We’re really cross now

Some differences you’d expect – the word fucking has the greatest disparity, occurring in 80% of R scripts and only 33% of PG ones. The rest of the top four are taken up by fuck, fucked and fuckin. In at 5th is asshole (56% of R; 31% of PG). Then comes jesus, shortly followed by christ, so obviously it’s the two words together that are making the difference. It’s amusing to see that “jesus christ” is used in language so much more often than either “jesus” or “christ”.

Shortly behind our lord and saviour is motherfucker and the top ten is rounded off nicely by bullshit and fucker (29% of R; 6% of PG). Some of the words I might have expected to appear in the top ten are nowhere to be seen – murder is way down at 20th and gun comes in at a miserable 517th (just 18% of R-rated films and 12% of PG-rated ones). It’s interesting that cigarette (in 12th) beats joint (in 13th), which in turn beats drugs (29th).

Of course, there must be some words that appear in PG films but not R films, right? Well, there are, but the difference is less distinctive. The biggest hitter is the word ship, which appears in 40% of PG films but only 23% of R ones. It’s followed closely by bows, excitement, cloud, larger and tower (41% of PG; 26% of R), but sadly I think any statistician would tell you this was irrelevant on a data set of this size.

Without further ado, here are the words that appear the most in R-rated films compared with PG-rated films. The words are sized by discrepancy.

And, in case you’re interested, here is the entire list in a big spreadsheet. Want to guarantee a PG rating for your film? Steer clear of any sort of fucks, don’t mention cigarettes (other drugs are ok) and don’t blaspheme. Perhaps add a nautical theme and your film is practically guaranteed a PG. Unless its primary visuals involve people being gunned down while conducting sexual acrobatics with a chain-smoking Shetland pony.

It’s possible that films are rated on more than just dialogue.

Yes, while it may be the greatest racing track in the history of the world to drive on, eight minutes is a lot of video to watch of someone else having a good time with their clothes on.

So, we present to you, ten Nürburgring videos that are in some way different. In no particular order:

1. Crashes at Adenauer Forst in 1970

Some useful things can be learned from this video:

• Always wear your seatbelt (particularly while driving on racing circuits)
• When racing, do not keep the entire contents of your home in your car
• Do not buy a car made in the 1970s
• YouTube has a “mute” button

2. Hans-Joachim Stuck Driving Faster Than You

Meet Hans-Joachim Stuck. He’s a thousand years old and he can drive faster than you. This 2004 video is either from a VLN race or the Nürburgring 24-hour, so it runs on the Formula One circuit as well as the Nordschleife (and there’s no pass-on-left rule). Bear in mind that the cars he is passing are actual racing cars, taking part in an actual race.

3. Porsche 911. Nürburgring. Snow

Skip to one minute in and, unless you speak German, just imagine some commentary. But here is a Porsche 911 driving on the Nordschleife in the snow. Which looks like a lot of fun, if a little daunting.

4. Under 7 Minutes in a Radical SR8 LM

Okay, you got me. This is just a video of someone driving. But, on the upside, you only have to watch it for seven minutes, because that’s how long it is. It’s not the fastest SR8 lap that’s out there, but it’s pretty exciting.

5. CTR Yellowbird

“Sideways Stefan” Roser, drives a 930 RUF CTR around the ring in a rather enthusiastic fashion. Quite a few external shots from a helicopter and various on-car cameras, which should help stave off the boredom.

6. Helmut Dähne Bike Lap

It’s a surprise to most that car lap records are faster than bike ones on the ring – what bikes gain on the straights they make up for in the corners. But, even if you’re not a bike person, you can’t help but appreciate Helmut Dähne endangering himself for your entertainment. Dahne holds the two-wheeled lap record on the Nordschleife – and will hold it for the foreseeable future: Lap records can only be set during official race or qualify sessions, and the track’s motorcycle homologation was not renewed after Senna’s 1994 accident, so until that changes no official bike lap record can be set. Because we’re talking bikes and Nürburgring here, I ought to add that Helmut is still alive.

