I decided to see what would happen if I cloned it to XxxZzz.co.nz for a perfect match to the keyword. Already I'm seeing some things that surprised me.

Day 1

Log

Here's my log and results (All times NZDT):

9-Feb-10 22:20

Registered the domain name

9-Feb-10 22:20-23:00

• Cloned the XxxYyyZzz.co.nz site to XxxZzz.co.nz on my server
• changing all occurrences of XxxYyy to Xxx and fixing a couple of grammatical errors.
• Added links to the new site on 3 of my sites.
• Registered it with Google Analytics and placed the link code in the pages.

9-Feb-10 23:09

.nz zone file reloaded, DNS resolving and site live. Visited the site and checked it out. The Adsense Mediabot spider visited all the pages I visited.

10-Feb-10 07:28

Googlebot visited the site retrieving robots.txt, and / (Index.php)

10-Feb-10 09:06

Googlebot returned retrieving all the pages linked from index.php.

10-Feb-10 14:08

Yahoo! Slurp retrieved robots.txt, /, and /default.css

10-Feb-10 18:24

Googlebot returned and re-read / (NB: Did not read robots.txt)

11-Feb-10 00:01

Waking up to having missed something I created a Google Alert for Xxx Zzz inurl:.co.nz

Analysis of day 1.

• Mediabot is practically real-time (expected).
• Googlebot found the site fairly quickly. Not sure if this was because of Analytics, Mediabot, or from scanning my other sites. Having read the first page it came back and read the rest fairly promptly.
• Yahoo! Slurp is none too shabby on the initial read either. It didn't have the extra aid I gave Google, yet found a brand new domain in only 15 hours.
• Either Slurp didn't like what it found, or is a lot slower than Googlebot in reading the other new pages. I find it a mystery that it gave priority to reading the css file over reading the other php files though.

Based on experience with adding pages to Tessa's Sweet Expectations site where it took 8 or 9 days for Google to notice an added page to an existing site I'm not expecting anything for a few days. I'll check periodically and update this blog with news of how it progresses.

Day 2

Very Quiet day. The only activity on the site was a return visit by Googlebot at 01:45 which just requested robots.txt - a 404. No sign of Yahoo Slurp or Microsoft's Bing spider.

Day 3

A couple more spiders visited: ScoutJet and Yandex, with a return visit by GoogleBot. In each case they fetched robots.txt and the homepage. Still no sign of Yahoo Slurp or Microsoft's Bing spider.

Day 4

A ScoutJet returned and spidered the site. So far Google and Scoutjet have both spidered the site, Scoutjet's directory isn't publicly usable yet, and Google isn't showing any pages for the site, yet.

Day 5

Yandex returned and read the robots.txt (I'm going to stop reporting minor search engines now, they've obviously found the site). Google re-read the index page and robots.txt only. A ScoutJet returned and spidered the site. So far Google and Scoutjet have both spidered the site, Spandex's directory isn't publicly usable yet, and Google isn't showing any pages for the site, yet.

Google sent its first real traffic today (1 visitor), and it was on the search I expected, I need to wait a few more days to check it wasn't just an aberration before declaring success, but for now at least it's looking hopeful.

Interestingly enough, this is only day 5 on a newly registered site, nearly twice as fast as day 9 on an existing site as in the Sweet Expectations Valentine's day page.

Day 6

Google revisited and re-spidered the site. They also sent another visitor and I received a notification from Google Alerts that the site exists. The visitor sent by Google was on a bit of a long tail keyword phrase that it matched up against the privacy page or all places, still the web browser went to a couple of other pages in the site; not ideal, but better than nothing.

Day 7

Quiet day, Yahoo! Slurp visited today and spidered the site. No sign of Google or any traffic from them but this doesn't matter as they have obviously decided to accept the site. Interestingly enough, still no sign of Bing. Bing sends traffic to one of the sites where I posted a link to the new site so it's either not interested in this site or has just given it a low priority for its spider.

