Specialisation is for Insects

Arbitrary

2009-05-21T12:13:00.002+01:00

Arbitrary is not my favourite word, these days. To say the least. Whether it is a real concept or not is not a matter for this blog to discuss. Ok, maybe it is, a bit. Arbitrary is defined as

1.	subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion: an arbitrary decision.

2.	decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute.

3.	having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government.

4.	capricious; unreasonable; unsupported: an arbitrary demand for payment.

5.	Mathematics. undetermined; not assigned a specific value: an arbitrary constant.

[ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/arbitrary]

These are some emotive definitions, right? And apparently arbitrary events can be extremely irritating. A job interview that is only offered at one specific time, which happens to be at the very time when you need to be on the other side of the country. User names you are given over which you have no control, especially when they have a vulgar connotation. A computer fault which means you may or may not have access to the Internet.

In fact none of these events are arbitrary, as such. There are valid reasons for them to occur. Interestingly, computers may be involved in all these situations. The computer is simply folowing the instructions with which it has been programmed, leading to a situation which is not ideal for somebody. The 'computer says no' scenario. We have checked our records and you do not exist.

A computer can easily allocate user names according to a certain rule. In the case of the Computer Science Department here at Queen Mary, the first two letters of your first name, the first letter of your last name and an integer are concatenated. My username is therefore sil1. Quite reasonable and appropriate, in fact better than my real name, no? short, sweet and impossible to confuse with sil2 or later sils. But what if my name was Sam Peterson? I'd be sap1, or, perhaps worse, sap2. How about Burton Moffat, Tim Taylor or Vanessa Gordon (the sixth).

Ok, I'll stop making people up now. I know ruts and peds and various other slightly uncomfortable (to me) user names. I'm sure that if you really had a problem with your name, you could change it, the people here are very nice.

The point I'm making is that actually, there is nothing arbirary about the process of allocating names. I expect a lot of thought went into choosing the appropriate format. At least the names are short, and quite easy to remember. My general username for the university is much more of a headful - ac06187. It took me quite a while to remember it, and on the library helpdesk I often encountered people who had forgotten theirs.

Likewise, decisions made by people may appear arbitrary but are made according to rules applied by that person. They may not even be aware of the rules, and the rules may be as simple as 'I want to get home, so I'm going to go with the first timeslot I have available, without checking whether this fits with the other person's availability'. This is laziness. I recognise that a lot of the things I criticise as being arbitrary, are where a fellow human has not been prepared to negotiate; they have simply imposed a situation on me. It's that lack of communication, lack of care, which is frustrating.

Lucky number seven

2009-04-06T15:15:00.004+01:00

A computer contains a (surprisingly small) number of interconnected main components. Main ones:

CPU or chip
RAM or main memory
Hard drive or other bulk storage
Buses, the wiring between these components

All of them need to operate at a similar level. It's pointless having a super-fast chip when your memory can only input and output data very slowly. And vice versa. And that pretty much applies to the cartesian product of all four of these components (i.e. how each interacts with each other).

Well, I've come to the conclusion that I have some kind of mismatch between the components of my brain. My thoughts sometimes go so fast that there's no way to store them, and I sort of lose them halfway. Apparently our RAM is pretty small, or rather, contains a small number of discrete storage areas, seven being the classic number. It may be that this is the bottleneck, that because I need to keep track of more than this number of things, that suddenly the whole idea just kind of collapses.

I don't know. Anyway, what was I doing?

The Joy of Texts

2009-03-20T14:59:00.002Z

Sorry for the unoriginal title. This is a discussion of when texting is appropriate and when not.

Is texting appropriate in the following situations?

1. You're running late for an appointment.
2. To ask somebody whether they are free on such and such a date
3. To update somebody on your mood
4. To ask someone to marry you
5. To dump someone

Answers:

1. Yes
2. No
3. Yes
4. Duh
5. Maybe

Comments are welcome. I think the only contentious one is 2. I will supply the reasons later...

Happy birthday happy world

2009-02-26T12:07:00.002Z

It's the New Year now (Tibetan) which feels about right, as the sap is rising.

I don't have a lot to say, except, who could doubt Darwin, when watching a human eat a banana? I mean...

Anyway, unprovable theories. Which are called theses, as it happens, due to their not having been proved. One of them is that of Church. Church's thesis, says, in a nutshell, that any computable function can be computed by a Turing machine. Which is possible to disprove, by finding one that isn't, but never to prove. Because there happen to be rather a lot of computable functions out there.

But is Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection provable? Well, it has been observed in various populations that they can quite swiftly change in response to changing environments. Not just micro-organisms, either, Darwin's own Galapagos finches have been extensively studied and seem to morph in response to changing climatic conditions. I say 'seem to' because one can never say with certainty that the change in beak thickness has been caused by the fact that there has been a drought, and that that in turn has favoured young with thicker bills. Perhaps it is a natural fluctiation; perhaps both effects were caused by another factor.