7. Liri Farfus Passenger Lap

I have driven my wife around the Nürburgring several times, and each time she has managed to look equally bored. My wife is obviously made of much sterner stuff than Liri Farfus, the wife of WTCC driver Augusto Farfus. He drives almost as fast as I do, I think, and she goes to pieces.

8. Electric Car Speed Record

Toyota ran a 7:47 in an electric car back in 2011. We’ve seen the future, and it looks exciting and sounds awful.

9. Sabine Schmitz Top Gear Van Video

I was at the ‘Ring when Jeremy Clarkson tried to break ten minutes in a diesel Jag and apparently succeeded. They closed the circuit in the early-morning for him to practise, on the only day I’ve ever been at the track when it opened. Sigh. Anyway, after Sabine Schmitz told him she could beat his lap time in a van, they sent her a van and a Richard Hammond. So she tried.

10. Seven-Second Ring King

What Nordschleife video collection would be complete without the shortest ‘ring video known to man? Two chaps from Manchester join the ring at Adenau only to leave it again at Ex Mühle. Using the alternate track entrance was probably a wise idea, as they ended up only five minutes’ walk from a pub.

This fine creation is located in building 35 of Microsoft’s main Redmond campus. It was made by a friend of mine called Thibaut, who informs me that it contains 512 cans. He matched up the drinks to the pixels in Excel (obviously) and then put up a “wanted” poster for the appropriate number of each.

As I’m sure you’re wondering, the artwork contains:

• 170 Diet Coke cans
• 82 Peach Nectarine Talking Rain cans
• 36 Coke Zero cans
• 120 Coca Cola / Dr Pepper full caffeine & sugar cans
• 4 Caffeine-free Pepsi cans
• 68 Pepsi full caffeine & sugar cans
• 32 Mug Root Beer cans

Apparently the hardest ones to find were root beer. Proof that software developers are not without a sense of taste.

Yes that is my real middle name. My plan was to buy a gun, but not keep any ammunition at home. The gun was only going to be a toy to casually throw in the lap of visiting Europeans, who had never seen one before. I might also take them to the firing range to play with it.

My wife vetoed this entire plan. The gun was a complete waste of money unless I was intending shooting somebody with it. If I found somebody I needed to shoot, I was to get back to her with the details and she could determine whether I could buy a gun or not.

At the time I made a pouty face, and went and test drove a Hummer instead for my taste of the American Dream. But I suppose my wife is right. Even in a country with bizarre laws about guns, there doesn’t seem a point in buying one unless you have a person to shoot.

The National Rifle Association is an American lobbying group which supports gun ownership. After the most recent school shooting, the CEO of the NRA, one Wayne LaPierre, gave a press conference in which he suggested a few things. During it, he said “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”.

Bad guys the world over can find ways of getting guns – I don’t think anyone would really disagree with that. But, in the UK at least, getting a gun is actually pretty difficult. You need to know the right smuggling contacts, you need to have a lot of money and you need to be pretty damn sure you’re going to need it, because if you get caught with a gun you’ll be put in prison until your hair is grey.

To allow people to compare the systems, I have drawn up a handy table to indicate whom is armed in the US, compared with the UK.

The bad guys who have guns in the UK need them for their work. They have specific people whom they may wish to put holes in, and the possible income they can gain from shooting those people outweighs the huge penalties for firearms possession. I think those people are unlikely to shoot me. The rest are also unlikely to shoot me, but they’re certainly the ones I’m most worried about. Are they the bad guys? Am I the only good guy?

Here’s a scenario that played out for me this week, and has probably played out for you before too. I’ve been tinkering around with the idea of recording on-track video from car races, and I was looking for a mobile app which could record video along with telemetry from an OBD2 engine management system while driving the car. From this you can make nifty videos overlaying dials from the car on the live feed.

Anyway, I was delighted to find that such an app exists! So off I went and downloaded it (it’s called aLapRecorder HD). It’s a rather specific niche market, so unsurprisingly there’s pretty much just the one app to do this.

