Damien's Irishperson in Exile Diary

Links for 2009-10-15 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

The Infinite Matrix
The Infinite Matrix was a webzine featuring new science fiction by major writers, reviews by respected critics, and essays by original thinkers. It was kind of monthly, kind of weekly, and kind of daily. It was published from August, 2001 to January, 2006. It revived temporarily in April 2006 for a single issue, due to zombie activity that may have been caused by the publisher's penchant for fugu sashimi.

Links for 2009-10-13 [del.icio.us]

2009-10-14T00:00:00-07:00

Psychology Class Notes: Intro Psychology and Cognitive Psychology Class Notes
"Don't worry if you missed an Introductory Psychology class, were in class but couldn't keep up with a professor who moved too quickly, or simply missed some important elements to a recent lecture. AlleyDog.com has sample lecture notes for the major sections covered in most Introductory Psychology courses. The notes were developed and used for teaching more than 10 Introductory Psychology classes. Please keep in mind that these notes are intended to be SUPLEMENTAL!! They are NOT to be used instead of taking your own class notes."
Cognitive Psychology Study Guide

Links for 2009-09-21 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-22T00:00:00-07:00

George Orwell's Library
Electronic versions of Orwell's novels and essays

Links for 2009-09-15 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-16T00:00:00-07:00

14 Great Cheat Sheets & Posters to Make You a Software Wizard
Here are some application cheat sheets for commonly used software that will hopefully make you more productive.

"Lay down all hope, you that go in by me"

2009-09-15T13:28:15Z

Image by kimberlyfaye via Flickr

What would classic novels be called if they were written for today's market?

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

I've just finished Dante's Descent into Dummy Loan Felonies —With a Detour for Minimum Security Prison— and Amazing Redemption as an Ethical Financial Advisor in preparation for the video game version. I don't remember the poet being so badass.

(via Boing Boing)

I blame Maggie Philbin for having to learn second-order integration.

2009-09-14T11:52:28Z

Image by Damien Ryan via Flickr

It's safe to say that Tomorrow's World was responsible for the careers of most of this generation's scientists in the UK and Ireland.

The show was oftentimes ridiculed for being out of touch and it was joked that having your product featured there meant it would never be seen outside of a research lab, but that half-hour on Thursday evenings gave a love of science to myself and many others over the years and is sorely missed.

While rumors of its return turned out to be nothing more than a cynical branding exercise, the BBC has finally released some old episodes from its archives. Unfortunately, the SDI simulation that I mistook for reality isn't one of them.

"The part about the Hookers was a lie."

2009-09-07T12:44:12Z

The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson's account of one of the US military's strangest black ops project, looks to be much funnier and absurd than the source material would suggest.

Based on research into the First Earth Battalion (and various other projects involving belief in magical thinking) the book is a trip down the rabbit hole of the American military-industrial complex at its weirdest.

The cast alone makes it worth checking out.

Links for 2009-09-11 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

George Whitesides: Writing a Scientific Paper
George Whitesides' classic Advanced Materials essay entitled "Writing a Scientific Paper" is one of the most-downloaded papers in the journal's history, recognized for its value in planning, organizing, and writing up scientific research.

Links for 2009-09-09 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-10T00:00:00-07:00

4 Websites With LOTS Of Completely Free Ebooks That Don’t Suck
It’s hard to find good, legal reads online – unless you know where to look. There are several sites that offer classic out-of-copyright writing, or publishes new e-books online as promotions.

Slumprawn Millionaire

2009-09-06T00:04:04Z

Image by sgroi via Flickr

Based on his short film, Alive in Jo'burg, Neil Blomkamp has come up with an intelligent science-fiction action movie in District 9. Shot mostly in a mock-documentary style the movie chronicles an alternate Johannesburg twenty years after an alien ship arrived.

In a plot heavily influenced by Apartheid era South Africa, the aliens are forced into the eponymous District to keep them separate from the native Jo'bergers but this does nothing to quell unrest. We follow newly-promoted bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe (in an amazing breakthrough performance by Sharlito Copely who improvised most of his dialogue) as he leads a team to move the Prawn to a new camp, two-hundred miles away from any human settlement.

Despite the science fiction plot and more obviously fantastical elements, there is a gritty realism that pervades the whole movie, especially in the more mockumentary parts. The effects are flawless and fit into the dystopian background of the shanty town that has built up in the aliens' ghetto and the aliens themselves are a far cry from the plastic and latex creations of Alien Nation. Many difficult questions are asked and few answers are given - like most good science fiction the movie is more than just an excuse for spotty teenagers to see some explosions, but serves to make us think about xenophobia, racism, and how we treat each other as a society.

One of the best films of the decade.

