What a surprise, religious extremists being racist too.

While the ultra-Orthodox guys are pretty appalling, it's hard to have sympathy for the sub-group of the Jewish community that are being discriminated against here. They themselves are so much better off than the Arab-Israelis when it comes to provision and funding of education (of course the article doesn't mention that).

Once you decide you're going to live somewhere with a a religious/ethnic caste system, you can't really complain if you yourself end up excluded from something because you're not in the right group!

内容: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world/ultra-orthodox-israeli-jews-stage-mass-protests-against-religious-school-integration-ruling-96637554.html （Google サイドウィキで表示）

Angler fish sex-life

Wikipedia agrees with this comic strip! How did it take me 35 years to hear about this? I mean how can anyone ever say anything about angler fish on TV and not mention this first?

Sounds like one of these ladies could give George Washington a run for his money.

in reference to: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler (view on Google Sidewiki)

Dyson marketing... not as great.

Poking around the Dyson website, I found this page about their fancy Dyson Digital Motor. It includes the sentence

And no carbon brushes means no carbon emissions.

Seriously? WTF? I don't think the climate talks in Copenhagen were held to reduce the amount of carbon falling off the carbon brushes in electric motors. These days "carbon emissions" means CO2 and unless you run your house on solar power, anything that draws power from the mains has carbon emissions.

Apparently these motors are very efficient, which will reduce CO2 emissions, but someone in the marketing department had to push it beyond the truth. Ah well, I still like them.

Holy shit, Dyson customer service is perfect!

I bought a Dyson vacuum a few years ago. I never got around to registering it for the 5 year warranty, not sure where the receipt is. During the week the bendy hose broke.

This morning I phoned the customer service number, they took my details, they took the serial number of the vacuum, when I said I didn't know the purchase date they said "the manufacture date is June 06 so it's still in warranty, the hose will be with you in 7 working days". I got a shiver.

From now on, if Dyson make the appliance I want, I'll buy the Dyson model.

Holy shit, again.

Drinking game: porn or not porn

It's amazing how much porn there is on the internet and how often you accidentally stumble across it while looking for something else (honestly, that's why it was on my screen). You can even turn it into a game.

Find an internet image search engine that allows porn in its results (far be it from me to recommend any particular brand in this post!). Ensure that you have turned off any "I don't want porn" settings that the search engine may provide. Here's how the game works:

1. The typer types in a search but doesn't click "search".
2. The guesser now has to guess whether the first page of results will include porn.
3. Click search.
4. If the guesser was correct, the typer must drink. If guesser was wrong, he must drink.

Take turns being the typer.

The key of course is to come up with search that is very hard to predict, let me start you off with "long wang", "gobbler's knob" and "pants pirate" :-).

You can play with more than 2 players in which case you probably just want everyone including the search-typer to guess and anyone who gets it wrong has to drink.

All good innocent fun!

Good place for kids: Spraoi

I've been to Spraoi fun-world a few times now and so has Midori but yesterday I was so happy with the place that I need to tell to the world. It's behind Aldi on the Long Mile road.

Food

We started off in the cafe where 2 main courses were more than enough for 2 adults and 2 kids. The baked potato with pesto chicken was very nice and there was loads of it for €6.95 including coleslaw and a salad. Seemed quite healthy and fresh if a little bit too salty. A good lasagne with chips was €7.95; and another €1 for a can of 7 up. Later on in the play area we got 2 ice-cream cones for €1! I was shocked. 50c each makes them probably the cheapest ice-cream cones in Ireland.

While we were waiting for the food the staff were very helpful and even got a ball for Seán to play with. In fact all the staff are helpful and friendly.

Play

For toddlers there's a ball pit and for older kids there'ss a massive complex of ropes, padded bars, swings, balls, 3-storey high slides (one wavey, one spiral chute) and other cool stuff. You get 90m playing for €7 (adults are free and there's a weekday-morning discount) and it's supposed to be a few euro per hour after that but Midori says they have never charged her for any over-time. You can order food and drinks inside and there are chairs and tables (but it gets pretty busy at the weekend). If they had the energy for it, the kids would stay there forever. They love it.