I installed it, got it going and then found a few bugs in it that were going to cause a bit of a problem with what I had in mind. So off I went to the developer forums… only to find that the forum is full of spam and appears not to be in use. Off I went to the reviews page (sometimes you can get some useful extra info from there) only to discover that the most recent reviews were all one-star ones complaining that the app didn’t work well on current hardware and that the dev didn’t pay any attention to the forum or email, and appeared to have given up on the project. And, sure enough, the last update was from November last year, so it looks like he has dropped it.

Why would the developer give up on something that was so close to great? The app looks superb and just has a few bugs. It’s so nearly perfect!

Well, let me tell you why. The “pro” version (which removes a two-recording limit) has sold “1,000 – 5,000″ copies, for $6.50 each. The developer has made somewhere between $6k and $30k. This app obviously contains many months of solid development work – I’m going to estimate six months, but it easily could be longer. The US Department of labour says that computer programmers in the US earn $60k per year on average. This app’s first review was in April last year, so if this talented programmer has sold the absolute highest number of copies that he could have done, he has been paid the average developer wage for the last year. And if he’s sold the least, he’s been paid what he could have got working in McDonalds. So, screw it. Instead of buggering around answering emails from angry users and fixing bugs for various new devices, the developer has no doubt just gone and got a job with some software company and is busy programming his heart out doing something different.

The consumers of this are car racers, and this is an expensive hobby. I just got an email suggesting that I buy the cheapest bolted neck restraint available for $600, which also involves replacing all four of our team’s helmets, at about $150 each. Race entry fees are easily $500-$1000 even for the cheap races. It would make no difference to a race team if this app was $30, $50 or perhaps even $100. And then the developer would have been able to keep working on it.

We’re used to wanting to pay the lowest price for everything, of course, but we have to remember that software is not like physical goods. It needs care and feeding to stay up-to-date with hardware and technology, and it is something that can evolve over time to improve, well after you have purchased it. It makes perfect sense to just want the lowest price when you go and buy a waffle iron. If the company who sold you it goes out of business, who cares? You still have a waffle iron. But if the company who sold you a piece of software goes out of business, it’s not going to get updated to work on the phone you’ll buy next year.

Of course, it’s the developer’s choice as to how he prices his application and in my view this developer made a poor choice. But the culture of users right now is constantly forcing prices down, and giant companies are busily producing mobile apps that make no money because they want a foot in the door of this market and, hey, they already make money from other stuff. For the poor indie developer who isn’t making money from other stuff, he’s left with a userbase that isn’t willing to pay for anything and an app that doesn’t make him a living wage.

So the next time you look at the price of an app, don’t think “$5.99?! Jesus Christ, what am I, made of money?”. You should instead think “$5.99? Hmm, perhaps this will still exist in three years”.

And, of course, I’m doing this every year. CO2 production varies a lot with age so it’s hard to come up with a figure for my entire life, but using the UK Carbonica calculator and extrapolating it to my life, I’m guessing I will consume somewhere around 2,000 tons of CO2.

I could get a job that involves less flying, and probably save 200 tons over my life. I could get the bus instead of driving, and perhaps save 150. I could start shopping more carefully, and maybe save 20. We’re converting our heating to electricity, which should save 50 or 60. These are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about in order to reduce my footprint.

The United States government are also doing their bit to shove me in the right direction. Last year they gave me $300 in subsidies to help insulate my attic (which should save 1-2 tons a year). They’re taxing motor fuel to encourage me to drive less, and that’s certainly made me carpool more often. They’re taxing air travel, and that’s cut down my number of work trips somewhat. All these seem like moves in the right direction.

Exhibit A

This is my son, Philip. He’s probably the cutest baby in the world. Well, top ten anyway. My wife and I made a choice to have him, and we’re very happy indeed about it.

