To be honest, the audio was much, much better, delivered as it was in a dry, extremely serious tone, with no indication of the comment’s wittiness. his co-announcer seemingly took no notice.

You learn something every day. After years of wondering how the acre came about as a measurement of area, here comes the Chain (length) (Wikipedia) to explain everything. An acre is apparently not just an inscrutably long and decimal-place–laden number of square yards. It is, in fact, exactly 10 square chains. A chain is one tenth of a furlong and equal to 66 feet. That makes more sense than 4840 square yards or a box 208.71 feet on a side.

In addition to the chain, there’s also the rood, which is a... [More]

Two point five kids.

Four-bedroom house in a good neighborhood.

Two-car garage full of garden tools and two new cars in the driveway.

Good schools.

Fancy vacations.

Keeping up with the Joneses.

The American Dream.

It’s called a dream because it doesn’t seem realistic that it will come true for every American. And it doesn’t—but only for those losers who aren’t willing to work hard enough for it. That’s the hard-as-nails story anyway—the philosophical core of the American... [More]

Silicon Tracking DetectorThe LHC (Large Hadron[1] Collider) is located in France and Switzerland at CERN[2]; the first experiments begin in early August 2008 and a full test of all 27km of track is planned in September. Project members expect to be analyzing the first collisions by the end of the year. The entire track will be cooled to just 1.75ºC shy of absolute zero (to -271.25ºC) and will be in-use for decades. The big expectation is that the long-sought Higgs Boson[3] makes an appearance.

The article Large Hadron... [More] (Big Picture)

If you have an email account, you can most likely check mail from anywhere in the world—either using webmail or by using a mail program using either POP[1] or IMAP[2]. In order to check mail, you must always identify yourself and authenticate with a password. Sending mail, on the other hand, used to be easier; some hosts used to relay mail from any address to any address. In the age of spam, this is no longer possible and many large ISPs have switched their SMTP[3] settings to require authentication... [More]

The recently-published RFC: Lambda functions and closures by Christian Seiler & Dmitry Stogov (PHP) has all the details about a patch for PHP that adds support for closures to PHP 5.3 and higher. It looks like the proposal was initially made in December of 2007 and the process lasted about half a year. Compare and constrast with Java’s long struggle to get closures, which isn’t over by half[1].

The syntax is pretty straightforward, though not as elegant as the lambda syntax adopted by C# (and likely others of whose syntax I’m not aware,... [More]

Citation found in Friend’s: Bright Shiny... [More] by Kevin Kopelson (n+1)

Terim coached the Turkish national side in the Euro 2008, where they fought their way through to the semifinals with “late goals helping to secure victories in their games against Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Croatia”.

Italy 2 – France 0

The vaunted Italy–France matchup went awry early for France as Franck Ribéry injured himself on a bad tackle and had to leave the game in the tenth minute.[1] Then, with their offensive duo of Henry-Ribéry cut in half, Eric Abidal pulled Luca Toni down in the box, giving Italy a penalty kick and earning himself a red card. Pirlo converted the penalty to put Italy in the lead 1–0. Italy looked quite strong and confident on the attack, using a good passing game through the... [More]

Germany 1 – Austria 0

This match was horribly boring; watching the first half was like watching a cat play with a mouse, as the Germans gave the Austrians a long leash to see what they could do. Austria was clearly outmatched, but they collapsed to an ever-exciting nine-men-in-the-box formation at the slightest hint of offense from the Germans, which made it hard for Germany to capilatize or even create chances. So, it wasn’t surprising that the lone goal came from a scorching free hick by... [More]

Weather Forecast for 14th–18th of June

The following comment at Irish Vote Scuttles Treaty Of Lisbon by logbass (Plastic) was rated as brilliant, but it seemed to miss the point by a mile:

“It is funny that Europe is so quick to point out failings in the US democracy, but when push came to shove they tried to completely subvert democracy to get Lisbon approved. Kudos to Ireland for actually caring what its citizens want.”

There are probably many who will agree with this type of flailing logic, but it mixes many false assumptions in order to come to the... [More]

Switzerland 2 – Portugal 0

Switzerland was already out and Portugal had benched many of their star players[1], but the Swiss came out still hunting for their first win in EM history. The Portugese had the game well in hand throughout the first half and both teams had a couple of decent chances. The replacement goalie for Switzerland was the old hand Patrick Zuberbühler—”Zubi” to everyone here—who made heavy use of his good friends the goalposts, as usual.