But common sense, such as I have, leads me to believe that one has caused the other. Indirectly, but nevertheless unstoppably. It is such an obvious idea that creatures that mutate (and surely that has been proven) would mutate in directions which enabled them to live longer and therefore be more likely to breed, that I cannot resist it.

As for Church's thesis, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to disprove it...

Stuckness

2009-02-10T15:40:00.002Z

I always seem to be stuck on something, these days. In the mathematical modules I'm taking, I'm always stuck on some theorem or other. And in the more practical programming courses, I'm inevitably stuck somewhere in the program. It's extremely rare that I just code and it's done, there's always a process of looking at the error messages and trying to figure out a) what they mean and b) how to correct them.

I guess this is how one learns, but it's a bit frustrating.

Lack of inspiration

2008-10-08T15:20:00.002+01:00

I haven't had much inspiration to write new posts recently. This is not because I have completely lost interest in life; the topics I've been interested in have either been too personal (my love life), too nerdy (setting up web servers) or slightly confidential (my third year project). Perhaps my generally relaxed condition after the summer is also helping. Or rather, hindering.

All you never wanted

2008-09-28T19:55:00.004+01:00

Round my way, eBay is not the preferred way of disposing of unwanted items, nor is it Gumtree. It is not even the fantastic bulky item disposal service provided gratis by the council. No, indeed, we prefer to just put stuff out on the street. If it is stuff that we are proud of, or we don't care what people think of us, we put it in front of our house. Sometimes, if it's something we are not so proud of, we put it in the shrubbery across the road.

I recently disposed of quite a number of items in this way. I have to say, the quality of the items I left on the street was fairly high, knowing as I do, that items will only get taken if somebody can think of a use for them. 9in fact, I myself was temted by a few things, and did stop to pick up a couple of pens on my way to school.) Having said that, I surmised that I really have very little idea of what somebody else might come up with a use for, so I tried my luck with all kinds of things. I will itemise those things that I can remember. All these things have been taken, over the last week.

An electric lawnmower (working)
A Dyson vacuum cleaner (hmm, not quite working)
A small radio/cassette player
Assorted small tiles
A large tub of tile fixative
A coat
Some brocade curtains
Various rubber stamps and ink
Assorted stationary
A hostess trolley
Assorted plates
Two calor gas fires
Three calor gas bottles (2 were later returned!)
A speaker
A thermos flask
Two pyrex dishes with lids
A pink lamp
About 8 beautifully made shutters with louvres

The only things that did not get taken were:

Four white dining chairs (I took them inside after 3 days when it rained, and decided I should keep them)
A box of large tiles (I'm leaving them outside:somebody must want them)
A canister of diesel oil
Two walnut effect curved cabinet doors (when my neighbour said he thought it unlike that anyone would take them, I mentioned that I had picked them up from outside somebody else's house)
A trestle table! I thought this would be highly desirable.

Check in

2008-09-16T11:18:00.003+01:00

I've returned from my summer in rural France. The contrast with my city existence is vivid. There, the pace of life is slow. My basic needs are provided for, so I don't have to spend lots of time thinking about and making my meals, I just show up. Work is generally simple: mowing, weeding, pruning and fixing tools. I don't read a lot; my entertainment is provided by my interactions with other people and nature. I have time set aside to practice meditation.

Here, things are much faster, especially when University starts (6 days to go). I have to travel on the underground, which in itself is a high pressure environment at rush hour. I dash from one lecture to another, to work, to meetings. My brain speeds up. I cram text books on the tube. To balance my schoolwork, I read textbooks from other subject areas: linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, biology, philosophy. Does that balance? Perhaps not. I try to keep up with friends' blogs and facebook activities. I try to keep on top of the latest technological and scientific advances.

And so on. It's busy, and the point I'm making is that the busier I get, the more I feel the need to fill the little gaps with more business. Sometimes I feel my head will explode. I will try to keep a lid on this tendency, a bit. Try to notice the world going by sometimes. Cook myself a slow meal from time to time. Take the time to really, properly communicate with someone. Just thinking about it slows me down a bit. I realise that that space, that peace, is important to me.

On Vision

2008-07-07T09:48:00.002+01:00

One of the modules that I did at university, Graphical User Interface design, involved a certain amount of cognitive science, which interests me greatly, and I have been reading around that subject since. How vision works is particularly complex and interesting. At the moment I'm reading two books on this subject: "Visual Intelligence" by Donald D. Hoffman and "Eye And Brain" by Richard L. Gregory. They cover similar ground: the way that our brain interprets the data which is coming into our brain from our retinas. Rather than vision being a passive process, in which what's 'out there' reflects light through our eyes giving some kind of analogue reflection that directly affects our brain, the visual processing areas of the cortex are interpreting huge amounts of ambiguous data to produce what usually appears to us a consistent and seamless experience of sight.

