Colins Blog 2008 |
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I admit that I enjoy watching the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing. I wouldn't say I'm a fan, but I do enjoy it. But now I'm somewhat annoyed.
After last night's show, two of the couples were tied on three points from the judges, with another on only one point. The show finished, the vote started, and the live results program was later that evening.
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Well, I didn't vote - I didn't, and don't, care enough. And it's just as well. Now it's announced that the vote got suspended, all couples are through to the final, and the votes will now roll-over to next week.
That's unfair, unjust, possibly immoral, and very likely illegal. If I had voted for Rachel, my vote would now count against my preferred winner. Surely I'm not the only one who analysed things in that way, and so the arbitrary actions of those in charge have now artificially boosted Rachel's chances of winning.
Good one BBC. Nice to see that you clearly have no idea.
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Hmm. Mass of data - how to visualise.
Then I fired up the GraphViz tool and drew the graph. Brilliant tool. Simple in conception, sophisticated in implementation, and fantastically powerful in action.
The original version was simplistic and used the page names rather than their title, and it wasn't clickable. I also thought there was going to be a better layout, so I've touched the problem again. The results are on Paul Graham Essays.
Click on a few - they'll repay your time.
I've recently travelled by air again, and I thought I'd give the new station at Liverpool South Parkway a go. It seems that from a regular rail station you can buy a ticket to the airport, then catch the train to Liverpool South Parkway, then any one of several shuttle buses to the terminal itself. Sounds like a great idea, and certainly beats taking the car and parking, or a taxi.
So I turn up at the station - slightly skeptical, and ask for a ticket to the airport. No problem.
Well, actually, small problem. It seems I can't buy a period return. They do singles, of course. Slightly less obviously they do day returns, just in case you want to visit the airport for the day. What they don't let you do is go today, and come back tomorrow.
That seems a bit daft. It's not often I want to go to the airport just for the day, but there you go.
So I buy a single.
You may see where this is going, but I didn't. It was, after all, morning, and I'm not at my best in the mornings.
So now I've returned, and I'm looking to buy my ticket to go home. Only I can't. There is no train station at the airport. It seems that I need to buy a bus ticket to a station, and only then can I buy a ticket for the train.
So all the advantages have suddenly evaporated. Why can't I buy a period return from my home station? Why can't a buy a single through ticket from the airport to home? Did anyone think this through?
Did anyone think at all?
Theory is fine, theory is hard, theory is essential, but turning theory into practical and useful devices that make the difference to our lives is a rare gift, insufficiently celebrated.
Bother.
Anyway, I know how to say that I can't speak Swedish, and for some reason I can't reasonably explain I recently put it into Google's translation system The result was interesting:
| Original text: (Swedish) | Jag talar inte svenska |
| Translation: (English) | I do not speak English |
Not sure I can put my finger on exactly what's worrying me about this ...
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There's a plaque that does its best to show what it was all about, and what it might have been like. It talks about the rituals as best they can deduce, and there is a picture of how it may have looked.
But it's actually all a little sad. The cows are in the field above, pulling up the grass and solemnly chomping away. The ground can't decide whether it's grass, bog, mud or what, and we're here, in the middle of a large expanse of nothing much.
What was it like? How can we remember it? Does it do it justice to see it like this? The purists don't want it rebuilt, or reconstructed, or otherwise touched, but is it really fair to leave it as hang-dog as this?
Visiting Alnwick (pronounced Annick) gardens (not the castle this time - that's a separate attraction). They have a fantastic water garden sculpture section - brilliant. Each sculpture is attractive in its own right, but most are inspired by, or clearly demonstrate, a scientific principle.
There's a "fountain" that uses the Coanda effect, a fountain that shows the principle of hydrostatic pressure, and one that's an exquisite example of a vortex. And more.
The kids, or course, didn't care. They were having a great time playing in the water - the principles and ideas going straight over their heads. But that's not the point. Exposing them to these effects now, letting them experience the way things work and making it part of their lives, means that they have some context should they choose to study them later, or some understanding of the ideas behind difficult questions like how aeroplanes fly.
Surely this is an unalloyed "Good Thing(tm)".
But then I wondered.
Suppose we experienced on a daily basis some of the minor miracles of physics and engineering. What would we have left to cause intrigue and wonder?
Suppose it was obvious that light is both a particle and a wave. Suppose it was obvious that things got shorter as they travelled faster. Suppose it was obvious that clocks went faster as you climbed a mountain. What would there be left to marvel about?
Kids I know take it for granted that Sat Nav systems can tell them where they are, and guide them to wherever they want to go. They have no idea how it works, and in many cases they simply don't care. Technology is becoming - has become - so ubiquitous that the sense of wonder is gone, and there is nothing left that makes them go "How does that work?" The answer is always just "It's a computer."
But where will we get the scientists, engineers, programmers and mathematicians of tomorrow? How can we create that sense of "Wow!", and not just from the ever increasing, and increasingly pointless, eye-candy of computer games and CGI "action."
How can we make kids interact with the real world, shape the real world, create the real world, and not just be passive passengers, experiencing, but never contributing.
Computers do everything these days, but how does a computer actually work?
That's why it was nice to see a well-structured, thoughtful, and above all accurate report on a maths event. Yes, it suggested that the people there were slightly kooky, but at least it didn't portray them as potential serial killers.
The Guardian:
| "Curriculum" comes from the Latin for "racetrack, and as soon as you have a race you have winners and losers. Is that necessarily a good thing? |
Clearly this shows the two different points of view for the question:
The hope is that good grades indicate genuine achievement. The perennial argument about A-Levels is exactly that - do A-Levels now give the same indication of underlying achievement as in previous years? But really the questions are:
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Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote in his paper "Aims for a Young Scientist" (EWD1055A.PDF):
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As so often happens in English, "Humble" has several definitions. In encouraging people to show more humility we are not asking them to become low in station - that would be ridiculous. Taking "humility" to imply that you are striving for low standards is ludicrous. Clearly if someone is encouraging us to be humble they must have something else in mind.
