fivemack | Recent Entries

Should you, for example, have a starving allosaur that you wish to feed, the Lucky Star Chinese restaurant, in the same large glass-fronted complex as the Cineworld cinema by the station, will serve you all the Chinese food you can eat for thirteen pounds. If you've brought a starving allosaur, you should probably also bring a small child of the kind that has just discovered it can walk with firm purpose in straight lines, to distract the wait-staff.

It is very tasty, though it is worth remembering that the signal from one's stomach "I'm full, for the love of all things stop eating now, yes, even free lychees and ice cream" takes about fifteen minutes to reach one's brain;

bugshaw and

aardvark179 were good company, as was the fabled

despotliz.

Unfortunately the person in front of me in the queue got the last ticket to The Prestige, and after several minutes of thoroughly English politeness I wandered home, discovering that rain makes the rims of bicycle tires so slippery that the little wheel of the dynamo no longer grips on them.

Full now.

I may have slightly alarmed my housemate with the volume of my involuntary cheer at seeing 'Rumsfeld resigns' on news.bbc.co.uk

Is there some series of command-line options to 'tar' which lets me create a tar file which contains the file called (with respect to the current directory) X/Y/Z/foo.baz but in such a way that, when my end-user unpacks the tar file, it comes out as R/S/bar.quux ?

It seems a natural thing for anyone doing packaging to want to do; the GNU info page for tar appears to be a dreadful combination of inadequate tutorial and inadequate reference manual, and I've been unable to figure out what to do merely by reading it.

I've got a membership for the Yokohama Worldcon, and am starting to wonder what else I need.

The flights seem to be either £600 on the hopefully-not-bankrupt-by-then Alitalia changing in Milan, or £500 on Aeroflot changing in Moscow (bringing with that all the delights of Russian transit visas); I suppose that's unavoidable since Japan is relatively distant and aviation fuel relatively costly. I've tried being flexible about mid-week departures and returns but it doesn't seem to reduce the cost; I presume NRT is the right airport.

There's obviously no point going to Japan for a five-day con; I'd plan to take a fortnight or so, so would be interested to know if people going are tending to take their extra time pre-con or post-con ... I'm sure there are likely to be fannish trips to places like the Tokyo Science Museum. I'm completely decision-paralysed by the long list of hotels on the con website, and so would like to appeal to people I know who are going to tell me which hotel they're in and I'll aim to use that one.

I get the impression Yokohama may not be the right place to stay for touristing in the Tokyo region: would it make more sense to book the central nights of the con in the con hotel (anyone prepared to share a room? five nights at the £120/night single-room rate is a lot more than I'm comfortable with, I can provide references that I'm not an axe-murderer) and get a travel-agent in England to book me a cheap hotel somewhere in the metro area for the rest of the fortnight?

A cold that has repeatedly decimated the company I work for (an easy circumstance in a nine-person company ...) has kept me mostly in bed since Friday afternoon, but I felt a little better after lunch today and went down to the Museum of Technology on Riverside (with the 170-foot chimney, it's hard to miss) for a demonstration of Tesla coils. Bumped into

bugshaw there; I think her trousers are the backdrop to the brush-discharge photo.

It's there Sunday as well; traditional British well-made hobbyist engineering, actinic sparks, electrical roaring, comforting whiffs of ozone, and there's also a museum of working steam-engines, with a vast furnace whose door, to save on coke, is only ever opened for just long enough to discover that you've got the exposure on your camera wrong. The Teslathon is well-concealed, but worth asking people to find.

Is there any way for a Java application to display a dialogue box at the top of the window stack, rather than at the top of the stack of windows managed by the Java VM?

When I'm testing the app, quite often I open an editor, which appears large and on top of the app window, make some note about the behaviour I've observed, and close the app; it displays a 'do you really want to close' dialogue, which appears behind the editor window, and the app then appears to have crashed because it's waiting for me to respond to the dialogue I can't see.

The simplex method is a recipe which instructs an N-dimensional triangular amoeba in how to move to the position in N-dimensional space that it likes best. Thinking in N dimensions is difficult, but all you have to know is that an N-dimensional triangular amoeba has N+1 corners, and that if you look at all but one of the corners they define something which behaves a bit like the face of a solid polyhedron.