This is such an important and revolutionary idea, and one that I, for one, find very hard to get my head around, that I will dwell on this for a little longer. It's very natural for us to assume that what we are seeing relates very simply and directly with what is out there; in fact for most of us for our idea of reality is based very strongly on what we think that we're seeing. Interestingly, if we have a vivid dream and then wake up, it doesn't take long for us to dismiss the visual experience that we were having as purely illusory. But in normal waking life, the sighted amongst us usually rely very heavily on our vision. If perspective starts jumping around or colours begin to shift, it is a very unsettling experience. Current scientific thinking is that the reason that these phenomena don't usually happen is that part of the brain is actively preserving the consistency and logic of our perceptions.

So how do we know this? As is often the case in biological matters, we see the underlying structure by implication, when things go wrong. In the case of vision, this is either when part of a person's brain is damaged and we observe the way that they interpret or misinterpret what they see, or in the optical illusions which affect all of us. Brain damage can in fact show us very specific vision modules, by their absence in those with damage to a particular area of the brain.

Optical illusions are a compelling way of demonstrating the ways that we interpret our visual world. There are many different types of illusions, each type demonstrating one way in which we interpret, by showing an anomaly or ambiguity. I'm sure most of us have seen illusions such as those which have two converging straight lines, overlaid onto which are two rectangles of the same size. Where the converging lines are closer together the rectangle looks bigger. Clearly this is something to do with our perception of perspective. If we are looking at receding railway tracks, and on the tracks are two objects which look the same size, we know that in fact the further one must be bigger. What's interesting here though is that is not simply a question of thinking that the shape which appears to be further away is bigger; we actually see it as bigger.

This may seem a minor point, but it immediately undermines the idea that our visual world is a direct analogue to what is going on around us. And it demonstrates that there are certain rules being applied in how we perceive the world: in this case, interpreting lines that converge as representing distance. There are many other optical illusions each of which demonstrates another facet of this active process of perception. We could call these facets rules: rules that govern the way that we interpret the ambiguous data which our eyes present to us. These are hard wired into our brain somehow.

Linguists may notice an interesting parallel here. Noam Chomsky's theories about the Universal Grammar, which is hard wired into our brains, are very similar. To those who are not familiar with these ideas, I'll try to give a brief account here. The acquisition of language by children has been a matter of debate for many years. Noam Chomsky, that most famous of linguists and social activists, proposed that all humans are innately engineered to communicate with language, hence the almost effortless manner in which children acquire language; in other words, that there are a set of rules which govern the way in which people use language constructs, an idea that he, perhaps confusingly, calls Universal Grammar (although some of his ideas are not completely original: many philosophers and mathematicians throughout the ages have proposed some kind of universality of language).

The funny thing is, that we often think that we are teaching our children to talk. We spend hours looking at pictures of animals with them, and are thrilled when they begin to associate the sounds of their names with the pictures in the book. And when a child begins to communicate, it is a magical time. What we might fail to notice, however, is the amazing ability of a child to construct grammatical sentences. The errors that the child makes in the early stages of talking highlight this. Having observed that past participles are constructed by adding a D sound to the end of the word, as in 'looked', 'tried', the child may say "I go'd to the shop". Presented with a certain amount of evidence of how sentences are formed, the child knows how to construct any number of sentences that will conform to the same rules. It is when there is an irregularity in the grammar of that language that the child will make a mistake.

Ice cold marketing

2008-06-05T23:49:00.002+01:00

I mean really. Since when is cider drunk with ice? If you believe the marketers, forever. In medieval times, a villein would not be seen drinking un-iced cider, it's so traditional. It's so traditional, in fact, that people got bored of it in about 1940, just before home freezing became possible, so for all the time since then, we've been stupidly, ridiculously drinking cider without ice in it. But now, thanks to ultra-old fashioned Irish Magners, we've been educated as to the error of our ways, and are drinking cider over ice.

Kak!

More from the BBC on how easy it is to dupe the masses

Indoors/outdoors

2008-06-01T17:30:00.002+01:00

I recently spent 10 days camping out in rural France, while attending Buddhist teachings. In that ten days I had as many minutes of access to the Internet. And in a way, that was ten minutes too long. For somebody who studies computer science, I can be remarkably unexcited about computers. Actually, I think I kind of have two lives. One is the life of my body, one is the life of my brain. My brain likes a lot of stimulation, constant activity. My body likes fresh air, walks, views, massage, good food. Lots of other things. My brain really just likes stimulation. Which includes studying, I suppose.

