100 Ways to Annoy your Supervisor

Hey gang, this is inspired by the original and classic 100 Ways to Annoy your Roommate: http://www.lab404.com/330/roommate.html

This was computer generated from the original by:

Take original 100 Ways to Annoy your Roommate
Apply 3 simple search and replace rules:
Roommate->Supervisor
Room->Office
Bed->Desk

100 Ways to Annoy Your Supervisor

Insist that you are a vegetarian and protest anytime your supervisor eats meat. Then leave “Slim Jim” wrappers on the floor and lie on the desk holding your stomach every time your supervisor walks in. If he/she asks about the wrappers, say you know nothing about them.
Get some hair. Disperse it around your supervisor’s head while he/she is asleep. Keep a pair of scissors by your desk. Snicker at your supervisor every morning.
Every time your supervisor walks in yell, “Hooray! You’re back!” as loud as you can and dance around the office for 5 minutes. Afterwards keep looking at your watch and saying, “Shouldn’t you be going somewhere?”
Trash your office when your supervisors not around. Then leave and wait for your supervisor to come back. When he/she does, walk in and act surprised. Say, “Uh-oh, it looks like THEY were here again.”
Every time you see your supervisor yell, “You son of a…” and kick him/her in the stomach. Then buy him/her some ice cream.
Set your supervisor’s desk on fire. Apologize and explain that you’ve been watching too much Beavis and Butthead. Do it again. Tell him/her that your not sorry because this time they deserved it.
Put your glasses on before going to your desk. Take them off as soon as you wake up. If your supervisor asks, explain that they are Magic Dream Glasses. Complain that you’ve been having terrible nightmares.
Eat lots of Lucky Charms. Pick out all the yellow moons and stockpile them in the closet. If your supervisor inquires, explain that visitors are coming, but you can’t say anything more, or you’ll have to face the consequences.
Set up meetings with your supervisor’s faculty advisor. Inquire about his/her academic potential. Take lots of notes, and then give your supervisor a full report. Insist that he/she do the same.
“Drink” a raw egg for breakfast every morning. Explain that you are in training. Eat a dozen donuts every night.
Every thursday, pack up everything that you own and tell your supervisor that you’re going home. Come back in an hour and explain that no one was home. Unpack everything and go to sleep.
Every time you wake up, start yelling, “Oh my God! Where the hell am I?!” and run around the office for a few minutes. Then go back to your desk. If your supervisor asks, say you don’t know what he/she is talking about.
Draw a tiny, black spot on your arm. Make it bigger every day. Look at it and say, “It’s spreading, it’s spreading!”
Buy a McDonald’s Happy Meal for lunch every day. Eat the straw and the napkin. Throw everything else away.
Buy a plant. Sleep with it at night. Talk to it. After a few weeks, start to argue with it loudly. Then yell, “I can’t live in the same office with you,” storm out of the office and slam the door. Get rid of the plant, but keep the pot. Refuse to discuss the plant ever again.
Buy a Jack-In-The-Box. Every day, turn the handle until the clown pops out. Scream continuously for twenty minutes.
Hang up pictures of chickens all over the office. If your supervisor eats eggs, yell at him/her and call him/her a cannibal.
Buy some knives. Sharpen them every night. While you’re doing so, look at your supervisor and mutter, “Soon, soon…”
Lock the door while your supervisor is out. When he/she comes back and tries to unlock it, yell, “Don’t come in, I’m naked!” Keep this up for several hours. When you finally let your supervisor in, immediately take off all of your clothes, and ignore your supervisor.
Bring in potential “new” supervisors from around campus. Give them tours of the office and the building. Have them ask about your supervisor in front of him/her, and reply, “Oh, him/her. He/She won’t be here much longer.
If your supervisor comes home after midnight, hit him/her on the head with a rolling pin. Immediately go to your desk, muttering, “Ungrateful little…”
Pile dirty dishes in your supervisor’s desk. Insist that you don’t know how they got there.
Collect hundreds of pens and pile them on one side of the office. Keep one pencil on the other side of the office. Laugh at the pencil.
Feign a serious illness for two weeks. Have a priest come and visit you. Write out a will, leaving everything to your supervisor. One day, miraculously “recover.” Insist that your supervisor write out a will, leaving everything to you. Every time he/she coughs, excitedly say, “Ooh, are you dying?”
Live in the hallway for a month. Afterwards bring all of your stuff back into the office and tell your supervisor, “Okay, your turn.”
Keep a tarantula in a jar for three days. Then get rid of it. If your supervisor asks, say, “Oh, he’s around here somewhere.”
Tell your supervisor, “I’ve got an important message for you.” Then pretend to faint. When you recover, say that you can’t remember what the message was. Later on, say, “Oh yeah, I remember!” Pretend to faint again. Keep this up for several weeks.
Bowl inside the office. Set up tournaments with other people in the building. Award someone a trophy. If your supervisor wants to bowl too, explain that he/she needs bowling shoes.
Walk backwards all the time. Then pretend to trip and hurt yourself. Fake an injury and go through a long, painful recovery. Start walking backwards again.
While your supervisor is out, glue your shoes to the ceiling. When your supervisor walks in, sit on the floor, hold your head, and moan.
Explain to your supervisor that you are going to be housing a prospective student in the near future. One day, bring in a pig. If your supervisor protests, hug the pig and tell your supervisor that he/she hurt its feelings. Watch t.v. with the pig, eating lots of bacon.
Make a sandwich. Don’t eat it, leave it on the floor. Ignore the sandwich. Wait until your supervisor gets rid of it, and then say, “Hey, where the hell is my sandwich!?” Complain loudly that you are hungry.
Punch a hole in the t.v. Sit and watch it anyway, complaining about the bad reception.
Wear a cape. Stand in front of the window for about an hour every day. Then, one day, when your supervisor is gone, go outside the window and lie down underneath the window, pretending to be hurt, and wait for your supervisor to return. The next day, start standing in front of the window again.
Collect potatoes. Paint faces on them and give them names. Name one after your supervisor. Separate your supervisor’s potato from the others. Wait a few days, and then bake your supervisor’s potato and eat it. Explain to your supervisor, “He just didn’t belong.”
Fill an empty shaving cream can with whipped cream. Use it to shave, and then spray some into your mouth. Later on, complain that you feel sick. Continue this process for several weeks.
Cover your desk with a tent. Live inside it for a week. If your supervisor asks, explain that “It’s a jungle out there.” Get your supervisor to bring you food and water.
Keep a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the office. Look at it with fear for a few days. Then, stay out of the office entirely, opening the door only a crack and whispering to your supervisor, “Psst! Is it gone?”
Break the window with a rock. If your supervisor protests, explain that you were hot. Open and close the broken window as you normally would.
Throw darts at a bare wall. All of a sudden, act excited, telling your supervisor that you hit the bull’s eye.
Send flowers to your supervisor, with a card that says, “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” When you see them, start ripping up the flowers. Repeat the process for a few weeks.
Call your supervisor Clyde by accident. Start doing so every so often. Increase the frequency over the next few weeks, until you are calling him/her Clyde all the time. If your supervisor protests, say, “I’m sorry. I won’t do that anymore, Murray.”
Hire a night watchman to guard the office while you are sleeping.
Move everything to one side of the office. Ask your supervisor if he/she knows how much an elephant weighs, and look at the floor on the empty side of the office with concern.
Practice needlepoint every night. At one point, grab your thumb and scream, “Owwwww!” Cry hysterically for a few minutes, and then go back to your desk. Sob and sniff all night.
When your supervisor comes in, pretend that you are on the phone, screaming angrily and shouting obscenities. After you hang up, say, “That was your mom. She said she’d call back.”
Every time your supervisor comes in, immediately turn off the lights and go to your desk. When he/she leaves, get up and loudly yell, “Okay guys, you can come out now!”
Start wearing a crown, all the time. If your supervisor tells you to take it off, say, “What the hell do you think you are? A king?”
Sit in front of a chess board for hours, saying nothing, doing nothing. Then look up and say, “I think this game goes a lot faster with two players.”
Talk back to your Rice Krispies. All of a sudden, act offended, throw the bowl on the floor and kick it. Refuse to clean it up, explaining, “No, I want to watch them suffer.”