Unfortunately for the planet, he’s munching through CO2 with gay abandon. He’s been born into a world that is more careful with this sort of thing and where carbon munching is more expensive, so I doubt he’s going to hit the 2,000 tons that I’ve used up. Let’s be conservative and say he is going to consume a tenth of what I will – 200 tons.

In environmental terms, my child will be the equivalent of:

• Driving around the planet nine times in a Hummer H3
• Seven Space Shuttle launches
• Flying first class from London to Sydney 16 times

And all this only if he manages to produce ten times less CO2 than I will.

I understand that reproduction is an important thing for human beings, and I don’t propose that we stop anyone from reproducing. But we could at least quit encouraging each other to continue banging them out. It seems odd to me that we’re all quick to look scornfully at the person zooming around on their own in an SUV, and at the same time smile demurely at the person with 3 kids in a Prius. It seems odd to me that kids get to eat for free in a bunch of restaurants, and that a person earning $100,000 in the US gets a $1000-per-child tax credit.

Which brings me on to China.

China is the world’s largest emitter of CO2. There are a lot of things that are a bit wonky about China’s one-child policy but it seems to me that, while the rest of the world footles around making subsidies for hybrid cars and solar panels and having pop concerts to “raise awareness”, China is the only country that’s actually made any effort to reduce the greatest cause of environmental damage.

Well, that’s the end of my child-hating blog post. No doubt my child will wave this at me at some point claiming it’s a fine example of my bad parenting (although hopefully he won’t have printed it out).

SOPA, as we all know, is a bill going through the the House of Representatives in the United States right now. It is intended to stop online plagiarism of intellectual property of various sorts, and proposes implementing this by allowing the police to delete Wikipedia,  shoot internet service providers on sight, and detain potential suspects without trial indefinitely. No, wait, that was something else. Well, you get the general idea. It’s not a very well thought-through bill and I hope it fails.

SOPA inspires me to become grumpy about two things. Firstly, I’ve heard several times that this bill is being forced through by the film industry, who are incapable of waking up to a reality of digital distribution. And, of course, Viacom, Warner Brothers et cetera are all supporters of SOPA. It’s certainly true that these companies stand to make money if SOPA passes. But the list of companies that oppose SOPA isn’t a list of companies that have the best interests of the glorious internet close to their cute little altruistic hearts. It’s just an equivalent list of organisations that will lose money if this passes. It’s the companies who’ll have to spend a ton of money vetting user content, screening their output and adding infrastructure for reporting and monitoring. Facebook, Microsoft, Google, et al. The fact that some of these companies had the muscle to black out a chunk of the internet on January 18th is something of a confusing message, but I think we should disregard the corporate sponsors on either side and think about the bill itself.

The second thing I’m grumpy about is the fact that there’s far too much online piracy, and the death of this bill will probably mean the continuation of that. People justify ripping off films, music and software because they’re just taking it from a big company and they’re all bastards anyway. And I can see why that justification is socially acceptable most of the time. But this rampant stealing from “the man” has left people my age with a similar disdain for intellectual property rights in general. How many of us have needed a picture of two rabbits having sex for a work presentation, Googled “rabbits having sex“, taken the first image and stuck it in the presentation? Sure, it probably belonged to someone and they had some blah on their site about attribution but it’s only a presentation and, hey, they put it on the internet for heaven’s sake, what do they expect? My generation is habitually stealing this sort of content with only the merest hint of shame.

What I only really realised this week is that people younger than me are doing this with no idea that it could actually be wrong.

My friend Doug takes pretty nice photos. He doesn’t do it professionally, and he states on his web page that you can use his photos for noncommercial purposes as long as you give attribution, and should contact him for commercial use. He’s a nice sort of a chap. I suspect his total income from this has been less than the price of a nice lens. Doug doesn’t go off looking for stolen copies of his photos, but he’s a good enough photographer that he or his fans regularly just come across them.

