Implementor

So, while the photograph of one of them has been in my sidebar, I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people searching for Ben Dawson’s street art thing The Moment A Thought Explains Itself. The thing is: little museum/art gallery style credit plaques on random walls around the country. They’ve been found in London, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford and in several other cities.

I don’t know who Ben Dawson is either, nor any more about it than the above. But I can point you at a flickr group collecting some examples. Which may be more useful to you than a blog that’s rarely updated save for an occasional post about impenetrable in–jokes at music festivals.

OM NOM NOM NOM!

Fun facts about Nottingham: there’s literally nowhere in the city centre you can get a clear line of sight to the sun rising without standing somewhere you’re not supposed to be. Every relatively open space in an elevated position has either a big fence around it and a padlocked gate, prominent “trespassers will be prosecuted” signs, or both.

I stood next to a newish BMW with smashed windows to take these photos. I love living here.

No, no flowers. He said they belonged in the garden.

At around the same time I was coming back from ATP, probably while we were enjoying the worst bus journey ever, my grandfather died. It was quick, and unexpected. He was 81. The funeral was held on Wednesday. It was a very moving service.

The day I was born, I’m told, he decided to leave this watch to me when he died. It originally belonged to his grandfather. Not once in 26 years did he ever mention it to me. There are so many questions I’d like to ask. What it meant to him, not least.

I’ll miss him.

So the BBC has this 10 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Week page on Ceefax and, it turns out, on their web site. Sometimes it mentions some recent scientific discovery of tremendous import, but mostly it’s amusing trivia. I think that link may change during the week, but today it said this:

In a fight between a polar bear and a lion, the polar bear would win.

Intrigued, I followed the link to the citation, which was also on the BBC’s site. So it must be true, right? Hmm.

It turns out that this snippet of information came from their report on IssueBits’ new Any Question Answered service. The premise of this service being that you send them a text message with a question in it and then they charge you a pound and send you a text message with the answer. Neat!

The only mention of the polar bear question is this:

There are other questions which are clearly about settling an argument. Such as ‘If a polar bear and a lion had a fight who would win?’ A polar bear, generally you don’t want to come up against a bear.

Now, I truly wouldn’t want to come up against a bear. The polar bear is assuredly a fierce and powerful predator and twice the weight of a lion. But I wondered at the science of this. How many instances of lion/polar bear combat do they have to draw on? I’m betting probably none. Lions don’t exactly look a pushover, do they? And I bet the average lion has quicker reflexes than a bear, which would be handy. They also fail to stipulate the venue for this contest. On the baking African savannah, a polar bear would rapidly overheat, whereas the Arctic icecap would provide poor footing for a lion.

Obviously this wasn’t a question I could answer alone. But for £1, I could call upon the resources of AQA and solve my quandary! Thus:

What is your source for that polar bear versus lion question, as featured on the BBC? I find it hard to believe such a contest has ever taken place.

The answer came back (a mere six minutes later, despite the early hour):

AQA uses statistics of found information, and deducts the most possible outcome, on such occasions. When asked to speculate, that is all AQA can do.

I assume they mean “deduces” rather than “deducts”, and will forgive them both that and their clumsy grammar, but the point seems to be that they made it up. That’s pretty shoddy service for a quid, if you ask me.

Anyway, if you have a question in need of answering, Chiara has pointed out the excellent Question Swap web site, where you can trade questions and answers with other web site users. It’s probably no more or less accurate than AQA (or spending five minutes on google or wikipedia for that matter) and doesn’t cost a pound a go.

Meanwhile, I’m offering a bounty of one British Pound Sterling to anyone who does know who would win in a fight between a polar bear and a lion, and can back it up with firm scientific evidence. Or at least with an impressively entertaining lie.