Links for 2009-09-04 [del.icio.us]

2009-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

Seriously Sick: Food For When You're Under the Weather
It's important to have a couple stand-by recipes that can be made no matter what condition you're in.

"I knew a boy who made all the wrong choices"

2009-07-15T22:38:00Z

Image via Wikipedia

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was a wonderful interpretation of the most complex and emotional book of the series. While it suffers a little from Empire Strikes Back syndrome, there's enough there to let it stand on its own without feeling like the middle child. Wonderfully natural performances, as can only be expected from a group of actors who have grown up together making these movies and a sense of wistfulness as they come close to the end of this part of their careers. Michael Gambon, as always, played Dumbledore so well that it's a struggle to see how the late Richard Harris could have done the same. While the fans are up in arms about missing scenes and changes made, the emotional impact of the ending would have been lessened too much if the book was followed too faithfully. With David Yeats set to direct the next two, the series can only end on a high note.

Anois is Aris

2009-07-11T19:34:00Z

Image via Wikipedia

The QI Elves on Twitter opened a can of worms when they mentioned that the Irish language has no words for "Yes" or "No". Dozens of tweets later saying that there are "Tá" and "Níl" or "'Sea" and "Ní hea", the Elves threw their hands up in the air and decided to leave the Irish alone. While, strictly speaking, it is true that there are no words for "Yes" and "No", in the Irish language to answer in the affirmative or negative, one repeats the verb of the asked question. For example, if one asks "Are you going to the cinema?" (An bhfuil tú ag dul go dtí an picturlann?) the answer is either "I am" (Tá mé) or "I am not" (Níl má). This happens even when Irish people speak in English, and is part of the charm of Hiberno-English that everyone seems to love.

...And I Feel Fine

2009-07-10T08:31:00Z

Image by Damien Ryan via Flickr

While browsing Recommended Titles on Amazon UK, I came across this. Does Amazon's recommendation engine know something we don't?

Big Read

2009-03-01T18:35:00Z

Image by jakebouma via Flickr

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 99
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

(via My Own Little Region of Space)

I thought I saw a Tweetie Bird

2009-02-24T11:11:00Z

Image by phxwebguy via Flickr

With the spate of celebrity Twitter stories in the media at the moment there's always been some debate as to whether these accounts are real, fake, or just an intern working at a publicist's office. When Shaquille O'Neal tweeted that he was eating at a Phoenix diner, Jesse Bearden and a friend decided to see if it really was Shaq.

Returning to our hushed whispers I asked Sean, "Should we go talk to him now?" "I don't know, should we?" "Yes, you should" a very deep voice entered our conversation from 2 booths over.

My own twitter account is here, though I can't promise to be in any diners.

Happy Emergency Christmas

2009-02-21T21:31:00Z

In the Crisis of Credit visualised, media design student Jonathan Jarvis takes a simple approach in showing how the US banking system has plunged the global economy into recession. How long will it take before all the Obama supporters start calling for his resignation because he took too long to undo years of greed and short-sightedness? Happy Emergency Christmas everyone.

ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers

2008-12-23T11:23:00Z

Via Metafilter, Typealyzer reckons the Myers-Briggs type of my writing appears to be INTJ:

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever. The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

Oddly enough, I usually test as INTP.

Saturday Night at the Movies

2008-12-16T13:18:00Z

Image via WikipediaJason Kottke links to Film Addict which takes a list of the 250 top-rated films on IMDB and scores you on how many you've seen. My score is 47.6%, what's yours?

The world's in a state of chassis Juno

2008-12-05T09:43:00Z

A couple of nights ago we were settling down for the night when this thing on the left started dive bombing the bed. With no clue as to how an insect managed to survive this long into the winter or even that night, when the outside temperature was a couple of degrees below freezing we assumed that it came back with us from a week's holiday in Malta. Turns out it was a Peacock Butterfly and was probably asleep in a cupboard somewhere but thought it was spring when the heating came on. I'm nervous about what else might be lying dormant...

"An bhfuil tusa ag leabhairt lomsa?"

2008-11-01T19:50:00Z

Image by jodimarr via FlickrHere's a great video about a bored Chinese shop worker who learns Irish before moving there, without realising that very little Irish is used in day-to-day life. Highlights include the Taxi Driver reference and a cameo from Frank Kelly (better known as Father Jack in Father Ted) and the result is a touching short film that's equal parts hilarious and shaming. Maybe I'll try and find my old Inter. Cert. course books and have a refresher before I start Cognitive Psychology.

Flipping Great

2008-09-14T00:03:00Z

Demitri Martin presents the findings from his life's research without needing to resort to Powerpoint or indeed data measurement.