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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Nicholas' LiveJournal:
- Cheese on rye, stir fry, rhubarb pie
- Cannelloni and panettone (with mascarpone -- OK, Italian is a bit of a cheat)
- Milk shake, steak, and cake (or a pasta bake)
- Bread rolls, sausage rolls, and profiteroles
- Tea (brewed), wild boar (subdued), and prunes (stewed)
- Cauliflower au gratin, and, um, fortune cookies in Latin...
| Thursday, May 15th, 2008 | |
| 4:58 am | WzDD's Poignant Guide to Ruby Bloggers (Disclaimer: yet another programming ramble. I'm sorry.) Okay, there is definitely something cultural, if that is the word I'm after, about the Ruby world's delight in giving things poetic, yet essentially meaningless and distracting, names. I think this enforced cuteness is basically because everyone is trying to copy Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, which is, as far as I can tell, the original cloyingly-cute Ruby document. Case in point: the introduction is about why the author wants you to have an onion with you when you read his book: "I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship." Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby doesn't get any less annoying, but its author at least has the decency to be tongue-in-cheek during his self-exploratory narrative excursions, it's full of cartoons, and through the whimsical ramble you can sense that he has a point, that he is leading somewhere. Having a point is a neat trick which not everyone can pull off successfully. The culprit this time is titled The Narcissism of Small Code Differences. Here the guy starts with a text processing problem (padding a zip code) and then immediately veers into Unrealistic Cute Categorisation Happy Land, randomly dividing programmers into Agnostics, who are pragmatists, Ascetics, who are generalists, Librarians, who ... uh, like using library functions, and Purists, blah blah blah, each with good intentions but secret fatal flaws! Each programmer-stereotype then rewrites the code according to their preferred style, and in doing so changes the behaviour of the function. As you'd expect, each rewrite is accompanied by a moralising paragraph or two about how narrow-minded they are being. To quote a friend of mine, this is about as subtle as an axe between the eyes, but the worst bit is that by the end of the article the problematic characteristic of the coders (it turns out) isn't their tendency to generalise, or library-ify, or what have you, it's just that they rewrote this guy's code and made assumptions about how it should behave without asking him. Which is a reasonable thing to point out, but you can make assumptions just as well regardless of how many library functions you use -- the problem isn't that the programmers have a favourite way of programming, it's that they were arrogant and / or stupid. It just seems like a whole lot of words to write, essentially, "some programmers are jerks". My programming advice to you is "don't be a jerk". I'm also (experimentally) testing this advice with other facets of my life, though apparently not my blogging. |
| Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 | |
| 10:31 pm | Personal post A couple of weeks ago I moved out of a sharehouse and into a single-bedroom place in Mosman. I'd been nervous about moving out by myself for the duration of my PhD because I was worried that the isolation would send me insane. Well, it's been three weeks, and I haven't gone insane. In fact, it's been fantastic. I can invite people over without wondering what my housemate is doing / going to do sometime later, the place looks presentable, I can play my bizarre music with impunity, and I can walk around without wearing pants whenever I like (though I never actually do this. I always wear pants. Always.) I really like my place and would recommend it to anybody. This brings me to my next point, which is that you are all informally invited for dinner and/or bizarre music at some point. Or, if you'd prefer a formal invitation, you should come to my housewarming, which I haven't organised yet. More sanity updates to follow as events warrant. |
| Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | |
| 6:00 pm | I know it's dangerous talking about this while I'm still in academia... ... but wouldn't it be great to actually live in an ivory tower? You'd get a great view of your surroundings, be totally protected against orc attacks (but not against ent attacks), and you could save on electricity bills by making use of the heat differential between the top bit and the bottom bit. |
| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 | |
