World: r3wp

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/3100

We have constant daylight savings here. That's why the time in Jakarta 
which is two hours flight to the east of us is one hour behind the 
time here. The sun is at  its highest between 1:00 and 1:30 depending 
on the season.


There was a rumour that the Prime Minister who made the change did 
so because he was fed up with the senior civil servants playing golf 
before going to work.

If the poles reverse, we might as well change the timezones so we 
can still use our compasses to guess the time

too bad that swatch time never caught on. perhaps it was simply introduced 
at the wrong time.

My chat program based on Maarten's rubgy used swatch time

All these webinar invites I get .. no idea what the local time is!

then why would they start adding OO concepts to functional languages?

 - to attract more (ignorant) people to the languages. (unless you 
 consider typeclasses an OO concept...)

indeed, some languages use feature labels, rather than actual design.

We have continuous daylight savings time here in the Netherlands, 
too, since Hitler synced us to Berlin time, instead of GMT

Isn't it the greatest achievement of a politician to be able to change 
time?

And the reason it persisted .. it makes sense??

Pity Hitler didn't enforce swatch time ...

Depends on if you trade more with Germany or with England. I suppose 
that changed through the war

Are wooden shoes more popular in Germany or England?

We only export those to tourists

Quick scan .. nope , nothing made by Philips in my house

But I've got a book signed by Max Euwe ...

Look in your hospital. They've refocused on medical equipment

worth anything?

Probably, if you bring it here :-)

He signed it for me when he toured NZ .. sadly I lost

What did you expect? :-)

To win of course .. it was a simul

So? :-)

Those GMs cheat though ...

Instead of moving to the next player .. they will sit one on one 
to grind you down in tricky positions

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/japan-earthquake/4857821/Tsunami-hit-towns-forgot-warnings-from-ancestors


Interesting ... the Japanese had been for centuries creating stone 
tablets warning people not to build below certain points .. and these 
were serving as coastal warnings.  But in modern times they were 
in many cases ignored.

Old technology ... but it did save some who paid heed and built on 
ground above the tablets

Such a lady was on TV. Her house was saved, but she lost all her 
neighbours

And the neighbours had built below the line?

Yes, and her family. I suppose. The tablet story wasn't mentioned, 
but she specifically built her house higher up

I suppose the next generations will leave stone tablets with nuclear 
warning signs...

LOL

Better would be solar powered Geiger-Muller counters embedded in 
concrete posts

NZ suffered a lot as a result of its anti-nuclear stance ...

What use if your children's children are going to ignore them, anyway?

I thought it was a modern Dutch disease to forget about the power 
of the sea, but apparently our fish eating cousins on the opposite 
of the earth have fallen to the same folly

Ah .. just create a new religion that observes the tablets .. there 
are other examples of tablet based religions

Christianity, Mac

All religions are based on such warnings. Problem is, we've forgotten 
what they mean

These tablets were pretty explicit .. warning of tsunamis after earthquakes 
yet people still went home to secure possessions, and died in the 
following tsunamis

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)  "Those who don't know history are destined 
to repeat it."

It doesn't say anything about knowing and ignoring :-/

Burke was a politician ... their statements are always lack clarity

:-)

It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that 
experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and 
their grandchildren, but then the memory fades

It would seem we're still living in the oral age of prehistory

There was a TV documentary produced in the 1980s I think that talked 
what would happen to Christchurch in a major quake

It's now on youtube and close to 100% of the predictions came true

Institutional memory and its failings are common problems in many 
spheresl and once an institution starts making a mistake, it tends 
to repeat it every institutional generation or so.
  Military examples: http://hnn.us/articles/45305.html

   college fundraising examples: http://cooldata.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/data-disasters-courtesy-of-mordac/