Change the locks on the door. Don’t let your supervisor in unless he/she says the secret word. Change the secret word often. If your supervisor can’t guess the secret word, make him/her pay a tithe.
Scatter stuffed animals around the office. Put party hats on them. Play loud music. When your supervisor walks in, turn off the music, take off the party hats, put away the stuffed animals, and say, “Well, it was fun while it lasted.”
Hang a tire swing from the ceiling. Act like a monkey. If someone besides your supervisor comes in, cease acting like a monkey and claim that the tire swing was your supervisor’s idea. When you and your supervisor are alone again, continue acting like a monkey.
Unplug everything in the office except for one toaster. Pray to the toaster. Bring it gifts. Throw some of your supervisor’s possessions out the window. Say that the toaster made you do it.
Challenge your supervisor to a duel. If he/she refuses, claim that you have won by forfeit and therefore have conquered his side of the office. Insist that he/she remove all of his/her possessions immediately.
Sign your supervisor up for various activities. (Campus tour guide, blood donor, organ donor)
Start dressing like an Indian. If your supervisor inquires, claim that you are getting in touch with your Native-American roots. If your supervisor accuses you of not having any Native-American roots, claim that he/she has offended your people and put a curse on your supervisor.
Wear your shoes on the wrong feet, all the time. Constantly complain that your feet hurt.
Hit your supervisor on the head with a brick. Claim that you were trying to kill a mosquito.
Steal something valuable of your supervisor’s. If he/she asks about it, tell him/her that you traded it for magic beans. Give some beans to your supervisor.
Instead of turning off the light switch, smash the light bulb with a hammer. Put a new bulb in the next day. Complain often about the cost of lightbulbs.
Videotape yourself hammering a nail into a wall for awhile, and then stopping. Play the tape in your office. Right before the hammering stops on the videotape, look at the screen and say, “Don’t do that.”
Buy a lamp. Tell your supervisor it’s a magic lamp, with a genie inside it. Spend a week thinking about what to wish for. At the end of the week, report the someone has released the genie from the lamp. Blame your supervisor.
Whenever your supervisor brushes his/her teeth, watch him/her do so. Take notes. Write a paper on it, and circulate it around campus. If your supervisor protests, say, “The people have a right to know!”
Collect potato chips that you think look like famous people. Find one that looks like your supervisor. Burn it, and explain, “It had to be done.”
Read the phone book out loud and excitedly. (“Frank Johnson! Oh wow! 894-8302! Holy cow!”)
Shadow box several times a day. One day, walk in looking depressed. If your supervisor asks what’s wrong, explain that your shadow can’t box with you anymore due to an injury. Ask your supervisor if you can box with his/her shadow.
When you walk into the office, look at the supervisor in disgust and yell, “Oh you’re here!” Walk away yelling and cursing.
Put up flyers around the building, reporting that your supervisor is missing. Offer a reward for his/her safe return.
Buy a watermelon. Draw a face on it and give it a name. Ask your supervisor if the watermelon can sleep in his/her desk. If your supervisor says no, drop the watermelon out the window. Make it look like a suicide. Say nasty things about your supervisor at the funeral.
Draw a chalk outline on the floor. When your supervisor comes in, say, “Don’t worry. It’s not what you think.” If he/she asks about it again, immediately change the subject.
Drink a cup of coffee every morning. When you finish it, gnaw on the mug for about ten minutes. Then look at your supervisor, immediately put the mug away, and quickly leave the office.
Paint a tunnel on the wall like they do in cartoons. Every day, hit your head as you attempt to crawl through it. Hold your head and grumble, “Damn road runner…..”
Leave memos on your supervisor’s desk that say things like, “I know what you did,” and “Don’t think that you can fool me.” Sign them in blood.
Hold a raffle, offering your supervisor as first prize. If he/she protests, tell him/her that it’s all for charity.
Make cue cards for your supervisor. Get them out whenever you want to have a conversation.
Talk like a pirate all the time. Threaten to make your supervisor walk the plank if he/she doesn’t swab the deck. Arrrrrrrrrrgh!
Set up about twenty plants in an organized formation. When your supervisor walks in, pretend to be in the middle of delivering a speech to the plants. Whisper to them, “We’ll continue this later,” while eyeing your supervisor suspiciously.
Buy a telescope. Sit on your desk and look across the office at your supervisor through the telescope. When you’re not using the telescope, act like your supervisor is too far away for you to see.
Keep some worms in a shoe box. When doing homework, go and consult with the worms every so often. Then become angry, shouting at the worms that they’re stupid and they don’t know what they are talking about.
Watch “Psycho” every day for a month. Then act excited every time your supervisor goes to take a shower.
Wear a paper hat. Every time your supervisor walks in, say, “Welcome to McDonald’s, can I take your…Oh, it’s just you.” Take off the hat, sit, and pout.
Go through your supervisor’s textbooks with a red pen, changing things and making random corrections. If your supervisor protests, tell him/her that you just couldn’t take it anymore.
Leave the office at random, knock on the door, and wait for your supervisor to let you back in. If he/she complains about it, go on a tangent about the importance of good manners.
Hang a horseshoe above the door. Make up stories about having had good luck. Then, take the horseshoe down and wrap your head in bandages. When you see your supervisor, look above the door where the horseshoe used to be, hold your head, and mutter, “Stupid horseshoe…”
Carve a jack-o-lantern. Complain to your supervisor that the jack-o-lantern has been staring at you. The next day, tell your supervisor that the jack-o-lantern thinks he/she has been staring at it. Confide in your supervisor that you really don’t like the jack-o-lantern, but you can’t convince it to move out.
As soon as your supervisor turns off the light at night, begin singing famous operas as loud as you can. When your supervisor turns on the light, look around and pretend to be confused.
Hang a basketball net on the wall. Challenge your refrigerator to basketball games, and play them in front of your supervisor. Do so for about a month. Confide in your supervisor that you think that the refrigerator has been taking steroids.
Drink lots of lemonade. Talk obnoxiously for hours about how much you love lemonade. Then, one day, paint your face yellow. From then on, complain about how much you hate lemonade.
Late at night, start conversations that begin with, “Remember the good old days, when we used to…” and make up stories involving you and your supervisor.
Whenever your supervisor sneezes, go and hide in the closet for about an hour. Look around nervously for the rest of the day.
Sit and stare at your supervisor for hours. Bring others in to join you. Eat peanuts, throwing a few at your supervisor. Then say, “Boy, these zoos just aren’t what they used to be.”
Tell your supervisor that your toe hurts, and that means that there’s going to be an earthquake, soon. While your supervisor is out, trash everything on his/her side of the office. When he/she returns, explain that the earthquake hit, but only on one side of the office.
Buy a gun. Clean it every day. One day, put a band-aid on your forehead, and refuse to discuss the gun ever again.
Buy a lobster. Pretend to play cards with it. Complain to your supervisor that the lobster is making up his own rules.
Make pancakes every morning, but don’t eat them. Draw faces on them, and toss them in the closet. Watch them for several hours each day. Complain to your supervisor that your “pancake farm” isn’t evolving into a self-sufficient community. Confide to your supervisor that you think the king of the pancakes has been taking bribes.
While you are ironing, pretend to burn yourself. Start a garbage can fire in the middle of the office. Toss the iron inside. If your supervisor objects, explain that you are just trying to get even.
Buy some turtles. Paint numbers on their backs. Race them down the hall.
Put out a plate of cookies at night. Tell your supervisor that they’re for the Sandman. Take a bite out of one of the cookies while your supervisor is asleep. The next morning, accuse your supervisor of having bitten one of the cookies. If he/she tries to tell you the Sandman did it, insist that you know what the Sandman’s teeth marks look like and that those are, in fact, not the Sandman’s teeth marks. Grumble angrily and storm out of the office.
Create an army of animal crackers. Put them through basic training. Set up little checkpoints around the office. Tell your supervisor that the camel spotted him/her in a restricted area and said not to do it again. Ask your supervisor to apologize to the camel.