| 2:41 am | Towel size vs retained moisture After showering, I dry myself with a towel. In fact I've got several towels, of different sizes and colours. I don't wash my towels after every use, and I've noticed that unless I hang them in a spot that is highly conducive to towel drying (such spots are, sadly, frequently rather awkward in all other respects) they tend to get wetter with repeated use, even taking into account the regular 24-hour-or-so drying period. Anyway, recently I ran out of bath towels and so I started using a beach towel. This towel is about twice the size of my normal towels, but it has managed to stay drier for far longer than I'd expected. It's definitely outlasted the bath towels. So: is the dryness size-related? I guess moisture spreads pretty-much evenly to all parts of the towel. In that case, any given spot on a larger towel would be drier than a similar-sized spot on a small towel. So the towel will feel drier quite soon after a shower. But since this towel has stayed dry over multiple showers, there must be more to it than that. I thought perhaps there was some sort of nonlinear relationship between moisture level and drying time, but, since there is simply more surface area in a larger towel, that probably isn't necessary: Larger towels dry quicker just because there's more towel exposed to the air. Makes sense. Hadn't thought about it previously. I wonder if there's a break-even point? |
| Thursday, January 31st, 2008 | |
| 4:57 pm | When a possum dies among the shrubs its body falls onto a bed of leaves, face down, tail already stiffening. By the second day its fur is matted and tufted, and ants crawl over its body, and flies come. By the third day the fur is a carpet, slowly, silently, dissolving into the leaves -- and it's really a beautiful process, returning to the earth, the energy in its flesh spreading throughout the garden. But it smells terrible, so I had to bag the thing and dump it in the rubbish anyway. |
| Monday, January 21st, 2008 | |
| 2:26 am | Why I don't like the Chinese Room experiment This is pretty nerdy. Sorry, non-hardcore-nerd friends. Sometimes the Chinese Room experiment sometimes comes up in conversation and I complain about it and then forget some of the reasons why I don't like it. If I type them up here then, when I inevitably forget them again, I can at least forget a definitive and comprehensive list. As far as I know, nothing in this post is original: all these objections are pretty well-known. I guess this could be a follow-up to these posts. Here's some info about the Chinese Room experiment if you don't know about it and are interested: IEP, plato, Wikipedia. It seems reasonable to claim that the person doing the symbol manipulation inside the room is not, in merely following a small set of instructions, performing the entire thing that the man on the Clapham omnibus (I learnt a new expression today) would call "being conscious". But the person inside the room is not the entirety of the system, which really comprises the symbol manipulator, the set of symbols, and some way of hiding the internal workings of the system from an interrogator (making it a black box, in computer science terms -- though it turns out that comp. sci. has actually co-opted a term which probably dates from WWII and was originally used about radios). ( Continued ) |
| Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 | |
| 5:13 pm | Freedom (I found this lying around - N) Driving to and from Canberra I sometimes take a break from my usual 3-hours-of-video-game-music-remixes partyfest and listen to a podcast or two instead. I'm not sure that it's a good idea because I then frequently want to make notes on what I'm listening to, which would be a life-limiting move at 110 kilometres per hour. For example, this weeks' episode of The philosopher's zone had a pretty interesting discussion of the concept of "freedom" in the context of the abolition of slavery. Up until quite recently, relatively, people were still making the argument that slaves were more free than paid workers. This is a pretty intruiging concept to modern ears and comes down, predictably, to what it means to be free. You can approach the definition of "freedom" in two ways. The first might be in terms of what freedom is not -- a "negative approach". Taking this track, one might say that freedom implies a lack of constraints: you are free if nobody prevents you from doing what you want to do. This seems to be a pretty common definition (it's basically the one in the dictionary). Another (much trickier) definition is to take the positive approach and attempt to nail down what freedom is, rather than what it is not. Perhaps "being able to realise your full potential" is a reasonable start at this definition. The 20th-century political philosopher Isiah Berlin is most famous for describing these two approaches in Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin argues that, at least in a political context, the positive approach to a definition of freedom is suspect: it contains within it some definition of human characteristics, which political parties may freely disagree upon (and thus abuse). In fact, this definition forms the crux of the "slaves are more free" argument -- they are guaranteed food and shelter and, if their master is kind, may live well their whole lives. But even "negative freedom" as presented above is subject to the same problem: you may still have a master, but he may choose not to impose any constraints. In response to this problem there has been a recent revival of the centuries-old concept of the "Republican concept of liberty", which says that one is free "not to the extent that nobody as a matter of fact interferes with me, but to the extent that [one] does not live under the arbitrary will of another person".