As I've partially achieved my objective, and want to watch things for a few weeks I'm going to shut down this log now, with just occasional updates as significant changes occur.

Summary

Google was very fast off the mark indexing the site, and added it into the index faster than I expected. Slurp indexed the front page pretty fast but was quite a sluggard indexing the rest of the site. Bing has been noticeable by its absence, and I'm wondering if they are sharing their spidering with Slurp already.

Google has also sent traffic a lot sooner than I expected. Given that it's a brand new site (The one I cloned had been registered since 2006 and been in its current form as as a mini-site for 3 months) and there are almost no incoming links I'm surprised it got out of the sandbox at all. The only question in my mind now is will I get enough traffic to justify the registration fee?

Living beach ball, another giant single cell

A while ago I bloggged on Giant Single Cells. Here's another one courtesy of New Scientist The single-celled xenophyophores shun the convention that single cells are microscopic. Syringammina is a brute, growing to a width of 10 centimetres, sometimes even twice that. The cell branches and splits into hundreds of tubes, which ramify and interconnect in a hugely complex network. It also bends the single-cell convention of having only a single nucleus: Syringammina has many, scattered throughout its tubes.

Masterworks in Petri dishes gallery

Ten photos of "Art" made out of growing bacteria at Gallery - Masterworks in Petri dishes - New Scientist Described as "Einstein in E. coli, an apple tree grown from fungi and a fluorescent Mario are just some of the masterworks cast in agar jelly by creative microbiologists, on display at www.microbialart.com". In my opinion, 7 of them are great images, even if manipulated (false colour etc), I won't say which ones left me cold as I'm sure everyone will have their own list.

Why did our species survive, not the Neanderthals?

Interesting article in New Scientist on Neanderthal extinction. It directly contradicts something I thought about Neanderthals and technology / tool creation so I must have a look into it to see if this is something under debate or if I should be changing my mental model.

"The history of the Neanderthals isn't a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but much of what has been written about the ancient human species may as well be, says evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson in his informative monograph...

"None of these just-so stories quite add up, Finlayson says. There is no clear indication that Neanderthals were any less intelligent than H. sapiens, and genetic evidence has shown that they share with humans key changes in Foxp2, a gene involved in speech and language. The distinction between Neanderthal and human technology isn't as clear-cut as palaeoanthropologists sometimes suggest, and Neanderthals hunted smaller game and seafood where it was available. Meanwhile, a first-draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome offers no sign that they contributed to our gene pool."

Article - 08 November 2009 - New Scientist.

Creationism and Islam

In a very similar way to how some extreme fundamentalist Christian sects reject evolution, so do some Islamic people. I haven't watched it recently, but Auckland's Triangle Television community station used to run anti-evolution programs made by these Muslims and I found them fascinating ... not because I agree with them, but for the way they were nearly identical to Christian anti-evolution films.

The biggest single difference was the the Islamic ones would have sound-bites from Jewish and Christian scholars -- presumably to show that their word-view was shared.

In 2008 New Scientist interviewed Salman Hameed an American academic who makes a number of pro-evolution points from an Islamic viewpoint including

• "The Koran itself does not provide a single clear-cut verse that contradicts evolution."
• "One of the big evolution problems from the US creationist perspective is the age of the Earth. Logically speaking, if you believe in a 6000 or 10,000 year-old Earth, then you have to reject evolution"
• "The Catholic church and Anglican church are not, as far as I know, atheistic organisations. These are religious organisations, but they accept evolution as a working principle behind the diversity of species. I think the same argument can and should be made in the Islamic world."

The interview is well worth a read.

Jon Haworth - Mission statement generator

Want to make your small business spout nonsense to compete with government agencies and big business? Mission statement generator is a tool that effortlessly produces prose like "Our goal is to professionally and synergistically fashion economically sound and cost-effective information that provide key differentiators between us and our competitors." and "Our company exists to collaboratively create economically sound, emerging and competitive products to meet the needs of an ever-changing marketplace."