Feb 27 2011

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The freight trains keep me awake at night…

The freight trains keep me awake at night. I can hear their malicious thundering as I am trying to sleep, a hollow, cavernous sound, starting quietly, barely audibly, then mounting to a thick bassy roar that shakes the foundations of my room and knocks leaves from the cherry tree outside.

I live about a mile from the base of the Tower. Its buttresses fly out from the central core like cathedralic oaken roots, diving into the cold ground and anchoring themselves to the bedrock a thousand feet below. It never sleeps. Dozens of freight cars are hauled up it every hour, each weighing about as much as a small ocean liner, packed to the welded seams with iron ore and sealed shut against the cold night air and, later, the vacuum.

That’s what the old soldiers used to call space: the night. “I’m going out tonight,” they’d say, uncertain whether they would come back to the welcoming pressurized warmth or float, blitzed and eviscerated, outside forever. “It’s a nice night for death,” they’d say, hiding the cowed fear that chattered at their heartstrings behind a desperately acted veil of bravado; a veil that was oh so thin. Starry, starry, night.

I will never go outside again. For me the daylight, the warmth of unfrosting mornings, the feeling of an atmosphere of air comfortingly blowing and weighing on my face. No more of that dead blackness. I am hiding now at the bottom of a pit, ensconced beneath the tropopause, safe in the knowledge that I am walking on the seabed of an ocean of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide and that there are miles upon miles of gas above my head.

But it gets to me still at night, when you cannot see the air. When the blackness outside is disturbingly confusable, through half-open eyes, with the stellated void. When the silence just before dawn is chillingly similar to the total quiet that breathes between the stars.

So I do not mind that the trains wake me. I am happy when their rumbling rescues me from the brink of sleep, drags me back from the edge of a terrifyingly bottomless dream. It is good to hear their sound, any sound, when I wake up doused in sweat and they chase the terror from my mind; the fear that I am back there where there is no sound, no light, no warmth. It is dire coincidence that the most ancient fear we know, that of dark and silence and the unknown, preys on the brave who venture into space. It vanquished me and cast me back down.

