What I've learnt this week...

I consume a reasonable amount of tat on the internet. Some of it makes me smile, some of it makes me wince, and some of it makes me think "that's quite interesting". I thought I'd note some of the more interesting things I've learnt this week. Most of it nothing at all to do with my line of work.

Five things I learnt this week from the internet.

Tigers

I've learnt that tigers get quite a bad deal. I'm no expert on this area, but it's something I've heard before. I suspect it's not just tigers getting a raw deal. To be fair, the article I stumbled across didn't really explain much about why or how tigers get a bad deal, but it showed a few pictures from Steve Winter, who has taken photographs for National Geographic in his career. Fortunately not all blood and guts; more food for thought in a couple of them.
Article: The Tragic Story of the Majestic Tiger. The links through give more detail on the story.

Space

I've learnt what a toy train looks like in space. This one is just plain silly. But great.

I've seen it from a couple of sources, so can't remember who to attribute my finding of the link to.
YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoMN-zg7r3M.

iOS6

I've learnt that I don't want to upgrade to iOS6, and that I think Steve Jobs was actually keeping a lot of control over Apple that just isn't there anymore. I travel a lot, and I use maps on my phone. I need it to work, or I will get lost (like I did when my Blackberry didn't get a data connection; which I think I read somewhere happened again this week). So whilst it sounds like there's some quite nice new things in iOS6, this aspect sounds like it's a showstopper for upgrading. It was story number three on the BBC News website homepage. Story three on the BBC news website? Quiet week of news, or is it really that serious for Apple? Would Steve Jobs have let it happen, or would he have pushed the maps button, played with it, and then just said "no, go fix it"?

• Apple promises maps app will 'improve' (BBC News)
• Apple scrambled to hire iOS 6 maps engineers DAYS before launch (The Register)
• "RT @tinkertim: NASA put people on the Moon. Rovio put birds into pigs. Apple put Berlin into Antarctica. Who wins?" Joel Spolsky (@spolsky).
• Apple glitch wipes Gothenburg off the map (The Local)

Finally on this one, a quote in the above BBC article from an Apple spokeswoman:

"We are continuously improving it, and as Maps is a cloud-based solution, the more people use it, the better it will get"

I didn't realise that's how cloud based solutions worked.

Green screen

I used to do quite a bit of amateur video production in my days at university, and this week I've learnt how much different it would be now. We were lucky to borrow the TV studio in the psycology department (yes, they had the best TV studio on campus). They had a very new piece of kit which allowed us to 'chroma-key' presenters against a blue screen. Being the techie in the team, this wasn't new to me, but to actually use one to let us make TV was a lot of fun. I still have most of the tapes from our productions; but there in lies the problem - 'tapes'. My VCR player gave up the ghost a few years ago - a 'long term' project of mine is to get these onto a computer somehow (assuming there's some kind of magnetic signal on them still!). All that said, it's a lot easier these days - and here's an interesting video on how and why.
Article: Using a Green Screen from Vimeo Video School on Vimeo.

Gangham

Finishing on a high! I learnt that Gangham is a local government district in in Seoul, South Korea. I learnt that this video is just crazy, entertaining, and interesting - having known little about Seoul before this. And... I learnt that Britney Spears.. well...

This has been so much on the wires this week, I don't think I can attribute where these came from!