In the second half, the impossible... [More]

Spain 2 – Sweden 1

Spain and Sweden were relatively evenly-matched, with Spain going into the lead early on a corner kick. Ibrahimovich evened it up for Sweden in the 35th minute and, from then on, all was pretty much quiet with no real chances for either side. The only events of note were a pretty obvious bodycheck by Sweden in the penalty box that didn’t impress the referee at all[1] and a relatively obvious handball—again by Sweden and again in the penalty box—that also didn’t get called.... [More]

Italy 1 – Romania 1

It just wouldn’t be Italy if they didn’t require certain teams to win and other teams to lose and goal differences to be just right in order for them not to be mathematically eliminated. The game was exciting enough, with Romania having a few chances, but Italy having quite a few more—they just didn’t capitalize as often as they should have. As usual, they had one goal taken back—a nice header by Luca Toni—on a poor offsides call, but that’s become so standard that... [More]

Germany 1 – Croatia 2

Instead of the Germans, it was the Croatians that were extraordinarily well-organized and put together play after play on the net. By the end of the first half, the Germans were showing their frustration after nearly every offsides call and after every defensive error, both of which occurred often. The referee was a bit yellow card-happy against the Croatians, handing out eight of them in the first half—sometimes for tackles that got a lot of ball and almost none of... [More]

Portugal 3 – Czech Republic 1

This match marks the first equalizer of the tournament, with the Czechs pulling even not long after Portugal shot into the lead. The first half stayed relatively even, but the start of the second half was dominated by Portugal’s offense, which failed to crack the well-organized defense of the Czechs for twenty minutes before Ronaldo put his side’s second one in on a low scorching shot.

Christiano Ronaldo is the Portugese star and it’s amazing to see his... [More]

Spain 4 – Russia 1

It was a miserable day in Innsbruck, but the steady downpour didn’t seem to have much of an affect on either side. There were more fouls early in the match, but far fewer once nerves had settled.

It started out as a pretty evenly-matched contest with both sides showing flair and imagination in controlling the midfield and penetrating the penalty area. Much to Russia’s chagrin, however, it turned into a Spanish clinic on goal-scoring. The Russians didn’t play poorly nor... [More]

France 0 – Romania 0

Beni Thurnheer, whose in-game exclamations usually tend towards the annoying, put it perfectly with this turn of phrase: “Ein unglaublich langweiliges Spiel aber auf einem sehr höhen Niveau”. In English, that’s “An unbelievably boring game, but played on a very high level.” Both sides were good and showed strong defense, but it was a ninety-minute snooze-fest. The French coach walked onto the field after the final whistle, clapping slowly; it was hard to determine whether... [More]

At the end of two days of play, both hosts—Switzerland and Austria—have had a chance to play and both, as expected, got zero points for all their effort. So far, the usual suspects—and those rated higher in the FIFA rankings—have won their games, though not without a struggle and not without showing weakness in the form of a soft game or what looked like squads that weren’t ready to run the full ninety minutes.

If a squad can’t play ninety minutes in a Swiss June like this one—15°C... [More]

The article Just one question (The Guardian) features a whole bunch of British people I’ve never heard of, half of them asking pithy questions, allowing the other half to offer equally pithy—and often, far lengthier—answers. “Julia Neuberger, rabbi and Lib Dem peer”, appearing about ¾ of the way down the list, though it a good idea to ask Christopher Hitchens an insipid question that he’d been asked dozens of times before. Whatever you may think of Hitchens either personally or professionally, this is the... [More]

As detailed in Swiss reject new citizenship rule (BBC News), an overwhelming 64% of Swiss rejected a return to secret ballots for deciding citizenship. Also on the referendum was the elimination of the right-to-appeal for rejected citizenship applications. Both of these measures were enacted five years ago when the previous situation was deemed unconstitutional. This is good news, but the way the BBC reported it was interesting:

“The Swiss People’s Party, the largest in parliament, wants the secret... [More]”

The game’s hyper-realism is its downfall; when something doesn’t work as expected, you’re not only disappointed, you’re screaming at the television. Case in point, the mission called “Final Destination” involves hunting down a dealer, then icing him. Several things get in the way of this being an easy mission, though.

The dealer has a friend when you confront him; this friend opens fire as soon as the cut-scene is done and the game helpfully auto-aims on the other guy, who’s running away from... [More]

The world is full of ideas, some of them good. There are some ideas that sound so damned good that they keep coming back, no matter how many times they’ve been stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake. They are ideas about products not enough people want (pet supplies online), products offered under impractical conditions (DRM music) or products that would never work (hovercars). And then there are the all-encompassing theories-of-everything (TOEs) of the IT world that haunt the R&D... [More]