What makes me feel healthier is being outside, using my body, feeling the raw elements. Campfires and long walks. Being indoors hunched over a computer screen does not make me feel good.

I don't really have an answer as to how to resolve the two sides: I've been working with them, oscillating between the two, for many years now, without finding a happy medium.

I suppose I can't assume that other people have the same experience as myself, but I suspect that many of the tensions of the city could be shed with occasional immersion in a more natural "country" lifestyle.

Another thing that occurs to me is the oriental idea of the body-mind. That one's mind, or consciousness, is not separate from the physical body. I do find that my mind is calmed by treating my body well. And in meditation one positions the body in such away that the mind is stabilised. The beneficial effect of exercise on one's wellbeing is documented, and I'm sure most people have experienced the effect of a day's physical exertion leading to a satisfying feeling of repose in the evening.

Perhaps I'm still skirting the real issue, which is that in fact one's body is really one and the same as one's mind. That is the body which we truly inhabit is simply a projection of the mind. From an external point of view, one's body might be diseased, but one might still feel healthy. To say that actually the person is sick is churlish. The person's experience is that they are healthy. Likewise somebody might be in "perfect" health from the point of view of a medical checkup, but feel sick. Telling them that they are fine is not going to stop them feeling sick. Most likely they will assume the medical practictioner is missing something.

Well, those are my musings for the day. As so often is the case, I feel as though if I were a bit brighter I might be able to articulate something worthwhile... sigh!

Into the Wild

2008-05-14T14:55:00.002+01:00

This morning my alarm was most unwelcome at 8. I had to drag my body out of bed, to the table, where I checked that my exam was at 10. The sheet says it's tomorrow. I find it hard to believe, as my timetable is firmly in my head, and it's today. But I have to believe the blue official-ness of the paper. I go back to bed, now only worried as to whether the shock will have made me unable to sleep. I doze for a while then sink into strange vivid dreamworld.

I am taking a party of fellow students to visit another student's house. Her father is going to pick us up from the train station. We arrive, and mill around with the hundreds of other people there, some of them other people I know. My phone rings and it's Jason, who is the brother of the person we've come to visit (at least in the dream, in real life he's the brother of a friend of mine from years back). I say "where are you" and he replies "look in the mirror". There being no mirror in sight, I look behind me, but he says, "no, look in the mirror". Then he says nothing more, but I hold the phone to my ear still, listening to the faint white noise.

Blessed Relief

2008-05-07T15:49:00.002+01:00

People told me that I would probably do better in my exams than I thought I would. After my second (of seven) exams this morning, I'm beginning to think they were right. I've already had the two I was most worried about, and I think I did ok. When I had attempted past papers at home, I had been pretty stumped. The papers did not just highlight some areas where my knowledge was lacking, the whole glorious fraud of my student career seemed brilliantly illuminated.

Perhaps these papers were harder than those of the last couple of days, perhaps the last minute cramming I did managed to fill the voids. But I suspect a large factor was my sheer inability to muster any kind of excitement about doing the mock exams, whereas the real things carry some power to wake me up and shine light into the dark corners of my knowledge.

The flora of my garden

2008-04-30T14:17:00.006+01:00

My garden is what you might call a small pseudo-woodland. Those who have seen it are probably already giggling, as it could equally accurately be described as a neglected mess, but bear with me, please.

The high storey of vegetation consists of sycamore trees (Acer pseudoplatanus), in my and my neighbours' gardens. The understorey contains large shrubs like elder (Sambucus nigra) and Forsythia. The groundcover consists largely of buttercup, or celandine (Ranunculus ficaria), bluebells (Hyancinthus) and spurge (Euphorbia). At the moment, there is an attractive burst of their various colours - the blue, white and pink bluebells, the green flowers of the spurge and the orangey-gold of the buttercups set each other off well.

One could certainly call that a typical woodland flora. There are a few anomalies, though. Sycamores are not native to the UK, they have naturalised over the last few hundred years. Because they have not co-existed with the insects of this country for all that long, they do not provide habitat for many species. Anyone who has parked their car under a sycamore in spring or summer and had it covered in honeydew (excreted by aphids in their millions) may dispute this point. I'm speculating here, but the non-native status of sycamore may just explain why aphids are so abundant on it. My hypothesis is that few of aphid's natural predators have found their niche in sycamore trees, whereas the aphids themselves have.

The bluebells are probably not native, either. These are unlikely to be the native bluebell found in old woodland throughout England, but more likely the larger Italian species, or a hybrid between them. Again, purists and ecologists would regard them as inferior to the native species, as they have not cohabited, so to speak, with the natives, so they do not have an established role in the ecosystem. I'm assuming that this is also the case with the spurges, as I don't think a native spurge would grow to almost three feet tall, as those in my garden do.