So I lie awake at night, listening to the trains climb the Tower, dragging themselves laboriously upwards, back where I will never go.

Aug 18 2010

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I’ll save that egg for later

Lt. Hawthorne Ahlowen, Investigative Officer, S.O.E.C.S.

Late spring.

I had eggs Benedict for breakfast.

Later we pulled up outside the quiet mansion in the countryside, parking between the other scene investigation vehicles and the arm-thick cooled cables that led down the Gothic stairs and into the generator in the garden, giving off a thin mist.

The ferrets got out of the way as I followed the superconductors through winding hallways and open doors which let brown leaves blow in behind me, through dusty morning rooms and under ornate chandeliers with a lifetime of blown bulbs. Eventually I reached the apparatus, which rested in the centre of a drawing room whose carpet had once been worth more than my job. Ruckled and muddied by the wheels of equipment trollies, it lay forlornly under the eight-foot metal sphere at the heart of the affair.

Going by the notes that Rufus Armitage had written and which I had read thoroughly over my eggs, time behaved differently inside that sphere. Outside it, all was normal. As the mind’s eye moved through the layers of piping, wiring, coils and cooling that surrounded it, all remained normal. But when one crossed the infinitesimal barrier- the perfect, mathematical sphere inside its precisely-machined but imperfect steel sister- it was all change.

On the first egg and the first chapter Armitage seemed mad, despite the tidiness of his handwriting and the ruled exactitude of his diagramming. It seemed as though he were designing a time capsule, your classic time-does-not-pass-inside-the-wondrous-container nonsense. Get inside it, command in your will that it should be opened in a thousand years and you shall step out needing not so much as a shave.

The second chapter changed my impressions of both Armitage and the machine. He demonstrated a capable grasp of n-dimensional mathematics, hyperplaited string mechanics and revelation theory. The latter has to do with the quantum effects of the revelation of an atom’s spin, charge and balance, not with anything religious.

By the third chapter my mouth was open and I was mopping egg from the pages of what was probably a historical document. It was not that I could not find any holes in the theory; it was that I was sufficiently impressed by Armitage’s obvious intelligence to believe that he probably would have. There was also the matter of his being sufficiently cunning to amass a fortune of sufficient size to install a bank of portable fusion generators on the lawn next to the carp pond, and to contract out enough materiel and manual labour to implement the designs. There was a folder packed with invoices and bills of lading.

By the end of the folder I had abandoned my final egg and was on the phone to the duty officer of the Serious Ontological and Epistemological Crime Section, of which I am an investigatory officer. Then I was in my car, revving quite hard all the way out into the countryside and down the leafy lanes to Armitage’s property.

They always seem so proud when you read their notes. I could imagine Armitage smiling into his moustache as he scribbled on that piece of paper, tucked it into the back of his notebook, climbed inside his machine and switched it on.

By “switched it on” I mean “activated the field ignition timer,” but you know what I mean. Armitage’s butler certainly did not as he calmly drove the notebook to SOECS as instructed, squeezed it through the letterbox and went home for lunch.

We stood around the machine, the device, the Installation, or however you want to refer to it. It seemed quite obvious how to switch it off. There was a large red switch. Which instructed a powerful computer to perform a long series of delicate operations, but was nevertheless red and inviting.

Armitage certainly wanted us to pull it. His notes explained that because of the nature of the spherical field, all the control and field maintenance systems needed to be outside it. The field could only be generated from the outside, and as nothing could cross it, it could not be deactivated from the inside.

He was relying on us to switch it off. So everyone else stood back, and I pulled the switch, which moved with the smoothness of never-before-operated equipment.

The fans, pumps and hydraulics around the steel sphere calmed down significantly as soon as I operated the switch; a huge load must have been taken off them. There was a slight change in the texture of the air as a huge static charge being generated by some part of the system disappeared.

And, in a pleasingly and doubtless intentionally dramatic manner, a section of the steel sphere swung open on hydraulic rams and revealed a man-sized opening. The inside of the sphere was semi-well-lit; there was a ring of dim LED lights around the upper interior. I noticed that some of them were out; Armitage’s engineering was not perfect after all.

I looked inside. There was a small of xenon, plastic and that musty smell you find in old cellars. The same smell had been present as I walked through Armitage’s ancient property. I was not surprised.

I was also surprised at the lack of Armitage, or of anything else conclusive. The inside of the sphere was very small, its walls quite thick. I shone my torch inside. There was a metal chair lying untidily on its side, a flat circular floor at the bottom, and not much else.

I climbed through the opening, the sides of the sphere pleasingly solid and unwavering as I braced my arms against them. Although cramped, there was enough room for me inside.

I was slightly annoyed. This had the makings of another hoax. One of the “My notes say I have vaporised myself / autocatapulted forwards through time / twisted myself through nine dimensions; but in reality I and my money are safe on the Kisaravadra beaches, with champagne” variety. I have seen several of those.

In this case, Armitage’s notes claimed he had constructed a chamber inside which, upon the application of a very large amount of amps, time would continue to pass- while time stopped outside. The inverse of the stasis chamber.

His final message implied that he had planned to stay in there for (subjectively) a few hours. From the outside-the-chamber point of view, time would of course seem to continue as standard. But somewhere during the operation of the machine, the fields would cast their spells and, instantly, extra time would have passed inside the steel sphere. Armitage would have emerged a few hours older.

In reality, it seemed that he was a few glasses of champagne happier and a few thousand miles away. There was no mention in description or theory of the sphere’s being able to neatly vanish away its contents; besides, it still contained a chair.

I got out my camera and began documenting the inside of the sphere. It was very dusty, much more so than the rest of the admittedly dusty house, and the chair was old and covered in scratches. There was not much to document, but I crouched down under the low domed celing, thinking of warm, sunny Kisaravadra, and what Armitage was running from.

After about twenty minutes of taking careful pictures and making notes I was imagining Armitage’s feud with the gangs of Coloscaterne and his well-executed plan to fake his disappearence into the eleventh dimension. Which is why I was very surprised when the door to the steel sphere flashed decisively down, loud on its hydraulics, and slammed closed; much more quickly than it had before. I was annoyed. Could he not leave us in peace without attempting silly jokes?

