Accurate Cold

It has recently got a little colder in Europe, which has resulted in the usual round of eveyone complaining about how cold it is and how out of character for this time of year etc etc. The fact that it is the middle of Winter and the coldest time of the year and only recently dropped below 3 degrees celcius seems to have escaped them, I mean if its not meant to be cold at this time of the year when is it? Of course the answer is, that most people NEVER want it to be cold, but I'm getting used to that idea now after being subjected to it for 29 years. What I find it really hard to get used to is that the various news agencies around the world are buying into the cold mania and losing all ability to give accurate reports. A good example is the recent Russian "cold snap".
It seems that around a week or so ago Russia, or more accurately, the Moscow region was subjected to unusually cold weather. The weather was so bad that many people died from freezing to death and all kinds of emergency measures were brought into place. I don't for a moment suggest that this was not the case, but what I found interesting was the disparity of reporting on the event. This disparity fell into two main categories. The first, was the difference in recorded temperature. A friend of mine said that he read in the German media that it reached -39 degrees celcius, a quick search on the net found this article which says -24 degrees, this article that says -31 and yet another article that doesn't give a precise temperature at all. I find it absolutely amazing that these articles, most from fairly reputable news sources can have such a discrepancy about the temperature of Moscow, the largest city in Russia, but it doesn't end there.
The second way in which things differ from article to article is of course the records. Society now seems fascinated with records. Every day we have to beat more and more records and something isn't viewed as news worthy unless it does so. I guess with that in mind it should come as no surprise that almost every article about the cold weather seems to feel a need to mention how it breaks some kind of record. What was amusing to me was that once again, despite a large chunk of evidence and recorded fact each report comes up with differing "coldest day in Moscow" and how, depending on the widely varying temperature that it was on those days, how it was broken or almost broken. How can it possibly be that there is such disagreement about an event that happened a few days ago, in a large city? I suspect the answer ties into the fact that almost all europeans seem to be fixated on the weather and the natural human tendancy to exaggerate.
While I'm on the subject of cold weather, perhaps a reader can explain to me why the following (admittedly a somewhat unsavoury topic but nonetheless curious) seems to never occur, visible farts. I've lived in some colder part of the world for a while now, certainly I've been in weather that was cold enough to freeze breath very often and yet i've noticed that you never, ever, see anyones farts. This was highlighted to me recently as I was standing at a bus stop with one other person in front of me with his back to me. I quite audibly heard the guy fart, but despite being a sub zero day, was unable to see a thing. The only explanation I was able to come up with is that breath was visible due to the moisture content and perhaps farts were invisible as they did not have enough moisture. I asked a few canadian friends of mine about the subject and (after the laughing stopped) they too were also unable to remember ever "seeing" a fart, despite the fact that where they grew up it was below freezing for vast amounts of the year. Please leave a comment if you think you know the answer to this conundrum :)

RSS feeds - engadget

As many of you know, I'm a huge RSS fan. I think its the easiest way to stay abreast of information that I have seen. One feed that I am becoming more and more attached to is engadget. While I've been following engadget for some time now, recently I've found that it's just about superceding all my old technology related feeds like slashdot. So while I havn't given up on some of my other feeds just yet, I whole heartedly recommend engadget to anyone that is even vaguely interested in technology.

Nice resource - reviews

Every now and again I stumble on some really nice resources while browsing the net. Today I found Consumer Research. This site has reviews of pretty much any topic that you could imagine, from geek stuff to non geek topics. What's great about it is that they all (at least the ones I checked / read were) up to date, being no older then 3 months, and had a thoughtful, non biased collections of facts and noted down general opinion. As an example I am looking to buy some new headphones and reading the review, had a list of the top scorers in each category from all the reputable reviewers (eg forbes, cnet, amazon, tomshardware, anandtech, audiophile sites), the prices for all of them, and it even contained observations on them from the comments by buyers from ebay and amazon! This site just made my bookmarks.

Lasers

I just saw an article on engadget about a new laser. This one is seriously kewl though as it actually does what you'd expect from a laser, ie transmits heat! This means that you can use this laser for doing things like, bursting balloons, igniting flammable things and of course, burning people! Check out their selection at this website.

Achieving

For most of my life I've felt like I am meant to achieve something. In all likliehood its the result of being an only child with a doting mother combined with excessive competitive drive, but whatever the reason I feel an urge to do something. Of course the tricky part is working out what that "something" actually is. I've had various ideas, some of which I'm actively working on, most of which have just gone by the way side for various reasons but I did find a very interesting article the other day which I think is a nice synthesis of my various problems and thoughts about the topic.

Christmas

Well I must admit that I didn't get all that I wanted to done this Christmas, but nonetheless, I don't consider it a complete failure. It's becoming a bit of a tradition for me to spend Christmas by myself concentrating on learning something new. The reasoning for chosing christmas is that it is a time of year that has no meaning for me but that seems to occupy almost everyone else around me, meaning that I am left unbothered by interuptions and able to get on with things that take a lot of time and concentration, something that I don't normally (or at least recently) have much of an opportunity to do. This time I decided to teach myself how to code in Python, given that three years ago I spend my entire Christmas break learning how to code c (I wrote a proxy server, nothing exciting but it was a learning curve for me given that I couldn't code a thing before that.). Well I met with some success, I managed to read most of a python book and have a fairly good understanding of Pythons strengths and weaknesses and also a reasonable understanding of how to get things done. Of course the main point, that being actual coding seems to have escaped me, as instead I saw myself spending a lot of time just relaxing and watching a series of relatively bad movies. While that is a little annoying, in the overall scheme of things I think it might have been the right thing to do as it seems to have allowed me time to reflect on a few things and to really recharge. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into a few projects in the next year.