Funnily enough, the celandine is native, although it is regarded as a problem species in gardens, being very hard to eradicate. It's also known as pilewort, as it is reputed to help with the irritating condition called piles. Another hypothesis: that it has acquired this name through the shape of its miniature tubers (which scatter when you try to remove it - so often when inexperienced gardeners are weeding, instead of achiving the desired result of removing the plant, they are actually propagating multiple clones) - enough said.

Other vegetation includes nettles (Urtica dioica, native and lovely), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis, not native), Fatsia japonica (maybe native to Japan?) and loads of ivy (Hedera helix, native). There used to be a California lilic (Ceanothus) but it died. There's also a lot of a pretty variegated dead-nettle, don't know the Latin. Relics of previous tended gardens include a climbing pink rose, pampas grass, reeds. Weedy trees such as the sycamore and also the native ash (Fraxinus Exelsior, native) are seeding themselves. There are occasional brambles, although I tend to pull them out if I ever go out there, as they trip me up.

The common factor in most of these plants is that they are shade-tolerant. Obviously, that 's a big advantage in a woodland, and in a neglected patch of shady land, I suppose those are the species that will thrive.

I have occasionally thrown a few seeds on some bare soil, but nothing I have planted has been able to compete with the established vegetation. I don't think I'll try again. Many of the species may not be true natives, but they're doing OK and amidst the chaos, lots of insects and larger animals can find a niche.

Exam stress and fish

2008-04-29T11:40:00.002+01:00

Seesaw is the word, I think, to describe my stress level fluctuation. It's funny to me how ubiquitous the term stressed has become when describing how one is feeling. In engineering terms, stress is a measure of how much force is acting on an object. Clearly, the meaning is quite different when applied to a human. But everyone seems to know what I'm talking about when I say I'm stressed. Strain, by the way, is the deformation which occurs to objects under stress. I think I've been feeling the strain, too!

Anyway, exams are nearly upon my fellow students and myself. I find myself getting stressed to the point where I can't think any more. I have done a little training in maintaining one's awareness in high stress situations (providing security to visiting dignitaries), and I recognise that cognitive impairment is a normal result of stress. In fact, there is an interesting progression in impairments as the level of stress one is under increases. I can't remember the details too well, but other things that are affected by rising adrenaline are one's fine motor skills (relatively quickly) and at some point gross motor skills (if these decline, you're really in trouble). In other words, if you think someone's about to attack you when returning home late at night, you might struggle to insert your doorkey into the lock. You'll probably retain the ability to turn around and knock them flying (before realising it's your inebriated flatmate).

Anyway, the level of stress that exam revision gives me is a more chronic one, rather than an acute attack. I wake up in the morning and think "Oh, God, I have to get myself together for my exams'" and the feeling often stays with me all day. Certain things help: ironically not the things one would expect. Although actually doing some revision is of course important, I've found it equally important to get out of the house periodically: to go shopping, to visit friends, or just to have a walk. Exercise has been good: my friend has been teaching me a bit of yoga. The pain took my mind right off the exams!

I was also lucky enough to spend a few days in Menorca last week. And I found the best cure for stress. Swimming in the icy sea with hundreds of fish all around me.

Eliza and Tony

2008-04-22T09:23:00.002+01:00

Eliza has been in the news a bit recently. She was the computer program back in the sixties, I think, that could act like a psychotherapist. All she, let's say 'it' did was to make encouraging or challenging comments, feeding back a little of what someone had said to it.

Anyway, I was just reading various blogs on technology, and I found one which works the other way around. I think the writer is actually a human, but he does a good impression of a lifeless robot! I was going to be nasty and include a link, but I found out that you can search for who links to your blog at blog search. You just type in "link:your-blog-here.blogspot.com" and it tells you who links to your blog. So Tony might have been a bit miffed, if he is indeed human.

A new use for a USB stick

2008-04-22T07:36:00.002+01:00

Also known as pen drives, flash drives or memory sticks, these little devices are used by many of my fellow students to carry their work around on, so that it's available whatever computer they are using. You can now get 4 gig ones, big enough to carry large movies. Mine is 256 megabytes; I only bought it because there is a minimum amount for a card transaction in the College shop. I've rarely used it, instead relying on SSH, email, google docs and my laptop to carry stuff around, but mostly relying on not bothering to organise stuff so that I have lots of different versions of my work on different computers. I have to say, I wouldn't recommend it as a way of working.

Included in Windows Vista is a nice little feature that enables you to use your flash memory as virtual memory. What's virtual memory? Ok, a little explanation for those that are interested. Programs that run on your computer use memory, right? Also known as RAM, this stuff is (usually) volatile (i.e. what's on it is lost when you turn off the machine) and fast. In fact it's many, many times faster to access than a hard drive. There are other memories on your computer which are faster, namely the caches, which store bits of memory which are accessed frequently, and, fastest of all, the registers, which store tiny snippets of vital stuff, like what line of the program comes next. The latter two things are generally on the processor chip itself.

