Posts

  • 1st
    • Bell ringing → I was walking past the church on the corner today, and the bells started ringing. Here is a ding by dong update of my thoughts: bong… Ah, the bells are ringing. bong… bong… Three rings. Must be telling the time. My watch only says 6:55 though. bong… bong… bong… bong… There we go, seven rings for seven o’clock. bong… Hang on. bong… bong… bong… Eleven [...]
  • 3rd
    • Unicode post. Please ignore. → I think I have unicode cracked now. 나가 unicode을 지금 부숴 달라고 한다 것 을 나는 생각한다 . 私がunicode を今割ってもらうことを私は考える。 我认为我安排unicode 现在崩裂。
  • 6th
  • 8th
    • Political analogy problem → - So tell me, Future Boy, who’s Governor of California in 2003? - Arnold Schwarzenegger. - Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor!? Then who’s Vice Governor? ______ _______? So who is to Arnie as Jerry Lewis is to Ronald Reagan?
  • 12th
    • Rules for posting comments → Read this before posting any comments
    • Naming is owning → Dave made me think, by writing what somebody else said: Judaism had its worse moment when it became an ism: it got put in its box and stopped changing. This is probably really obvious, but “-ism” construction is just plain old name calling. Putting things in a box makes you feel powerful, because the metaphor implies that [...]
    • Lessons learned when using Unicode with Python → I’ve been wrestling with Unicode for some time now, but it looks like that time is almost over. Hopefully somebody will find this a useful shortcut to the long meandering trudges through Google that I found myself on. Unicode is an abstract mapping from numbers to character symbols. It is not a document encoding. UTF-8 is a [...]
    • Review: Permutation City → This seems to be required reading in all the transhumanist/AI/wibble circles, so it’s been high on my reading list. Now I’ve read it. Now I can be one of the people shouting at other people, telling them to read it immediately. This is a SF story for mathgeeks, or anyone who can appreciate really big numbers. [...]
    • Review: Underworld (the film) → (Wrote this weeks ago. Don’t know why I didn’t post it. The film was probably so bad it wasn’t even worth writing a bad review of.) Underworld is 100% shite. It wasn’t even bad enough to be entertainingly shoddy; it was just boring. All the bad bits of the Matrices, but aimed at goths, and crapper. [...]
  • 13th
    • I hate you, Manchester NH → There is a city in the USA, in New Hampshire, called Manchester. It’s obviously a cheap knockoff of the real Manchester. That wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t pollute the “Manchester” keyword in Google. Sorry to anyone living in Manchester, NH, but your town annoys me regularly.
    • The crushing sadness of Manchester’s club lures → On arriving back in halls, I was greeted with the friendly piles of local club spam under my door. It’s worse this year, on all counts. Manchester being the UK’s most bohemian city, the competition between clubs must be furious. Most of the fallout is in the form of increasingly pornographic leaflets and adverts. If you’re [...]
  • 20th
    • Circumstantial Evidence → Now here’s a mini adventure! Living in catered halls means eating at set times. I usually (well, always) eat at about 5pm, with a bunch of other people, some regulars, some not so regular. S is one of the regulars who eats at our table. She’s sat with us almost every day. The weekend before [...]
    • Course convergence → Had one of those blinding flashes of holism today. Three modules this semester are Topology of surfaces, Metric spaces, and the unholy An introduction to measure theory, integral and dimension. It turns out that they’re really all the same thing! (except the last one, which will additionally give you the feeling of swimming in infinitely [...]
  • 21st
    • Overheard conversation → “What d’you have?” said random person A walking past me. Random person B, in a thick rolling-r’s Russian accent: “Two… mackerel.” Proper How-to-download-WinBoost moment.
  • 22nd
    • Last flight of Concorde → Raswan asked if I’d heard a huge window shaking thundering roaring sound this afternoon. I had. It was a Concorde going over, low enough to get a good look. God knows what it sounds like when it’s going fast. Unless I camp out at the airport tonight and tomorrow, it’ll have been the last time [...]
    • Catcher in the Rye → The best part about reading a book is finishing it and googling for things people have said about it. I didn’t know this was a banned book when I started it, and I never would’ve guessed if I hadn’t looked it up. The psychotic prudes in the USA are still trying to pretend it doesn’t exist, [...]
  • 25th
    • Reading backwards → I noticed something interesting just now: I tend to read backwards. Most web pages, and a few books, have a very low signal to noise ratio, so rather than reading everything, I skim over for interesting keywords and phrases, then quickly backtrack to the point where the ideas leading up to the interesting phrase began. [...]
  • 26th
    • Big beige square → Presenting a big beige square:   Thankyou.
    • Terrorists travel on the Magic Bus → Saw this marker pen graffiti inside a bus today: BIN LADENS CAVE & NO WEED Cmon Britain increase ure sub fleet and transform the concordes (B53s) - fuck america! u can do it. At least it has more purpose than your average scrawling.