The Geography of Covid
I cannot explain this map, but the clear division in compelling. A few lines divide the world into high, medium and low covid death rate countries and there are few exceptions in the high and low death rate areas. (more…)
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Why we are never prepared for a crisis
From 2005 Sri Lanka has been well prepared for a tsunami, unfortunately it was entirely unprepared in 2004. From 2021 onwards I have do doubt that the world will we well prepared to deal with a pandemic. We are always ready to fight the last war..
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Its not paradise, but lets not exaggerate
I can understand Ankie Renique’s frustration about people who think that living is the tropics and working as a remote freelance is idyllic, but her reaction is to pick on a number of minor issues, or those that say more about her than the country, rather than picking very real problems. (more…)
The real purpose of DRM
Ian Hickson, maintainer of the HTML5 specification, argues that the real purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage over device manufacturers. Although this is true for some applications of DRM, in many cases the purpose is to lock customers to particular devices and services, and to raise barriers to entry against new devices and services. (more…)
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Five plausible nightmare hypotheses
This is a list of various possibilities that could be true, and which would be very frightening if they are. They are varied in scale an effect, but are all unpleasant. I have left out nuclear war and natural disasters (such as super volcanoes) as we know they are possible. I am interested in things that have a reasonable likelihood of being try, but are not known. (more…)
Don’t trust complex climate models
My previous post did not make it clear why climate models are so similar to complex financial models, which failed so spectacularly. (more…)
Credulous police and bad English
I cannot decide whether I am more shocked by the news that the police are relying on Wikipedia, or the bad English in this discussion of it (more of the comments that attempt to use the word “credible” get it wrong than get it right).
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Thomas Gall International School website
As a few people arrive at this blog searching for information related to Galle, it is worth mentioning that I have done a website for my daughter’s school: The Thomas Gall International School, Galle.
Update, Sept 2012: That website is no longer up, as the school failed to renew the domain name. I believe they have plans for a new site.
Update, April 2015: My daughter moved to another school some time ago as well.
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Is Ubuntu destructive?
Adam Williamson thinks that Ubuntu has been destructive, unfair competition, and that Mark Shuttleworth could have taken a different approach that would have been less destructive.
Race is arbitrary
Willem Buiter’s blog post on the arbitrariness of racial classifications are spot on. I wonder if he is too decent to realise that the whole point of the concept of race is to divide people; to provide people with a sense of belonging to a tribe. Race is purely whatever society defines it to be. Both the countries I know well, Britain and Sri Lanka, show this.
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