So when you start a program, it will load some or all of itself into memory. There is typically a maximum of 4 gigabytes of addressable memory in a desktop machine, hence the limit on how much RAM you can install. In the past this limit was absolute: you couldn't write a program that needed more that 4 gigs (and it would have been unthinkable in the days when this limit was set) and all the running programs could add up to no more than that figure. Indeed, the limit was usually a lot less, depending on how much actual memory was in your machine. I remember my iMac telling me No you can't start another program up.

The workaround for these problems is what is known as Virtual Memory. To say it simply, this involves allocating space on the hard drive which can be used to store parts of running programs. Usually a program will be using only some of it's code at any time, so large chunks can be written out into the hard drive. If that bit is needed, it's fetched again. This of course takes time, so there are ways of guessing whether particular bits of code will not be needed. Sometimes when you're doing a lot on the computer, it can pause for a time. This background process of swapping stuff onto and off the hard drive is one of the reasons. If you're not using a program, but it's still open in the background, much of the memory used can be swapped out, so when you start to try to work with it again, it can take quite a while to "warm up".

In order to make this process faster, you need a virtual memory storage that is faster to read than a hard drive. That's where flash memory comes in. It's cheap and much quicker than a HD. Recognising that, Microsoft have enabled flash memory in the form of USB sticks to be used for a certain amount of VM. Sorry, getting a bit acronym heavy. That seems to happen in IT. Urg. Within the settings for the stick you can allocate a certain proportion of it to be used for VM. The computer will then recognise it and use it whenever you insert it. And apparently you can remove it at any time, with the only penalty that you lose the speed advantage again.

I have yet to try it, as it seems my USB stick has give up the ghost. But I will. I'm looking forward to seeing if it speeds up performance.

I have eco balls

2008-04-20T09:20:00.002+01:00

What these are are balls that you put into the washing machine when you do a load of laundry. They do the same job as washing powder or liquid, but last for much longer.And I think I could say that they work. Apparently "they produce ionized oxygen that activates the water molecules naturally and allows them to penetrate deep into clothing fibres to lift dirt away." They cost about £35, but should last long enough to do a thousand washes. That's a lot of money saved. I just read on the website that you can use a low temperature, short wash with them too. Pretty cool. They get the seal of approval.

My brain is decaying

2008-04-16T14:28:00.001+01:00

I forgot to go to work on Sunday.

Yesterday I changed somebody's name on the library database. To a number!

I'm wondering what is next?

Is there a global electricity tide?

2008-04-15T10:10:00.004+01:00

I was sitting on the bus thinking about electricity. As you do. Britain and France's national grids are connected, so that surplus energy in one network can be used by another. This is helpful because power stations tend to take a while to get up to full efficiency, so it is best to keep them running almost constantly. Power usage, however, rises and falls dramatically according to the time of day.

Having a national grid irons out some of the peaks and troughs, due to variations in power consumption across the country. Energy companies also sell night-time electricity at a discounted rate, often to businesses but also to consumers with storage heaters, that use power in the night and release the heat throughout the day.

The bigger the grid you have, the more that local variations are taken care of, by using power piped in from somewhere there is less demand. So it was a great leap forward to connect our little island with mainland Europe by underwater high voltage cables. We can now borrow electricity from France and they from us. The morning surge when people switch their kettles on happens an hour earlier in France, due to the time difference. So I expect we send them lots of power for that. Likewise we boil the kettle for our hot water bottles a little later than them.

Gas can be stored relatively easily, but to store electricity is prohibitively expensive and quite inefficient, so there exist various ways to store potential energy that has been created with electricity. In Wales there are a couple of 'pumped storage' power stations, that use cheap off-peak electricity to pump water up a few hundred metres to a reservoir. When there is a power surge, the plug is pulled and the water rushes down, though turbines and generates a lot of power for an hour or so.

Another proposed solution is to use pressurised air stored in huge natural cave systems. And a perhaps more practical option is to use the electricity to seperate Oxygen and Hydrogen in water. Hydrogen can be stored (although it is a lot more explosive than natural gas) and can run engines or fuel cells for static or mobile energy generation.

Anyway, my musing was more about whether the grids of France are connected to those of Germany and other countries . I was imagining this surge of power flowing westward towards the sunset. But having arrived in Ireland, where would it go? Are there transatlantic power cables? Somehow I doubt it. Guess I'll have to do a teeny bit of research, before starting my revision proper.

http://www.terrawatts.com/ - the page *for* a global electricity network
http://climate.blog.co.uk/2006/05/09/the_global_electricty_grid~786943 - an intelligent dissenter
http://www.smm.org/buzz/blog/think_globals_electric_car_city - a cool electric car project
http://www.hybridcars.com/news/car-electric-grid-utopia-caveats.html - more cool car stuff

Ok, these last couple were interesting in the sense that they are talking about car energy storage as a potentially two-way flow. In other words, the car is charged when it is cheapest, but could potentially be harnessed as an energy source at peak times. The last page linked to suggests "all the energy needs for the entire United States could be run for five hours from a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids, if those vehicles held enough battery energy to run a vehicle in all-electric mode for 33 miles". It sounds good, but are people really going to want to have their car batteries only partially charged?