I tapped on the door, waiting for my colleagues to lift it open, and took another photograph. I thought affectionately of the egg Benedict I had left on my kitchen table, and looked forward to it later.

Then I heard the superconducting cables begin to hum loudly again, an increasing rattle from somewhere under the steel sphere, and the jarring, rising sound of something spinning up in the den of machinery underneath the sphere.

I tried the door- I tried to try the door. There was no handle on the inside. Just a smooth, machined surface.

I picked up the chair and banged it against the door, which did not give. A sizable quantity of dust fell out of the gaps between the legs and the seat, and scattered on the floor. Along with what had fallen off the chair before, there was now a small pile of it. Dry, grey dust.

I was always quick in school.

It was as the field switched on that I realised what had happened to Armitage.

It was as the whirring of the superconductors and the bass rumble of the machinery rose to a crescendo and then fell instantly into complete and utter silence that I imagined him sitting on that chair as he activated the machine.

He had intended to stay in the machine for a few hours of subjective time, his notes said. To an outsider, an afternoon would have flicked by for Armitage in an instant.

But an instant for the outsider could just as well have been a week for Armitage. Or a month.

Or a hundred thousand years. Enough time for half the milliennium-rated LEDs in the celing to fail. And for Rufus Armitage to waste away and starve and die a terrible lonely death and fade and rot away to dust, the dust that lay on the floor of the steel sphere, scattered by my boots.

All while time was frozen outside, unmoving; the sun still in the sky, birds frozen in flight, a leaf fixed in mid-air. My colleages beginning to look up and realise that the sphere was closed, the superconductors were running, and something was going on.

There was total silence. I could see the field now, a tiny glitter just inside the surface of the sphere, impervious to touch, vibration and sound.

I thought of my egg Benedict, sitting on my table at home, probably still slightly hot; the steam frozen now, a translucent sculpture in the still air.

I sat on the chair and doodled quietly on my pad, feeling the fear and the panic and the tears approaching quickly from far away.

I had been looking forward to that egg.

Jun 2 2010

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Technical error

There was a technician v. fine

Who was flipped ‘bout a vertical line

Now the fats in his burgers

Were enantiomers;

He starved though he ceased not to dine.

http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf169

03:31

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A look inside

There’s one major difference between trying to repair a computer and trying to repair an alarm clock, a car, or nearly anything else.

Normal devices have physical working parts which you can see interacting- camshafts, gears, bits of metal and moving components. They make noises. They vibrate, hum, emit smoke, and generally give off many different signals which give you information about them.
Computers only interact with their environment over the prescribed input/output channels. One one level, this means the only way they can talk to you is via the screen and the speakers. On another level, it means the only things you can see is what the operating system wants you to. It’s quite happy to let you know the processor load or the amount of free memory- but only when it wants you to, and it’s often very dumbed-down.

This can be annoying when you’re trying to fix things.

If something goes wrong with a piece of machinery, you can usually open it and have a look. There’s usually some kind of cover which you can easily remove, and then you get an overview of the workings of the machine. If you’re lucky you will be able to scope out vaguely how it works, and if you’re even more lucky the problem will be obvious. There may be smoke or something obviously not moving which ought to be.
A computer is basically a black box. If something goes wrong, you have no way of peering inside and seeing what’s going on. You can take apart the machine, fine. But you can’t take apart the operating system, the contents of memory, the webcam drivers or the bootloader. They’re just patterns of bits on a disc.

So it’s usually completely impossible to see what’s wrong.

Yes, the OS is meant to keep you informed about things like this. But since when did it ever do a good job of this?

The only information OS’s generally give you is

A list of processes and the resources they’re using
How much memory is free
How much processor is being used.

Wouldn’t it be brilliant if, when you had a wifi problem, you could just peer into the TCP/IP stack, watch the packets flowing backwards and forwards, and spot that they weren’t getting past the router?

Wouldn’t it be awesome if your printer wasn’t responding- but you could just take the cover off the USB controller and see that one of the driver instances had crashed?

Well, you could.

Imagine a separate monitor program that runs alongside the OS, as weakly connected to it as possible (so that the OS can go down without affecting the monitor). Its job is to give you a visual, schematic-type picture of everything going on inside your system.

List of running processes? Bah. Now you can see each process as a box on the screen, with lines connecting it to the resources it’s using: network sockets, hard disc, memory, files it has open, DLLs or libraries it has loaded.

Along each line you can see the flow of data: how much, and in what direction. Look at your Firefox instance and you can see it pulling data from different servers over wifi or ethernet, loading it into memory and, in the case of Firefox, forgetting about it there.

Processes are not the only thing you can monitor. When you open a bonnet, you can see your engine working: there are moving parts, obvious interconnections and obvious problems. Our monitor program would watch the OS and display a schematic of its various parts (kernel, graphics, I/O, network, device drivers…), how they were connected to each other, whether each one was responsive, and how data and dependencies existed between them.

One of the most annoying things about Windows is when it won’t let you eject a drive because it is “in use.” Even if nothing appears to be using it. No problem any more. Just check the monitor; see the lines (or curves, or excting flashing trails) leading from the drive to all the programs which are using it. Check the data flow down the lines, and if if nothing important is being written, you can kill the programs.

Hard drive on the blink? Not sure whether it’s the drive or the motherboard? Check the monitor. Data flow seems fine along the line from the motherboard to the drive. Crap, I need a new motherboard.

Of course, there are downsides…

Someone needs to write all this shit and make it able to keep an eye on parts of the OS. Don’t expect Microsoft to do it. PCs should be fixed by PC World, not the USER!
Watching the whole system all the time might have a performance hit. But probably not. You can spare some of those 3 billion cycles per second to log data rates, I think.
Even if you know exactly where the problem is, the only solution might be to restart the computer anyway…

01:26

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I remember

I remember.

I remember the sunlight falling on my youthful face all those years ago, the photons tickling my skin like raindrops. I remember the wind blowing the fibres of my hair, twisting and tousling it like smoke. I remember the crunch of my parents’ gravel drive as I walked home on a summer evening, wending my way up from the road to the ivy-covered porch of the house where I was born.