The recipe is:

Find the corner that you like least; call it W

Figure out the direction which takes W from its current position through the mid-point of the 'face' defined by all the other, better corners. Move along this direction; when you're half-way to the mid-point, call your position C. When you're at the mid-point, call it M, and say that you've moved 1 unit. When you've moved 2 units, call your position R; when you've moved four, call your position E.

If you liked R better than you liked W, check if you liked E even more; if so, move corner W to E, otherwise move corner W to R.

If R was inferior to W, check if C is nonetheless better than R; if so, move W to C.

And if E, R and C are all inferior to W, scrunch up by moving every one of your corners half-way towards your current absolute favourite corner G.

Repeat, and continue repeating until all your corners are immersed in equally high-quality happiness.

For the last month or so I've been wrestling with a particular problem at work, trying strategem after stratagem and cunning plan after cunning plan to find the best possible solution.

On Wednesday I gave up and let the amoeba crawl away at the problem starting from the best solution I'd had to date. By lunchtime it had managed to find a significantly better one, but by Thursday morning it had got stuck; so I started it off again, from the position that I'd started at back in September, and by teatime it had crawled to a position significantly better even that Wednesday's. It is still crawling; the simplex method is not very fast.

So, the simplex method is very useful, but it's slightly humiliating to be out-thought by so straightforwardly programmed an amoeba.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/09/29/the-cell-is-like-tron/

It's a video of the major processses happening inside a cell: building and unbuilding of the microtubules and actin fibres that are the cell's skeleton and reinforcing rods, transcribing enzymes whizzing down a stream of DNA and writing RNA, the ribosomes of the translation machinery zipping down an RNA molecule and extruding a protein, kinesin walking down a tubule carrying a vesicle. It's pretty accurate - the proteins have the shapes which crystallographers worked out for them.

Some of you have already seen it, but while talking to

aldabra after tidying up her garden this afternoon I discovered that she hadn't.

On Saturday, I went with

ewx and my new lens to visit London Zoo.

The photos are here; the extremely long lens means I can actually take portraits of animals, rather than pictures consisting of a great deal of tree with a slight leavening of monkey. It was a little tiring to walk around with three kilos of optics around my neck, and I've discovered that often one finds the whole weight of camera and lens supported on one's glasses, which transfer the weight efficiently to the nose-pieces, giving the effect of walking for four hours around London Zoo with a five-pound bag of potatoes balanced on one's nose; but I think the pictures are worth it.

Shortly after the last posting, the sleep-besodden blancmange occupying the space where my brain should be pointed out that I had a perfectly serviceable telescope in the dining room, and that it wasn't that late, and that the moon was at Last Quarter and would be rising even more inconveniently late during the week, so ...

[pocket digicam with the lens put up against the eyepiece of a 114mm reflecting telescope; 900mm focal length scope, 20mm eyepiece, 35mm equivalent lens on digicam, so roughly 1600mm f/14; a slightly cumbersome piece of photographic equipment]

The Appenines at the shore of Mare Imbrium are the line of mountains curving at the top of the shot; at the end of the chain is crater Eratosthenes, then (very white) Copernicus, then the patch further to the left is Kepler. The dark oval at the far left is crater Grimaldi, the big crater in the centre of the disk is the splendidly named Albategnius. The little dot of a crater just above the right-hand end of the chain of mountains at the top (with a bigger one just above it) is called Autolycus; if centred in Cambridge, it would reach to St Neot's and the A1 one side, and to Newmarket and the A142 the other; I'd probably have cycled across it on a sunny Sunday by now.

The subject is Vega, the instrument my New Shiny Lens (170-500 zoom, at the 500 end), the weak point in the process my hands, and the result a fine demonstration of Brownian motion:

I think I should add a Tripod of Inconceivable Rigidity to my shopping list, though it's not a bad squiggle as squiggles go. For objects bright enough to be exposed in a millisecond, the results can be better:

I've decided to try reading a well-received thriller (Franz Schätzing's Der Schwarm) in German, to improve my German.