Lost and found

The (rather stupid) highlight this time was me losing my shiny Nexus 1 phone after a bit of rough and tumble with the kids. It took me about 3 minutes to notice that it was gone and I got in quite a fluster. I retraced my steps but couldn't find it. I got Midori's phone and phoned it and lo and behold they had it behind the counter. That could so easily have disappeared, a big thanks again to the staff.

So if you have kids and you're looking for somewhere to go some day, I would definitely recommend Spraoi, for value, service and fun.

Restaurant: ???

Topping off Boojum for value (but maybe not for taste and definitely not for healthiness) is a Chinese restaurant with no English name, English menu or English-speaking staff! I spotted the sign a few weeks back and recognised some foody words and a big €6 and figured there must be a restaurant up there above the hair salon. Thursday night I had to figure out my own dinner so decided to check it out.

Up 4 flights of steps I went and on the last one was met by a woman who was clearly confused by my presence. I sat down in the small, bright and clean restaurant she hurried off to get someone. She came back with a younger woman from the kitchen who had a few words of English and between that and my Chinese (which is getting almost unusable these days) she set off to bring me lots of small things to eat.

A while later she came back with battered fish, you tiao ("oil sticks" - deep fried bread things). A few minutes later another plate with some battered squishy sugary thing with peanuts in it and some turnip pancakes (had them for the first time ever a few weeks ago and they are not as bad as they sound at all). I also ordered some soup dumplings which came with some kind of long straight sea-food that I have never had before. Finally I ordered some dou fu nao (a kind of gloopy soup with tofu, vegetables and maybe pork).

All very tasty and at the end of it I was nicely full and actually left a few bits behind (turnip pancake is not exactly awesome). Add a pot of Chinese tea which I think was free and the whole thing came to €5, yes five quid.

There are about 20 things on the menu, all €1-5, so my plan is to go back with more people and and just order 1 of everything and see what we get! Who's on for it? It's on Parnell St, just past Sichuan House (still awesome BTW, I had hotpot there recently and it was super-tasty)

Restaurant: Boojum

It's a new Mexican fast-food place in the "Italian quarter" just over the Millenium bridge. I had lunch there with Ríona today. Very tasty, Ríona ate all of hers. Also very helpful and friendly staff. When I asked about something suitable for Ríona, they suggested I order the 3-tacos meals and they'd make one of them for her. They then let her sample the 2 mild sauces to see if they were OK for her spice-wise by dipping a chip in. They do a lunch special, €7 for a main meal and water (the main fed myself a Ríona just nicely). Can't argue with that. Or can you...

As usual, complete nonsense from Indo letters

When it comes to global warming you can assert that white is and the Indo will publish your letter.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano/

has the real figures, supplied by Nordic Volcanological Institute of the University of Iceland.

The volcano is putting out 15,000 tons and the airplane are not putting out 206,000 tons.

in reference to: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/man-will-never-be-mother-natures-boss-2143073.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

random kid stuff

Some things are better for kids to learn through experience. The fact that you can't grab hold of a stream of piss is not one of them.

Tae Kim's guide to Japanese Grammar as a .epub

Here it is.

This guide to Japanese grammaris highly recommended by lots of people because it teaches "real" Japanese rather than a stilted textbook version and also because it doesn't try to over-translate the Japanese example sentences, rather it just leaves them making their sense in Japanese. This last bit is particularly interesting as the "true" meaning of a sentence in Japanese is often highly dependent on the context because in Japanese you're allowed leave out pretty much anything that is obvious from the context, subject, object etc. so picking a single meaning as the translation is often just not appropriate.

I've been meaning to read it for ages but I don't want to print it out and most of my reading now is on my Android phone, e.g. while putting Seán to sleep. The guide comes as a giant HTML file or a PDF, neither of which are convenient on Android. There is however a very nice ebook reader called Aldiko which can open .epub files. Despite the fact that .epub is just zipped up html files, Alidko cannot read plain HTML.

