How does altitude affect the World Cup teams?

Some of the stadiums are at a fairly high altitude, while others are not:

Whoever wins the tournament will have switched from altitude to sea level and back again at some point.

The key message for the World Cup, then, is that teams need to take into account transition, acclimatisation and tactics. Players will need to adapt to changes in altitude, especially the effect this has on the flight of the ball. Teams that use high altitude to their advantage - or that are already used to switching from low to high altitude - will profit. That points to a win for a South American team.

Read the full article at New Scientist.

USA wins 1-1 - Greatest tie against the British since Bunker Hill

Photos of San Francisco by locals and tourists in Flickr

Eric Fischer cleverly used the geotagging information in Flickr to distinguish between locals (blue) and tourists (red) and then plotted the data. It is fascinating to look at unexpected red clusters trying to work out what they are.

John Lanchester on the difference between complaining and moaning

From the New Yorker (full text not available):

Visitors to Britain are rarely able to grasp – sometimes after decades of residency – the vital distinction its inhabitants make between complaining and moaning. The two activities seem similar, but there is a profound philosophical and practical difference. To complain about something is to express dissatisfaction to someone whom you hold responsible for an unsatisfactory state of affairs; to moan is to express the same thing to someone other than the person responsible. The British are powerfully embarrassed by complaining, and experience an almost physical recoil from people who do it in public. They do love to moan though.

Kate Nash / Supercute! at Bottom of the Hill, San Francico, 8-May-2010

Oh dear. Kate Nash is a clever songwriter, vaguely in the Lily Allen genre. She doesn't have a strong voice so what she needs is a sympathetic backing. Unfortunately she seems to have fallen in with the complaint rock crowd. She has a stodgy backing band who can play (they keep switching instruments and roles) but don't know how to not play. Kate Nash herself gets to strap on a guitar and play loud but the whole effect is like having George Best on your team and putting him in goal. The best part is when she is joined by support band Supercute! who are surely destined for world domination.

Recovering a usb hard drive

I have a load of mp3s on an external usb hard drive. Before our office move I backed these up to another usb hard drive. At the new office the original disk was giving that distinctive clicking sound that indicates death. I started copying the other disc but then it too stopped working. I took out the disk from its enclosure and attached another usb interface adapter, but that didn't work either. Next I opened up my four year old desktop computer, hoping that it would have a sata interface. The discs weren't sata but I was able to pull out a dvd driver cable and attach that to the disk (see picture above). Now Windows saw the disk and chkdsk ran. Finally I have been able to spend the last two days copying files off the disk using rsync.

UK Election day newspapers

Florence and the Machine / Holy Hail @ Mezzanine, San Francisco, 17 April 2010

Poor Holy Hail had some good ideas and lots of enthusiasm, but terrible sound. I hadn't been to the Mezzanine before. It is a big location for Indie rock (shudder) and they do get a lot of British bands. For a time they didn't offer advance tickets which was a deal breaker for me. Inside is a nice club layout with a few hidden away places where you could sit around. The stage is weirdly in a corner of the dance floor. I was worried that this was the source of the poor sound but it must have been just traditional cruelty to support acts.

Florence and the Machine are a band but are really one person, the eponymous singer. The hired help consists of players of drums/bass/guitar/keyboards and (super trendy) harp, all dressed in black so as to fade into the background. Florence was dressed in a traditional combination of wedding dress style leotard over metallic shorts, along with a flowing shawl which was worn in several different ways. She has two tones when singing, a plaintive throaty voice, and a full blooded roar form the gut. When she lets loose it is an awesome sound which sweeps everyone along with it. Some of the songs on the album are pretty decent so altogether it is an impressive package. Why then did my attention wander a bit? Well I was tired. But I would have sacrificed a bit of power in the singing for more detail, and I'd like to have heard a bit more character from the band. Overall though this was memorable.

UK General Election quiz

Internet quizzes seem to favour the sensible party, which in this case is the Liberal Democrats.

Take the Who Should You Vote For? UK General Election quiz

Labour				30
Liberal Democrat				29
Green				14
Conservative	-18
UK Independence	-37

You expected: LAB
Your recommendation: Labour
Click here for more details about these results