Fuddland
Category: Science
Entries about the world of science.
This category also has the following subcategories [number of entries in brackets]:
- Computing [11]
- Technology [2]
It’s about time Pluto was stripped of its planet status: the significantly smaller, non-spherical, bizarrely-orbiting hunk of rock at the edge of the Solar System has enjoyed its false apotheosis for far too long.
I’ve visited the Arizona observatory where Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, and noted at the time how prominently [and proudly] it was advertised that Pluto was the only planet to be found by a non-European [read: American]. It would be quite interesting to have a look at them nationalities of the subset of the 2,500 voters who decided to downgrade Pluto’s standing, and the nationalities of those who wanted to keep things how they are, but of course I can’t find this breakdown anywhere [I suspect the vote was anonymous].
Meanwhile, the mathematical world is agog at the news the man now generally accepted to have solved a hundred-year-old problem doesn’t want the various awards and prize monies to which he is entitled. Except I don’t believe it’s really the maths world that is surprised that he doesn’t want the Fields Medal or the $1million Clay Institute prize money; if he’s anything like some of the mathematicians I know, he has probably forgotten most of the details of his proof because they turned out to be obvious, and has already moved on to solving something more difficult — it seems to be a few journalists and science authors expressing their amazement at this shunning of notoriety, whilst being unable to draw any astonishment from professional mathematicians beyond, “Well, he’s just a bit odd.” Throw a rock at any maths department in the world and you’ll hit at least one academic just as odd — and what’s more, they’ll go on to tell you the velocity at which the rock was travelling at the moment of impact.
In: Science
2006 / 08 / 25 – 15:04 | Comment [6] | Top
In order to both reduce the amount of packing I’ll need to do when I move house, and to raise some extra pocket money [my grant ran out in March and there’s no teaching over the summer], I’ve offered-up quite a number of old videos, CDs and DVDs for sale on Amazon Marketplace, ones I’ve rarely — or in some cases have never — watched. I was quite surprised to find that whilst the CDs and DVDs are shifting pretty rapidly, no one wants any of the videos, despite them being only a quid or so each. I suppose the general decline in VCR and video cassette sales means that only rare [i.e. unavailable on DVD] items would be sought after.
Also, people are really bad at leaving feedback ratings; of the twenty-two people who have purchased one of my items, only three have bothered to give me a Seller Rating. Happily, I received top marks from all three, but it’d be nice if every one of the twenty-two took a few minutes to show I’m a reliable Seller — I bet if they were unhappy with the products they’d be straight online to give me a negative rating.
Update: Of course, no sooner had I posted this than someone bought one of the videos. Which reminds me, I must write that entry on the dearth of glamour models waiting on my doorstep when I come home…
In: Local News & Science / Technology & WWW
2005 / 07 / 29 – 12:29 | Top
My theory is based on a widely-known fact: the longer you wait for a bus [at a stop which a number of buses travelling different routes coincide], the more chance there is that the next one to arrive will be the one you want.
When the first one pulls up, you hardly expect it to be your bus. If it’s not, then when the next one arrives, you think it’s more likely to be yours. When ten buses have passed, none of which were the one you wanted, then the next one must almost certainly be for you. And so on… [Until you realise you’re at the wrong stop. But let’s assume you are at the right one.]
The logic governing these thought processes is the assumption that, as time goes on, the probability of an event occurring approaches a certainty; it has to happen eventually, if you just wait long enough. [In mathematical terms, an event which is certain to occur has probability equal to 1; one which can never happen has probability 0. For example, the chances of this entry receiving any comments supporting my theory is close to 0.]
So now let’s apply this rule to the following event:
Time travel is going to be discovered by a human, and it will be used to travel backwards to a time earlier than our present day, and its secret revealed to another human, providing them with all the technology required, who will then demonstrate the discovery to the whole world.
Clearly, this has not happened [unless I missed the report on last night’s news]. Therefore time travel will never be discovered by a human being for as long as we exist.