After much searching, I finally found a html to epub converter called Calibre - Google search didn't help, in the end I found it through Aldiko's help pages and it seems to have done a fine job of converting the book to .epub format with it's html2epub program (no setting options or anything, just point it at the html and it works). Calibre is open source and available to apt-get on recent Ubuntu releases. I'm pretty sure I'll be using it often. It would also make a very nice web-service - give it a URL and get back a .epub great for those too-long-to-read-right-now web pages, maybe I'll get around to something like that.

Puzzle food

We discovered a great trick for eating out with small kids last night. We went to Lisa's Trattoria in Terenure for dinner. We'd been stuck in all weekend with coughs and colds and also me being on call which means I can't leave the house.

Sean was fairly cranky when we got there and we asked for soup for the kids ASAP, while we chose our food. When it arrived, Sean calmed down and ate the soup with hardly a word from him. He got a bit shirty again when it was all gone but then Midori's mussels starter arrived and this is the trick...

Midori gave Sean a few mussels and he set to work on them but mussels aren't the easiest thing to eat. For Sean anyway, there's a good minute of poking around to try and get the mussel out of its shell. Each one is a new puzzle and he quietly sat there solving each one for its little meaty reward. He was completely engrossed in it and when the mussels ran out, he went back and checked every empty shell to see if there was anything left. We ate our food in peace.

I can't think of any other puzzle foods that make kids work for each bite. I'd love to find a few more.

Sean also had a great time with my rigatoni. Each tube fitted nicely on a finger. He ate loads of everything. We also had a visit from a child of the family that run the restaurant. He played with Riona a little and at the end of the meal we got free coffee! I've been here three time and had free stuff twice! Lisa gave us free ice cream when we were there just after Sean was born. I think she likes kids and the little boy had a good time and told us we should come here every day.

Anyway, it was a nice food and plenty of it, although a bit pricey. The recession doesn't seem to have reached their menu yet. I think that explains why they were a bit empty while other restaurants on the same street were pretty busy.

Some advice on the Nordic Eco showerhead

I bought a Nordic Eco showerhead from The Cultivate Centre in Dublin on a money-back basis. I got that promise beforehand because at 50 euro, I didn't really fancy trying it and being stuck with something that doesn't work. I'm glad I did. This gadget may well be great but it is completely pointless for my shower.

In the brochure that comes with it, it says it will cut your shower from 22 litres/min down to 9 litres/min but it will still feel like a great shower. Sounds great. What I didn't realise is that my shower does only 4.5 litres/min! With the new shower head attached, nothing much changed and in fact the old shower head was better for that rate of flow.

The moral of the story is, if you're thinking about one of these, get a bucket or a jug or whatever and figure out how many litres/min your shower does before buying anything.

In hindsight I could have worked this out in advance, even without a bucket. It's a 10.5KWh shower. It takes 4000J to heat 1 litre of water by 1 deg C. I need to heat my water to about 40C and let's pretend it's starting at 0C (it's close enough in the winter). So it takes 40C*4000J/C = 160000J to heat 1 litre of my cold water to 40C. A shower that does that once per minute is using 160000J/60s = 2666W. So a 10500W can do that about 4 times per minute, i.e. about 4L/min.

The truth.

Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

I do... hold on, do you want it depth first or breadth first?

Using kakasi

Kakasi is a converter from Japanese with kanji to phonetic Japanese. Its documentation is sparse and I couldn't find any examples on the net that worked. So here's a note to myself for how I got it to work. It's pretty lame that it won't just handle utf8 by itself...

echo イさんに本を貸しました。 | iconv -f utf8 -t euc-jp | kakasi -JHK -s -f | iconv -f euc-jp -t utf8 イ さんに 本[ほん] を 貸し[かし] ました 。

Dropping the -f causes the kanji to be replaced entirely by their pronunciation, instead of having their pronunciation noted alongside them.