Assuming there is meaning in the exhortation, another meaning of "humble" must be relevant. Here is a definition from the Concise Oxford Dictionary:
Edsger W. Dijkstra was perhaps one of the most influential members of computing science's founding generation. A web site of his writings is here:
It is all good reading, some technical, some sociological, some ranting, but all informative, even if you don't agree with it.
It's a really good puzzle - see if you can work it out.
Anyway, I went and had a look. Then I started following links, and looking at other videos, and on it goes. I'm sure you know what I mean. Even if you're a complete luddite you may have lost yourself for a time reading a dictionary or encyclopedia, perhaps especially if you're a luddite.
Sorry - "late adopter."
On 2005/06/14 I wrote this:
| It has been said that the internet, and the World Wide Web in particular is a great leveller, a great equaliser. It gives pretty much anyone the ability to publish on a world-readable medium what ever they want to say ... what we've discovered upon giving everyone ... the ability to publish, is that most of them don't have anything interesting to say. |
I should like to consider the folk song and expound briefly
on a theory I have held for some time to the effect that the
reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were
written by the people. If professional song writers had
written them instead, things might have turned out considerably
differently
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It's a deeply worrying trend, actually.
News sites used to find their own news, report it as clearly and even-handedly as they could. Admittedly, many have, or had, a strong bias, some were downright one-sided, but at least what they produced was well-produced. Now stories are followed by poorly thought-out, poorly constructed, poorly phrased and content-free rants.
George Bernard Shaw said "People would sooner die than think. And most of them do." Why are we being subjected to the endless, mindless drivel.
The BBC news site says:
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Good writing is hard, and now, thanks to being swamped by the volume of value-free, well, let's just say twaddle, it's hard to find anything actually worth reading.
I was half surprised at how readable was the version that I created with my eyes closed, but also half disappointed. Perhaps I should finally learn to touch type properly.
I'm sure those of you who travel by train a reasonable amount have seen the idea. Just as some coaches used to be designated as smoking, and if you smoke you went and sat in those coaches, in this case it's "Being Quiet" that's banished to the special coach.
And the analogy is surprisingly accurate. Just as in the case of the smoking coach, if you didn't smoke you were still allowed to go in there. In the case of the "Quiet Zone", people who aren't quiet do, indeed, still go in there.
The sign on the window, indeed, on every window, says
Sit back and relax...Please refrain from using mobile phones,and creating unnecessary noise - thank you. Quiet Zone. |
The "Q" has headphones on, and the "i" is actually a mobile. Very sweet.
Great idea too. It means that people on long trips and having to get some work done - thinking style work - have the chance to do it without the distraction of mobile ring tones, loud conversation, and all that "unnecessary noise".
Which is, of course, right alongside "necessary noise". In the last 20 minutes I've heard nearly 30 telephone calls and text messages. Yes, I am sad, I have been counting.
So just as with the smoking coach, where it was still permitted for non-smokers to go, we have quiet coaches, where non-quiet people can go. The ticket inspector does his best, but people literally ignore him, too busy with their conversations to pay attention.
And unlike smoking, mobile phone noise is getting worse. And worse.
These days it's quite unusual for me to sit in the quiet coach. It's just as noisy as the others. You may wonder why I bother specifically to hunt out the non-quiet coaches if they are, indeed, pretty much the same. The fact of the matter is that they are pretty much the same, but at least the noise is expected, and doesn't make me so bloody annoyed.
Most of the time it doesn't work as well as it could. Perhaps as well as it should.
The reason is clear. Companies don't want to make you happy. Companies want to make money. They will do as little as they can get away with, reducing their quality of service until the money they save is less than the money they lose.
Because customers are generally loyal, and forgiving, companies can get away with reducing their services to a very, very poor quality indeed.
And that's what happens in a competitive market. Sod the customer, we have to compete, so we'll give them as little as we can get away with.
Cynical? Me? I prefer to think of myself as realistic.
We'll chart some of our progress on the Moving To Broadband page.
It's also not that efficient. There are several repeated letters, including "e" and "o". Can we do better than the 35 letters? What about
How about a complete change of theme?
We can play this game for a while, and it's instructive to do so. In fact, there were some villains from a remote valley village in Wales who found a funny symbol made out of some clear crystal. They thought it might be worth money, so they tried to work out how to steal it, but the task left them scratching their heads.
In fact, one might say this:
| ¿Cómo llamar a un ascensor en Inglés? |
The answer expected is, of course, "a lift".
No. The actual answer is "Con su dedo." - "With your finger."
How can this be translated into English? The original question, when translated literally, is "How do you call a lift in English?" The answer now is obvious and unsurprising. The colloquial translation of the original is "What do you call a lift in English?", and now the joke doesn't work at all.
It simply doesn't translate.
Sometimes when I'm talking to people, trying to explain something, I can see that it's just not working. They aren't hearing what I'm saying - the thoughts from my head are just not getting there. They simply don't get it. This doesn't mean they're stupid, it doesn't mean they're incapable, it simply means that they don't have the same basis from which to work, and the "explanation", doesn't.
Language is an amazing thing, and the more you study it, the more you realise it simply can't work. The fact that we can communicate at all is quite stunning.
I finish with two quotations from Terry Pratchett. The first points out the different in attitude that perhaps is driven by the recognition that there are different languages, and lack of understanding is often down to the listener.
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