I was an average child. I had none of those precocious talents that always seem to appear early in great men, no penchant for differential equations with my hot chocolate or prime numbers in crayon on my bedroom wall. I was not one for taking apart broken radios at the age of five and fixing them together again in perfect working order. But I am not a great man.

And I remember how simple the world used to be, when there was one set of seasons, one constant cycle of warmth and cold. When you knew that summer would follow winter and then autumn would usher the cold back in. When there was one superpower, one world language, and one sun.

How things have changed since then.

And what I remember perhaps best of all; Julia. I remember the smell of her hair, the softness of her forearm, the taste of her lips brushing ever-so-gently against mine; all those stereotypical things that resonate in memoirs and in novels and in all the fading memories of every soul in this wide universe.

She is long gone. She has long faded beneath the dust of centuries, beneath the ruins of countless lives stratifying in silence under the wet ground. So has everything that I remember. The porch of my parents’ old house is slowly turning into fossil fuels, a mile below the thundering cities that hug the surface of our long-suffering Earth. The sun no longer stands alone, a beautiful solo against a choir of stars; she has been joined by the discordant light of a rusty-red newcomer. And no ivy has grown on Earth for many years.

But I am still here. I can still feel the sunlight; I can feel every photon falling gently on my eyes. I can hear the wind blowing fitfully across my perked-up ears. And now I am posessed of oh, so many talents.

I can look at a differential equation and, without a moment’s thought, I know it like a friend. I know its solutions and its zeroes, the landscape it describes, perfectly.

I can look at a starlit sky and count, instantly, the stars that I can see; the galaxies and the quasars, the constellations and the planets. I see them in the ultraviolet, the infrared, the gamma spectrum. I feel them moving, watch the arcseconds tick by as Orion comes up above a foggy horizon.

I can feel the latency as the part of me in San Francisco catches up with the part of me buried in concrete in what was once Mayfair. I can feel my thoughts racing at slightly below the speed of light. I can feel the parts of my mind, silicon and molecules and photonics, working together in glorious, cold harmony.

I can remember everything that has ever happened to me since they blew away my charred skin and opened up my mind and poured it into matrices of logic. Since I closed my eyes, my real eyes, one last time. My eyes now are not viscera and muscle; they are amplified CCDs pouring gigabits of data into my processors. My ears are not shaped cartilage but electret microphones, listening to the sound of your heartbeat as your slow mind decides what to say. And my mind is artificial.

I can remember, but I can never forget. I am relentlessly, marvellously awake, but I can never sleep. And though I can see Julia in my mind, can spin my model of her, accurate down to the last freckle on her beautiful cheeks- I can never touch her. For not only have I no hands, no nerves, no fingertips- but Julia has been dead for a hundred thousand years.

And so I abide in my scintillating prison, looking out through my hundreds of lidless eyes. I am master of all languages. I know all the theories that have ever been concieved. I understand it all.

And I feel nothing. These words pass through my consciousness without a flicker of sadness, without an instant of nostalgia. I think of Julia, how I once loved her, and not one circuit sings the beauty of her name. I do now know, any more, what it is like to truly feel.

But I remember.

Jan 30 2010

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Wizardry

I was five when they realised that I was a Wizard. They found me arranging lines of stones on the beach; two, three, five, seven, thirteen. They sent for one of the Emissaries, travellers who wandered the world looking for the sparks of childlike curiosity, the clues that separated those whose inner light was on from the dark dull minds of the untouched.
I did not know I was a Wizard at the time. I had no idea what they really did or what they were really like, being five; only that they were wise and powerful and somehow elevated above other people, and that without their Art our ways of life would stumble and collapse. I did not know that was I was doing was wisdom, that the patterns I was making were magic.
The Emissary was very old and his white beard scared me at the time, floating at twice my height, wizened stratocumulus. He carried with him an air of untouchable wisdom and undeniable respect. It was only later that I would learn that despite his dirty but stately white robes and beard, he was a failure; like all the Emissaries, he was one who had failed in his search for the Art. Now I am far above his level, with beard and robes of my own; though mine are clean and pure and black.
I was still on the beach when he came. I had just completed my sixth line (seventeen stones) and was beginning to wonder how many I should align next. The Emissary came quietly up behind me, on his own, unfollowed by my family and friends. I looked up as his long shadow fell across my stones, turned around to see the tall figure in dusty robes once white, stained dusky orange by the sun going down into the sea.
“What are you doing with those stones?” he asked, his lips unseen behind his beard.
“Lining them up,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because they go together,” I said, because he seemed interested in what I was doing, and adults usually dismissed my playing and told me to get on with things. He cocked his head on one side, asking why.
“Well,” I said. And realised that the reason why, in my mind, my lines went together wasn’t really able to express itself; it couldn’t find the words. I thought about it for a bit.
“Well,” I said, pointing at the first line of two stones. “That one… isn’t in any of the other ones. And that one-” pointing at the three-stone line next along- “isn’t in any of the ones after. And they’re all like that.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to say what I meant, but I knew. Somehow he knew I knew. He was quite happy about this; I could tell from the way one corner of his beard hitched up, so you could tell there was a smile going on underneath.
“Why haven’t you put a line at the beginning containing one stone?” the Emissary asked.
“Because… that would be in all the other lines. If I did.”
The other side of his beard hitched up as well. Then he went away to talk to my parents.,
The next day they took me away and began to teach me Magic. Now, many years later, I can tell you quite easily that I was constructing, in stones, the first seven prime numbers. And what I really meant was that every line would not divide any of its successors.
I stayed on the beach as the sun went down, constructing a line of nineteen stones. It got dark before I could finish it.

Few of us will ever be Wizards. Few of us have the intellect, the distilled cunning, the fearsome temerity and the superhuman calm required to master or even glimpse the Art. Many try and most fail.

I was twenty-six when I first spoke to the Master Programmer. I was taking him a cup of tea.
He lives on the top floor of the kilometre-tall tower of the Wizards in Surpriyavali, where the view changes slowly as the balanced steel superstructure sways backwards and forwards in the wind. He has a whole floor to himself, the top slice of the many-sectioned cylinder, and it is empty and pristine except for a cushion in the exact centre and the big screen, a metre and a half wide, in front of it.
You come up to his floor through a spiral staircase recessed into the floor, and it is like climbing up through an actor’s hatch on to a deserted stage in an empty opera house. The floor is uniform and black, and so is the ceiling. The tower is cylindrical, the ceiling average height, the circular wall on this floor an unbroken, crystal transparent window. It looked as though the builders had forgotten about this floor, forgotten to add inner walls and corridors and furniture. There is nothing else there except for a dozen candles scattered about the floor.
It was evening, and the sun was near enough to the horizon to shine upwards onto the black ceiling of the high tower. The Master Programmer was sitting cross-legged. In the centre of the room with his back to me, facing his wide screen. I could see coloured lines, curves, symbols and patterns flashing and sweeping over it, faster than I could follow, obscured by the unmoving silhouette of the Master.
I paused for a second, unsure of what to do, and then started to walk slowly towards him, carrying the steaming cup of tea. The tower was wide and this floor was a big disc about the diameter of a small theatre; the staircase hatch was by the edge, and it was a minute or so’s walk to the centre. I watched the screen as I quietly moved, the patterns becoming clearer as I drew nearer.
On one side of the screen were two sound wave displays, both nearly flatlining- except that they would pulse and jump whenever one of my feet came down on the ground, and fuzzed as the wind rose outside. In the middle was a third, overlayed with twisting curves in red and blue that responded to the waveform. On the left seemed to be a frequency analysis of the each of the preceding three curves, with a few areas heavily amplified.
Experimentally I blew quietly through my lips, too quietly to be heard, and watched the waveforms wrinkle and stutter. The Master Programmer still had his back to me, unmoving, fixed on the screen.
“Brewed for too long,” he said suddenly, when I was still a good twenty metres away across the floor. I heard him perfectly in the silence, his detached, calm voice.
“The tea?” I asked, and the waveforms buzzed.
“Yes.”
I knew it was disrespectful, but I had to ask. “Master, how can you know it is brewed for too long if you have not yet tasted?”
“The sound. There are microbubbles in the tea; they form faster the more it is brewed. They pop. They make noises.”
I looked at the heavily amplified frequency analyses on the screen. He knew. He could read them. He could see the popping sounds of the bubbles in the tea and the padding of my footsteps, all in the dancing feeds. I was quiet.
A few more steps later I was standing behind the Master. I stopped, not saying a word, and held out the cup of tea.
The Master held out one hand behind him and took the cup. As I was about to leave he turned his head to look at me.
He was wearing a blindfold.
“Thank you,” he said, “and tread quietly on the way back down.”

Jan 12 2010

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What my MSc is Actually About

I spend quite a lot of time explaining to people what the hell I’m actually studying. It’s quite difficult because my MSc is made up a motley collection of modules that don’t really have much in common.

The central theme is Natural Computation. It’s basically about

Looking at the ways nature processes information- all kinds of information. Computers aren’t the only things that compute- animals, plants, cells and bacteria, anything that lives, has to make decisions and “think” in some way. Even if it’s as simplistic as angling a leaf to perfectly catch the light. (Which actually turns out to be very complicated indeed).
Trying to learn from these processes and copy them in our electronic computers. Imitating nature often gives us far better results than trying to solve problems ourselves. Artificial computers are blazingly fast but incredibly stupid. Nature’s computers (the brain, the immune system, and so on) are much slower, but their complex architectures make them incredibly cunning.

My modules this term are…

Complex Bio-Inspired Algorithms: we looked at how ants work together to find food, how the immune system decides what it should take out and what it should leave alone, and how birds and fish avoid predators by flocking. Then we saw how we can learn from these to build pathfinding algorithms (the ants), antivirus and fault detection systems (the immune system) and swarms of cool-looking but rather useless £400 doughnut-sized robots that can flock together- provided someone turns them around before they fall off the edge of the table.
Neural Networks: we studied systems that copy the brain (all brains, human to insect, share roughly the same architecture). The human brain is an interlinked web of nearly a hundred billion cells called neurons, and the patterns of electrical current flowing between them are our thoughts. The largest artificial brain has 20 billion neurons and runs on a supercomputer, and it can’t do very much compared to a person. Yet.
Evolutionary algorithms: your body is an evolved solution to the problem of keeping yourself alive. Over millions of years we’ve become more and more sophisticated and tuned as natural selection acted on our gene pool. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could solve real-world problems like traffic routing or even electronic circuit design just by letting the answers evolve for themselves? Well, we can. You have to generate a huge amount of random solutions, kill off the shit ones, keep the good ones, maybe mix things up a bit, and repeat. This process has been used to generate quite complex electronic circuits that do things like measure frequency. And we don’t understand how they work. And we don’t need to. They evolved themselves, and they work.
Quantum information processing: I’m not sure why this module is even in my course, as it’s not very “mother nature”- it underlies the physics behind the entire universe, not just a bunch of furry things on a random planet. But I@m glad it is. It’s absolutely mind-blowing. Basically, on the subatomic level, things don’t really exist. Objects (such as they are) don’t have a definite location or state- just a set of states in which they might be found. Classical objects have being. Quantum objects exist only in superpositions of different states. By juggling these superpositions and bending them around (we usually work with superpositions of light and laser beams) we can build computers. They’re not just faster than classical computers. They’re on a whole new level. Quantum computing is going to be more revolutionary than the transistor or the processor. And quantum theory as a whole rips the foundations out from the entire way you think about the world.

It’s been rather fun so far.

Next term we’re doing…

Emergent systems- large interacting systems with very simple rules that, when looked at as a whole, have very exciting properties.
Simulating complex biosystems, like proteins, DNA and cells.
Quantitative research methods- how to do experiments properly. Yes, PROPERLY. No more of this “oooh, method A is 0.0002% more effective than method B! REVOLUTION!!”
Evolvable hardware. The self-building circuits that I was on about.
Computing with biology and chemistry- using jars of DNA to work stuff out for you! Like the computers in Star Trek: Voyager!