Google's Halloween Joke

When the Web was new, the first search engines were created and listed every page they could find. Often site owners were unhappy with this for a number of reasons:

• Confidential information could be displayed (Actually an indication of a misconfigured website, but blame the messenger)
• Inner pages could be displayed bypassing "guard" pages
• The spiders could consume a lot of (then) expensive bandwidth

AltaVista which was the first popular search engine, designed a special file "robots.txt" for webmasters to include. This file could be used to instruct robots not to index part of a site. Most people never see this file as it is usually uninteresting, but it's often there and creating it is one of the less interesting parts of creating a website

Tonight is Halloween and Google has added these lines to the bottom of their robots.txt file

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

Another stupid crook leaves name, number

Dumb robber leaves name, number: "A regular customer of Penny Lane Records in Sydenham, Christchurch took his opportunity just before closing on Friday to reach over the counter and grab a wad of cash and flee.

According to the owner, just a few minutes earlier, the man had put a CD on lay-by and had left his name, address and phone number with staff. In addition, he is a regular customer and well-known to staff." Doh!

Orwell and Shakespeare. Hamlet and 1984.

This is of necessity a draft. I want to talk about the artistic process and the way we misinterpret the art of past ages by imposing on the work of former eras the values and standards of our times. I haven't yet figured out all I want to say on the matter, so I will revisit this theme at some future time.

In his Ab Urbe condita (Literally “From the founding of the city”, but usually rendered as Early History of Rome) Titus Livius had historical or semi mythical people from the early days of Rome speaking and acting like Romans of the late republic, his era.

Most English speaking people today, and for at least the last century, regard William Shakespeare as a genius in writing plays. To the modern ear his language has dated and his political world view and concerned are that of a bygone age. If you ask a modern person what was so great about Shakespeare they will usually say that it is the originality of his plots.

In this they couldn't be more wrong. Shakespeare's plays usually retold well known stories and the Elizabethan audience expected to be presented with familiar plots and scenes. Romeo and Juliet was from earlier Italian tales ultimately named Giulietta e Romeo and presenting much the same plot, according to the Wikipedia article on Romeo and Juliet “The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Romeo and Juliet are all from Italian novelle.” Shakespeare's greatest play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is based on earlier stories, including the Roman legend of Brutus, Scandinavian legends and an earlier “Ur-Hamlet” possibly by Thomas Kyd (See Sources of Hamlet on Wikipedia ) . To the Elizabethan mind, Shakespeare's greatness wasn't the originality of his tales, but how well he told them; by the standards of the day he was a great playwright. Normally we never get to hear this, today we demand novelty, especially originality in plots, and Shakespeare was great, so we must think of him as conforming to today's standards of greatness which requires original plots so Shakespeare must have had original plots. so the antecedents of Shakespeare's plays are conveniently forgotten.

A similar thing has happened with George Orwell, one of my favourite authors. Today Orwell is primarily remembered for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four and occasionally for Animal Farm, his Satire of the Russian revolution and the early USSR, most of the rest of his writings are conveniently forgotten.

Felix, the knitted toy

The earliest toy I can remember was a simple knitted "rag doll" style soft toy I called "Felix" that one of my parents' friends in England had made me.

My earliest memories are from when we first lived in Auckland, New Zealand when I was three and Felix was my constant companion. I don't know if we brought him overland with us when my parents drove their car halfway around the world from the UK to Aotearoa, or if it had been mailed out, but the one thing I do recall is that he was there and I have no memory of being given him.

In those days we lived in Takapuna and when I was four we moved to the East Coast Bays, Mairangi Bay was home, but my grandparents lived in Murray's Bay and the other bays were visited often enough for shopping or picnics. Back then this was an idyllic corner of NZ for kids. Like all children I had a vivid imagination and as everyone we knew seemed to live in a bay, I invented "Stingins Bay" (with a soft G sound) where Felix's father lived, and I was forever trying to find it. Looking back I have no idea why he didn't have a mother -- just one of those kid things, I guess. Being only a few km away we kept in touch with the next door family from Takapuna which was good as I had made good friends with their son who my own age.

