Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Svalbarði Polar Iceberg Water

Business Insider reports: [edited]

Harrods has a new product on its shelves: a bottle of 'luxury water' retailing at £80, harvested from icebergs in the Arctic Ocean.

The brand's founder, Norwegian-American businessman Jamal Qureshi founded the brand after collecting melt water from the Norwegian territory of Svalbard in 2013 as a gift for his wife. "Four years later," the company said in a statement, "the whimsical, selfless thought has transformed into an epicurean product, which is redefining the very notion of drinking water."

Qureshi collects batches of the water by chartering an icebreaker with the permission of the Governor of Svalbard and travelling to the icebergs of Kongsfjorden, which is 1,000km from the North Pole. Once 15 tonnes of ice is gathered, it is melted and bottled by hand in order to "capture the water in its purest form."

The brand says that the water has "an exceptionally light mouthfeel with a unique terroir – the taste of snow in air and evokes recollections of snowflakes on the tongue".
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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Creative Commons Updates Its Image Search Engine

TechCrunch reports: [edited]

The engine pulls in photos from Flickr, 500px, Rijksmuseum, the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its initial sources.

In addition to having a more modern look-and-feel, the new CC Search lets you narrow searches by license type, title, creator, tags, collection and type of institution. It also includes social features, letting you make and share lists of favourite images, as well as add tags and favorites to individual items.

You can save your searches for quick access in the future and the engine also makes it easier to apply the necessary attribution, when available, by offering pre-formatted copy you can click to copy and paste.

The beta search engine is available here.
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Sunday, February 12, 2017

London - Somerset - London, 11 & 12-02-17


London - Somerset 11-02-17
Music to Watch Girls By - Andy Williams
Rockit - Herbie Hancock
Heart Of Glass - Blondie
I'm Your Man - Wham!
What's Love Got to Do With It - Tina Turner
Just Lose It - Eminem
Each Time You Break My Heart - Nick Kamen
The Gambler - Kenny Rogers
Lean on Me (Ah-li-ayo) - Red Box
99 Red Balloons - Nena
You Make My Dreams (Remastered) - Daryl Hall & John Oates
The Reflex - Duran Duran
Mo Money Mo Problems (feat. Mase & Puff Daddy) - The Notorious B.I.G.
Build Me Up Buttercup - Foundations
i - Kendrick Lamar
Howzat - Sherbet
Maggie May - Rod Stewart
How Will I Know - Whitney Houston
Victim of Love - Erasure
Pharaohs (feat. Roses Gabor) - SBTRKT
Seasons (Waiting On You) - Future Islands
(TSOB) The Sound Of Philadelphia - MFSB
Us - Regina Spektor
C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L (Edit) - The Chemical Brothers
She Taught Me to Yodel - Frank Ifield
Beat It - Michael Jackson
Your Love Is My Drug - Ke$ha
Maneater - Daryl Hall & John Oates
The Blow Up - Blackalicious
Bat Out Of Hell - Meat Loaf
I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor
I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor - Arctic Monkeys
History - Mai Tai
You Got It - Roy Orbison
Candyman - Christina Aguilera
Walk On The Wild Side - Lou Reed
I Beg Your Pardon - Kon Kan
All Right Now - Free
Dance Yourself Dizzy (7 Inch) - Liquid Gold
F*k Yeah Ace of Hearts - XXXChange
Fill My Little World - The Feeling
Wannabe - Spice Girls
Grace Kelly - MIKA
Cheesecake - Louis Armstrong
Listen to Your Heart - Roxette
Waiting for a Star to Fall - Boy Meets Girl
Pass Out - Tinie Tempah
Cheap Thrills - Sia feat. Sean Paul
Baba O'Riley - The Who
The Sound - The 1975
Spinning Around - Kylie Minogue
Up Town Top Ranking - Althea And Donna
She Drives Me Crazy - Fine Young Cannibals