Ta da!
In: Science
2005 / 06 / 20 – 09:53 | Comment [16] | Top
Apple’s new iPod shuffle and it’s “innovative” notion of random playlists is precisely how I usually use my own MP3 player: very rarely do I copy entire albums into its 256+64Mb memory. I just fire up either Rio’s bespoke synchronisation application or Windows Media Player and copy over a random selection of my music, and enjoy the playlist for a couple of days before uploading a new one.
It’s because I knew this was how I wanted to use my player that I didn’t opt for a proper iPod in the first place: I don’t want all my music with me at all times, but listen to only ten percent of it on a regular basis — I want to be pleasantly surprised by a song I haven’t heard in years. And if I forget the name of the song or which album it’s on, I have a handy LCD providing the basic metadata, something Apple decided wasn’t worth adding — I can imagine that might lead to some frustrated users desperately trying to recall the name of the singer whilst out and about, having no choice but to try and remember to look it up later on. I can understand the thinking behind not including a display [reinforcing the fact that it’s designed for random play, as well as cutting the cost I should imagine], but personally I prefer to have the information readily available.
There’s an interesting [and lengthy!] look at the idea of shuffled playlists over at City of Sound.
In: Music & Science / Technology
2005 / 01 / 13 – 12:38 | Comment [1] | Top
This is the ill thought-out and quietly-added “feature” of Windows XP SP2 which has caused Imogen and Matt, amongst I’m sure many others, to lose valuable work:
No operating system should ever assume it’s safe to reboot without the express permission of the user. If the updates are critical to the security of the system, by all means temporarily disable any internet connections, but don’t reboot it in the middle of the night, there’s no way it can know it’s not losing valuable work in the process. These points aside, five minutes is a ridiculously short warning time — that’s time enough to be off making a cup of tea or talking on the phone away from the computer. If they wanted to force a reboot, twenty-four hours notice would be much more apt.
To prevent this happening, change your auto-update settings to one of the middle options: it can either download any updates then wait for permission to install, or just notify the user of their existance.
2004 / 12 / 17 – 12:24 | Comment [2] | Top
Don’t you just love it when you upgrade your video card drivers and you find they’ve added a whole new feature?
2004 / 12 / 04 – 18:40 | Comment [1] | Top
Change the clock.
According to the system clock on this laptop, it’s almost half past six in the evening. Except that it’s not, where I am, it’s almost half past twelve in the afternoon. Understandably, the Department sets up most people to have Limited Accounts when they borrow a laptop — they don’t want people installing any old software, either on purpose or by accident on visiting a dodgy website whilst bored and alone in their motel room after a long day’s conferencing. [This is not the case with myself, I hasten to add: I am neither bored nor alone, and am staying somewhere a damn sight nicer than a motel room. Nor am I at a conference, for that matter.]
But preventing a user from changing the clock? How can I break anything by setting it to a different timezone?
2004 / 09 / 05 – 18:24 | Comment [1] | Top
The progress bar — some of you, particularly those who spend all bloody day messing around with Matlab, may call it the “waitbar” — is a wonderful thing. It puts one’s mind at rest; it says, “Hold on for a second, I’m just doing something, but don’t fret: so long as I keep inching towards 100%, you can rest assured I’ve not hung your precious machine. Tell you what, why don’t you have a nice cup of tea? Go on, I’ll just keep on letting you know how much further I have left to go.”
Previously, when I set my code running, I had no idea how long it would take. Well, I could guess, based on certain parameters I’d set: minutes, maybe hours, possibly days. But would “hours” turn out to be “several days” written another way? Would “days” be “weeks times seven”? I was never really sure, and it usually meant I’d stop the code before it had finished its run, change a couple of things to try and make it run a bit quicker but with less accuracy, then restart it all over again — and I had no idea if I’d stopped it three seconds before it was due to spit out the end result.