Then I get a 6-month project as part of which I am apparently expected to publish papers. LOL.

Dec 4 2009

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kitchen.coffeemaker.brew()

Wouldn’t it be really fun if you could connect to every electronic device you owned (from your laptop down to the toaster) remotely, and tell it to do things?

You could write a program that would run at 9am every morning to switch on all the lights downstairs, preheat the oven, make you some coffee, and turn on the TV.

Or you could log into your house via a web interface and switch the heating on from work before you left for home.

Or you could remotely turn off some lights you’d left on, or record a TV programme.

This idea is presently in its infancy in the form of smart-house power controllers, like plug sockets that you can switch on and off over a network. But these only control power, and are not part of actual devices.

What I’m imagining is a universal, standardised protocol (call it Universal Device Control Protocol or something) by means of which every piece of electronic gear you own can be talked to by a computer.

The manufacturer of each device would write a library of functions you could call to a) make the device do things b) check various variables of its status (fridge temperature, time until toast ready…)

This really wouldn’t take much..

A wifi (cost about £10) or maybe Bluetooth (less than £3) transciever in each device. We don’t need higher bandwidth because we’re only transmitting trivial control signals, not audio streams or anything).
A control processor, which need not be very powerful at all (PIC or less). No actual intelligence is required as all we are doing is recieving commands, and maybe transmitting information about the state of the device (eg. whether your toast is ready).
Some hardware to translate control signals into device action- i.e. a relay to switch on the toaster.

This would be very hard to engineer into existing devices (i.e. a CD player would have to have its entire architecture deconstructed so that calls to play and pause functions could be inserted) but very easy to design into future devices.

There are many advantages…

Universal control from a local area (via wifi/bluetooth) or from anywhere in the world (via control software running on your home laptop or router) of every single electronic device you own.
Well…um… that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

However we can envisage numerous problems…

Security. How do you stop your malicious neighbours from turning off all your lights during a party by bluetooth? Authentication on both ends would be required, as well as full encryption.
Anyone eavesdropping would (even if they couldn’t decrypt) be able to tell that you were talking to your devices, and probably which ones were replying to you, by the presence of signals.
At the moment we have to be near a device to control it. This proximity gives a certain degree of safety as we have to supervise the device- if you lit your heating or oven from the office you have no way of knowing whether it has actually fired or whether it’s just leaking gas. If you remotely turn on your kettle you don’t know if it has spilled boiling water all over your dog or not.
Control. If there’s a wifi/bluetooth router in the house, all the devices can connect to this. But what if you bring your toaster over to a friend’s house? We don’t want to have to mess about with wireless-key-woes style connection. Something automatic would have to be developed. Maybe a distributed network. But they’re hard.

Whether this ever actually happens depends on whether anyone would buy it. The market at the moment would be geeks-only, as you’d have to write your own software in the command language for UDCP. However as the tech became more evolved we’d get such things as integrated suites of home-running software that you could install- like an operating system for the home*.

I think affluent people would buy this- paying a premium (if the components cost £10 companies would probably charge at least £20 extra) for each device for total autonomous wireless control of everything you own? People already pay in the hundreds for coffeemakers, high-end toasters and so on.

Eventually it would become commonplace and every device would come with a UDCP control system by default.

Excuse me, I think forgot to lock the door downstairs… oh wait, I don’t have to move!

house.door1.getStatus(locked);

locked = FALSE

house.door1.lock();

*Let’s hope Microsoft do not get involved.

Note: something like this exists for servers and such. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol

Nov 30 2009

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Algorithmic politics

Consider the problem of running a country in such a way that the average happiness of the population is maximised.

At the moment, we go about this in a pretty terrible way.

Set up a horribly complex distributed system of people which, as a whole, has control over legislation.
Every five or so years, replace all these people with a new set whose way of doing things is often the complete opposite of the last way. In fact, the new way is often by definition the exact opposite- so that the people who weren’t keen on the last way will vote for the new way.
Loop.

In an ideal world, changes in policy would be chosen by their predicted effect on average population happiness (measuring this is a whole other problem). Or they could be tried out serially and the policy changes which led to the most happiness could be kept (the evolutionary algorithm approach). However, policy changes in the real world are controlled by

the votes of a large number of people who often have near to zero knowledge about the details and dynamics of the systems we are trying to design and optimise (the economy, the tax system, the criminal justice system…) but whose decisions are informed by either
tradition
the actions of the incumbent party in one isolated case (“I’m voting Conservative because Labour can’t run my local park!)
one’s social circle (“I’m voting Conservative because all my friends do”)
the media.

Nearly all the public’s conception of politics, the policies and people invoved, is shaped by the media. When did you last look at a website, draft bill or manifesto actually produced directly by a politician? When did you last watch BBC Parliament live? People very rarely look at the political system directly. We view it through TV, radio and newspapers, and what we see in these places is controlled by a very small number of people: the editorial team, journalists and producers of the sources concerned.

So if you put the country in the hands of a team of software developers, how would they go about “running the country?”

(We assume, hippie-style, that the best way to go about this is by maximising population happiness. You could always choose another metric, though. What about maximising GDP? Or population intelligence? Or even, empire-style, land area controlled by the country?)

We could imagine…

Using some kind of software development lifecycle- work out requirements for the government and then try to refine this into actual policies.
The evolutionary approach- don’t design policies, but evolve them, making small changes and gradually tuning towards a better solution. We do nothing like this at the moment- we leap to an often diametrically opposite solution every time we have regime change. This would mean that our policies were not designed by people, however, but by the algorithm. Most people wouldn’t be too happy with this- even though it would probably achieve higher average happiness.

Unfortunately, though, there is no chance that at any point in the near future, government as we know it will be replaced with any kind of system that makes sense or tries to solve the problem in a reasonable and scientific way. It’s too ingrained in tradition and democracy is too much of a wonderful idea to give up.

Nov 27 2009

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Hey, gang.

Yes, you.

Thanks for coming. Please write me a comment... comments make me happy.

I'm Fintan.

My Wikipedia page

A Series of Unlikely Explanations