We moved again when I was five, this time about 400km south to New Plymouth and in the summer holidays visited Auckland, including our old friends in Takapuna as well as the friends in Mairangi Bay.

Disaster Felix went missing! There was a search, but he could not be found and I could not be consoled. For weeks I was heartbroken.

Here's were it gets weirder. Several months later, Felix turned up, he'd been pushed down behind the sofa at the Takapuna friends house. He was returned to me, but the magic had been broken and I don't think I ever played with him again.

This would have been 1964 or 1965 and as Peter, Paul and as Mary sang a couple of years earlier in Puff, the magic dragon "Dragons live forever, but not so little boys. Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys." I'd moved on and now had little room in my life for soft toys.

Looking back from forty-four years later it makes little sense that Felix should have been so important, perhaps we had him on the trip and it was that he had been my travel companion as we drove half way around the world, perhaps he just represented stability as as we moved three times before finding a permanent home in NZ. As I write this I find myself wondering what did eventually happen to Felix? I still have a wind-up toy from that same era, now no-longer working, but occupying pride of place above my desk at home.

 Originally published on Qondio

Big ribbons a better luggage tag

When you fly with checked luggage, at the end of your journey the bags and suitcases of hundreds of people all end up on the same carousel. If your luggage is a standard type it can have a dozen or more close twins as travel "companions".

When you get close to the bag it's usually possible to tell your bag, but even if you haven't done it yourself I'm sure you've seen people pick up a bag, then see it isn't theirs and put it back.

As people pick up their bags and leave the luggage collection area the crush around the carousel dies down, but if your bag is one of the first ones out it can be quite a mission to get to the front just as your bag comes past.

Distinctive luggage tags can help, but if they are small they don't help when the bag is in the distance and bags can be treated pretty roughly in transit and if the tags are large they can get caught and detach from your case.

A few years ago a travel companion put me onto a great idea. Get a large (minimum 2" - 5cm), distinctive ribbon, and wrap it tightly around the outside of the case, through the handle, and securely tie it. Now when my bags come onto the carousel I can see them from a distance and get to them as they come past.

I've used this technique flying from New Zealand to Australia, Singapore, India, back to NZ and internally in good old Aotearoa without problem. Wide stripes and bright ribbons work best, but anything that contrasts with your suitcase will do. If you can't find a unique ribbon, just get two or more thinner ones and tie them beside each other.

If you're traveling on holiday or for a tourist vacation you can pretty much use any pattern, but on business trips you might want to be a little more sedate. You should also consider any cultural issues when choosing your ribbons. Many countries use a tricolor (three stripes) as a flag and national symbol. Flying into Pakistan with something looking like the national flag of India might not be the wisest thing you can do.

Finally, don't forget that this is an aid to help you identify your luggage at a distance, it isn't a substitute for clearly marking your bags with your name and contact details. You need that in case your bags are mislaid by the airline and they need to get them to you later.

I've often considered painting a large identifying mark on my bags, but have so far refrained. The ribbon can be cut off and discarded at journey's end but the paint is there forever.

Originally published on Qondio

Help improve Wikipedia

Do you use Wikipedia as a reference site? Do you find that there are times when you look something up and find a short "stub" article? Would you like Wikipedia to be better?

Wikipedia is a volunteer effort. There are people who spend a lot of time on Wikipedia trying to improve it. Unfortunately they can spend a lot of their time doing very trivial changes such as correcting typographical errors, spelling mistakes, and rewording clumsy grammar because these are important things to fix and while, each one only takes a small amount of time, collectively they take a long time because there are so many of them.

As an ordinary user of Wikipedia you can easily take over some of this load. When you are browsing Wikipedia and you notice a small error, hit the edit button and fiix it. For example, in the last sentence I wrote "fiix" rather than "fix". If this was Wikipedia you could simply fix it. It's only a tiny change, but there are so many people visiting Wikipedia on a regular basis that if everyone who visited fixed them they'd soon be gone.