This may be a foolish exercise, since the list of words I've had to look up so far include

Verschwindet	disappears
Heerscharen	hosts (multitudes)
die Qualle	jellyfish
Unterdessen	meanwhile
gewaltig	immense (general adjective of amplification)
Zangenkiefern	not sure (fangs? Zangen are forceps, but Kiefern are pine-trees)
Hingezaubert	conjured forth
Ahnen	to suspect
der Vorfall	incident
die Bedrohung	threat
der Fortbestand	continuity
vermeintlich	alleged
die Werbeagentur	advertising agency
ausgebildeter	trained (selbstausgebildet = self-trained)
der Taucher	diver
erfüllen	to accomplish

and I have only just finished reading the blurb before page one. You probably get an idea of the theme of the book from this vocabulary alone, in much the same way as, trying to read the lead article in a German newspaper, I learned in succession 'Mut' (courage), 'Pflicht' (duty) and 'Mehrwertsteuer' (value-added tax).

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=482998 -- March (intended return by train, actually bus to Ely then taxi)
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=483027 -- Ickworth and Bury (return by train)
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=483039 -- Audley End (back the way I came)

Anyone got any more good ideas for routes of that sort of 50km length around Cambridge? Bury was probably my favourite, nice rolling countryside and very picturesque villages, and there's much more to see at Ickworth than there is in March.

It was a lovely Sunday, so I got back on my bike. I couldn't figure out a friendly route to Huntingdon, and all routes to Huntingdon have the problem that you're in Huntingdon at the end, so I did a triangle across to Bourn, up via Conington to Over, then back via Cottenham instead. 50km in four reasonably leisurely hours: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=481750 has the route.

Words of the trip are 'foraging' and 'exotic fauna'; goats on a farm outside Conington, emus (and nice tea and chocolate cake) on Highgate Farm just outside Willingham, blackberries in the hedgerows, and an apple-tree with beautifully sweet ripe red apples on the little lane between Conington and the A14. I'm sure there were also plums in the hedgerows, but am not quite confident enough to pick a random white-hazed dark-blue fruit and eat it, in case it's deadly nightshade.

( Pictures )

Current Mood: relaxed

Here's Charles Finch, about thirty hours after he made his way into the world:

I went to see Tony, Rachel and Charles at the Rosie this afternoon; they're all well, and should be let out around the middle of next week, but have other concerns than posting pictures of their baby. His eyes do open, and are a nice shade of blue when they do.

Georgia (on the Black Sea coast, rather than the Atlantic, and containing Lake Tabatskuri rather than Strom Thurmond Lake) is currently being thoroughly Frowned Upon by the Russians, who've set up quite serious economic sanctions against it (banning the import of its wines and mineral waters to start with, then cutting off flights, postal connections, and permission to send remittences home) on account of its temerity in arresting Russian spies on the grounds of espionage, and in attempting to join NATO.

I tend to have the naive belief that small democracies being Frowned Upon by large autocracies ought to be supported. On the other hand, there's essentially nothing imported from Russia that I buy (except for natural gas, but boycotting heating seems to be going a bit far); if I can't stop supporting the Russians I have to start supporting the Georgians, and, whilst a small democracy, Georgia is a lot bigger than I am, and I don't know how to go about supporting it. The most visible exports to the UK are Georgian wine and champagne; I wonder if Cambridge is big enough to have sellers of such things.

The other obvious approach is to visit: the country's gorgeous, though the Foreign Office advises against travelling there alone. Does anyone fancy Easter in Tblisi?

The Saturday before last, my grandmother Betty had her ninetieth birthday. The clans gathered from Derbyshire to Macclesfield to Blackpool, and proceeded to Clare Hall for a mighty feast. The weather was superb.

The food was copious and splendid (Betty is cutting a chocolate cake in the bottom photo)

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Betty was in great form; she has an excellent collection of brothers and cousins, who I see only at this sort of family event but tend to vow to make excuses to see again after each such event. Her brother Anthony has seven children and twelve grandchildren, most of whom we saw in Macclesfield for Betty's cousin Evelyn's birthday earlier in the year, but Betty's own offspring have been unaccountably inefficient in arranging great-grandchildren for her ...