Dogs barking

2008-04-12T15:56:00.003+01:00

I just spent half an hour stomping around in the little park, building up the steam needed to write an article complaining about dog owners. And you could say that I ended up with a full cylinder.

The problem is that the sugar transporting layer in a tree is just under the bark. If you remove the bark it damages that area, and if you remove the bark all the way around a tree it will kill the tree. In fact, ring barking, as it is known, is a forester's trick for killing unwanted trees.

One of the reasons why squirrels are generally disliked is that they chew off bark from the branches of trees, to get at the sweet sugar carrying layer beneath. That layer, called the phloem, is vital in allowing the tree to transport sugars, both up the branch or tree in spring and down later in the year. If a branch gets no sugar in spring, it will die. If the squirrels kill enough branches or ring bark the trunk of the tree, the tree effectively starves to death.

In the last few years one of the most common fashions for the younger people of this area has been to have a dog. Some of the more ferocious fighting dog breeds have been banned, so a Staffordshire terrier is the favourite. To strengthen the dog's teeth and jaws, their owners will often encourage them to hang from ropes from trees. In the event that all of the ropes have broken, they will use the trees themselves. So trees with low hanging branches soon end up with no or dead low branches, or pitiful splintered stubs.

A couple of times I have walked through the park and intervened when I've seen a dog doing this. I'm not sure if it was the same guy each time, but the reaction was, pretty much. It amounted to mind your own business, but in slightly less pleasant terms. I said, "Let's see what the police say about that," took out my phone, and feigned dialling the police. That seemed to have the desired effect.

In any case, between the two of them the dogs and the squirrels have killed several trees in the park. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was the squirrels, as the dogs weren't really around in order to have been responsible. I remember noticing that there were several standing dead trees and in retrospect, I remember that there were the telltale signs of ring barking around many of the upper branches. (Incidentally, when tree surgeons came and removed those trees from the park, I managed to persuade them to give me a lot of the wood, which I occasionally burn downstairs in the fireplace.)

Partly I'm sure that the problem is just ignorance on the part of the owners of the dogs. In fact I think a lot of people suffer from the delusion that trees are a solid and permanent part of the landscape. And certainly don't think that they could be responsible for major injury or death to a tree. I hope that it is ignorance alone which explains the fact that a beautiful, medium sized lime tree has been almost completely ring barked. I'm sure that this is not squirrels, because it is at ground level and I think that the bark is too thick for their small teeth anyway.

I expect that that tree will die. But it may take some time, and the dog owner responsible may never be aware of the destruction that they have caused.

Today I am mostly...

2008-04-06T20:42:00.002+01:00

..in pain. My back has seized up. Actually, I woke up with a stiff upper back and neck a few days ago. But today it is much worse, for no obvious reason. I've got a rolled towel around my neck. Along with my stiff bearing, it makes me look like a character from an Oscar Wilde.

Ouch.

Further reflections on speech input and mind maps

2008-04-01T23:17:00.002+01:00

So having done a bit of research on the Internet, I have not managed to find any mind mapping software with built in speech recognition, neither one that implements Microsoft's speech recognition interface. Sounds like a great third year project!

My musings took me further: the web itself is a nonlinear map of chunks of information, as I said. So what about a mind mapping technology that not only will display a mind map, but would also generate web pages based on the map.

Actually, mind mapping technology does not seem that difficult to construct. Certainly compared to speech recognition technology. If that speech recognition technology is available as an interface (not being a professional software developer, I maybe using the wrong terms here, apologies), then the truly hard bit has already been done for you.

By the way, the reason that I'm writing these musings into my blog is that I have not yet found a very useful tool for jotting down these preliminary thoughts. In the running are Microsoft's One Note, the new web-based tool EverNote, and one of the mind mapping tools, which I have not yet tried.

And I still haven't written what my real current idea for my third year project is.