Somerset to London 12-02-17
Fireflies (UK Radio Edit) - Owl City
Tonight's The Kind Of Night - Noah and the Whale
Give me some kind of sign girl - Brenton Wood
Barbra Streisand (UK Radio Edit) - Duck Sauce
Where the Light Gets In - Primal Scream
I Drove All Night - Cyndi Lauper
Teenage Kicks - The Undertones
Wow - Beck
Rockabye (feat. Sean Paul & Anne-Marie) - Clean Bandit
Jolene - Dolly Parton
The Boys Are Back In Town - Thin Lizzy
Don't Think I'm Not - Kandi
The Love I Lost (Single Version) - Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes & arranged by Bobby Martin
Rest of My Life (feat. Usher & David Guetta) - Ludacris
September - Earth, Wind & Fire
Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) - Beyoncé
Don't Stop Believin' - Journey
My Sharona - The Knack
If I Had A Hammer - Trini Lopez
Life Is A Rollercoaster - Ronan Keating
The Favourite Band of a Dead Man - Man & The Echo
If You Let Me Stay - Terence Trent D'Arby
Babooshka - Kate Bush
Price Tag (feat. B.o.B) - Jessie J
Just Got Lucky - Jo Boxers
Evacuate The Dancefloor - Cascada
Don't Let Me Down (feat. Daya) [Illenium Remix] - The Chainsmokers
Bad Reputation - Avril Lavigne
Rum and coca cola - The Andrews Sisters
Airplanes (feat. Hayley Williams of Paramore) - B.o.B
I Should Have Known Better - Jim Diamond
Does Your Mother Know - ABBA
Bad Girls - M.I.A.
High - The Cure
Umbrella (Seamus Haji & Paul Emanuel Radio Edit) - Rihanna
The Ballroom Blitz - Sweet
Tilted - Christine and the Queens
My Favourite Waste of Time - Owen Paul
Save Your Kisses For Me - Brotherhood Of Man
It's Raining Men - The Weather Girls
Who's That Chick? (feat. Rihanna) - David Guetta & Rihanna
Smarty Pants - First Choice
FloriDada - Animal Collective
110% - Jessie Ware
Moves Like Jagger (feat. Christina Aguilera) - Maroon 5
Le Freak - Chic
Eye of the Tiger - Survivor
You're The First, The Last, My Everything - Barry White
Telephone - Lady GaGa & Beyoncé
Levels - Avicii
You Sexy Thing - Hot Chocolate
How Bad Do You Want It (Oh Yeah) - Sevyn Streeter
Your Drums, Your Love - AlunaGeorge
Stuck In The Middle With You - Stealers Wheel
Move It Like This - Baha Men
Dancing in The Moonlight - Toploader
On the Regular - Shamir
XXXO - M.I.A.
Black Betty - Ram Jam
Titanium (feat. Sia) - David Guetta
Go! (feat. Mai Lan) - M83
Here I Come (Broader Than Broadway) - Barrington Levy
Don't Stop Me Now - Queen
Don't Cha - The Pussycat Dolls
Mr Loverman (feat. Chevelle Franklin) - Shabba Ranks
Alive - Empire of the Sun
Call Me - Spagna
Dilemma - Nelly Feat. Kelly Rowland
Punching In a Dream (Single Version) - The Naked & Famous
Live And Let Die - Paul McCartney & Wings
Moving On Up - M People
Thunder In My Heart Again (Radio Edit) - Meck & Leo Sayer
Home - Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
Don't Deny Your Heart - Hot Chip
5.7.0.5. - City Boy
Lo Sforzo (The Stress) - Ocelot
Total Eclipse of the Heart - Bonnie Tyler
Don't Talk To Him - Cliff Richard & The Shadows
It's My Party - Lesley Gore
Walking Back to Happiness - Helen Shapiro

Image by brook jordan
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Wednesday, February 08, 2017

AI conquers No Limit Texas Hold 'Em

Wired reports: [edited]

An AI built by two Carnegie Mellon researchers has defeated four top players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em — a particularly complex form of poker that relies heavily on longterm betting strategies and game theory.

Over the past twenty years, machines have topped the best humans at checkers, chess, Scrabble, Jeopardy!, and even the ancient game of Go. But no AI had ever beaten the best at such an extreme game of 'imperfect information', a game where certain elements, such as the cards on the table, are hidden.

Carnegie Mellon professor Tuomas Sandholm and grad student Noam Brown designed the AI, which they call Libratus, Latin for 'balance'. Across 20 days of play, Libratus topped its four human competitors by more than $1.7 million.

According to the human players that lost out to the machine, Libratus is aptly named. It does a little bit of everything well: knowing when to bluff and when to bet low with very good cards, as well as when to change its bets just to thrown off the competition. “It splits its bets into three, four, five different sizes,” says Daniel McAulay, 26, one of the players bested by the machine. “No human has the ability to do that.”
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Wednesday, February 01, 2017

The origin of ampersand

Medium reports: [edited]

The symbol “&” is an amalgam of the letters 'et', Latin for 'and'. The character is known as an ampersand.

It began with American children learning their ABCs. In the 1830s the alphabet started incorporating the symbol '&' as the 27th letter. Reciting the end of the alphabet would be confusing if it were 'X, Y, Z, and'.

So a couple of words of Latin were incorporated into the chant, 'X, Y, Z, and per se and'.

'Per se' is Latin for 'by itself'. Through routine repetition the phrase 'and per se and' transmogrified into 'ampersand'.

And it stuck.
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