By an implausible stroke of luck, nearly all the people in the photo have different first names, which means I can abbreviate the labelling. Everyone here is either a descendent of Mary Elizabeth Cole 1851-unk, or related by marriage to such a descendent.

[ many thanks to the several family members who proof-read this labelling: amongst a plethora of other errors, the first draft recorded my father as my mother's wife ]

Top row: Ben son of Joanna, Marian wife of James, Helen wife of Anthony, Eleanor wife of Philip, and Frieda wife of John Lyon.

Middle row: Richard son of Dick Woodcock, James son of Joanna, John Hodges son of Geralyn, Geralyn wife of Tom Hodges, Susannah daughter of Geralyn, Daniel son of Geralyn, Thomas son of Joanna, Philip son of Betty, and John Lyon son of Donald.

Bottom row: Valerie wife of Dick Woodcock, Anthony brother of Betty, Joanna daughter of Betty, Betty, Thomas son of Joanna's loud waistcoat, Evelyn cousin of Betty, and Michael husband of Joanna.

Sadly missing from the picture are Dick Woodcock (Evelyn's brother) who died about three years ago, Tom Hodges (Betty's other son) who died suddenly on 21 September last year, and Donald (Betty's other brother) who is still alive but not well enough to travel.

This entry is non-obviously linked to the one preceding it; Betty's husband Laurie, who died in 1988, worked at B.P. during the war, and I keep thinking I must sort out the logistics to show Betty around the place.

Yesterday was Becky's birthday; usually this is celebrated with something disproportionately energetic in a forest near Thetford, but this year we went here:

and saw things like

The splendid bit of brass here is the device for automatically oiling the worm-gear which transfers rotation from the main drive-shafts to one of the twelve time-multiplexed sets of Enigma rotors in a bombe; a single bombe wardrobe contains thirty-six of these hollow brass pentapodes, and by the end of the war Dollis Hill was producing six bombes a week.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&t=k&ll=48.857699,10.205451&spn=0.002404,0.00673

Not at all sure how people found this one in the first place, but it just goes to show the importance of not feeding radioactive growth hormone to your earwigs, or possibly just of ensuring your scanner is free of beetles.

It's a miracle. It's a wonder. It feels actually ergonomic, and pleasantly designed. It's forty quid on ebay; as with cameras, buying the top-of-the-range item from four years ago second-hand gets you an admirable proportion of bang to buck.

Though its performance may have been made more impressive by

a) I hadn't swept the floors since April

b) Except on Sunday before

ghoti came to dinner, and doing one or two rooms then had taken me an hour and a half with a very small dustpan and brush, and left my face (and, judging from my breathing, the insides of my lungs) caked with dust.

I empty the dust-tray in the garden, where I hope the fluff will fertilise the plants, and the dust mites, by feeding medium-sized insects, cause the spiders to grow strong and photogenic.

At maximum macro, the camera+lens images 52mm down the sensor and 77mm across it, which is 25 microns per pixel, and indeed I can count the twenty pixels between the centre of adjacent half-millimetre marks on a mechanist's rule; easily enough to show that insects are hairier than you'd expect and daisies as splendidly structured as sunflowers, though the depth of field is annoyingly much shallower than the larger spiders available.

eBay, understandably, does not want people to be able to implant nasties, Javascript or otherwise, in messages sent between their users.

One of the ways they do this is by preventing the use of HTML, asterisks or quotes in the messages.

By which they mean, ASCII characters 0x22 and 0x27 are forbidden.

This means that one is obliged to write in the manner of a rather stilted Victorian, the apostrophe being disallowed. And apostrophes are surprisingly hard to see among text; I had to read the message I was sending three or four times to get in the full quota of it has, I am, you are.

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Tom Womack

Recent Entries

Infinite food! Thirteen pounds!

Creating useful .tar files

Logistics for Worldcon 2007

Sparkly sparks

Java question

I love the simplex method

Amazing molecular-biology video

London Zoo

(no subject)

Squiggles

Over-ambition

Bike rides this summer

Another day, another bike ride

Aww

Supporting Georgia

Grandma's 90th birthday

And you thought fans were tedious to maintain

The Great Earwig of Kapfenburg