The only thing to watch out for is, despite what you were taught at school, English doesn't have a standard spelling, it has several. British spelling is different to American spelling and Canadian spelling is different to both in significant ways. New Zealand, Australia, India and Singapore are all close to British spelling but all have slight regional differences of their own. Wikipedia can't make up its mind which form of English should be used; the rule is whichever form of English is first used in an article should be retained. So resist the temptation to change labour to labor or aluminum to aluminium.

After typos, the other thing that really needs doing is fixing the dreaded disambiguation page. When a word has two (or more) meanings or several people share the same name and you go to the page for them you come to a "disambiguation page", a page that (hopefully) points you to the right article. This is great when entering Wikipedia, but if you are reading a page on computers and click on a link for Apple, you expect to reach a page on Apple computers, not a page giving you a choice of the fruit, computers, etc. When you find you've followed an internal link to one of these pages, click the back button, fix the link so it bypasses the disambiguation page and you've just improved Wikipedia.

As the old Scots saying goes, "A wheen o' mickles mak's a muckle" (Many small items add up to a large thing).

Remember, it wasn't a single raindrop that carved the USA's Grand Canyon, it was the collective action of uncountable billions of raindrops that carved it, but each one helped.

Originally published on Qondio

Wikipedia The untrustworthy reference book

Want to find out about something on the web? The chances are you'll end up at Wikipedia, either directly or because Google sees Wikipedia as important and ranks its results highly. Wikipedia is available in many languages and I really only know the English language version that is edited by talented people from all over the world, but largely by editors in English speaking countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom as well as it's home country the United States.

A lot of people trust the information they get from Wikipedia and generally the information there is pretty good, but unfortunately Wikipedia can't be relied on to provide accurate answers and the reason for this is also the same reason that it has been such a success. Wikipedia is a contraction of Wiki Encyclopedia and anyone can edit practically any page at Wikipedia. You can edit, I can edit, bored school children can edit. This means that at any moment the page you retrieve is probably good, but may contain anything from biased information or commercial spam to a puerile string of rude words.

The puerile strings of rude words are usually removed very quickly, sometimes automatically and sometimes by a small army of volunteer editors from all over the world. I know, I'm one of these volunteer editors. Every so often I look at the recent changes by anonymous users page and try to remove bad edits that the robots missed. Because spammers are pretty dumb, spam links are usually very easy to spot, but more subtle vandalism is something that only an expert in a field is likely to spot, and because very few people are experts in many fields, random Wikipedia editors looking at random pages are unlikely to spot the vandalism and it can stay there for a very long time.

The other problem with the vandalism is that talented and dedicated editors from all over the world who should be working on improving Wikipedia are spending a lot of time reverting this vandalism. Specialists should be editing articles on their area of expertise, other editors could be editing and improving articles on things they know, such as their country or home town. British editors could be improving articles on England, Scotland, Wales, etc. I could be improving articles on NZ.

How do you as a user of Wikipedia protect yourself? The official answer is that just like a paper encyclopedia, all information in Wikipedia is supposed to be referenced to source documents. Unfortunately a very large number of pages are not properly sourced and those that are sourced can have sources that general readers would have trouble understanding.

The next best way to protect yourself is to use common sense, if you see something that looks like arrant nonsense, wait a minute and refresh the page, if the nonsense goes away, you're probably safe. For extra safety every page has history and discussion pages and a quick look there will show if the page is frequently edited or has known problems.

If you spot something you know to be wrong, you can always fix it. Be careful, that's the start of the process that got me started as a regular Wikipedia editor.

The late Douglas Adams described the fictional Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe as being definitive as

"though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it was always reality that's got it wrong."

Sometimes I feel like this about Wikipedia. I'd hate to live without the wealth of information it provides, but I always treat it with caution.

Originally published on Qondio