Wargle

Kids are so easy to trick!

2012-01-11T13:50:00.001Z

When it comes to shower time, there's often a fight in our house, first over whether it's shower time at all and then next over who has to go first. Recently the who goes first issue has been resolved by "spin the sword". Whoever the toy sword ends up pointing at has to go first.

On Monday night, Sean was fighty but Riona wasn't so I washed Riona and then came back for Sean. "But the sword didn't point at me", he complained. Crap, we hadn't done the sword thing and Riona was already washed. With nothing to lose, I sat Sean down for a solo game of spin the sword. He saw nothing wrong with this plan. It took just two spins to get it pointing vaguely in his direction. He gave me a slightly miffed, "it's a fair cop gov'nor" look and came quietly to the shower.

I should make more of an effort to get up to all kinds of shit while I can get away with it. I'll miss this time when it's gone.

How to ship your household to a foreign country.

2011-11-01T02:39:00.000Z

Having just done this, I thought I'd write it up because it worked well but I hit a lot of dead ends and almost payed a hell of a lot more for a worse service. I didn't ship any furniture, TVs or big items, so this method is for a small or medium sized move.

What I did was ship 9 boxes of various sizes for a total of 225KG from Dublin to Narita airport as unaccompanied baggage. This cost me just over 700EUR with K International Freight, including 40EUR to come pick it up from Crumlin. I dealt with Kevin who was helpful, prompt to give a quote and answer questions. They also reinforced some of my less well done packaging, without which I suspect some of my stuff would still be littering the floor of a warehouse in Dubai. The boxes were shipped with Cathay Pacific and took about 3 days of flying via Manchester, Amsterdam, Dubai and Hong Kong. They were trackable all the way. We rented a van in Tokyo, got various bits of paper stamped by customs and loaded the boxes up. The airport part of it took about 1 hour in total, I would not like to have done it without a Japanese speaker.

Less than a week after I arrived, we had all the stuff. We could have had it sooner but I only finished packing at 4am - 5 hours before I got on the plane! Also I was happy to be a bit rested and settled in before organising the pickup and wanted to avoid any complications where my flight was delayed and the boxes arrive before me and need to be stored. I never figured out how long they would hold it for free or how much storage might cost but the Cargo Terminal in Narita is a busy place, so my guess is "not long" and "lots". I also never figured out what would happen if it arrived on the weekend. The Cathay Pacific website says customs "office ours" are Mon-Fri.

I hadn't heard of unaccompanied baggage until I was on the plane to Narita and filling out the customs form. It had a space for how many pieces of unaccompanied baggage I had, so I filled that in and confirmed with the customs guy in Tokyo that it was appropriate. I needed to fill in 2 copies of the form, one he kept and the other he stamped and I presented that when picking it up. I contacted Kevin and asked him to mark the boxes as unaccompanied baggage, which he did. I assume other countries have the same concept, but I've never seen that on a customs form before.

As for other solutions, I looked at lots of moving companies and got a range of quotes, up to many thousands of EUR. Some of the companies offered a full service, they would come and pack your whole house up and deliver it door to door. This was not what I wanted, others ranged in between. Some companies had to be harassed to actually quote me. Others wanted a list of all items in order to quote me! All were far more expensive than K International. There were even some who would put my stuff on a boat for 8 weeks and charge me a small fortune for it.

The 2nd most reasonable option was An Post who cost 145EUR for 20KG but have some tricky size restrictions on the parcels and I also don't trust them too much - according to their website, a parcel that was delivered 4 weeks ago, still hasn't arrived!

Another pretty reasonable option is Vigin's extra baggage service which charges about 100EUR for each extra bag up to 23KG (1st extra bad is only 40EUR). Since my flight started in Dublin with Aer Lingus, I could not use that. It took a bit of work to get a straight answer on that but eventually I got confirmed that I would have to pay Aer Lingus 9EUR per KG for the Dublin to London leg. Given the chance, I would have shipped it this way and avoided 2 trips to the airport but it was not to be. Fuck you Aer Lingus, if you're going to do connecting flights (unlike Ryanair) you cannot avoid checked in baggage, so by charging penal rates you're just doing yourselves out of business.

I suspect other freight forwarders would have similar prices but they do not seem to be common knowledge or targetting the "moving your house" market. I only found K International because I phoned Virgin Cargo (to see if I could bypass Aer Lingus) and they told me they don't deal directly with the public and pointed me at K International.

The only thing I regret was that I tried to pack things into the smallest number of boxes possible. This made it somewhat cheaper but really wasn't worth it. Most of my boxes were 50cm cubed (from Elephant Storage). Freight is charged by weight or if the density isn't high enough, it's charged by volume. Take the volume in cubic cm and divide by 6000 to get the "volumetric weight", you are charged for whichever weight is higher. So I just needed to make each of these boxes at least 21KG to avoid paying by volume. I did better than that but I spent a lot of time dicking around and moving stuff. I also made too many trips to the box shop. I was always sure I needed just 1 more box, I should have just bought lots and returned the ones I didn't use. I optimised for money but at huge expense of time. Lesson learned the hard way (45 min sleep before leaving for the airport and a mess in the house that my family very kindly took care of).

Also, shipping by sea tends to be no cheaper than air. I imagine if you get a container and fill it with your house and car it probably works out better but for a small move, air freight seems to be much cheaper.

Gay Mitchell

2011-10-11T18:51:00.000+01:00

Maybe it's my imagination but when I saw this windswept Gay Mitchell I immediately thought of The Munsters.

Half way to Tokyo.

2011-09-11T20:40:00.000+01:00

M and the kids got on a plane to Tokyo this morning (just barely!). That was all much harder than it should have been but they should be in the air on the way from Abu Dhabi to Tokyo now.

It's been a remarkably stressful week.

It started last weekend with me noticing that S had chicken pox just days before they were all due to fly. He actually had spots one or two days before that but I thought they were insect bites (R had insect bites aplenty). We thought we might be able to fly anyway given the timing and the official policies of airlines but the doctor said we couldn't (and if he had not still been contagious, S would have been horrible to fly with on Thursday). So now we're into insurance claims. We were lucky that managed to rebook at about the same price. It seems that not so many people want to fly Etihad via Abu Dhabi on 9/11. Any other airline or Etihad on any other day was 800e more! Virgin Atlantic take bikes for free, Etihad charge them as excess baggage (45e/kg * 20kg = 900e!). So I'm left with an enormous cardboard box with half-assembled bikes in it.

Next up was finding out at the start of the week that my original Tokyo transfer plan has been scuppered by company-wide changes in staffing. I can either wait and see with no guarantees or start down a different path. So now I'm starting down a different path. Also wondering whether I should start dusting off my CV.

Finally today, for no very good reason we barely made check-in at the airport. It didn't help that it was terminal 2 which neither of us had ever been in and, as they say, mistakes were made. It ended with my heading to oversized baggage while M took the kids up to the security queue. Oversized baggage was broken in some way and had a queue of about 30 people with golf bags when I got there. I headed to the top of the queue and explained that they had made special phone calls about our luggage at the desk and that my wife and kids were running for the flight. Once the system was working again, the nice man took our stuff. By the time I got upstairs they were gone.

With about 4 hours sleep and a major dose of adrenalin at the airport this morning I have been completely unsettled all day. I'm supposed to be tidying the house but my stomach is still spinning and doing something useful seems impossible. I wonder would I feel better if I had managed to say goodbye properly. Do the "sad goodbye" chemicals cancel out the "run for your life" chemicals? It was weird feeling like this all day. It reminds me of taking exams or sitting outside the principal's office but that's usually quite quick. Having had it for about 12 hours now, I can totally understand how people give themselves up to the police after they've committed a crime.

Getting a chumby to play from NFS.

2011-08-04T00:56:00.000+01:00

Mostly a note for myself. I'm finally in the process of ripping all the CDs in the house, since hauling them physically to Japan is unappealing. I've had the chumby for ages and I'm a bit disappointed in it's inability to easily play songs from the network and as a result it's been gathering dust.

Tonight I figured out tonight that mount -t nfs pop.lan:/share /mnt/usb will convince chumpy's mp3.x utility that my server is actually a USB drive and now the songs show up under the builtin "my music" player. That just gives me random shuffle which is still pretty crappy but maybe getting somewhere.

Independent nonsense: banks should be lending to house buyers

2011-07-17T12:29:00.001+01:00

So, house prices are way down but the silly banks aren't lending. As usual the Independent leaves out half the story.

The monthly cost of a mortgage (and so the ability to repay it) is determined by the price times the interest rate. Interest rates for Irish borrowers are about twice what they were.

Our interest rates used to be a little above the ECB but now they're massively above it. There's a double reason for this. Irish banks have to pay lots more for their credit now, they can't get it at ECB rates anymore. So they have to charge people what the bank is paying plus a margin for profit.

Secondly, the banks sold a load of tracker mortgages which means that for all those customers, not only are they not getting to add a profit margin, they are actually charging those customers less than what it costs the bank. The result is that they have to add an even bigger profit margin on their non-tracker loans. Yes, if you don't have a tracker not only are you not as well off as those who got a tracker, you are actually being charged extra because of them!

The only mention of "interest" in that whole article is for the buyers who are "interested" in the properties.

So should the banks be lending? I had no idea before I read that article I have no better idea afterwards.

Independent nonsense: balance of payments

2011-06-08T21:33:00.000+01:00

Am I missing something or is this article contradicting itself in the space of a single paragraph?

Our export-led growth has given us a positive balance of payments position on current account. Depressed consumer demand has helped keep our spending down on imports. So we don't owe as much as we might. The real problem impeding a fuller economic recovery is that consumer confidence and domestic demand have not bounced back. The positive balance of payments will be short-lived if domestic demand does not improve.

So on the one hand depressed consumer demand has kept our imports low and so our balance of payments is positive. Yet somehow, our balance of payments will become negative unless consumer demand increases.

While I agree with some of what he says, the whole article has the feel of a random collection of assertions and opinions about the crisis cogged from others.

Adventures in Dublin

2011-05-23T00:15:00.001+01:00

I got to see Hanna this evening which was good fun. Just before it started, Midori phoned to say she couldn't get to the house because the road was taped off by the police (actually not our road but the one we usually come in by) and Midori has photos of an army truck with "Explosive Ordinance Disposal" on the side. Presumably a pipe bomb (or suspected pipe bomb). Robots were involved. I passed a similarly taped road on the way home a few days back. Meanwhile town is all taped off for that other bomber, Obama and I had to cycle the long way to get home.

When I came out of the cinema, some scumbag was rattling my bike. I shouted and I was told to "fuck off" and his girlfriend explained they were "only looking". So it seems it was all just an innocent misunderstanding or something.

Half-way home, crossing Sally's bridge over the canal, a guy exited a taxi, drunkenly stumbled backwards down the bridge, grabbed a railing, spun round and fell on his arse into the grass. I stopped and went over, he was lying with eyes closed, seemingly at peace, listening to his ipod. I didn't think the top of the canal embankment was the best place for him (an unstable equilibrium) so I offered him a hand up. He seemed a bit embarrassed but happy for the help. He told me I was "very sweet". Yes... well... indeed. He made his way a bit more steadily (sobered up by embarrassment I think) over the bridge to his house.

And speaking of the Queen, Sean decided to stage a dirty protest during her visit. He's been very independent toiletwise for a few months now but this time something went horribly wrong. I'm talking #1 and #2, wall, floor (multiple places), trousers (inside and out), socks, toilet seat, bath mat and his plastic step. I am absolutely at a loss as to what actually happened. It must have been a bit like JFK's magic bullet. I should really have outlined everything in chalk and taken photos.

Finally, Riona's on a roll. After watching Madagascar 2 yesterday, she later said that certain parts of her mothers anatomy were "heavy... they look like a hippo's bum". This morning while sword fighting with Sean, she told him, "I'm going to kick your nuts off!". Sean thought it was hilarious, I couldn't help but laugh, so now this phrase is the best thing ever. Apparently she heard it on TV (seems unlikely, given what she gets to see but who knows).

Over all, this week has been above average colourful.

Forget π (pi), τ (tau) is where it's at

2011-05-02T23:04:00.000+01:00

Below is Vi Hart's video explaining why τ (= 2π) is the more natural "circle constant". Everything just works out more neatly with τ and thinking about a full turn rather than a half turn just makes sense. And yes,

e^iτ = 1

is how it should be. The Tau Manifesto has more details but suffice to say, while Mar 14th never did much for me, on Jun 28th I might just make an effort this year.

No this is not entirely a waste of time, using τ with beginners would actually eliminate quite a bit of confusion.

Bit of a maths puzzle.

2011-02-21T22:35:00.004Z

Ugh! This comes out nicely on my blog but looks like crap in Google reader, presumably because the javascript can't run.

Define a function:

\[ f(x) = \frac{2x}{1 - x^2} \] In case that maths layout thing isn't working, that's f(x) = 2x/(1-x^2)

Now, \[ f(0) = 0 \] so that repeats. Also \[ f(\sqrt 3) = -\sqrt 3 \] and \[ f(\sqrt -3) = \sqrt 3 \] so that repeats too.

The question is, what values repeat if you keep applying f to the result? I thought I knew the answer but now I think maybe it's more tricky.

The medical miracle of checklists.

2011-02-20T13:17:00.000Z

From this New Yorker article

Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated hundred and seventy-five million dollars in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

I work as part of a team that helps keep several giant websites up and running. An error by any of us can result in millions of users seeing error pages. That's not to say that every error is that dangerous, there are plenty of backups, fail-safes and checks but there are still opportunities for massive accidental destruction. Checklists and documentation are essential for us, although we prefer to produce software that removes the need for manual following of steps where possible. We aim to leave humans dealing with the big picture. We also want to free up our brains to make the best decisions we can during a crisis. When the site is melting, the last thing we want to be doing is to try to follow a procedure we haven't thought about for six months. With more to think about, we are more likely to make poor decisions and more likely to get the procedure wrong.

Most medical care is a long way from being automatable and in lots of cases human judgement is critical but it seems also that lots of common procedures are well understood and have well known procedures for minimsing risk. Errors in these are more far more common than you'd hope and can result in pain, disability and even death. For those interested in the bottom line (which is everyone in Ireland these days), all of the above lead to increased expense, usually for the tax payer. In the case of a 5 step procedure for inserting a sterile line the article says that "In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one [step]." and when they introduced mandatory checklists the infection rate went from 11% to 0%, saving lives, huge amounts of money and freeing up staff and beds to look after new patients. Before the checklist, these staff would instead have been treating those who became even sicker because of an infection.

It's also important to note that when freed from thinking about the minor procedures, staff can apply better judgement about the big picture. They can also attempt more complex procedures knowing that all their effort won't be wasted just because 1 of the 10 sub-procedures is going to be fluffed and end up doing more harm than good. When you discuss a procedure with a doctor they explain it all and tell you the odds of success, failure, injury and death and you give informed consent or decide that it's not worth the risk. Those odds are based on previous cases and they are not just the odds that the specific cut or splice that the surgeon wants to make will work. They include complications that arose from all the other procedures involved, anaesthetics, blood transfusions, keeping you sterile, not leaving equipment inside you, stitching you back together etc. If you could guarantee that all of those other procedures would go perfectly, that could change the overall odds quite a bit. Enough that procedures that were previously high risk, high reward would now be much lower risk and well worth opting for.

Every now and then, someone in work quips, "it's only a website" but really we take it very seriously and do everything we can to improve the outcome, learn from previous mistakes and remove any element of chance. Most people would be horrified to hear a doctor say "it's only a patient". With checklists we have a simple technique that is uncontroversial in my line of work, that has a big impact on success or failure and that has now been proven to have the same impact in medicine. I'm horrified to find out that it has been adopted widely and that its introduction can meet significant resistance.

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised though, anaesthesiology has had a lot of engineering know-how applied to it as well as standardised user interfaces on their machinery with huge improvement in outcomes but that was also met with great resistance (I don't have a link for that, I read about it in a book once, so it must be true.)

The original article is from 2007, here's another from 2010 on the spread of this checklist since then. Here's another report on a similar checklist for general surgery.

I would love to know if checklists are being adopted in Ireland. It seems like a no-brainer. I will ask the next medical professional I meet.

"fixing" a hard disk with hdrecover

2011-01-27T22:01:00.000Z

Mostly so I don't forget. I fixed Midori's windows laptop a while back. After finding 0 viruses and others nasties, I couldn't explain why it was so jumpy and crappy. During the virus scan I'd noticed some disk errors and after fruitless messing with SMART I ran into hdrecovers which reads every sector of the disk and tries to provoke the disk into declaring a bad sector as irreparable. The disk then marks it as such and replaces it with one from its stash of spare sectors.