Musings on musings on third year projects

2008-04-01T19:35:00.002+01:00

Finally the term is drawing to a close. We have handed in our last piece of work, and I have given myself permission to start relaxing, even if I have not really started that process. Actually, perhaps I have, a bit. I'm home, and I have poured myself a beer, and I found myself spontaneously singing some kind of religious chant-like song. Walking home from the tube a cacophony of thoughts erupted in my mind, on the subject of my third year project, which I had been discussing with another student who is just finishing off her third year

The truth is, I have so many ideas but it's very difficult to decide what to do. The remit is quite large with several different types of projects available. There are some suggested ones, but you can also come up with your own ideas. And ideas are something that I am not short of. In fact, in just rehearsing some of my ideas, I came up with a new idea, or rather, came up with an idea for a tool that will be particularly useful in brainstorming and planning my project.

It's actually quite a simple idea, that fuses two already existing technologies. What that is a is a fusion of Mind Map technology with speech recognition. As you may know, I'm dictating my blog, although I'm not dictating it straight into the text area within the browser, but using Wordpad, which enables all of the voice recognition shortcuts in Windows Vista, and then pasting it into the browser.

(Going contentedly in my usual way against the grain, I'm recommending Windows Vista to anybody that will listen. This is partly due to its prettiness, partly as a reaction to the torrent of abuse which has been hurled at it, and in no insignificant measure to the ease of use of the voice recognition software built in. The main difficulty that I am finding is, as I've mentioned above, the fact that some software has very good built in support for this technology, while others does not. I don't yet know why, but the fact that the good compliance is found within Microsoft software might give us a clue.)

Mind mapping is a way to collate or present information in a nonlinear way. When a policeman writes down notes in his little notebook, I'd be surprised if he did not write it down in a linear way: in other words as the information came to him he would add it after the previous chunk of information. In some ways this makes sense, because it does not waste space in the notebook. But the information is hardly likely to come to him in an ordered way.

Policeman: " Could you tell me what happened to you, starting with the details that will be crucial in our investigation, and leaving out anything irrelevant. I would prefer it if you gave it to me in chronological order, preferably with times of individual events." Well, it seems a little far-fetched.

So that information in the policeman's notebook is most likely written from left to right and from top to bottom, filling the pages. Very little structure. Of course, I'm making some assumptions about the policeman here. Apologies to any police who have much more effective ways of taking notes. I'm just making a point.

Now in contrast to that linear way of taking information, mind maps allow us to write down chunks of information in the order in which they appear, and make links between them. This is as simple as drawing each idea in its own little bubble and drawing lines between the bubbles to represent links. I have used this technique to plan essays, and found it to be very useful.

You might start with a central idea of your essay, or thesis, and as ideas linked to that occur to you (as will usually be the case, if you're a human being) you write them down in a linked bubble. As you have more ideas, more bubbles will appear with lines between them, and a spider-like structure appears on the paper in front of you. This explains another name for mind maps, spider diagrams.

(I have had quite a lot of ideas for new pieces of software over the last year or so, and a disturbing number of them have appeared on the market in that time. A part of me is hoping that simply by putting these thoughts down on paper I will cause the program I am imagining to exist.)

And what that program is, is simply a tool to make mind maps using one's voice. It is a very simple idea, and I can fully visualise the software in my head. If it does not exist, it is a definite candidate for a third year project, as I think it would be both relatively simple to implement and highly marketable. But the amusing thing is, that the reason I thought of it, was that I was thinking ahead to getting home and putting my ideas for my third year project into the computer.

Just like the policeman's notebook, this article is being written linearly. It actually puts a rather a dampener on some aspects of the creative process. Writing in this way is rather like deciding to go for a drive but your car turns out to be one of those small self-propelled vehicles on a railway track. You see some scenery but there's no way of turning off and exploring side avenues. Actually, I should qualify that, by the obvious assertion that I make so many asides and it's hard to tell what the main stream of the article is about. But in any case, you may see what I'm getting at.

So I sense another avenue of Internet research opening up before me. And of course, the Internet is the ultimate nonlinear information receptacle. I can start looking for one thing, but before long, I quickly find myself in a fascinating but completely unrelated area. It may be stretching a point but perhaps we could say that the Internet is the ultimate Mind Map.

Who says computer textbooks are dull?

2008-04-01T12:21:00.004+01:00

So it turns out that the great Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr played a role in enabling such technologies as Bluetooth. She had been married in Germany before the war to a man who made military equipment. He explained to her how easy it was to jam the guidance signal in enemy torpedoes. When she realised he was selling his products to the Nazis, she ran away from him, ending up in Hollywood. While there she seems to have invented a frequency-hopping transmitter, which generates a signal that is far harder to jam.

Bluetooth uses frequency-hopping to minimise collisions between messages that are being sent, both between Bluetooth devices and those on wifi, which uses the same frequencies.

I discovered this while reading my textbook on Networks, by Tanenbaum. Here is a link to the e-book:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Pd-z64SJRBAC&dq=tanenbaum+networks&pg=PP1&ots=RBMSCs0ZhF&sig=nXybWj9LSUmHKpL9ACvcNbo44eQ&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tanenbaum+networks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail