February 2011
1 post
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...
August 2010
1 post
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...
June 2010
3 posts
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...
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
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...
January 2010
2 posts
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....
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....
December 2009
1 post
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...
November 2009
4 posts
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...
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...
Elementary, my dear Wilson
So I & Dasha realised (thanks in part to the Uncyclopedia article on House, which is quite fun) that nearly every House episode has the same kind of structure. There are lots of things which always happen.
So we wrote a Python program to generate House episodes.
The scene is a baseball game. John, a 14-year-old leukemia patient, collapses with a serious case of anal haemhorraging. The credits...
code
import random
team = [ "Foreman", "Cuddy", "Chase", "Cameron", "Wilson", "13", "Kutner", "Amber"]
namesM = ["John", "Clint", "Eric", "Jordan", "Jamie", "Angus", "Nathan", "Joe"]
namesF = ["Mary", "Yolanda", "Jordan", "Marilyn", "Miranda", "Janice", "Rachel"]
starsM = ["Patrick Stewart", "Axl Rose", "Nathan Fillion"]
starsF = ["Sigourney Weaver", "Lucy Lawless", "Lucy Liu", "Kate...
June 2009
1 post
How to rotate screens on campus computers
Hey team!
Some of the campus computers (including most of the library PCs) have LCD monitors that you can physically rotate by 90 degrees. Did you know that it’s also possible to rotate your Windows screen as well?
This makes it much easier to read A4 documents on screen, as you can fit a whole page on your screen at once. Most web pages are also far taller than they are wide, which makes...
May 2009
2 posts
Synchronicity:
It turns out that something like the Hasse-Weil zeta function (from the Fermat proof), the Riemann zeta function, can help in calculating the critical temperature for a Bose-Einstein condensate!
Connections are everywhere.
Science Gets Older, Too
It’s amazing how much your view of science changes over the years. Not as you get older, but as you progress through the strata of knowledge and academia, up the slopes of the Mountains of Knowledge.
It starts off, well, before you can really remember, when it first occurred to you to ask questions about what was really going on. You were five and you wondered why there was light when you...
April 2009
1 post
The Adventure of the Masterless Game
I take up my pen now to relate to you one of the most intricate and challenging pursuits ever to grace the billiard rooms of the Strand. It first came to my attention in 189- when my dear friend Christopher S. of Portsmouth invited me to his chambers with the utmost excitement. When I arrived it took me several minutes to calm him sufficiently that he could relate to me the reason for his...
March 2009
8 posts
Sorry to those of you who don’t have a snowflake’s clue in the foggiest hell what I am on about. Just ignore me and go and eat some biscuits.
Here are some of the many things I hate about Visual C++.
Does your program want to talk to some files? Visual C’s not having any of that, oh no. Launch your program from the IDE and it’s deaf and blind. Unless you use absolute file...
Remember, kiddies,
jamsque:
that no matter where you go in life, a poet has been there before you. I feel that the last verse of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost adequately sums up my current feelings on my final year project, which is due in a week on Tuesday:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I...
So this is how it goes
Terms: we’ve had nearly eight of them now. Has anyone noticed any patterns?
The Week 1 Killzone. You have exams. Lots of them. You’ve just got back from a lovely holiday and there they are waiting for you in Central Hall with big teeth and the FEAR. There’s a certain 1960s architecture smell about Central Hall, and whenever you whiff it it takes you right back to the zone, the...
The 7 Levels of Cunning
Do it yourself.
Pay someone to do it for you.
Convince someone to do it for you for free.
Use a program to do it.
Write a program to do it.
Get someone else to write a program to do it.
Write a program to write a program to do it for you.
Once you have level seven, i.e. a program that can write programs to do anything for you, you are what is termed Set Up for Life.
You have also...
Don’t fuck with C++.
It’s like weaving a complex spell from patient, brooding dark magic. It’s incredibly complex, terrifyingly powerful and it will not give you an inch of mercy or a single second chance. Messing around without really knowing what you’re doing and expecting to be fine is like drink-driving an F-15.
More specifically, watch out for local variables. They...
Neutrino Boy
Most days, I pay it no more mind than a brick door stop. Today, I squint to see the orange orb spew golden arcing filament across the Atlantic morning sky, everything’s in spin. Before it’s too late, I look away, blue spots with yellow flame fringe linger. Past the sparse hackles to redden my scalp, warming sidewalks and bones baking the dirt in a clay flower pot softening...
The Pinocchio Paradox
Pinocchio: “My nose will grow now!”
What happens? Does the world explode?
February 2009
12 posts
"And when you broke my heart it was about a 9..."
This is the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.
It was developed by Justin Schmidt, entomologist and possibly beat poet who claims to have been stung by the majority of stinging hymenoptera.
1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
...
£16,000 worth of music: part II
(This is the second of a two-parter. The first is two posts ago.)
So I promised to show you how to get hold of all the music you could ever need from the Internet, safely, quickly and for free. This is how. I can’t believe more people don’t do this and it pains me to see people buying overpriced CDs like there’s no tomorrow.
Overpriced DVDs as well, actually, and they’re...
I will not see the flowers of our artificial minds For when they bloom I’ll be forgotten dust I’ll never see the shadows and I’ll never feel the winds Of other worlds, for pass away I must. Our children soon will walk the roads that travel to the stars But we will never follow where they wind We are constrained by ignorance and superficial wars Our minds they chain, our...
I have £16,000 worth of music. Would you like some...
I’ve just procured a new hard drive to back up my music on to, because I’ve experienced a hard drive crash before and lost the whole of my precious music collection (and it is precious. I love music.). It was absolutely traumatic and I had to spend months getting hold of it all again. But that’s another story.
I have 308 gigabytes of music. That’s…
48,585 songs
20...
Summer's Coming!!
It’s the festival season again! Well, it’s the season to start thinking about going to some.
Oxfam have a wonderful system where you volunteer at one or more festivals (3 8 hour shifts during the festival, but you get to arrive a day early and leave a day late if you want to) and in exchange you get in free. Trust me, having to steward doesn’t detract from the experience-...
“Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill 80 million Russians. I truly...”
– Charles de Gaulle
What Computer Science is Actually About
You have no idea what computer science is really about.
(Unless you do it, of course, in which case you can go back to sleep.)
It’s surprising how many people just don’t know what computer science actually involves. Actually, it’s not all that surprising, since it’s not a very popular subject in the public mind, and it’s become connected with a shedload of negative...
I’m blogging from someone’s iphone in an artificial intelligence for games practical! I’m impressed with the typing, it’s really good at getting the correct letters. It should have some punctuation on the first page though! I’ve got up to a quite fast speed and I’ve only just started using it! it can’t run applications in the background though. It is a...
About Me
Who
I’m called Fintan. He was an Irish saint. He was pretty hardcore and lived to be 260.
http://www.doonbleisce.com/Fintan.htm
What
I’m not a girl.
I am a cat though.
Where
I’m at the University of York at the moment, where they’re trying to make me learn computer science. That’s Old York.
When
I started in 88.
Whence
I’m from Middle England....
There’s a notation called Portable Game Notation that chess engines use to communciate moves, positions, game data, etc. It has fields such as Game Date, Players, Location, and Termination; the latter records how the game ended.
One of its possible values is “Death.”
January 2009
23 posts
http://www.elitemrp.net/index.php?page=hippietest
James thinks I’m a hippie.
(Among other people).
If five of you take this, and tell me the results, I’ll tell you my results.
I was in a bookshop. I found a long, intricate sociology book about a certain aspect of internet subculture. It was called “The Flame War.”
http://www.parkers.co.uk/cars/specs/Summary.aspx?model=651
Wrong.
Death is a Strange Attractor
There’s a concept in physics called a phase space. It’s the space of all the states a system can be in: the layouts of a chessboard, the possible velocities and positions of a pendulum, the ways the clouds can be laid out in the sky. All of them. Every imaginable configuration of a system is a point in the phase space.
Over time, a system changes; it evolves, it moves through...
Builder’s Breakfast: It’s quite awesome that it’s possible to engineer crisps that taste reasonably like bacon, eggs and buttered toast dipped in tomato sauce!
The Full English Breakfast is an amazing tradition, espescially when you jam everything you can possibly think of into it. I’m voting for this one.
Onion Bhaji tastes like onion bhaji. I have nothing more to say...
New layout… we has one!
The above is one of those comments that you find about every five minutes on the internet. Along with “welcome to my new blog, I’m going to post every day” or “under construction” or The New Year’s Resolutions Post.
Well, we does have one. And we only has one new year’s resolution, which is not to make any of them.
MP3 Software and Why it Sucks
It’s just impossible to find music library software that supports the small list of features that I need. I don’t think it’s greedy to expect a music player to:
Use a reasonable amount of memory
Be able to cope with a large library (mine is 300 gigs)
Start up reasonably fast, and not spent 30 seconds paging itself back into memory whenever you switch back to it
Those are the...
“And at the time I didn’t see how anybody could not love Israel. It was the...”
– Iain Banks, Dead Air
Walkers have a new thing to draw us even deeper into their corporate crisp fiefdom. It’s called the Taste Challenge or something similiarly exciting sounding, and it’s an amazing marketing strategy. They’re testing five new flavours of crisp on us (until around May) and we have to vote on which one becomes permanent; the others will disappear into the crisp-ether forever. So the...
1 tag
Some Formal Sucking-Up
Draft personal statement for AI MSc course at Edinburgh Uni. It’s still rough and many bits are cheesy. Like some red leicester you’ve left out of the fridge for days. Feedback would be appreciated!
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Ever since I discovered computer programming, my imagination has been captured by its complexity,...
Drunk blogging is fun. Har har har. Though not likely to be very coherent or even remotely understandable.
I’m going to have to watch out not to offend anyone during my blogging adventures. I think the groups of people I’m most likely to offend are
Religious people
Sociologists
People who like types of music I don’t like
People who don’t like Star Trek
I’ve finished all my exams! No more for fourteen weeks or so now.
On the other hand, I have to do a literature review, some save/load functions and an evolutionary algorithm for breeding and evaluating neural network processors before Wednesday. Plus I’m doing five modules this term (PUP, CGO, DCR, SDM and AFG).
I’m reading:
The Coming of the Quantum Cats by Frederik Pohl, I...
I’m going to bed now because I have an exam in… what… five hours. En garde.