Surprisingly, after "fixing" about 10 sectors, video stopping stopping and audio stopped being randomly distorted. For whatever reason, these sectors were upsetting windows but they clearly weren't actually important because when they are fixed, their data is lost forever.

I'm about to give it a spin over another disk that had been causing problems.

Disney more evil than I thought!

2011-01-06T23:11:00.001Z

http://xkcd.com/843/ brought me to this page where I find in the section on how lemmings wrongfully got a reputation for suicide (last sentence is the punch-line):

"The misconception is due largely to the Disney film White Wilderness, which shot many of the migration scenes (also staged by using multiple shots of different groups of lemmings) on a large, snow-covered turntable in a studio. Photographers later pushed the lemmings off a cliff."

I guess somewhere in the credits was "fewer than 1000 animals were harmed in the making of this film".

in reference to:

"The misconception is due largely to the Disney film White Wilderness, which shot many of the migration scenes (also staged by using multiple shots of different groups of lemmings) on a large, snow-covered turntable in a studio. Photographers later pushed the lemmings off a cliff."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions# (view on Google Sidewiki)

Testing out MathJax

2010-10-03T21:47:00.005+01:00

Just seeing if I can get this MathJax maths display thing to work

\[ \frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} \]

Cool, works for me. Now I just need to find a good place to install it, rather than spongeing off someone else's installation.

Independent nonsense: It's not an anomaly, it's the law!

2010-09-20T20:56:00.001+01:00

Summary: developers who rent an apartment won't get the 0% stamp duty when they go on to sell it. Well duh! It's not a newly built apartment if someone has been living in it.

A perfect case of wanting to eat their cake and still have it.

"The anomaly stems from the fact the stamp duty exemption for new homes is legally only triggered if they're sold immediately after erection, and not if they're sold for the first time."

It's not an anomaly, it's exactly what was intended.

At the end of the article we have

"Many homeowners who will have to move on from properties they can no longer afford have been comforted by the fact that there is a significant build-up of new homes on the market, meaning stamp duty can most likely be avoided.

"That comfort will vanish if the unsold stock is rented first and loses its stamp duty exemption."

What comfort? The price will be exactly the same, the only difference will be that instead of all of it going to the developer, some of it will go to the govt.

If there are 2 apts side by side, one that was rented and one that wasn't, the developer is going to set the prices so that with stamp duty included, both apts cost the same to the buyer (in fact he's probably going to charge a premium for the new one because it's new and shiny).

in reference to:

"The anomaly stems from the fact the stamp duty exemption for new homes is legally only triggered if they're sold immediately after erection, and not if they're sold for the first time."
- http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/developers-renting-new-homes-lose-exemption-2344405.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

Knock knock...

2010-09-20T12:29:00.000+01:00

Who's there?

Santa... elbow.

Santa elbow who?

Santa elbow... face. HA HA HA HA HA

This is what happens, over and over, when your 4-year-old discovers knock-knock jokes. I'm not sure at what age they actually start to understand them but right now, they are the most hilarious thing in the world and 20 minutes of non-stop, similarly point-missing jokes is apparently a great way to pass the time. Funnily enough, he first one was "Justin", I was expecting "Justin Time" but no, it was "Justin... emm, emm... Leg. HA HA HA HA HA" and it went downhill from there.

Willie O'Dea's bullshit.

2010-08-29T16:36:00.002+01:00

Why does he get any space in the paper to make himself look good?

Fianna Fail have been running this country for over 10 years. So if bankers aren't banged to rights by now there is clearly only one group to blame. Whether it's because the laws are not there or because the willpower is not there, it all comes back to FF and Willie O'Dea was a minister in that government. Screw you Willie, it's entirely your fault!

At the same time, I'm sick of hearing how Bernie Madoff is already locked up in the USA and nothing has happened here. Bernie Madoff was a slam-dunk, he took other people's money and spent it on boats, holidays and solid gold crappers.

Seanie Fitz and friends encouraged other to engage in baroque financial schemes, apparently with the blessing of the financial regulator, working around laws that obviously aren't strict and clear enough. Again, the fault of the FF government who thought the regulator was a great fella and who did nothing to clear up these laws.

So while Sean Fitz should be banged up, the comparison with Bernie Madoff is just lazy, populist crap and continuing to make it just lowers the quality of argument on the topic.

in reference to: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/odea-its-taking-too-damn-long-to-bring-the-bankers-to-justice-2316097.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

Random Turkey Burgers

2010-08-26T23:43:00.001+01:00

I'm minding the kids for a few days. So not only am I cooking, I have to cook things they will eat too. I bought some turkey mince with the intention to cook turkey burgers. Looking around the net for recipes, I found that about the most important thing about turkey burgers is all the other stuff you put in since turkey itself has very little flavour. So here's what I put in my turkey burgers today. They were tasty enough and the kids ate all of theirs which is fairly remarkable. I picked a few things that I figured would give them some flavour - salami, olives, garlic, white pudding and some random other stuff. I just squished it all up together in a bowl with my hands, shaped it into burgers and then grilled them. The amounts below are what I used today and in no way represent an ideal amount. It would almost certainly be better with more of some and less of another but I have no idea which.

450g turkey mince.
Half a onion, chopped.
1 slice of brown bread, turned into crumbs.
1 egg white, beaten a little.
2 slices (12g?) of Aldi Salami Di Milano, ripped into small bits.
1 clove of garlic, chopped.
Half an inch of white pudding (20g?).
8 olives in brine, chopped.
Various herbs and stuff, I think it was celery salt, cumin, basil, thyme, salt, black pepper, Lidl Puszsta spice mix.
Cheddar cheese, grated - I didn't use it but I saw it suggested and I'm putting it here to remind me.

I used half of that to get burgers for 1 adult and 2 kids and I cooked these really easy potato wedges which the kids ate too, despite being a bit burned.

Oh, there's also this which looks pretty good and I might try it at some stage.

What are Amazon doing?

2010-07-17T16:01:00.004+01:00

I just bought a book. It cost be £9.49 from Book Depository. Shipping is included in their price. Before buying it, I checked Amazon's site. They wanted £8.43 but they also wanted £4.98 to ship it to Ireland! The book was eligible for "super saver shipping", so if I was buying more than £25 worth of books, the shipping would be free but I wasn't so that's beside the point.

If Book Depository can do the whole thing for £9.49, there's no way on earth it is actually costing Amazon anything close to £4.98 to ship 1 book to Ireland. So I really wonder what's going on. Are they trying to discourage single-item purchases? Are they ripping off the Irish (why leave that to the Irish?) Does it really cost them that much to ship a book? Is Book Depository losing money on this?

I'd love to know what's really going on. I sent them a mail. I already bought the book from Book Depository but I figure there's no harm in encouraging some competition.

Letter to the editor: Why people protest against Israel and not Iran.

2010-07-12T09:28:00.003+01:00

I'm a sucker for punishment, I'm sure they won't publish it but I wrote this because I haven't seen this point being made anywhere and I think it gives a pretty good answer to a commonly thrown accusation and even if they don't print it, I've been meaning to write about this for some time now.

Sir,

Eddie Naughton asks where are all the do-gooders protesting the death
sentence for Sakine Mohammedie Ashtiani in Iran (letters,
Jul 12th). The Irish branch of Amnesty International has a section
of their website devoted to Iran and are covering this case amongst
others, so the do-gooders are on the case.

As for why Iran and other states like it do not draw the same kind of
protests that Israel does, I would guess that it's because Iran does
not attempt to present itself as a modern, moderate, Western-style
democracy. Iran is not in the process of joining the OECD, it does not
seek approval from the West nor does it claim to have similar values
and morals to Western countries. So protesting outside its embassy or
criticising it in public is mostly a waste of time. Nobody expects any
better from them.

Israel on the other hand does all of these things. It wants to be part
of our club and that makes it vulnerable to bad press and peer
pressure. The Israeli government knows this and puts huge resources
into media and internet campaigns to defend its image - far more than
other states abusing human rights. Unlike in Iran, Israeli government
policy can and has been changed by public opinion, within the country
and without. They are listening. The USA, their main sponsor, is also
sensitive to such publicity.

In summary, people protest loudly and publicly against Israel because
it might actually work. People don't do the same with Iran and others
because it seems completely futile. Nobody has time to fight them all,
they're just fighting the battles they think they can win,

Iran is run by the religious and even if the last elections weren't actually rigged, the choice of candidates is controlled by the religious too. Holding a placard outside their embassy is pointless. Iran's problem seems most likely to be solved by an uprising of its citizens, at which point it will hopefully be a much more just and democratic place (it had a real democratic government in the past which was overthrown in 1953 by that beacon of democracy, the US).

Israel is controllable by its citizens and only able to do what it does because the USA currently approves and pays for it. All it would take is a moderate stance by enough of its citizens or an awakening of the US electorate to their massive subsidising of Israel or just to the reality of its actions. This all seems much more achievable and public action is a viable method.

It does not require a hatred of Israel or a hypocritical bias to explain why people focus on it. If anything, Israel is sick and in need of help (as was/is Northern Ireland). A peaceful, just Israel would be a great thing for Israelis, Palestinians, the region and the world. It would upset the plans of the radical Zionists and the fundamentalists who believe the land is theirs because it says so in their book. I'm not sure they can ever win that fight anyway so in reality, they'd probably be better off too. It would upset the plans of Muslim fundamentalists too.

So the reward could be huge and the goal appears achievable. I think that's why people choose to fight this fight and not the others.

Why you can't have infinite data compression.

2010-07-11T18:19:00.009+01:00

I was leaving a comment on this blog post and it got kind of long so I thought I'd make it a post (and got a whole lot longer!).

Even if you can squeeze a quart into a pint pot...

Compression methods make lots of files smaller. Zip can shrink text because they have lots of redundancy. In fact most things created by humans have lots of redundancy in them. Repeating something in a different way it helps us grasp understand more easily. Redundancy also defends against small errors. So if, in my first sentence, I wrote "compresion", with just one "s" you would still know that I probably meant "compression". Maybe I meant "comprehension" but from the title and the rest of the sentence you could rule that out.

It seems like maybe, if you were clever enough, you could somehow compress a file, then compress the compressed file and then do that again and again and end using lots less disk space (at the expense of doing lots of compression and decompression all the time).

... you can't squeeze 511 quarts into 255 pint pots.

To see why this cannot be done, no matter how clever you are, imagine you had a compressor that always made things smaller. Let's consider all possible strings with 8 or fewer bits. There are 511 (2^9 - 1) of them. If they all get smaller then they must all turn into strings of 7 or fewer bits. There are 255 (2^8 - 1) of those.

Now take all of these 7 bit strings and uncompress them. You have 255 inputs so you get 255 outputs, but that's not enough. You started off by compressing 511 things and you only got half of them back. Some of your input strings must have compressed down to the same output string. That's no good, you need to always get the original back. A compressor that doesn't give the original back is called "lossy" and while that can be great for pictures and movies where the human eye discards lots of the fine detail anyway, it's not the kind of compression that you need for legal documents or computer software.

What if I only compress the ones that get smaller?

It seems like you can still do better by only compressing the ones that get smaller and leaving the others uncompressed. The problem here is that while the strings get smaller on average, you now have to remember which ones you compressed and which you didn't. So now you have to add an extra bit to signify whether it was compressed. There are 256 exactly-8-bit strings and 255 7-or-fewer-bit strings which means at least one of the 8 bit is left as an 8-bit string. Now add the "was I compressed" bit and you get a 9-bit string. It got bigger! Actually it's a little bit more subtle than this because you might say that for an 8-bit, uncompressed string you don't need the extra bit, it obviously wasn't compressed but you must remember that some of the 7-bit strings weren't compressed either and so became 8-bit strings. You have to be able to tell them apart from an 8-bit string that wasn't compressed. Either way, you have 511 inputs and you don't want to mix any up so you need 511 outputs and in the best case, that requires strings up to 8 bits long.

Working at it from the ground up.

Another way to come at this is by thinking about what such a miracle compressor would do to short strings. First, consider the 1-bit strings. There are 2 of them, "0" and "1". Since this compressor must make everything shorter it's stuck already. So let's make an exception for 1-bit strings and say that they always compress to 1-bit strings. So what about 2-bit strings? Well, if it turned any of those into 1-bit strings we'd have a problem because the 1-bit outputs are already taken (for the 1-bit strings). So let's make an exception for the 2-bit strings as well and let them compress to 2-bit outputs. What about the 3-bit strings? Well, all the 2-bit outputs are already taken, so we'll have to make an exception for the 3-bit strings too... Eventually we'll make an exception for every input, no exceptions!

Back in the real world.

There appears to be a loop-hole in real-world computing. It seems you can always get a win-win solution by only compressing the files that compress well and applying the right method. So Zip your text files, PNG your images and don't compress anything that doesn't compress well. You always save space or break even. This seems to contradict what I wrote above. That's because it ignores the fact that filenames take up space. It only works because your computer has already allocated some number of bytes for the name you're going to give the file.. So even if you give it a really short name, the extra space is used anyway. Also, if you already had a really long name, adding .zip on the end may not be possible as it would exceed the size-limit on filenames. Some filesystems don't have a limit and only use as much space as the length of the name but then adding .zip takes up 4 more bytes.

Just being silly now.

If you use a filesystem that does not have a limit on the length of a file name then the following compression method "works". Convert the file you want to compress to a number (that's essentially what your computer does when you save a file anyway - the numbers are big, this blog post has about 6,000 letters in it so would be saved as a number with about 14,000 digits). Now compress this number by subtracting 1 from it and sticking a .z on the end of the file name. Now do that again and again and again. Eventually the number will be 0 and the file data will take no space on disk. When you want to read your file you just keep uncompressing it until all the .zs are gone from the file name. Great, now if only you could find a way to compress the filenames you'd be set...

I declare July 5th to be Dependence Day.

2010-07-05T07:58:00.008+01:00

I spent July 4th in Mountain View, California (I'm visiting head office for two weeks). Apart from a very cool doodle on the Google homepage and hearing some fireworks as I sat in my apartment, it was just like any other weekend day I've spent in sleepy Mountain View. The official day off is tomorrow, so nothing was closed or out of the ordinary.

The name of the day got me thinking though. These days, the USA is no more independent than most countries, in fact it (and most other countries) are far more dependent now than ever before. So I am declaring July 5th to be Dependence day.

On this day we can celebrate (well maybe just acknowledge) our dependencies. First off, our dependence on brutal governments around the world to keep their people living in poverty and unimaginable pollution while selling us oil and raw materials at knock-down prices (hello Nigeria). And on countries that are exporting minerals stolen from their neighbour, mined by children and slaves, with all the care and humanity you would expect from such operations (Congolese coltan in your mobile phone).

We should also acknowledge the governments that make sure their workers cannot meaningfully organise for better pay and conditions. Like China, where any unions are run by the company and the state and not the workers. This article about a recent strike indicates that things may be changing but it includes this gem near the bottom

Many workers are asking for independent collective representation. Unions in China are usually funded by companies, staffed by management and answerable to the Communist party. During an earlier strike at the Honda plant in Zhongshan, union representatives fought workers, injuring two of them.

That sure is a militant union.

Without this setup we couldn't possibly have DVD players for €20 and other electronic devices that are cheaper to replace than to repair (e-waste is itself a massive problem, I'm not sure if ifixit.com is really the answer but fair play to them for trying). And of course all the cheap plasticky crap that we don't really need or want but end up with anyway. Stuff that may eventually make its way to the North Pacific Gyre and from there perhaps into the stomach of a soon-to-die albatross chick

As well as material dependence there is psychological dependence. Living in Ireland, I get to be relatively happy with my government's record on human rights and such-like. I'm not too happy with the US military planes landing at Shannon on their way to Iraq but we have a foreign minister that has attempted to visit Gaza and many TDs (in and out of government) who speak out against Israel's occupation and other issues. I get to rail against the US, UK, French etc. governments for their part in the exploitation of various people and places. If I don't think too hard about the origin of the things I buy, the power I use and the forces that keep the whole modern world ticking over, I can keep my conscience clean most of the time and I really couldn't do that without those foreign governments or for that matter the Irish government. Although it isn't directly involved, my government happily lies down with those who are, while only making a fuss about the more obvious bad-actors.

Happy Dependence day everyone.

Post Script

After writing all this I did a Google search for "dependence day", figuring someone had probably beaten me to all of this. I was half right. On the first page at least, all I could find was various right-wingers decrying the lack of independence within the US, the "over-reaching", "over-regulating" "nanny state", the dependence on health care and how the founders would be sick if they could see us now, blah blah. The usual libertarian guff. It makes me think of this video. So while I doubt this is really an original thought, it doesn't seem to be a common one.

Watcha doin?... Toilet. Daijoubu. Falling asleep in the bath.

2010-07-05T02:25:00.007+01:00

Watcha doin?... Toilet

Sean likes to follow me to the toilet. He no longer tries to get a close up look into the bowl (putting his head right in the flight path) or grab onto the glittering stream. Now he runs in and looks up and shouts "Whatcha doin? [short pause] Toilet". I think it must be something he picked up in the creche because the phrase just suddenly appeared, shouted confidently on a regular basis. Now he uses it in other contexts. A fart results in a laugh followed by "whatcha doin? Chin chin". "chin chin" is Japanese for "penis" but clearly Sean has a slightly broader meaning for it or a horrible medical condition that we haven't yet noticed. I'm not sure he's even asking a question, it seems to just mean that something interesting is happening or he's just saying hello.

Daijoubu

"Daijoubu" is kind of Japanese for "don't worry, I'm OK", usually it's a response to someone asking you if you're OK. A few times a day, Sean will just suddenly say it without prompting. I turn around to find him upside down hanging off the couch or worse, half-way up the stairs and I can only wonder what awful tragedy he narrowly avoided.

Where's Riona for all this?

Why am I posting all this stuff about Sean and nothing about Riona? Riona has morphed from a cute and amusing, small animal into something much more like a small human being (yes I am in danger of anthropomorphising children). She isn't doing anywhere near as much funny stuff, stuff that betrays an almost complete lack of knowledge about the real world. She is, in fact growing up... but not too much.

For the 3.5 weeks I was in Japan, I think we pushed the kids too hard with trips out to this and that and a week in Okinawa. The result was frequent breakdowns from Riona and one total meltdown from Sean, who is usually the voice of calm and contentment in our family. Riona fought over ridiculous little things that were in hindsight, I think, protests at being dragged out here or there to meet some friends of ours. Sean's meltdown was on the way back from Kamakura, when he was just completely sick of being on trains and started screaming and screaming and screaming. I tried taking him for a walk in his buggy while still on the train. All that did was introduce a furious, screaming child to carriage after carriage of disapproving Japanese commuters. We had to change trains and Midori bought some sweets and just a single toffee square was all it took to return (poor) Sean to his usual happy, playful self. He spent the short ride home playing peepo with 2 slightly drunk business men.

The funniest incident with Riona was a fairly common case where she had a bath before bed and then didn't want to come out of the water. This time she was so tired and grumpy that she ended up falling asleep mid-protest. She was slumped in the corner of the bath (don't worry I was in the room with her). I took some photos of her but I'm pretty sure that posting them on the Internet will get me done for kiddie-porn. I'll just save them for my power-point presentation at her wedding.

Don't like dat vs jibun de.

2010-07-05T02:17:00.005+01:00

This post might not be of much interest to anyone but me (moreso than my others posts).

About 2 months ago, Sean learned the phrase "don't like dat", usually accompanied by pushing "dat" away and sticking out his bottom lip. It's very funny to watch. It often actually means I've had enough - something he does like and was happily eating a few minutes ago will be declared "don't like dat" when he's full.

Children's language skills are very practical. The words and phrases they use are actually chosen not for their "real" meaning but for the outcome they produce. For Sean, if "don't like dat" results in dat being removed and something better replacing it (where something better might just be leaving the table) then who cares whether he really does or doesn't like it. The long term goal of communicating his preferences to us suffers a little but he's not really into long-term planning yet :) and up until now we've had to figure out his preferences from non-verbal cues anyway. So as long as we don't take him literally, this phrase serves its purpose perfectly.

Even for Riona, the word "why" is still just a button she can press to make me speak more about something. I often forget this and get frustrated with questions like "why is that a toilet?".

More recently Sean learned "jibun de" - "by myself" or as Riona used to say (or shout) "my do! my do!" (that's English by the way).

The problem is that both phrases now come out sounding mostly the same, so when you move some food onto his plate and he starts shouting at you, it's 50-50 whether he doesn't want the food or whether he does want it but wants to get it himself. For some reason I seem to get it right considerable less than 50-50. Poor Sean (for a while I thought maybe we should change his name to Poor Sean, it's not easy being small, adventurous and Riona's little brother).

Narrowly avoiding shaming myself again in Japan.

2010-07-05T01:59:00.006+01:00

The last of a lot of things I wrote last Sunday in a Cafe.

A history of friction.

My trips to Japan, staying with the in-laws have not always gone terribly smoothly. I am allergic to their house and it brings on my asthma like nothing else I have encountered. Usually I only suffer if I play soccer on a really cold day or something but their house is my kryponite. It's quite old and Japan is incredibly humid. A friend bought a bamboo bag this summer and that evening (the day she bought it), the bag had a one-inch layer of fuzzy, fluffy fungus growing on part of it. Add to this the cat, dog, birds and other animals (which have never given me a problem elsewhere) and I get wheezy within minutes of entering the house. On every trip, after a few days I have had to struggle to the English speaking doctor who gives me a bag-full of drugs and inhalers which get me back to normal in about 2 weeks.

These near-death experiences do not make me a good house-guest and last time I was there, my lack of energy (and hence enthusiasm and politeness) caused some friction.

After coming back last time, my Irish doctor gave me a preventative inhaler which I suck on every day whether I feel like it or not. It's a remarkable thing. Whenever I get a cold now, I have pretty much no symptoms until I get a fever and feel like crap. No snots, coughs or wheezes.

So, for this trip to Japan I was prepared. And it worked. For the first few days, I did feel a tiny bit wheezy in their house, so I cut back my time in there and soon after I was better. After that I seemed to get a bit of immunity and was able to hang around without any problem. It probably also helped that we were there in the summer this time. As uncomfortable as summer there is, I much prefer stripping off to wrapping up (hope you weren't eating when that image hit you). I think no more winter-time trips to Japan from now one.

Disaster looms.

I was in Japan for 3.5 weeks (1 of them spent in Okinawa) and so far had been getting on perfectly well with everyone. On my last night, with Midori and the kids asleep early, I took a trip to the big second-hand book shop near the train station. It's part of a big chain called Book Off (I have lots of ideas for a competing brand - Book You, Book Me, Book That, What the Book?, Go Book Yourself With a Chainsaw etc.). I wanted to buy some teenage-level manga, many of which have the pronunciation alongside the Kanji and in fact I got one that I'm having good success in reading (it does appear to be some kind of teenage girl time-travel romance adventure but it's enjoyable enough so far even if I have to hit the dictionary for nearly every sentence).

I borrowed Midori's dad's bike and even though he always says "don't lock it, it's not worth stealing", I did, because I knew the combination and having the bike stolen would just be so embarrassing. What I didn't know was that Midori's mother's bike looks almost the same in the dark and has a different combination!

So an hour later, I'm outside Book Off realising what has happened. I phoned the house to find that they don't know the combination number, confirming my worst fear. My last day in Japan is going to involve getting Midori's mother out of bed and down to the station in the now pouring rain to unlock her bike. I'm to ring back in 2 minutes. I think perhaps her mother doesn't know the number anymore but does know what buttons to press and is going outside to press them on another bike and make a note of the numbers.

Screw you Japanese bicycle locks!

Japanese bicycle locks are for the most part laughable. Some have a key, some have a 10-digit pad and you press down the right 4 of them and push in the tab to open the lock. In both types you are just pushing a piece of metal through the spokes in the back wheel. You're not actually locking it to anything and the whole thing could be hack-sawed off or pried open in about a minute. I guess it just stops kids from jumping on your bike to get home from school quickly. Most of the bikes are of the "mama-chari" style, a Japanese abbreviation of "mamma chariot". I saw hundreds of bikes every day and I'd say maybe once per day I would see something like bike in Dublin. That is a mountain bike, hybrid or racer (road-bike). On the rare occasion I saw one, it seemed to have a bit of a beefier lock too but still nothing special.

Anyway, I was determined not to shame myself entirely after such a smooth trip and spent some time examining the lock to see if there was something simple I could do to open it. I remembered cracking a luggage combination lock years ago by just pulling on the lock and twisting each dial until it kind of stuck a bit. Then you know the dial is at the point where it's interacting differently with the... the whatever you call the bit of metal that you're pulling on.

Wow these locks are crappy.

So I tried variations on that without success. Finally I just tried pushing and pulling the tab and seeing which button reacted. I pushed that button and wiggled some more. After 4 buttons the tab pushed in and the lock opened! I couldn't believe it. Earlier, I had assumed that such a simple approach would not work and had tried other stuff. OMG these are really, really crappy locks. It took me 8 minutes to figure this out and now that I know how, I guess it would take me about 30 seconds to open another one.

So I phoned the house again and told Mr Inagaki the code. They had already found it by then and I don't think Mr Inagaki was really listening to me - after I finished talking he proceeded to tell me the code. I rode home in the cool rain with a little buzz of victory!

In the morning when I told my story over breakfast, only Mr Inagaki thought it was cool.

No ni sai - how to ruin your child's second birthday.

2010-07-05T01:52:00.005+01:00

The first of a few random snippets on what Sean says and does that I find amusing. For some reason, Sean's stock-phrases are much more likely to be in Japanese than Riona's were, maybe because Riona had full-time daycare in Ireland for a while and Sean never had.

Sean is almost 2 years old and still does a little bit of breast-feeding, mostly in the middle of the night. Midori is trying to end this and sometimes stops his attempts and tells him "mo sugu ni sai" which means "you're nearly 2" ("ni sai" means "2 years old"). Sean now gets grumpy and starts saying "no ni sai, no ni sai!". Sometimes just for divilment we'll say "mo sugu ni sai" to him to wind him up and it works. All good, innocent, infant-bullying fun.

What might be a problem is that Sean is 2 on Jul 15th and he'll be in Japan for that. I'm not sure what Midori is planning but he'll at least have a cake and the family around him, all repeating that dreaded phrase "ni sai, ni sai, ni sai" and he'll have a big grumpy head on him, shouting "no ni sai! no ni sai!".

I wish I could be there to see it! Obviously, I wish I could be at Sean's 2nd birthday anyway but he'll have lots more birthdays and it'll be a long time before he has another where he gets upset by anyone who mentions his age.

What a surprise, religious extremists being racist too.

2010-06-25T02:39:00.001+01:00

While the ultra-Orthodox guys are pretty appalling, it's hard to have sympathy for the sub-group of the Jewish community that are being discriminated against here. They themselves are so much better off than the Arab-Israelis when it comes to provision and funding of education (of course the article doesn't mention that).

Once you decide you're going to live somewhere with a a religious/ethnic caste system, you can't really complain if you yourself end up excluded from something because you're not in the right group!

内容: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world/ultra-orthodox-israeli-jews-stage-mass-protests-against-religious-school-integration-ruling-96637554.html （Google サイドウィキで表示）

Angler fish sex-life

2010-05-29T19:46:00.001+01:00

Wikipedia agrees with this comic strip! How did it take me 35 years to hear about this? I mean how can anyone ever say anything about angler fish on TV and not mention this first?

Sounds like one of these ladies could give George Washington a run for his money.

in reference to: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler (view on Google Sidewiki)

Dyson marketing... not as great.

2010-05-22T17:31:00.003+01:00

Poking around the Dyson website, I found this page about their fancy Dyson Digital Motor. It includes the sentence

And no carbon brushes means no carbon emissions.

Seriously? WTF? I don't think the climate talks in Copenhagen were held to reduce the amount of carbon falling off the carbon brushes in electric motors. These days "carbon emissions" means CO2 and unless you run your house on solar power, anything that draws power from the mains has carbon emissions.

Apparently these motors are very efficient, which will reduce CO2 emissions, but someone in the marketing department had to push it beyond the truth. Ah well, I still like them.

Holy shit, Dyson customer service is perfect!

2010-05-22T12:44:00.005+01:00

I bought a Dyson vacuum a few years ago. I never got around to registering it for the 5 year warranty, not sure where the receipt is. During the week the bendy hose broke.

This morning I phoned the customer service number, they took my details, they took the serial number of the vacuum, when I said I didn't know the purchase date they said "the manufacture date is June 06 so it's still in warranty, the hose will be with you in 7 working days". I got a shiver.

From now on, if Dyson make the appliance I want, I'll buy the Dyson model.

Holy shit, again.

Drinking game: porn or not porn

2010-05-16T10:48:00.005+01:00

It's amazing how much porn there is on the internet and how often you accidentally stumble across it while looking for something else (honestly, that's why it was on my screen). You can even turn it into a game.

Find an internet image search engine that allows porn in its results (far be it from me to recommend any particular brand in this post!). Ensure that you have turned off any "I don't want porn" settings that the search engine may provide. Here's how the game works:

The typer types in a search but doesn't click "search".
The guesser now has to guess whether the first page of results will include porn.
Click search.
If the guesser was correct, the typer must drink. If guesser was wrong, he must drink.

Take turns being the typer.

The key of course is to come up with search that is very hard to predict, let me start you off with "long wang", "gobbler's knob" and "pants pirate" :-).

You can play with more than 2 players in which case you probably just want everyone including the search-typer to guess and anyone who gets it wrong has to drink.

All good innocent fun!

Good place for kids: Spraoi

2010-05-02T18:48:00.003+01:00

I've been to Spraoi fun-world a few times now and so has Midori but yesterday I was so happy with the place that I need to tell to the world. It's behind Aldi on the Long Mile road.

Food

We started off in the cafe where 2 main courses were more than enough for 2 adults and 2 kids. The baked potato with pesto chicken was very nice and there was loads of it for €6.95 including coleslaw and a salad. Seemed quite healthy and fresh if a little bit too salty. A good lasagne with chips was €7.95; and another €1 for a can of 7 up. Later on in the play area we got 2 ice-cream cones for €1! I was shocked. 50c each makes them probably the cheapest ice-cream cones in Ireland.

While we were waiting for the food the staff were very helpful and even got a ball for Seán to play with. In fact all the staff are helpful and friendly.

Play

For toddlers there's a ball pit and for older kids there'ss a massive complex of ropes, padded bars, swings, balls, 3-storey high slides (one wavey, one spiral chute) and other cool stuff. You get 90m playing for €7 (adults are free and there's a weekday-morning discount) and it's supposed to be a few euro per hour after that but Midori says they have never charged her for any over-time. You can order food and drinks inside and there are chairs and tables (but it gets pretty busy at the weekend). If they had the energy for it, the kids would stay there forever. They love it.

Lost and found

The (rather stupid) highlight this time was me losing my shiny Nexus 1 phone after a bit of rough and tumble with the kids. It took me about 3 minutes to notice that it was gone and I got in quite a fluster. I retraced my steps but couldn't find it. I got Midori's phone and phoned it and lo and behold they had it behind the counter. That could so easily have disappeared, a big thanks again to the staff.

So if you have kids and you're looking for somewhere to go some day, I would definitely recommend Spraoi, for value, service and fun.

Restaurant: ???

2010-04-24T22:40:00.006+01:00

Topping off Boojum for value (but maybe not for taste and definitely not for healthiness) is a Chinese restaurant with no English name, English menu or English-speaking staff! I spotted the sign a few weeks back and recognised some foody words and a big €6 and figured there must be a restaurant up there above the hair salon. Thursday night I had to figure out my own dinner so decided to check it out.

Up 4 flights of steps I went and on the last one was met by a woman who was clearly confused by my presence. I sat down in the small, bright and clean restaurant she hurried off to get someone. She came back with a younger woman from the kitchen who had a few words of English and between that and my Chinese (which is getting almost unusable these days) she set off to bring me lots of small things to eat.

A while later she came back with battered fish, you tiao ("oil sticks" - deep fried bread things). A few minutes later another plate with some battered squishy sugary thing with peanuts in it and some turnip pancakes (had them for the first time ever a few weeks ago and they are not as bad as they sound at all). I also ordered some soup dumplings which came with some kind of long straight sea-food that I have never had before. Finally I ordered some dou fu nao (a kind of gloopy soup with tofu, vegetables and maybe pork).

All very tasty and at the end of it I was nicely full and actually left a few bits behind (turnip pancake is not exactly awesome). Add a pot of Chinese tea which I think was free and the whole thing came to €5, yes five quid.

There are about 20 things on the menu, all €1-5, so my plan is to go back with more people and and just order 1 of everything and see what we get! Who's on for it? It's on Parnell St, just past Sichuan House (still awesome BTW, I had hotpot there recently and it was super-tasty)

Restaurant: Boojum

2010-04-24T22:35:00.002+01:00

It's a new Mexican fast-food place in the "Italian quarter" just over the Millenium bridge. I had lunch there with Ríona today. Very tasty, Ríona ate all of hers. Also very helpful and friendly staff. When I asked about something suitable for Ríona, they suggested I order the 3-tacos meals and they'd make one of them for her. They then let her sample the 2 mild sauces to see if they were OK for her spice-wise by dipping a chip in. They do a lunch special, €7 for a main meal and water (the main fed myself a Ríona just nicely). Can't argue with that. Or can you...

As usual, complete nonsense from Indo letters

2010-04-19T09:43:00.001+01:00

When it comes to global warming you can assert that white is and the Indo will publish your letter.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano/

has the real figures, supplied by Nordic Volcanological Institute of the University of Iceland.

The volcano is putting out 15,000 tons and the airplane are not putting out 206,000 tons.

in reference to: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/man-will-never-be-mother-natures-boss-2143073.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

random kid stuff

2010-04-13T09:16:00.002+01:00

Some things are better for kids to learn through experience. The fact that you can't grab hold of a stream of piss is not one of them.

Tae Kim's guide to Japanese Grammar as a .epub

2010-03-21T14:00:00.006Z

Here it is.

This guide to Japanese grammaris highly recommended by lots of people because it teaches "real" Japanese rather than a stilted textbook version and also because it doesn't try to over-translate the Japanese example sentences, rather it just leaves them making their sense in Japanese. This last bit is particularly interesting as the "true" meaning of a sentence in Japanese is often highly dependent on the context because in Japanese you're allowed leave out pretty much anything that is obvious from the context, subject, object etc. so picking a single meaning as the translation is often just not appropriate.

I've been meaning to read it for ages but I don't want to print it out and most of my reading now is on my Android phone, e.g. while putting Seán to sleep. The guide comes as a giant HTML file or a PDF, neither of which are convenient on Android. There is however a very nice ebook reader called Aldiko which can open .epub files. Despite the fact that .epub is just zipped up html files, Alidko cannot read plain HTML.

After much searching, I finally found a html to epub converter called Calibre - Google search didn't help, in the end I found it through Aldiko's help pages and it seems to have done a fine job of converting the book to .epub format with it's html2epub program (no setting options or anything, just point it at the html and it works). Calibre is open source and available to apt-get on recent Ubuntu releases. I'm pretty sure I'll be using it often. It would also make a very nice web-service - give it a URL and get back a .epub great for those too-long-to-read-right-now web pages, maybe I'll get around to something like that.

Puzzle food

2010-02-22T10:42:00.005Z

We discovered a great trick for eating out with small kids last night. We went to Lisa's Trattoria in Terenure for dinner. We'd been stuck in all weekend with coughs and colds and also me being on call which means I can't leave the house.

Sean was fairly cranky when we got there and we asked for soup for the kids ASAP, while we chose our food. When it arrived, Sean calmed down and ate the soup with hardly a word from him. He got a bit shirty again when it was all gone but then Midori's mussels starter arrived and this is the trick...

Midori gave Sean a few mussels and he set to work on them but mussels aren't the easiest thing to eat. For Sean anyway, there's a good minute of poking around to try and get the mussel out of its shell. Each one is a new puzzle and he quietly sat there solving each one for its little meaty reward. He was completely engrossed in it and when the mussels ran out, he went back and checked every empty shell to see if there was anything left. We ate our food in peace.

I can't think of any other puzzle foods that make kids work for each bite. I'd love to find a few more.

Sean also had a great time with my rigatoni. Each tube fitted nicely on a finger. He ate loads of everything. We also had a visit from a child of the family that run the restaurant. He played with Riona a little and at the end of the meal we got free coffee! I've been here three time and had free stuff twice! Lisa gave us free ice cream when we were there just after Sean was born. I think she likes kids and the little boy had a good time and told us we should come here every day.

Anyway, it was a nice food and plenty of it, although a bit pricey. The recession doesn't seem to have reached their menu yet. I think that explains why they were a bit empty while other restaurants on the same street were pretty busy.

Some advice on the Nordic Eco showerhead

2010-02-13T14:33:00.006Z

I bought a Nordic Eco showerhead from The Cultivate Centre in Dublin on a money-back basis. I got that promise beforehand because at 50 euro, I didn't really fancy trying it and being stuck with something that doesn't work. I'm glad I did. This gadget may well be great but it is completely pointless for my shower.

In the brochure that comes with it, it says it will cut your shower from 22 litres/min down to 9 litres/min but it will still feel like a great shower. Sounds great. What I didn't realise is that my shower does only 4.5 litres/min! With the new shower head attached, nothing much changed and in fact the old shower head was better for that rate of flow.

The moral of the story is, if you're thinking about one of these, get a bucket or a jug or whatever and figure out how many litres/min your shower does before buying anything.

In hindsight I could have worked this out in advance, even without a bucket. It's a 10.5KWh shower. It takes 4000J to heat 1 litre of water by 1 deg C. I need to heat my water to about 40C and let's pretend it's starting at 0C (it's close enough in the winter). So it takes 40C*4000J/C = 160000J to heat 1 litre of my cold water to 40C. A shower that does that once per minute is using 160000J/60s = 2666W. So a 10500W can do that about 4 times per minute, i.e. about 4L/min.

The truth.

2010-02-03T18:20:00.003Z

Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

I do... hold on, do you want it depth first or breadth first?

Using kakasi

2010-01-10T00:44:00.005Z

Kakasi is a converter from Japanese with kanji to phonetic Japanese. Its documentation is sparse and I couldn't find any examples on the net that worked. So here's a note to myself for how I got it to work. It's pretty lame that it won't just handle utf8 by itself...

echo イさんに本を貸しました。 | iconv -f utf8 -t euc-jp | kakasi -JHK -s -f | iconv -f euc-jp -t utf8 イさんに本[ほん] を貸し[かし] ました。

Dropping the -f causes the kanji to be replaced entirely by their pronunciation, instead of having their pronunciation noted alongside them.

Some thoughts on Ireland's financial woes.

2010-01-06T00:15:00.016Z

This letter was a bit surprising. The guy complains that the govt didn't have a plan to prevent overbuilding of hotels. What he seems not to realise is that the hotels were built as a direct result of govt tax breaks. Not only was there no plan to prevent overbuild, they actively encouraged it. It's odd that someone who can put together a letter to the paper wouldn't know that.

One of the worst things about Ireland's problems is that it's not just public debt. Some countries have bad governments that run up massive public debts but not only do we now have the massive NAMA debt and massive yearly deficit, our government created a massive private debt through tax incentives and planning for developments of hotels, leisure centres and housing estates that are now lying empty and even those that are occupied (many privates houses) are depreciating rapidly. It didn't just bankrupt the state, it bankrupted the citizens too.

The EU puts borrowing limits on member states, the idea is to prevent governments borrowing massively and unwisely. It puts no such restrictions on private debt. By encouraging massive private borrowing and then taking a cut via VAT, stamp duty and other taxes, this government was able to get its hands on far more borrowed money than EU borrowing limits allowed. At the same this money cost far more as the govt only took a small cut of what was borrowed. We'd have been better off as a country if the govt had borrowed it up-front while the people stayed solvent.

I really doubt that anyone in govt thought of it as a way of circumventing EU rules. They found a button they could press that made money come in and they kept pressing it without any regard for the consequences. Just like the rats that pressed the "pleasure" button to the exclusion of everything else, eventually dieing of exhaustion. We should probably be thankful we didn't get an extinction burst!. That said, the car scrappage scheme is just another way to encourage Irish people to borrow so that the govt can take a cut. Again, it'd be a whole lot cheaper if the govt just borrowed the money itself without Irish consumers borrowing it at commercial rates and lining the pockets of foreign car manufacturers. Not quite an extinction burst, more like the rat finding a new button it can push.

So why did it happen? Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Given that some of the architects of our current woes bought property at peak prices - Mr Cowen at Leeds University, Mr McCreevy at the K Club (now worth almost one million euro less than he paid) and presumably lots of others who got fast track loads from Fingers Fingleton it seems that while there was an element of malice - well avarice I suppose - stupidity was the overriding factor. Unless these property losses are just a smokescreen, these guys had no idea that this was a bubble that obviously had to burst, right up to the end.

Which brings me to the sad conclusion that we are still boned. The people leading us out are those who led us in. They had no clue what they were doing then, they don't even seem to get what the problems were - Pat Gallagher still thinks cheap credit from the ECB was a great thing. There is no evidence that they suddenly have a clue now.

If the whole disastrous boom had been a clever scheme to line their own pockets, then, at least, I'd have to have some respect for their ability, if not their character. I might believe they could cook up a scheme to help the country recover, although I might not trust them to implement it. Instead, whatever pocket lining they managed to do was purely due to being in the right place at the right time and of course some political cleverness. I'm not sure whether we'd be better off with an honest idiot or a clever gangster.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

2009-12-27T09:24:00.002Z

The Scifi channel have a habit of showing some fairly awful movies and Midori has a habit of recording them - tedious tromps around the woods looking for a Sasquatch that never comes into shot, ghosts of dinosaurs attacking oil drillers in Alaska. Last night she excelled herself. I was too tired to do anything but watch and 20 minutes in it played its trump card. A scene of such ball-shattering awsomnitude that the clip has been watched more than 750,000 times on youtube.

Actually that clip has only been watched 60,000 times but the other clip replaced the movie's soundtrack with a song for no apparent reason so I linked to this version.

Think of how many consecutive failures in quality control had to happen for that to appear on my TV last night.

More importantly, someone was paid to write that scene and in fact the whole film and if that wasn't you then you are losing the game of life!

Computing combinatorials

2009-12-13T19:55:00.019Z

I was commenting on this fun post about efficiently computing n-choose-c but my attempt to post some code seems to have been eaten by the comment system (I suspect use of square and angle brackets upset it), so I'll post something here instead.

Here's why c always takes integer values and more generally why (k + 1) * (k + 2) * ... * (k + n) is always divisible by factorial(n). There are three ways to show this.

Apologies for the crappy maths typesetting, I should really figure out how to do this nicely.

Proof by hand-waving.

First off, something hand-wavy. One of (k + 1)*(k + 2) is even so 2 divides into that product. One of (k + 1)*(k + 2)*(k + 3) is threeven (not a real word!) so 3 divides into that product. 4 is not so simple. One of (k + 1)*(k + 2)*(k + 3)*(k + 4) is fourven so 4 divides into that product - however maybe the fourven number was also the even number we used to cancel the 2 earlier on so it only has one 2 left for division but if that's the case then since one of the remaining 3 numbers is also even and you can get a 2 from that to make up the 4. 5 works just like 2 and 3. 6 contends with both 2 and 3 but you can resolve that too. This gets messy quickly but essentially, for any prime p, every time you come to the next multiple of p in the divisor you will have already added at least one multiple of p in the k+i product and by the time you hit a multiple of p² you will have already hit a corresponding one in the k+i product too, so you'll still have enough ps in the product overall to cancel all the ps in the divisor. Still a bit hand-wavy but it could be made rigorous, however there is another proof that's easily rigorous but less insightful.

Proof by counting prime factors.

There is a well known formula for finding the power of p in factorial(n). It's

sum(i=1..infinity, [n/pⁱ])

where [] means take the integer part, throwing away any fractions. So if p = 5, and n=30 then this is

[30/5] + [30/25} + [30/125] + [30/625] + ... = 6 + 1 + 0 + 0 + ...

It's all zeros after that, so the end result is 7. So 5⁷ divides factorial(30) and 7 is the highest power of 5 that divides it.

So rewriting the k + i product as factorial(k + n)/factorial(k) we now know that for any prime p, it contains exactly

sum(i=1..infinity, [(n+k)/pⁱ]) - sum(i=1..infinity, [(k)/pⁱ])

powers of p. If this is greater than

sum(i=1..infinity, [(k)/pⁱ])

then we know that factorial(n) divides factorial(k + n)/factorial(k).

Well, [x + y] >= [x] + [y] so

[(n+k)/pⁱ] >= [(n)/pⁱ] + [(k)/pⁱ]

now bring one term over to the left hand side to get

[(n+k)/pⁱ] - [(n)/pⁱ] >= [(k)/pⁱ]

Now sum over i=1..infinity and you get exactly what we needed to show. So for any prime p, there are at least as many powers of p in the k+i product as there are in factorial(n), all the ps in the divisor cancel out and the divisor divides in evenly.

Proof by "it just is".

The final and least insightful way is to note that factorial(n+k)/(factorial(k) * factorial(n)) is n+k choose n and so must be an integer

Code

Here's a python snippet that checks that the division is always even with an assert.

#! /usr/bin/python2.4                                                            

import sys

def comb(n, k):
  # k = max(k, n - k) # would make it go faster
  c = 1
  for i in range(k + 1, n + 1):
    c *= i
    assert c % (i - k) == 0
    c /= i - k
  return c

n = int(sys.argv[1])

for i in range(0, n + 1):
  print "comb(%d, %d) = %d" % (n, i, comb(n, i))

Give it an n and it will print out comb(n, i) for all i. The assert never fires for me.

As it loops, c gets the values comb(k + 1, 1), comb(k + 2, 2), ..., comb(n, n - k), all of which are integers (and remember that comb(n, n - k) = comb(n, k) so c ends up with the desired value.)

If your lanugage does tail-call optimisation, you could define

comb(n, 0) = 1

comb(n, i) = comb(n - 1, i - 1) * n / (n - k)

and be done. With memoisation you could avoid lots of repeated calculations.

Eddie Hobbs and the car scrappage scheme.

2009-12-09T10:15:00.003Z

Update:Eddie's reply is at the bottom

Lots of good things in this post but I'm surprised to see positive mention of the car scrappage scheme - "Focus on energy efficiency, green energy and a cash- for- clunkers scheme for low emission cars.". It is neither green nor good for the economy.

We don't have a car industry, we have a car sales force which funnels money straight out of this economy with a small bit staying locally. Stimulate this and you stimulate the Germany and Japanese economies far more than the Irish.

Scrapping cars that have plenty of life left just to have them replaced with something that is maybe 10% less emitting is going to cause a net increase when you factor in the manufacture of the car. Never mind that fact that some will upgrade their cars to bigger, more-polluting models.

Given all that I'm curious why Eddie thinks it's a good idea. he makes a virtue of not being beholden to vested interests so it's unlikely he's saying it for his mates in the motor trade. There are ways to spend the scrappage money that would produce a greater economic stimulus in this country and produce greater environmental impact per euro too.

I sent Eddia a link to this and he replied quite quickly which is very good of him. He said

Yeah, you’re right to pick me up on it. Technically it’s the wrong thing to do since we don’t have a car manufacturing industry but that is softened somewhat by the emphasis on Band A and B. It is, of course, front-end loading cars sales but the x factor is the sight of 2010 new plates on the road, car rooms with consumers in them and a lift in consumer morale. Very hard to measure I know and a subjective call but morale is pretty important to arrest the spending delay factor caused by deflation. Much will depend on the relative allocation to energy, efficiency etc where we’ll get a proper return so let’s see at teatime.

to which I say, hmmm... maybe. One small snag here is that these newly confident consumers just blew all their money on a new car so although they feel good, they're less likely to do anything as a result...

in reference to: Ten things Brian Linehan must get right (view on Google Sidewiki)

Independent nonsense: negligent doctors

2009-11-23T21:44:00.004Z

As usual, the Indo provides some useless statistics, this time on malpractice cases. What they tell us is:

A senior house officer -- a grade of junior doctor -- was most likely to be involved (74pc) as against 14pc for registrars and 8pc for consultants.

What they don't tell us is what percentage of patients are dealt with by each type of doctor. So if only 50% of patients were dealt with by junior doctors but they were involved in 74% of malpractice cases then that's a black mark against junior doctors and would be something worth knowing. Elsewhere in the article it's stated that they deal with "the majority" of cases. Without these other figures, the statistics are not just useless, they're possibly quite misleading.

in reference to: http://www.independent.ie/national-news/ae-blunders-responsible-for-one-in-seven-medical-claims-1951185.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

The "open" web awards.

2009-11-11T15:47:00.001Z

They want me to sign in with a twitter or facebook account, not any of the many other sign-in systems out there. Not very open...

in reference to: Mashable's 2009 Open Web Awards - Votes (view on Google Sidewiki)

Sichuan House - Spicy chilli chicken

2009-10-28T21:58:00.002Z

Mostly a note to myself. I got in a quick trip to Sichuan House on Sunday with Riona. I ordered Spicy Chilli Chicken (山椒鳥 I think). It was quite tasty but the sauce was not very exciting. I was expecting a different dish actually but now I have no idea what that one is called. This was cubes of chicken but looked a lot like an Irish-style dish (I was assured it wasn't and in fairness it didn't taste like it was, just looked like it).

Looking up Kanji/Hanzi quickly on zhongwen.com

2009-10-25T21:01:00.009Z

Update: I've turned this into a Google App Engine app - http://zhongwenlookup.appspot.com/

zhongwen.com is an excellent dictionary that shows the decomposition of all Chinese characters and links to the entry for each component. It's the online version of Rick Harbaugh's "Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary". I've spent plenty of time looking things up in it while learning Kanji (both online and in my own copy).

The one problem I have is that it's not possible to just paste a character into the search box and get to the entry. You can only search by radical, pronunciation and radical none of which lead directly to a single character. Tonight I finally got bored with that and was about to mail the author to see if he would add a search by character feature. While composing the mail I started poking a bit further and realised that the URL scheme for the site is based on the BIG5 encoding of Chinese characters and so I could just do it myself.

Here's a little bash script that takes characters as arguments and gives you back the zhongwen.com URLs and pass them to a command called browser which, for me, opens them in Firefox. Yes it's ugly. I tried to convert it to Perl but ran into encoding problems that I couldn't be bothered solving.

#! /bin/bash -e

if [ -z "$@" ]; then
  echo Usage: ./harb char1 char2 ...
  echo
  echo Will print the zhongwen.com URL for the characters and pass them to browser
fi
 
while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
  url=$(
      echo $1| iconv -t big5| \
      perl -lne '@c=unpack("CC", $_); print "http://zhongwen.com/d/$c[0]/x$c[1].htm"'
  )
  echo $url
  browser "$url"
  shift
done

Invoke it as harb 宅煉 to get the URLs for those 2 characters. Characters must passed as separate arguments (e.g. space separated).

Here's my browser script, while I'm at it

#! /bin/bash

if firefox -remote 'ping()';
then
  firefox -remote "openURL($1,new-tab)"
else
  echo no ping
  firefox "$1" &
fi

1889 Kanji Characters

2009-10-20T23:35:00.007+01:00

It's been slow going for a while now but I'm 153 away from finishing the book. I would have said that's just a few weeks away but it seems that every week now something comes up and I end up add only 10 or so kanji. The current chapter is a mixed bag of kanji that don't really fit into the scheme at all and is supposedly the most difficult chapter. I hope I can finish the whole thing before December. I'd like to be able to say I cracked it in less than a year. At this point there is no way I'm giving up!

Some stats - I've done 22451 repetitions, that means I've written that many kanji. So on average I've written each one about 12 times which is not so bad really. I have an 88.2% success rate on "mature cards" which is also OK but I find recently that cards from 6 months ago are coming up and I'm flummoxed. I think Anki is a bit too aggressive in increasing the interval between repetitions. I could tune that but at this point it's mostly working and I don't want to screw with it. I've been doing this for for 319 days. On 160 of them I added new kanji, on 159 of them I added no new kanji.

Finally a graph:

Hyperbinary numbers

2009-10-12T21:42:00.010+01:00

Update: The proof is over here.

I've been following along the a discussion on The Math Less Travelled about hyperbinary numbers (here, here and here). I'm posting this here because it's a bit too big to fit in the margins of the other blog (although I have found no remarkable proof). Since I have very little time to work on this (and have already given myself a few nights with insufficient sleep!) I thought I'd do a brain-dump of what I did in case someone else can finish it. Apologies for the awful formatting, I don't post much maths so have no nice styles for it and no time to find them.

Quick summary

h(n) is the number of ways of writing n as a sum of powers of 2 where each power of 2 can only occur 0, 1 or 2 times. See the articles for more details but the key facts are (I'll refer to them by these numbers):

h(2n) = h(n) + h(n - 1)
h(2n + 1) = h(n)

From those you can get several relationships, like h(k * 2^n - 1) = h(k-1). Other interesting stuff is in those posts. The main question is how to find the inverse of h(n). That is, given k, what values of n have h(n) = k. It turns out that each even solution to that leads to an infinite number of odd solutions and all odd solutions can be traced back to an even solution. So the question then is what are the even solutions - the "primary occurrences"? My contribution so far has been to notice that there seem to be φ(k) even solutions for a given k although I am still stumped on how to prove that.

Another useful things is that h(2n + 1) = h(n) means that all the odd positions are just repeats of earlier values. Applying fact 1 to the right hand side of fact 2 gets you h(2n) = h(2n + 1) + h(2n - 1). So all the even positions are just the sum of the values that come immediately before and after.

Finally, h(2^n - 1) = 1 and h(2^n) = n + 1 and from that you can get h(2^n + 1) = n

New stuff

The last bits got me thinking about h(2^n + k). It's fairly easy to figure that out for more and more values of k. For h(2^n + 2) just apply fact 1 to get that as the sum of 2 things we already know:

h(2^n + 2) = h(2^(n-1) + 1) + h(2^(n-1)) = (n-1) + (n-1) + 1 # note this line for discussion below. = 2n - 1.

Looking at the table of values primary occurrences (here) you can see that all of the odd entries do indeed have 2^n + 2. In fact after a bit, it's the lowest value for each odd entry.

What about 1? 2*1 - 1 = 1 but if n = 1 the line commented above is not valid because h(2^n + 1) = n is only valid for n > 1.

To get a bit further, consider h(2n) = h(2n + 1) + h(2n - 1) from above. Moving things around a little that becomes h(2n + 1) = h(2n) - h(2n - 1). So we can get the next odd entry by subtracting the previous odd entry from the previous even entry. So h(2^n + 3) = n - 1. Since 2^n + 3 is odd this doesn't tell us anything about primary occurrences but it's still useful as all odd entries are duplicated later on.

Now we can get h(2^n + 4) = h(2^(n-1) + 2) + h(2^(n-1) + 1) and again we know what they are = (2n - 1) + n = 3n - 1. And low and behold, all the entries (except 2) in the primary occurrences table of the form 3n - 1, include have 2^n + 4 (5 -> 12, 8 -> 20, 11 -> 36, ...). What about 2? 2 = 3*1 -1 but if n=1 then the relation above breaks because the 2n - 1 rule is only valid for n > 1.

Continuing on in the same vein you get the first 100:

h(2^n +    0) =    1n +    1
h(2^n +    2) =    2n -    1
h(2^n +    4) =    3n -    4
h(2^n +    6) =    3n -    5
h(2^n +    8) =    4n -    9
h(2^n +   10) =    5n -   12
h(2^n +   12) =    5n -   13
h(2^n +   14) =    4n -   11
h(2^n +   16) =    5n -   16
h(2^n +   18) =    7n -   23
h(2^n +   20) =    8n -   27
h(2^n +   22) =    7n -   24
h(2^n +   24) =    7n -   25
h(2^n +   26) =    8n -   29
h(2^n +   28) =    7n -   26
h(2^n +   30) =    5n -   19
h(2^n +   32) =    6n -   25
h(2^n +   34) =    9n -   38
h(2^n +   36) =   11n -   47
h(2^n +   38) =   10n -   43
h(2^n +   40) =   11n -   48
h(2^n +   42) =   13n -   57
h(2^n +   44) =   12n -   53
h(2^n +   46) =    9n -   40
h(2^n +   48) =    9n -   41
h(2^n +   50) =   12n -   55
h(2^n +   52) =   13n -   60
h(2^n +   54) =   11n -   51
h(2^n +   56) =   10n -   47
h(2^n +   58) =   11n -   52
h(2^n +   60) =    9n -   43
h(2^n +   62) =    6n -   29
h(2^n +   64) =    7n -   36
h(2^n +   66) =   11n -   57
h(2^n +   68) =   14n -   73
h(2^n +   70) =   13n -   68
h(2^n +   72) =   15n -   79
h(2^n +   74) =   18n -   95
h(2^n +   76) =   17n -   90
h(2^n +   78) =   13n -   69
h(2^n +   80) =   14n -   75
h(2^n +   82) =   19n -  102
h(2^n +   84) =   21n -  113
h(2^n +   86) =   18n -   97
h(2^n +   88) =   17n -   92
h(2^n +   90) =   19n -  103
h(2^n +   92) =   16n -   87
h(2^n +   94) =   11n -   60
h(2^n +   96) =   11n -   61
h(2^n +   98) =   16n -   89
h(2^n +  100) =   19n -  106

With the 2^n + k only being valid for n such that 2^n > k.

Obviously calculating these by hand gets a bit boring. To write some code to do it I had to play with f(n, m) = h(2^n + m) and it breaks down into 2 cases for m even and odd.

For the odd case, let m = 2k + 1. So

f(n, m) = h(2^n + m) = h(2^n + 2k + 1) = h(2n + 1) = h(2^n + 2k) - h(2^n + 2k - 1)

For the even case, let m = 2k. So

f(n, m) = h(2^n + m) = h(2^n + 2k) = h(2(2^(n-1) + k)) = h(2^(n-1) + k) + h(2^(n-1) + k -1) (applying fact 1) = h(2^(n-1) + m/2) + h(2^(n-1) + m/2 -1) = f(n - 1, m/2) + f(n -1, m/2 - 1)

Turning that into python and adding a couple of base cases gives the following code (it tries to also cope with 2^n - m but there's a bug somewhere). #! /usr/bin/python2.4 import sys class ANPlusB(object): def __init__(self, a, b): self.a = a self.b = b def Sub(self, n_plus): return ANPlusB(self.a, self.b + self.a * n_plus) def Eval(self, n): return self.a * n + self.b def __str__(self): if self.b < 0: s = "-" b = - self.b else: s = "+" b = self.b return "% 4sn %s % 4s" % (self.a, s, b) def __add__(self, other): return ANPlusB(self.a + other.a, self.b + other.b) def __sub__(self, other): return ANPlusB(self.a - other.a, self.b - other.b) TABLE = {-2: ANPlusB(1, -1), -1: ANPlusB(0, 1), 0: ANPlusB(1, 1), 1: ANPlusB(1, 0), } biggest = 1 smallest = -1 def F(n_plus, k): """Find the a*n +b for 2^(n + n_plus) + k .""" # Note something is broken for negaitve n_plus, going below -10 # causes infinite recursion. global smallest, biggest if k not in TABLE: if k < smallest: val = _FSmaller(k) smallest = k else: val = _FBigger(k) biggest = k TABLE[k] = val val = TABLE[k] return val.Sub(n_plus) def _FBigger(k): if k % 2: return F(0, k - 1) - F(0, k - 2) else: return F(-1, k / 2) + F(-1, (k / 2) - 1) def _FSmaller(k): if k % 2: return F(0, k + 2) - F(0, k + 1) else: return F(-1, k / 2) + F(-1, (k / 2) - 1) def main(): min, max = [int(x) for x in sys.argv[1:]] for i in range(min, max+1, 2): print "h(2^n + % 4d) = %s" % (i, F(0, i)) if __name__ == "__main__": main()

You can run it as ./hyperbinary.py 0 100 or to get the first 50 even entries. Looking at the output it seems that h(2^n + m) = h(m) * n + c. I haven't proved it formally but it should be easy enough, just show that the coefficient of n obeys the fact 1 and fact 2. I didn't find a good relation between m or h(m) and the c above (the best I can spot is that int(c/h(m)) is always log_2(m) and when m is 2^k c=k*h(m) + 1). Nor did I relate any of this to φ although at least now there appears to be some modulo arithmetic going on.

My contribution to the Lisbon debate.

2009-09-28T21:42:00.000+01:00

This time around I have neither the time nor the energy to do very much. However I would really love to have a wind-driven rotating sign to express my opinion on the level of the debate. The kind that often stand outside shops for ice cream etc. Since that isn't going to happen I tried my hand at an animated GIF:

I'm a 35 year old man trapped in the body of...

2009-09-27T17:44:00.007+01:00

... a 35 year old man. Basically I have no excuse or no reason to plead a special case. Well, my 2 small kids seem to sleep less than some others but not outside the ranges given in baby books. I just can't do things like I could before. I used to play a lot of soccer which made me quite fit (self-praise is no praise). When I played again a few weeks ago I was in a steaming heap after 10 minutes. Some of it is lack of exercise some is just getting older. I hardly drink any more because I just hate losing time to hangovers and I don't have to drink very much to get one anymore. It was nice be able to abuse my body and not pay the price in my teens and twenties (self-abuse is no abuse!).

What's the point? Nothing much. Just when I changing my socks I was playing with the phrase "An X trapped in the body of a Y" and I realised that if I claimed to be different on the inside and the outside I'd be kidding myself.

To vastly over-generalise and ignore changing life-circumstances, as people age they stop doing some things. I don't think they stop because they have lost the desire to do them but because they have lost the ability to do them. Of course that may then impact the desire or simply cause the focus to shift to new things which can be done but I think you don't stop wanting to do anything simply because you're older. Which probably explains the childishness of many people (myself included).

In Soviet Canada, healthcare system pays for your problems.

2009-08-02T15:18:00.003+01:00

Their nearest neighbour makes it very hard to find a way to exclusively make fun of Canada...

Smalltalk's become() in python

2009-07-31T17:20:00.005+01:00

Posting this here because blogger's sucky comment system won't let me post formatted code in a comment on this post. This is an implementation of Smalltalk's become() in python. It will not work on strings, int etc. but otherwise is identical

#! /usr/bin/python def become(a, b): swap(a, b, "__class__") swap(a, b, "__dict__") def swap(a, b, attr): tmp = getattr(a, attr) setattr(a, attr, getattr(b, attr)) setattr(b, attr, tmp) class Animal(object): def __init__(self, name): self.name = name class Dog(Animal): def Cry(self): print "%s says woof" % self.name class Sheep(Animal): def Cry(self): print "%s says baa" % self.name a = Dog("rover") b = Sheep("shaun") c = a a.Cry() c.Cry() become(a, b) a.Cry() c.Cry()

This prints

rover says woof rover says woof shaun says baa shaun says baa

Note how both a and c are now sheep. To do the same thing in perl you monkey around with bless and resetting all the hash entries, it's a bit uglier.

Answer to 1 of the 2 puzzles and a new puzzle.

2009-07-29T09:13:00.007+01:00

I take Nicole's comment to mean she gives up, although Nicole, it turns out that your comment has a deep relation to this problem and raises a new question.

To find out on average how many items are left unmoved by a random permutation, you can consider every permutation and how many are left unmoved by each, add them all up and divide by the total number of permutations. To avoid mathsy notations I'm going to write a tiny program that calculates this total.

total = 0 # Check what every permutation does to every item, if it leaves it # in the same place then increase the total by 1 for p in perms: for i in 1..N: if p(i) == i: total = total + 1

Now, here's the key to this problem - swap the loops. The final answer stays the same we just end up adding things up in a different order.

total = 0 # Check what every permutation does to every item, if it leaves it # in the same place then increase the total by 1 for i in 1..N: for p in perms: if p(i) == i: total = total + 1

So now what we're doing is looping over the items and counting how many permutations leave that item in place and that's something we can work out. The number of permutations that fix a given item is (N-1)! (where ! is factorial) because when you fix 1 item, you're left with N-1 other items which you move around however you like so it's just the number of permutations of N-1 items which is (N-1)!. So now the code can be just

total = 0 # Check what every permutation does to every item, if it leaves it # in the same place then increase the total by 1 for i in 1..N: total = total + (N-1)!

which is just adding (N-1)! N times. That's N x (N-1)! which is just N!. Now we have to divide that by the total number of permutations which is also N! to get an average of 1.

You can also get to this answer by drawing a grid with all the permutations across the top and all the items down the side. You put a tick in a cell in the grid if the permutation on the top leaves the item on the left unmoved. Now count the ticks. Doing it column by column is hard but doing it row by row is easy because there will be (N-1)! ticks in each row.

So the conclusion is that if you do a perfect shuffle of a deck of cards, on average 1 card will end up in the same places as before.

So where does Nicole's comment come in? I knew it was Ralph Wiggum who said it but I couldn't remember the context turns out. I found it here. It's

  Lisa: Hey Ralph, want to come with me and Alison to play "Anagrams"?
Alison: We take proper names and rearrange the letters to form a
        description of that person.
 Ralph: My cat's breath smells like cat food.

and what we've just shown is that given a random anagram, you'd expect 1 letter on average to end up in the same place - well kind of, that's only true if there are no repeated letters. I hadn't thought of this in terms of anagrams before and that adds a nice twist in terms of repeated letters. Thanks Nicole!

So the new puzzle is - given a string written in scrabble tiles (it can have repeated letters), if you mess up the tiles and make a new string at random, how many letters do you expect to be in the same place as before?

No code has no bugs.

2009-07-26T15:39:00.003+01:00

So the more no code you have, the more no bugs you have.

Pat, "the cope" Gallagher: dishonest or just an idiot?

2009-07-25T23:15:00.006+01:00

In his letter to the Indo calling for a "yes" to Lisbon, Pat defends our membership of the Euro. I think there are upsides and downsides to it but for Pat even the downsides are upsides. He happily points out that

The eurozone has ensured that billions of euro have been made available to Irish banks via the operation of the European Central Bank.

and that

As a member of the eurozone, Ireland has benefited from very low interest rates, notwithstanding the very difficult economic situation that faces us.

Surely he must know that these 2 things are the root cause of our massive bubble. The IMF and even Brian Lenihan have said as much. So if he knows this, then to list them as upsides of eurozone membership is basically swearing that black is white and up is down. There is of course that odd "notwithstanding the very difficult economic situation that faces us" which seems to be an attempt to cover all angles - as if to say "yes I know this is what fucked up the country but still it was great craic at the time."

Of course maybe he truly disagrees with me and thinks that the oversupply of cheap credit was an entirely positive thing and we should be thankful for it. This would certainly be compatible with FF's policy over the last decade, right up the point where the shit hit the fan.

2 fun maths puzzles

2009-07-16T23:56:00.004+01:00

I guess they're fun because I figured them out! If there's anyone actually reading this, post your solutions in the comments. If I get any responses I'll post solutions and if I don't, I might not.

On average, given a random permutation of N items, how many elements do we expect to stay put? E.g. if N=3 there are only 6 perumtations, 1 leaves all 3 in place, 3 leave 1 in place and 2 shift all of them (left or right). So that's (1*3 + 3*1) / 6 = 1.
On average, given a random function from 1..N->1..N which may or may not be injective or surjective (that is there may be X and Y such that f(X) = F(Y) and there maybe be a Z such that f(X) != Z for any X), how many elements do we expect to stay put - f(X)=X? E.g. if N=2 there are 4 possible functions, f(X) = X, f(X) = 1, f(X) = 2 and f(X) = 3-X. These fix 2, 1, 1 and 0 elements respectively. So on average that's (2+1+1)/4 = 1 but what about larger N?

Movie: Blood, the Last Vampire

2009-06-28T23:10:00.004+01:00

I went to see it tonight. It was mostly OK, some good action scenes but often things were moving too quickly to really be able to appreciate it. I found myself wanting to watch Ong Bak,the super-awesome Thai movie starring Tony Jaa. It's super-awesome because there's no wire-work in it. I dislike wire fighting. If you're going to do it with wires, you may as well just do it with camera tricks or CGI and then even I could do it - not awesome at all. The stuff Tony Jaa does in Ong Bak is just fantastic and - more importantly - surprising and often funny.

Aaaaaanyway. Blood is essentially Blade but instead of Wesley Snipes the half-vampire vampire killer is a Japanese schoolgirl. What could possibly go wrong? Mostly nothing goes particularly wrong or right. Add in an unsatisfying ending and you've got "meh".

I would have been annoyed if I hadn't managed to get to it but I'll have forgotten about it in a month.

Movie: A tale of two sisters

2009-06-21T00:21:00.002+01:00

I saw this Korean movie years ago but my trip to the cinema tonight reminded me of it because there is just a single sudden fright in the movie and everyone in the cinema leapt, popcorn flew and a few seconds later everyone was nervously giggling and apologising to the complete stranger next to them. A great movie. It turns out it was remade as The Uninvited which was out a few months ago. From the reviews I can find, they made a pig's mickey of it. Ah well.

Mouth water chicken - yummy but dangerous

2009-06-21T00:05:00.004+01:00

After my movie trip I went to Sichuan House and ate the spiciest food I've eaten for some time. I came home and ate ice cream in the vain hope that that will neutralise some of the spicy before it makes its way out again. On the menu as "口水鸡 - steamed chicken in chili sauce" (first in the list of salads if you're looking for it), it literally translates as "mouth water chicken". It's a half a cold chicken, drenched in spicy, oily sauce with peanuts, sugar, spring onions and other stuff. It smells exactly like the smell you get in a real Sichuan restaurant - it's nice to know what I was smelling way back when. It's damn tasty and I brought half of it home on the back of the bike! Not sure if I'll eat it myself. I'm going to a BBQ tomorrow, I might bring it along for others to sample. In the meantime, I think I'll go put a pack of wet-wipes in the fridge...

P.S. Ow! Jesus! I rubbed my eye! Chili, chili, chili! Ow!

Movie: drag me to hell

2009-06-20T23:42:00.005+01:00

I just saw Drag Me To Hell and I had a great time. It had the scariest old woman I ever saw in a movie. It had the scariest lace handkerchief I ever saw it a movie. It had lots of out-of-seat jumping. It had gumming (not a typo) and goats (also not a typo) and it made me laugh out very loud - just once, mostly it wasn't trying to be funny. I'm really glad I saw it. There's how's that for elevated expectations leading to certain disappointment?

Afterwards I ate some lovely Chinese food.

Too much syntactic sugar...

2009-06-15T17:56:00.001+01:00

... gave Perl syntactic diabetes.

1362 Kanji Characters

2009-06-14T16:29:00.005+01:00

1362 might not sound like significant number but that is 2/3 of the way through the 2042 characters of Remembering the Kanji. It has become a bit of a slow slog but the progress is fairly steady. I thought I'd get more done while Midori and the kids were away but so far I haven't done anything amazing. In fact 54 in the last 7 days is less than 10 per day - I was occasionally able to beat that with the family around. It's way off the pace from my first 4 weeks but I had 2 weeks of rest before that and I was excited and motivated by the discovery of a sure-fire method of learning the kanji.

It's nice having a fixed goal of 2042. This covers the standard high school kanji and some extras that are too useful to leave out or necessary for the method. It also allows me to set motivational targets. Without a fixed goal, I could set targets of doubling my kanji count and meet the pretty easily to being with. Going from 128 to 256 in about a week was possible. After that, doubling gets harder and harder and doubling 600 to 1200 took a very long time because of lack of free time. But with a fixed target, now I'm on the down slope. The next target is 3/4 (1531), then 4/5 (1633) and so on.

The first hint of trouble begins when I finish number 2002. That's when I go across the 49/50 mark. The trouble is that I also cross the 50/51 mark which makes kanji number 2002 twice as exciting, that might not seem like trouble but more is to come. Kanji 2003 only crosses 51/62 and Kanji 2009 only crosses the 60/61 mark but from there on in every kanji crosses at least 2 marks. Kanji 2041 crosses 1020 marks! All the way from 1020/1021 to 2040/2041. But the real problem is the last kanji. When I complete that I will cross an infinite number of motivational markers, presumably resulting in infinite excitement, that can't be a good thing.

To avoid danger to myself, my family and small animals near by I have already ordered the follow on volume which covers a further 1000 useful but less common kanji. I will deploy that as soon as I feel the excitement is getting too much. Mr Heisig sure is a devious man.

The real reason for bailing out Anglo Irish bank.

2009-06-07T15:53:00.004+01:00

I like Gene Kerrigan's articles in the Sunday Indo. He had 2 recently: "Servile surrender sowed seed of doom" and "Saving economy while people go down" which deal with our governments obsession with saving Anglo Irish Bank and the others at the expense of absolutely everything else. Why this is happening is a really important question. He makes a lot of sense but he seems to think that the govt are simply mesmerised by the bankers, "deferential and submissive" just as they were in the past to the church. He makes it sound like the govt is just in awe of these guys and willing to do whatever they request - the same way some politicians seem to be in awe of the "free market" and espousers free market ideology. I actually don't think it's that simple (I doubt Gene Kerrigan does either).

Mr Kerrigan says that we should let Anglo go to the wall and let the bond holders take the hit. The argument is that they gambled, they knew the risks and they lost - there is no reason for the Irish government to cover their bet. The problem here is that when they placed their bet, they were ostensibly betting on regulated a bank in a modern, Western, open democracy. As such, on paper, their risk was low and their rates of returns would have been low too (I haven't checked the rates...). On paper, such a bank, regulated by a well run EU member, should never go bust. The problem is that there was no such regulation, worse still there may even have been collusion between the bank and the regulator. For the government to then say "sorry boys you lost, thanks for playing" raises some problems. These bond holders would certainly not be happy with that and would presumably draw even more attention to the misdeeds of the bank and the regulator, possibly even taking legal actions (I have no clue what recourse they would have) and at the very least making it very hard for AIB, BOI and the other to raise capital as they were and still are under the same crappy regulatory system.

The whole thing is a bit like cheating at poker in a gentleman's casino. Ireland sat at the poker table and won hand after hand. It won because it was cheating - it didn't regulate its banks properly. Come the end of the and by now everyone knows Ireland was cheating and Ireland realises that they know. Of course "gentlemen" don't like to bring up this sort of thing in public, it's impolite. Ireland has 2 choices:

it can pretend it didn't cheat, leave the casino with its winnings - in this case it will be black-balled and no one will ever play poker with Ireland again. The genetlemen might then abandon their usual decorum, call out the cheating directly and look for their money back.
it can say "what a splendid evening we've all had" and leave its winnings on deposit in the casino's safe, then come back and play a losing game every night until it has lost enough to repay it's cheating debt plus interest.

Gene Kerrigan is calling for #1, this government is doing for #2.

The good news is that finance is not the same as poker. There is a third option. We can do #1 and also avoid being black-balled and banned from every table if we can convincingly promise never to cheat again. We must acknowledge the wrong doing, punish the wrong doers and put in place legislation and regulators with real powers. They must not be mates of the politicians or the bankers and they must be willing to remain adversarial. No more jobs for the boys. Without this step, #1 would be extremely dangerous for all Irish banks. That still leaves us open to attempts to recoup our ill gotten gains but the worst that can happen is we end up paying them all back, just as in #2 except.

The bad news is that Fianna Fáil certainly don't have the balls to do this. They are much happier to take #2 whereby everybody remains gentlemanly, nobody loses face and the tax payer picks up the bill (to a large extent it was the tax payer who benefited but it will not be those who benefited most who end up paying back the most). I don't believe that any of the other parties have the balls to try it either or to even contemplate it, they don't want to rock the boat and they have all shown that jobs for the is what its all about.

Incidentally, I don't believe the bond holders were dummies either. I imagine they knew how poorly regulated the bank was. However knowing that the government would feel forced to save them, they could make their bets based on the imaginary state of regulation, not the real state of it.

Quick review: aldi and lidl tins of tomato

2009-06-07T15:48:00.003+01:00

More of a note to myself than a review. I make a tomato dip that is a cheap and easy version of a friends more lovely but more labour intensive tomato dip. It's great with a cook-it-yourself ciabatta from Aldi. You just get a tin of chopped tomatoes (I have been using Aldi chunk chopped with herbs), add a teaspoon or two of pesto (I have been using Lidl's) maybe some extra olive oil if you like and a bit of salt and pepper.

So the point of this post is to note that when I made this with Lidl's "Nostia" chopped tomatoes it was nowhere near as nice. Theirs seems much more watery. I haven't tried it Roma. I doubt I will since they are 3 times the price of Aldi's and unlikely to be 3 times tastier!

Quick review: graco stadium duo double buggy

2009-06-07T15:42:00.003+01:00

About 9 months ago, we bought this for about 170euro after having our second child and we're pretty happy with it. It's quite heavy and big but so much that Midori can't lift it into the boot of the car (it just fits cross-wise in the boot of a Prius). The kids are comfortable in it, Seán can sleep in the back section when its flattened out. There's plenty of space underneath for carry shopping etc and it's surprisingly maneuverable for it's size. I think Midori even went to town on the bus with it once but I wouldn't try that myself unless I knew the bus would be very empty.

Overall a thumbs up, especially at the price.

making dvds from video files

2009-05-20T23:38:00.003+01:00

Lest I forget again, DeVeDe did a decent job of putting an flv file that I had downloaded onto a DVD for playback on any TV and it's apt-gettable on ubuntu.

A fun shell idiom.

2009-05-13T12:49:00.003+01:00

To find what's in filea that isn't in fileb, I have always done

cat filea fileb fileb | sort | uniq -u

similar things give you union, intersection, symetric difference etc. Recently I shortened it to

cat filea fileb{,} | sort | uniq -u

which I thought was good fun.

Quality reporting from the Indo

2009-04-29T09:23:00.002+01:00

From this article on ESRI models of the economy (my emphasis added):

"It would be wrong to call that a forecast. It is more of an assumption, because migration is so hard to predict."
With employment officially defined as more than one hour's work a week, the numbers on the live register could reach 500,000 on these forecasts.

1021 Kanji characters

2009-04-25T09:47:00.009+01:00

Yay! I just got to character number 1021 - half way - in the super book Remembering the Kanji. I can write all of these characters from memory. Actually my success rate is 89.8% but that's fine, it's remaining stable as I add more characters. Striving for 100% success would be far more work for only 10% more reward. The tricky characters will eventually stick.

You can see from the progress graph that certain periods have been more productive than others - 600 in the first 4 weeks, 16 weeks for the next 400! What a difference having kids around makes. I accelerated again recently and hope to finish in about 3 months, although the last 2 weeks were pretty poor due to everyone around in my house being ill in a variety of sticky, gooey ways!

It would have been a lot harder without kanji.koohii.com for stories when I couldn't think of good ones myself and Anki for making efficient learning just a matter of sitting down every night and clicking the buttons. Also thanks to the inspiring and entertaining Khatzumoto-san at All Japanese All the Time for documenting that it can be done and that it's a worthwhile step along the road to Japanese proficiency.

Now to try get in another few characters before Seán - asleep on the couch beside me - wakes up!

Infantile coprophagia and numerical synthaesia

2009-04-12T21:37:00.005+01:00

I watched a very interesting documentary a few years back when Google video first started. It was about a Daniel Tammet, a semi-autistic savant who learned to speak icelandic in a week, could memorise thousand of items and perform incredible calculations. He "suffered" from synthaesia - a condition where the senses interfere with each other. Some people can "see" sounds or "smell" colours etc. Daniel Tammet could see numbers, they had particular shapes and colours and it was consistent - a week later, the same number would have the same shape and colour.

So what's that got to do with infantile coprophagia? The participants shall remain nameless to protect them but a couple of weeks ago (let the record show that it was Tue March 25th 2009) my youngest child was left alone briefly with a nappy loaded full of my eldest child's poo. When my wife returned, she found that not only had he tucked in to a tasty treat and was smiling a joyous brown smile but he had decorated the floor, the toys, the books and anything else he could get to.

So while I have no reason to believe that he will be an autistic savant, he does know what number 2 tastes like...

Notes from lidl trip

2009-04-12T21:33:00.002+01:00

Mostly for my records so I can remember to buy it again:

Twinner smoked peppered salamai. V nice.
Smoked peppered salmon. V nice. (peppered brie from Aldi, also v. nice but I know that without making notes).
Grafenwalder beer. Meh.

The powers of oneechan

2009-02-13T10:37:00.005Z

"Oneechan" (お姉ちゃん) means "big sister" in Japanese and Ríona now understands that she is a big sister. Many things can be explained by this. Her ability to walk along the edge of a wall or to climb up something or to eat by herself are all because she is "Oneechan"

As usual though, she doesn't think this means what we think she thinks it means. Yesterday, watching Bambi, we got to the scene where he fights the dogs and saves his girlfriend. Ríona announced "お姉ちゃんですからね" - "that's because he's a big sister". Not much you can do but agree.

Recipe: Penne ala Irish Breakfast

2008-12-06T13:42:00.007Z

I hesitate to call this a recipe, it's just something I did for the first time today without much thought for what would be "right" but it was pretty cool. I probably would have added a rasher if I'd had one.

Ingredients:

pasta (I used penne because that's what I had).
4 sausages - 160g (Dunnes' Simply Better or whatever you like yourself).
white pudding 50g (again Simply Better)
3 cloves of garlic
2 dried chillies with the seeds removed (I might use 1 next time)
1 tin of chopped tomatoes (Lidl I think, not that it matters very much)

Method:

Start the pasta cooking.
Fry the sausages in some oil (I used olive oil for no particular reason) until they are mostly browned. You don't have to worry too much because they're going to cook some more later.
Take them out and slice them into circles about .5cm long - maybe 10 or 12 slices per sausage.
Slice the garlic and fry it and the chillies in the pan for about 30s or a minute. I just let them fry in the little bit of oil that was in the pan from cooking the sausages.
Put in the tin of tomatoes and stir it up.
Put back in the sausages and stir it up.
Mash in the white pudding - you want it to break up into little grains and be spread all through the sauce.
Leave it cook some more, stirring now and then to make sure it's not sticking to the bottom of the pan. About 5 minutes of cooking seemed to do the trick for me.
Pour it on the pasta and eat it.

That's a nice spicy, tomatoey way of getting all the vitamins and goodness contained in an Irish breakfast. Maybe it should have a fried egg on top but I was never one for fancy presentation.

That's my daughter

2008-12-01T16:52:00.003Z

Shortly before we went to Japan, we go some family photos taken - it would be unfair to Seán to only have nice baby photos of Ríona. The studio had various props, wicker baskets, dolls, chairs etc. At one point between poses, I heard Ríona crying. I turned around to find her with her head stuck in some railings. They were part of one the props, a little stand-alone fence that would be waist-high to a 6 year-old - something to lean on or whatever. Poor Ríona, I couldn't help laughing, especially when the photographer said, in a puzzled voice, "I've had that for 25 years and no one has ever done that".

Regrettably I am not a cruel enough father to take a photo before popping her head out from the bars, I actually didn't think of it at the time, I wish I had. I do plan to bring this up at her wedding though.

Japan - smoking

2008-12-01T08:28:00.004Z

One afternoon I was flicking around TV looking for a cartoon or something to occupy Ríona for a few minutes. I found a cartoon, so we watched that for a few minutes. It wasn't by any means a toddler's cartoon, it was called "Gunlock (SaiYuki)" (there seem to be several seasons and variants of this anime, I have no idea which one I was watching). It's a retelling of Journey to the West (aka "Monkey Magic") with more modern characters, some guns etc. Although it wasn't a toddler's cartoon, it held Ríona's attention for while I got something else done. She seems to like any kind of cartoon at least for a few minutes.

The cartoon had some violence ("Daddy, boy fell over") but what really surprised me was that one of the main characters was smoking. He wasn't even a bad guy. I was just really shocked to see someone smoking in a kids show at 2pm.

It was actually pretty uncomfortable in Japan on several occasions, restaurants still have smoking sections, usually as big or bigger than the non-smoking sections and we sometimes had to settle for a seat in the smoking area.　We even found one that didn't have a non-smoking section at all!

What's really odd though is that it's not like smoking is entirely acceptable in Japan either. In lots of places, smoking on the street is illegal and some streets had designated smoking areas. And in true Japanese style, people obeyed these rules. I saw plenty of smokers at the smoking areas and I can't remember seeing anyone smoking in the "wrong" part of the street.

Still it's better than China. A few years ago I was in Beijing airport and I went into a restaurant. "Smoking or non-smoking?". "Non-smoking", I said. "Sit anywhere you like", said the waitress. I was sleepless and jet-lagged at the time so I didn't notice how stupid this was. For a while I was the only customer but soon some more tables filled up, including a guy smoking right beside me. It was only then that I understood my conversation with the waitress. The question was purely cosmetic - probably just for foreigners - there was no non-smoking area in this restaurant, or certainly none that the waitress was willing to enforce. I wonder if I had lit up a cigarette would I have been told to put it out because my table was non-smoking?

The snot hoover.

2008-10-26T13:04:00.006Z

We arrived in Japan on Tuesday morning. All of us had colds, sniffles and coughs. Ríona had had hers for a week or two already.

On Friday, Midori decided it was time to get her checked out and brought her to a Japanese doctor. The doctor gave her antibiotics, cough syrup and aspirin. Japanese medical clinics all seem to include their own dispensary which is very handy but I wonder about the conflict of interests in terms of prescribing expensive drugs and also little things like aspirin, (maybe it's all regulated, I dunno).

The most exciting thing about the whole trip (and the bit I regret missing) was the doctor's use of a small vacuum cleaner to suck all the snots out of Ríona nose! You get to see what comes out in a glass jar too. Apparently she was not bothered by it at all.

So if that wasn't nasty enough, the doctor also told Midori that she should repeat the procedure herself. "How?", I asked, "by sucking her nose?". Apparently, yes, by sucking her nose, while giving her a bath for example. Just in case you haven't already run through the details in your head, you suck, nothing happens, you suck harder, nothing happens, harder some more... pop a torrent of hot, green snot shoots into your mouth, hitting you straight in the tonsils. Did you just gag? I know I did when I first thought about it. I imagine in real life that my mouth full of snot would quickly be followed by me puking up my own daughter's nose. Maybe if you're into live fish, sea-urchins' gonads and rancid soy-beans then it's nothing special.

Might be a good idea for Jackass...

Get a SIP phone to work with openwrt on a linksys WRT54GL

2008-09-24T23:27:00.004+01:00

Update: I've changed this to put the siproxd.pid file in /tmp which avoids touching the flash memory for the pid file and also avoids the need to mkdir and chmod (which I typoed BTW) and thus allow siproxd to come back up automatically after a reboot.

I bought a WRT54GL today and get openwrt running on it with no hassle. More importantly I got my SIP router thing (a Linksys SPA3102) to work behind it (initially the SIP router was in front of it which is inconvenient in many ways).

To get the SIP thingy working (and also SIP clients on PCs in my home network) I just installed siproxd with

ipkg install siproxd vi /etc/siproxd.conf

The editing of the config file (like most of useful stuff in this post) comes from this page. I changed the following four entries

if_inbound = br-lan if_outbound = eth0.1 registration_file = /tmp/siproxd_registrations pid_file = /tmp/siproxd.pid

the first two were the only ones that required any "figuring out". Then I started siproxd and set it to start at boot time too

/etc/init.d/siproxd enable /etc/init.d/siproxd start

After setting up the openwrt box, I just set the outbound proxy for my SIP router and other clients to be my openwrt box and that was that.

Is the govt's Lisbon study legal?

2008-09-11T09:45:00.002+01:00

The govt survey into why Lisbon didn't pass is out. I haven't yet tried to find the original and I wonder what questions were on the survey. I assume it was along the lines of

If you voted "no", was it because you thought Lisbon would bring a) abortion, b) EU army, c) corporation tax harmonisation?

The point being to uncover why "no" voters voted that way.

There could equally have been a survey that went along these lines

If you voted "yes", was it because you thought Lisbon a) would help fight climate change b) necessary for Croatia's entry to the EU c) would give national parliaments to ability to stop bad EU laws?

but no such survey exists.

Is it legal for this government to spend public money on a survey whose sole purpose is to help turn "no" voters into "yes" voters without also spending or providing money for a similar survey to investigate the misunderstandings of "yes" voters and correct them.

Mamma chin chin all gone.

2008-08-19T20:14:00.006+01:00

Bathing Seán while Ríona is around always results in the following conversation, although tonight it got a bit surreal. "chin chin" is Japanese (and maybe Chinese) for "penis" by the way.

Ríona: [seeing Seán naked] chin chin! chin chin!
Dad: yes, baba's chin chin
Ríona: My chin chin?
Dad: no, you don't have a chin chin
Ríona: my chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: mamma chin chin?
Dad: no mamma has no chin chin
Ríona: Mamma chin chin all gone
Dad: yes
Ríona: An pan man chin chin?
Dad: ehhh.. you'll have to ask mamma about that.

The end is nigh.

2008-08-18T21:51:00.002+01:00

I was at a kiddies' playground at the weekend and I overheard one dad say to his angelic 3-year-old daughter, "now play normally, I don't want to hear you talking about taking anybody out". WTF is the world coming to?

I kept an eye out when she was near Ríona but didn't get close enough to check for the mark. I should probably have got her name so I could make sure I was on her side when the apocalypse comes!

Creative Zen: useless for listening to podcasts, books etc

2008-08-07T22:01:00.004+01:00

Summary: if you want an MP3 player for listening to podcasts, documentaries or anything where you might to resume from you left off then avoid the Creative Zen.

I bought a Creative Zen (not a "Zen M" or a "Zen V", just a "Zen" - well done Creative on picking a name that is almost impossible to search for without finding all of your other products!). It's quite a nice little device, with a nice screen and a slick UI but unfortunately it makes we want to scream.

If you're listening to an hour long MP3 and you turn off the device, you'd expect it to resume the MP3 where you left off. You'd expect the same when you switch to the radio. Alas the Zen does neither of these. If you turn it off, it remembers for about an hour but then it turns itself off completely and when you turn back on you'll be at 0:00:00. Same when you switch to the radio or watch a video or god knows what else.

The Zen does have 10 bookmark slots but you have to go through a series of button clicks in order to mark your place and if you forget to do that before switching to the radio, tough luck.

It really is quite mind-boggling how such a basic bit of usability could have been left out. I assume they spent all their time making sure all of the album-art and other fluff worked properly. What's more frustrating is that my previous player was a creative MuVo, a far less sophisticated memory-stick style player that always remembered exactly where I was. I would have bought another if they weren't about 30 quid dearer than its video-playing cousin.

Worse still, I borrowed a Creative Zen Stone for a few days. It's a much simpler device than the Zen, much more like the MuVo except without the ability to plug directly into a USB port. In fact, the Stone seems to be pretty much identical to the MuVo in its functionality, including remembering where I am in the current track. At about half the price of the Zen, I'm really annoyed that I was tempted into buying the flashier model.

It seems to me that there are at least 2 development teams in Creative, one that does the video devices and one that does the audio-only. Unfortunately the video team don't seem to have looked at the audio devices when figuring out what matters.

While I'm complaining, I may as well point out that the Zen only works as an MTP device and cannot be used as a straight-forward USB disk and bizarrely, if you transfer an MP3 file using the linux MTP command-line tools, the Zen cannot figure out how long the track is and so you cannot seek forwards or backwards! So I have to Gonad or Gnomad or whatever it's called.

One slight bright point is that Creative's support responded quickly to my query, confirmed that the functionality was indeed missing and they had passed on my comments to the developers. Of course they could just be saying that but at least it was prompt!

When will I learn...

2008-08-03T20:02:00.003+01:00

When will I learn to wait long enough before eating pizza? I'm almost 34 years old and I still end up burning the roof of my mouth almost every time I cook pizza at home. I suspect the answer is never and I like to think that pizza night in the Shaolin temple leaves even the most enlightened wu-shu masters asking the same question.

An interesting maths proof (to me anyway).

2008-07-28T12:22:00.004+01:00

This is a comment I left on a blog but the comment box had no preview button and my comment came out kinda mangled, so I'm posting it here.

First of all, it's a long time since I proved anything so I may be wrong. Secondly, the markup is probably going to be terrible, there seems to be no preview button and I can't find wordpress's help section for markup. Finally, apologies if this is straying too far from the original idea of proof automation but I think this answers the question of whether this is true for Complex also. I can't really claim that this proof is discoverable by pattern matching as it's not really an epsilon-delta proof. That said, if I haven't made a mistake, the problem becomes "easy" if you consider a compactification of R and maybe looking at compactifications is a reasonable strategy for theorem provers.

Anyway, I think you can capture all of the fiddly parts and the proof-by-contradiction inside the Heine-Borel Theorem instead of using the Baire Category Theorem, which seems to be a bit more heavy-weight.

The essence is to show that for any δ > 0, there is a single N_δ such that |f(nX)| < δ for X ∈ [0,1] and n > N_δ. The conclusion follows from the fact that any Real > N_δ is something in [0,1] times an integer at least as big as N and therefore |f| will be < δ for this Real too.

Let X ∈ Real. We are given that f(nX) -> 0 as n -> ∞. More formally, ∀ δ > 0, ∀ X ∈ Real, ∃ N_δ,X ∈ Natural such that |f(nX)| < δ ∀ n > N_δ,X. Since f(X) is continuous there is an open set, O_δ,X containing X such that |f(N_δ,X y)| < δ ∀ y ∈ O_δ,X (it is the inverse image of (-δ, δ)).

For a fixed δ, {O_δ,X: X ∈ [0,1]} gives us an open cover of [0,1] and Heine-Borel tells us that there is a finite subcover. This means we have a finite set of O_δ,X, each with an N_δ,X and we can take the maximum N_δ,X and call it N_δ. This is a Natural such that |f(nX)| < δ ∀ X ∈ [0,1], ∀ n > N_δ.

Now let X ∈ Real, X > N_δ. Let N = [X]+1, where [] is the greatest integer function and let θ = X/N. Note that θ ∈ [0,1] and N > N_δ. So |f(Nθ)| < δ. That is, |f(X)| < δ.

So all you need is the compactness of [0,1] and the fact that you can generate all of Real+ from [0,1] and multiplication by Natural. So it seems that is true for Complex or Real^N etc. where you take x -> ∞ to mean |x| -> ∞ and you use [-1,1] instead of [0,1].

If Real itself was compact you could skip the scaling step entirely. I think rephrasing the question in terms of Real ∪ {-∞, ∞} makes it almost trivial but I must admit I'm going beyond what I can remember from my student days, I expect someone will tell me that rephrasing it like that causes something else to break.

I think it would be reasonable for a theorem prover to start by choosing a δ to aim for and use continuity to construct the cover of Real from the inverse images of (-δ, -δ). It would get stuck then and I don't know whether there is a reasonable automated bridge to the solution from there.

Nice beer

2008-07-27T19:22:00.002+01:00

This is mostly just a note for myself, not knowing the first thing about beer and drinking less than a pint a month these days means my opinion may be "wrong" but I wanted to make a note of this beer so that I buy again next time I have a beer drinking opportunity.

While R<&iactute>ona was sleeping, I cooked some spicy tomatoey rib things (the butcher gave me ribs when I asked for belly and I found a recipe that seemed easy). Afterwards I had a bottle of quite nice beer. It's called Franziskaner (as in Fanciscan Monks I think) and is a weisse bier (funnily enough the photo on that page is the beer I drank so maybe it really is good). It was very easy to drink after my dinner.

I became a real parent today.

2008-07-22T22:48:00.002+01:00

1 week after the birth of my second child I became a "real" parent. Ríona was in the buggy with her hand out, rubbing against things as she went. She rubbed against a dirty car tyre and got some nasty black stuff on her fingertips. I didn't want her to get that all over her clothes, so I did the only thing I could think of. I took out my hanky, spat on it a little and cleaned her.

Technically, the standard for "real" parenthood is to spit on a hanky and clean your child's face but that wasn't an option. I suppose I could have waited for her to rub her face with her dirty fingers. Maybe next time.

The lamest command never

2008-06-19T01:14:00.006+01:00

While writing the preceding post, I was reminded of my time doing tech support at an ISP. Most of the customers were running Windows 95. I really wished that the authors of Windows 95 had just admitted how lame it was and included a "Close all programs and log on as the same user" option on the Logout menu, because that would have been the most popular choice, that or "Restart".

kf: the lamest command ever

2008-06-19T01:02:00.004+01:00

Like everyone else (well, every unixy-one else) I find myself repeating certain tasks often enough that it's worthwhile creating a script to do it. The lamest of these scripts is kf. The script itself is not lame, it couldn't be simpler or more elegant. It's the fact that it exists at all that is lame. Why?

$ cat `which kf` killall firefox-bin

That's why. I've thought of just filing a bug on their bugtracker, saying that I shouldn't need such a script. It wouldn't be in the least bit productive but it would be satisfying in a pointless kind of way.

I guess I'll just have to wait for something better to come along. I hear Firefox 4.0 is going to be awesome.

P.S. I also have have ke for killing evolution when it decides to head off into the weeds. I keep trying out the other mailers and somehow they keep managing to suck even more than evolution.

Who is Rob?

2008-06-15T02:39:00.003+01:00

In the prior post I mentioned Rob. Turns out that the mock-misogynism in that post isn't universally popular and Rob is not over the moon with me linking to him from it. I guess he feels it's important to keep on good terms with the humourless feminist segment of the secure linux boot cd burning, Lisbon treaty opponents who account for 90% of my visitors.

The problem is that I believe that the semantic web will, one day, get its thumb out of its arse and start working, so I like to link when I can. Hence this post, which puts the real Rob, one step removed from the offending article, while still preserving a trail.

Letter to the editor: final Lisbon

2008-06-09T23:37:00.003+01:00

The letters page in the Indo has been 100% Lisbon for the last few days and I spotted one today that annoyed me enough to get back on the horse. Maybe it'll sneak in in time.

I'm sick of hearing about how Europe has been good for us because that misses the point - Europe with consensus and vetoes has been good for us but there's no reason to believe that Europe with majority rule imposed on the minority will be any fun for us at all.

For an example of how "good for Europe" does not always mean "good for Ireland" you just have to look at ECB interest rates over the last 10 years. The low rates caused an unsustainable property boom in this country and made property speculators and landlords wealthy while making housing unaffordable for many. Now that Europe needs higher rates, our boom has turned to bust and there will be no soft landing.

I'm sick of hearing how this treaty is mainly about streamlining - if this treaty wasn't about giving away sovereignty, there would be no requirement for a referendum. The EU could streamline itself left, right and centre without needing the Irish people's say-so. For example, as I understand it, the treaty of Amsterdam amended the same treaties as Lisbon does and required no referendum in Ireland because it didn't touch sovereignty.

Anyway, there's too much there to have any hope of being printed, here's what I sent.

Those pushing for a "yes" to Lisbon are fond of pointing out the EU
has been great for Ireland - and it has. Directives have come from
Europe that our government has agreed to but would never have put
forward itself. They are like medicine - sometimes unpalatable but
good for us in the long term.

What the "yes" side always gloss over is that these directives have
all been negotiated with the knowledge that each country has a veto.
This has ensured that we really do get something that's good for
everyone, not something that's a cure for the bigger nations and a
poison for us. The Lisbon treaty changes this.

By removing vetoes, the treaty does not just "streamline" the EU's
decision making, it fundamentally changes it. We will not get the same
end result, just with less red tape. It will be a different end
result, one which may not be good for us in the short-term or the
long-term but which we will be powerless to reject,

You have to be careful not to anthropomorphise children

2008-06-09T22:19:00.002+01:00

Just wanted to put that out there.

Excellent article on Lisbon Treaty

2008-06-08T16:53:00.004+01:00

I've been rather pissed off with the Independent however this anti-Lisbon article by Alan Ruddock really does a great job of expressing most of my reasons for voting "no". I won't try to summarise, just read it.

Dodgy bits of the Lisbon treaty: the "expanded" role of national parliaments

2008-05-26T22:17:00.011+01:00

All posts on Lisbon

Update: I spoke to someone from the Dept of Foreign affairs on the phone this evening who confirmed my understanding. They also said that they felt the FAQ answer was not misleading, that the answers on that page were supposed to be shorter with less detail. That the detail they chose to omit renders the entire thing pointless was not an issue for them.

I keep hearing about the expanded role that national parliaments will have if Lisbon is ratified. As far as I can tell it is at best a figment of the imagination of the "yes" campaigners.

This is from the Dept of Foreign Affairs Lisbon treaty website

The Reform Treaty will give the National Parliaments of EU Member States a direct input into European legislation. All proposals for EU legislation will be sent directly to National Parliaments. The Parliaments will have the right to offer “reasoned opinions.”

If a sufficient number of National Parliaments object to a particular proposal, it can either be amended or withdrawn. This “yellow card procedure” is designed to give National Parliaments an important role in ensuring that the Union does not exceed its authority by involving itself in matters which can best be dealt with at national, regional or local level.

This "yellow card procedure" is what is focused on by "yes" campaigners as the fabulous new power that parliaments will have. It seems great, it seems like if enough parliaments get together they can stop bad legislation coming from the EU. The problem is, the circumstances under which they can stop something.

National parliaments will not be able to stop legislation that they don't like or that they think would be damaging to the EU or undemocratic or just generally a bad idea. There role is "ensuring that the Union does not exceed its authority by involving itself in matters which can best be dealt with at national, regional or local level". It's spelled out more clearly on the Referendum Commission's website

The parliaments may send a “reasoned opinion” to the EU institutions on whether draft legislation complies with the principle of subsidiarity. There is also a Protocol on subsidiarity which requires that draft legislative proposals are justified on the basis of subsidiarity and proportionality.

If enough national parliaments vote to send a reasoned opinion the draft legislation must be reviewed.

...

The review does not mean that the proposal must be withdrawn. If the proposer (usually, the Commission) wished to continue with the proposal, it must set out a reasoned opinion on why it considers that the principle of subsidiarity has not been breached.

According to this, parliaments can only object when a law breaches the principles of either subsidiarity (some things are better handled by the individual countries) or proportionality (any EU laws must achieve the goal of the treaties with the minimum of side-effects or restrictions on the member states). If enough parliaments feel the proposal breaks these principles then the EU must either change the proposal or explain why it thinks it's right and the parliaments are wrong. Either way, the proposal continues on, unless more 50% of parliaments objected, in which case either the European parliament or the Council of Ministers can kill it (by a majority vote). The full details of this are laid out (fairly clearly) in Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality (full treaty available in all EU languages from this page).

So basically the "expanded" role of the national parliaments is that they get to point out when the EU is doing something it's not allowed to do. I'm not sure who policed this previously, maybe it required someone to take a case to one of the European courts but basically this is a nonsense power. If you were to listen to the "yes" campaign you'd believe the parliaments would be able bounce back any laws that they don't like. This is simply not true.

While I'm at it, Lisbon gives the EU power in lots of new areas, areas which are currently under the power of national parliaments. So no matter how you slice that, Lisbon is reducing parliaments' roles in all of these areas. Giving them the ability to act as a speed bump in the very limited circumstances I've described does not change that and certainly doesn't justify their role being described as "expanded".

For completeness I should also point out that parliaments have a new veto power. Various areas currently require unanimous agreement by member states but in the future these can be changed to qualified majority if all member states agree (interestingly the reverse, going from majority to unanimity is never possible). If this ever happens, parliaments can veto it. Of course this would require the rather unlikely situation where a prime-minister agrees to switch to majority but his national parliament vote against him. Again if you consider that, before Lisbon, it was impossible for any area to change from unanimity to majority, describing this veto as an "expanded" role is nonsensical - previously this power resided with the parliaments (or in some countries with the people) so again this is actually a reduction in the parliaments power. It's a bit like if you (parliament) and your partner (prime minister) have a joint bank account and then someone (EU) says "I'm taking your name off the account and putting my name on it but don't worry, you now have an expanded role - if I ever try to take your partner's name off the account, you're allowed stop me."

Interestingly, other pages on the Dept of Foreign affairs completely leave out the fact that parliaments can only object on grounds of subsidiarity and give the impression that they can object for any reason:

The Treaty gives a new role within the EU to national parliaments. All proposals for EU legislation will be forwarded to national parliaments for their consideration. National parliaments will have a period of 8 weeks in which to vet proposals and offer opinions on them. If enough national parliaments object to a proposal, it can either be amended or withdrawn. Any national parliament can block moves to increase the number of policy issues that can be decided by majority voting.

it's possible that I'm misunderstanding something but give that this contradicts other pages on the same website and also the Referendum Commission's description, this seems incorrect. I am waiting for a call back from the dept. with clarification. Update: they called me back, I'm correct, they don't think it's important.

So, there you go, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and reduced is expanded. It's funny, if this role for parliaments didn't exist at all, I probably wouldn't care. What I care about is that the "yes" side are lying about it and selling it as something it really isn't.

Cinema trip: Doomsday

2008-05-24T21:39:00.003+01:00

I went to see Doomsday on Thursday night. It wasn't as bad as the review led me to expect. I was supposed to go see Caramel but I missed the start time because Sichuan House was really busy and my excellent Kung Po chicken took ages to arrive.

Doomsday is mostly silly but good fun, Rhona Mitra looks nice and the depiction of Glasgow, 25 years after after law and order breaks down, almost makes this a documentary.

George Orwell: Politics and the English Language

2008-05-24T19:27:00.008+01:00

Turns out my quotes are unreadable in Google Reader, presumably because they rely on the style-sheet. That sucks. I should bother the reader people about that.

A few years ago, I listened to a pretty good PARC forum, The Paradox of Political Language by Geoffrey Nunberg, University of California, Berkeley. In it he mentions Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language". I can't even remember if it played a big part or a small part in the talk but I decided I should read it.

Searching on Google now finds me lots of copies of the essay but for some reason, at the time, I didn't do that (or maybe it recently went out of copyright, I don't know). So off I went and bought "Orwell and Politics", a collection of his writings on politics.

It's got lots of interesting stuff in it and you pick up all manner of information about life in Britain before during and shortly after World War II. Stuff that you really wouldn't get in history class (if you took it!). There are lots references to odd political groups and the many Nazi-sympathizers that there were, seemingly quite a common thing before the war - those fascists were doing a fine job of keeping the wheels of industry and commerce turning and making sure the plebs didn't get above their station. There is also a lot of criticism of the blind support for Russia which was apparently quite common among intellectuals at the time.

It's got a copy of Animal Farm in it, including the original preface on "Freedom of the Press" which ironically did not make it to the press. In fact a repeated theme in the book is that while speech in Britain was quite free, with the major press owned by the rich, the political discourse of the time was completely distorted - a situation which has only really gotten worse with the further consolidation of the media and the increasing dependence on advertising for revenue.

Anyway, I have been slowly making my way through the book (I bought it in Dec 2006) and have now reached "Politics and the English Language". Of course I had read it already, back when I first bought the book but I decided I might as well read it again. Most of it feels completely unfamiliar to me. I recognised some stuff at the start but the rest is like I'm reading it for the first time. I don't know if I was distracted when I read before or if my memory really is that bad. Maybe it's just one of those things that you get more from each time, like The Naked Gun :). Anyway, the purpose of this post is to record what I thought were some great bits of that essay. They are as true today, as they were in Orwell's time, maybe moreso.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Add to this list "terrorism" which now means "what they do to us" but definitely not "what we do to them".

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

    I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

    Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.

I think it was the octopus in the following paragraph that made me want to write this post.

By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

I have highlighted the most important sentence in the next paragraph.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Orwell is blowing the whistle on the powerful hiding their crimes behind inoffensive euphemisms. 50 years on and such euphemisms are still being coined, accepted and regurgitated by the media. Instead of parroting them until they enter common parlance, an honest, responsible media would confront those who use them and make such phrases unutterable. Every time someone is allowed to say "extraordinary rendition" instead of "kidnap and torture" or "collateral damage" instead of "innocent civilian deaths", they have been let away with a deliberate lie. I wonder would war be less acceptable to voters and less comfortable for warmongers if they could not avoid "calling up mental pictures" of their crimes?

Has the gap between "real aims" and "declared aims" ever been as big as today? I like this image anyway.

When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

This is also as true today as ever.

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The Cure.

Orwell gives several pieces of advice on how to write well (I have cut and pasted paragraphs from various sections of his essay). The first one here really strikes a chord with me after all my recent letters-page activity.

People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Orwell is not unwilling to criticise use of the "not un-" construction, a construction I myself am not unguilty of using from time to time.

One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

His final list of rules.

I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

The result

It is a little depressing to examine Orwell's list of "worn-out and useless" phrases that he would like to send to the dustbin.

One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

I have no idea how popular or novel they were at the time but sadly for Orwell, it would be hard to find an edition of a newspaper today that didn't feature one or more of "Achilles' heel", "hotbed", "melting pot" and "acid test". I think "jackboot" is only missing because there's nobody to use it against, which leaves "veritable inferno" as the only one to have been extinguished (pardon the pun). It's not that I myself dislike these phrases, I grew up with them and they seem perfectly natural to me but I presume they were relatively new in Orwell's time. They were badly- and over-used enough for Orwell to list them in the conclusion of his essay and almost all of them not only survived but flourished.

Finally, I must admit that I have not (and will not) go back over my previous postings and letters to the editor to see how well I measure up by Orwell's standards. I know I put considerable effort into shortening and to-the-pointening some of the letters to increase their chances of publication, although it didn't always work. Hopefully though, by writing this post, his wisdom won't just slide out of my head again like... an Achille's heel sliding out of a jackboot, into a veritable inferno.

Proof by taxation

2008-05-19T20:58:00.016+01:00

A little story

One day your boss says, "Great job, we want to give you a bonus, were you planning a holiday this year?". You say "well actually, I wanted to go here", you show him a website, "but I can't afford it". "How much is it?". "1000 euro", you say. "Great, we'll pay for that". "Thanks boss!". Happy days.

Later you realise that if they just give you 1000e you'll have to pay tax on that. The tax rate is 40% so that's a 400e tax bill, you still can't afford the holiday.

You head up to your boss's office and explain the problem. He's still in a great mood and says, "Don't worry, we'll pay your tax bill too". "Wow but there's another bit of a problem, I'll have to pay tax on that extra 400 too. 40% of 400e is 160e, I still can't afford it". You boss is looking less happy now and gets out a piece of paper. "Right, we'll pay all your tax, no matter what" and starts writing down some figures 1000 400 160 64 25.60 10.24 4.096 1.6384 0.65536 you hear him mumbling as he starts adding them all up. Suddenly Joan, his secretary, who's been quiet all this time blurts out "1666e and 66c". You both stare at her in amazement then after a lot more mumbling the boss says "my total is 1666e and .23c but I suppose if I added a few more lines to the sum it'd probably be 1666.66. How did you get it Joan?"

"Well, tax is 40% so he gets to keep 60% of anything you pay him. So the final amount in his pocket is the what you give him times 0.6 . So you're looking for a number that when you multiply it by 0.6 gives you 1000. So 1000 ÷ .6 is the number you're looking for because when you multiply that by 0.6 the two .6s cancel out and only the 1000 is left and 1000 ÷ 0.6 is 1666.666666666...", says Joan.

So what we have proved is that 1000 + 1000 x 0.4 + 1000 x 0.4^2 + 1000 x 0.4^3 + ... = 1000 ÷ 0.6 . There was nothing special about our choice of 40%, so replacing 0.4 with r (and 0.6 by 1-r) and dividing out the 1000 on both sides gives 1 + r + r^2 + r^3 + ... = 1 ÷ (1 - r) Of course there are other ways to prove this but, I like my proof by taxation because it feels like it explains why they are equal.

Israeli Refuseniks

2008-05-14T23:05:00.004+01:00

Here's a very interesting article on Israeli soldiers, pilots etc who have refused to serve in the occupied territories. There are many quotes and they are fascinating. There are pilots who have refused to commit any more "crimes" or "state terrorism" by carrying out air-strikes on populated areas. There are prestigious elite commandos and ordinary soldiers who have spoken out against the use of the Israeli army for immoral purposes.

Some rambling thoughts.

It is bizarre that there is a country which is exercising such brutality on one hand but on the other is civilised enough that it is possible for these soldiers to do what they are doing. They are, of course, punished for their disobedience but the punishments are not extreme. And although their tales are depressing, it is somewhat hopeful that these people exist and their numbers are growing.

It seems to me that it is a lot harder to stand up like this, against your peers, your commanders and maybe even your subordinates than it would be to just continue following orders. Especially if you have been doing something for several years before you conclude that it is wrong. People rationalise their own actions in all kinds of ways and seem to want to continue doing the same thing even though they know on some level it is wrong because to change now is to admit that you were wrong all along.

That said, the pilots said they had noticed a change in the character of their missions in the last few years, "We believed in the purity of our arms and that we did all we could to protect unnecessary loss of life. Somewhere in the last few years it became harder and harder to believe that is the case." . I suppose it is easier to change allegiance when the object of your allegiance changes first.

BBC's coverage of Palestine

2008-05-14T22:57:00.003+01:00

Media lens has a very interesting article on the pro-Israel bias in the BBC's coverage of the conflict. Most interesting was the quote from the BBC's correspondent Jeremy Bowen,

"There were no interviews yesterday with grieving families because as the death of the Reuters cameraman showed, it was very dangerous to move around. They may well surface in the next few days. Very little video came out of Gaza yesterday. In a piece I did the night before last I interviewed the father of an 11 year old boy, Riad al Uwasi from al Burej camp, who was killed last week. When he was killed it was impossible to get to al Burej, which is where the Reuters cameraman died. When things were calmer, it became possible, until the next incursion."

and Jonathon Cook's comment

"It is a terrible irony that, precisely because Israel has created an environment in the occupied territories in which it can unleash so much violence so unpredictably, journalists are increasingly fearful of venturing there to tell the human stories of the Palestinian casualties behind the simple numbers. It is, of course, equally ironic that, because life inside Israel is relatively safe, journalists can easily humanise the stories of the far smaller number of Israeli casualties. Unfortunately, Bowen and most other journalists fail to appreciate this irony or to act in useful ways to counter its effects on their reporting."

I keep trying to think about how and when I will explain this kind of thing to my offspring.