Status-Q

Yesterday, we bought some new kitchen knives, 25 years after last doing so. These new ones are terrifyingly sharp, and will no doubt result in the loss of a few digits over the coming weeks, but they did enable me to cut a blueberry into eighths before putting it on my cereal this morning.

I haven't felt a desire to do this in the past, but it's pleasing to know that I now can, should the need arise.

...when you're no longer the youngest person at the garden centre. :-(

I feel that our quality of life in general would be improved if we were to embrace more thoroughly:

(a) the Spaniards' idea of the siesta.

(b) the Hobbits' idea of Second Breakfast.

Working on it.

Bill Bailey is just brilliant. Here's another favourite.

What I like about this image is that, though it could come from various parts of the world, it very clearly is not in a British suburb.

Quite often, when I have a meeting scheduled with a Chinese person, I don't know their gender in advance, because I can't guess it from their name.

This just adds to the fun, but I had assumed this was simply because I was an ignorant westerner. It appears, though, that it is in general more of a challenge in Chinese than it is in some other languages, and fortunately there are technical solutions to help you out if you need to know, based on the statistical usage of certain Chinese characters in male and female names.

A nice way to play with this, for any language, is to construct a URL of the form:

http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gender/<firstname>/<lastname>/

and you'll get back a JSON string telling you, for example, that Jean Renoir is probably male, while Jean Smith is probably female. There's a -1..+1 scale showing the confidence.

If you know the country, you can add the ISO code on the end, so it will tell you, for example, that Jean Smith is rather likely to be male if he/she comes from France:

http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gender/Jean/Smith/fr

Quite fun.

Very sad to learn that we have lost Prof Sir David MacKay today.

David was a good friend, but I only realised quite recently that we were almost exactly the same age, a fact which I found exceedingly humbling.

If I should be granted twice as many days, and achieve half as much, I would be very happy. And very surprised.

The world is poorer for his passing. But much richer for his having lived.

I've seen dozens of these little chaps over the last few days, but few that have let me get as close as this.