Imma boop your intellectual property rights

Doug’s most stolen photograph is probably this one. It was turned into this by a gentleman, who unashamedly added a copyright message for himself and then posted it all over the internet. This week it was posted on one of those “funny thing every day” Facebook pages – Doug spotted it, and pointed out that it was his stolen picture. The usual mixture of YouTube-style comments (from both sides) followed, but what really struck me was a comment from the original poster who was incredulous that someone could be so “up-tight” about “A FUNNY PICTURE POSTED ON THE INTERNET”. This hit a raw nerve for me – I was kind of okay with us having a society that ripped off each other’s internet content the whole time, but we’re breeding a society that has no awareness that this is even wrong.

Ten years ago or so, I used to occasionally search for plagiarised versions of my own web site. I’d send them an email asking them to link to my actual site as well, and they’d normally reply saying they were happy to. I thought I’d have another look today, so I searched for a reasonably distinctive phrase which appears in my definition of “bollocks”. Rather disappointingly, my own site is the third result after copy-pasted versions on The Urban Dictionary and DictionarySlang.com. Other highlights were a Facebook page which seems to consist of nothing other than unattributed chunks of my book, several copy-pastes of swathes of my site content and the rather glorious version of my entire paper book that the Chinese search engine Baidu has, complete with a handy reader app, some colour added and “Mr_doody2004@yahoo.com” carefully written in the footer. Sorry to disappoint, ladies, but this is not my email address.

(c) mr_doody2004@yahoo.com

Shall I mail all these people asking them to attribute me? Probably not, because there’s every chance these days that these are people who are genuinely unaware of such a thing as copyright (well, except for Baidu). If I did this now I’d probably get incredulous replies wondering why on earth I’d try to shut down funny stuff posted on the internet.

People ripping off Doug’s photos and my book doesn’t really make a difference to the world.   Although we both make a little money from our enterprises, we’re not trying to make an income and we’d both still do it if there was no money at all. But what about my sister, Joanna, who is trying to start a career as a professional photographer? What about my friend Nick, who makes a living writing online Excel training?

As I mentioned towards the beginning, I have no solution to this problem. Maybe it’s not SOPA, but we need something to teach our kids that going to a web site and hitting Ctrl-C is the same as going to the library, selecting a book, taking it home and starting typing from it verbatim.

Position	Car
1st	Tesla Roadster Sport
2nd	Porsche Cayman R
3rd	Lamborghini Gallardo Coupe LP 570-4 Superleggera
4th	Ferrari 430 Scuderia
5th	Porsche 911 GT3 RS 4.0 Coupe
6th	Audi TT Coupe
7th	Audi R8 GT
8th	Aston Martin V8 Vantage S Coupé
9th	Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG
10th	Audi S4 Sedan 3.0

Okay, there you go. That’s that decided. Now, should you be interested, here’s how I got to this list.

1. I downloaded the textfile version of Freebase’s automotive data
2. I loaded it into Excel. I am now looking at 23, 812 cars
3. I filtered out all the automatic transmissions – down to 6392 cars (presumably this data is somewhat skewed towards America)
4. I filtered out the front-wheel drive cars – down to 5312
5. I filtered for 0-60 times of less than 6 seconds – down to 355
6. I took the lightest ten by curb weight

Here’s the list I had at this point:

2010 Tesla Roadster Sport
2010 Tesla Roadster
2011 Tesla Roadster Sport 2.5
2011 Tesla Roadster 2.5
2011 Porsche Boxster Spyder
2011 Porsche Cayman R
2011 Porsche Boxster Spyder AT
2011 Porsche Cayman R AT
2011 Porsche Cayman
2011 Porsche Boxster

2010 Tesla Roadster Sport
2011 Porsche Boxster Spyder
2011 Porsche Cayman R
2011 Lamborghini Gallardo Coupe LP 570-4 Superleggera
2008 Ferrari 430 Scuderia
2011 Porsche 911 GT3 RS 4.0 Coupe
2012 Audi TT Coupe
2011 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 Cabriolet
2012 Audi R8 GT
2010 Nissan 370Z Roadster

Click the photo to view on Flickr.