Then I discovered I could make Matlab display a progress bar, that this was incredibly simple to do, and all was joyous in the land of Fudd. Not just because now I can judge how long my code is going to take, based on the speed of the various bars that I’ve added at various stages, but also it makes the code appear to run faster: I can quite happily sit and watch the bars creep up to the big one-oh-oh and not go slightly mad wondering if I should stop everything and change that 0.05 to 0.04.
Of course, my progress bars live in a strange fantasy world far-removed from those we come across in everyday life: my progress bars always reach 100%; they increase fairly uniformly, except for one which accelerates, but that’s because the code I wrote does fewer and fewer calculations the farther it gets through its run. The progress bars we see during our average days, however, are progress bars gone bad.
They tease us: they shoot up to 95% in ten seconds, then take ten minutes to do the last 5%; or they get distracted by something on the telly and give up completely on the task in hand, sitting firmly at 45% until you crack and hit the “Cancel” button; sometimes they pretend to be finished, displaying a lovely filled-in block of one-hundred-percentness, but refuse to relinquish control of your computer. “What is it you have left to do?” you plead. “Oh, nothing,” the bar whistles innocently, “I just like being here.”
Not so my progress bars: they are Plato’s Progress Bars, plucked straight from the world of ideas. Now if only the rest of my code would find its way down from there…
2004 / 07 / 19 – 22:58 | Comment [3] | Top
There’s nothing like a freshly reformatted hard disc — free from months of needless clutter and with a new policy of reinstalling software only when you want to use it for the first time rather than on the off-chance you might need to convert all those MP3s to MIDI files or write a LaTeX document in Cyrillic using four different text editors — to really make you appreciate how nifty your PC really is, despite being a few years old now.
The only downside is when you get so distracted downloading all the patches and updates or locating those registration codes that disappeared into your email archives several months ago, that you forget you’ve left a rather large pot of water boiling on the hob [to remove the chlorine before cooling and topping up the fishtank], and only remember when you notice the mirror seems to be dripping in condensation and you realise that’s a bit odd for quite a warm May afternoon.
sharing a pc — or specifically, the mouse — between two people is fine if they are both of the same handedness, but in my house there is a problem because i am left-handed and my housemate is right-handed. the setup is such that the cord does not reach over to the right-hand side of the keyboard, and whilst we can both use the other hand to some degree, it’s much nicer to be able to have things orientated naturally.
it’s to this kind of situation that cordless mice are ideally suited. in fact, i have one, but it’s got a tiny flaw: it’s rubbish. the batteries it takes make it too heavy to use freely — the ball gets stuck very frequently no matter what surface you use it on; the range of the receiver is laughable — any further than a foot or so away and you might as well be trying to throw a tissue to somebody in a hurricane for all the good it does; if you are within range, the batteries run out within a couple of days, and no matter how many packs you buy, you’ll always find you have no spares precisely when all the shops are shut.
so i decided i should take the plunge and splash out on the all-singing cordless, optical, rechargeable logitech mouse i’d heard about from phil. except, of course, it’s ergonomically designed for right-handed people only. look at those handy configurable buttons on the left-hand side — yes, i’m sure they’re easy to press if i remember to dislocate my little finger every time i sit down at the computer.
i’ve searched extensively but this is about the only cordless, optical, rechargeable mouse i can find — the next option is to buy a cordless, optical mouse and a pack of suitable rechargeable batteries, but this doesn’t have the convenience of charging every time the mouse is stowed away for a few hours. it’s annoying because, seriously, who actually uses those extra buttons? left click, right click, middle click sometimes, scrollwheel — that’s all i need. mac users get by with just one button, surely eight is overkill?
2003 / 10 / 06 – 16:08 | Comment [16] | Top
2003 / 08 / 20 – 02:37 | Comment [12] | Top
2003 / 07 / 17 – 11:47 | Comment [10] | Top
2003 / 06 / 28 – 17:15 | Comment [11] | Top
2003 / 05 / 14 – 16:51 | Comment [2] | Top
2003 / 04 / 15 – 14:11 | Top