Freedom is rather a core concept in Western (and, I guess, all) political systems: how strange that the best definition we have is in terms of what it is not. |
| Monday, December 3rd, 2007 | |
| 12:54 pm | Now I'm seeing things  Now I'm seeing things. Where the hell did they come from? Is this some sort of virus? A computer bug? I knew I shouldn't have upgraded my OS. Everything worked just fine on the old version. It's definitely not a feature. "New with OS X Leopard: Oompa-loompas." Get a grip, Christine. Computers can't do that. Breathe. Relax. OK, they're still there. Don't panic. What causes that? Paracetamol? Maybe that fifth Panadol pushed me over the edge. Maybe this is the worst tension headache I've ever had. Maybe it was those oysters at lunch. God, they're walking around on the table. Fuck Gary. If he wasn't such an arsehole I wouldn't be here working myself into the ground in the first place. Him and that prissy bitch with the tits. That's fine. If he wants a fight, I'll give him a fight. Get these mini-fashionistas here to sneak into her flat and give her the shock of her stupid, bimbo life. Man, I could really use a drink. Hey, you little guys. Want an adventure? Yeah? Get into my handbag. Come on. We've got work to do. |
| Sunday, November 25th, 2007 | |
| 10:08 pm | Extra blog pimping I recently discovered tumblr -- it's another one of those miniblogging sites. I loved the layout so I started a tumblr site at flonk.lardcave.net. Posts there are less edited, and more random, than posts here. |
| Friday, November 9th, 2007 | |
| 11:48 am | This is a post about open source Wii mod chips. They're pretty interesting, but ( the actual content is quite nerdy. ) |
| Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 | |
| 1:43 pm | Things that beat solving this coding problem I have, number 293 After a conversation with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} liedra I've been trying to come up with rhyming food. Ideally each rhyme should describe a multiple-course meal. So far I've got:Anyone got any others? |
| Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 | |
| 10:48 pm | My name is Shane Koyczan / I like women and free food / Running makes me sad Tonight I went to a poetry evening with my mum where several local poets spoke, poetry-slam style, before the main event. I've never been to a poetry slam, but my prejudices about hipsters were pretty well-established. So I made sure to wear my finest brown corduroy-looking jacket. It worked! I blended right in! I stopped congratulating myself on my self-deprecatingly ironic outfit when Shane actually began speaking, though, because he was amazing. Clever, emotional writing, masterfully presented -- and all of it was clearly heartfelt. He took me from tears (which don't happen too often, cf my fetid, blackened soul which I am sure I have written about elsewhere) to laughter in the space of two poems. But perhaps the most impressive part was the collection of nubile young women who sat up the front in rapt attention, like pre-schoolers during story time. I have a visual aid:  I thought poetry recitals were all about greasy middle-aged men in trenchcoats, and dingy lighting, and microphones which smell of stale cigarettes. Nobody told me that women were involved! Have I missed my calling? "Maybe that's a little creepy" - Shane Koyczan on youtube |
| Sunday, August 19th, 2007 | |
| 3:11 pm | Na naaa na na na na naaa na na  Like most stereotypical female villains, Dr. Blight exhibits a rather sexy figure consisting of the idealistic hourglass body with a thin athletic body and big hips. It's not clear whether she achieves her perfect figure through working out, metabolism or scientific means. - Wikipedia on Doctor Blight, enemy of Captain Planet. The article is full of other great quotes! |
| Friday, August 10th, 2007 | |
| 12:00 am | On computer programming It's hard to make analogies about being a computer programmer because I honestly believe it is quite different to other professions in which practitioners tend to be held accountable for their actions. With programming, you are in charge of not only the Platonic ideal but also the real-world implementation of any solution. The implementation always sucks, but nonetheless people don't just put up with it but actually seem to think that what you have produced is innovative and life-enhancing. It's sort of like you're a combination architect / builder, but you're a really terrible one. Someone asks you to build a new bathroom for their house, so you do, but despite all your careful planning the finished product is just shite. For example, the shower wall is made out of soap, because you thought it would be convenient -- now nobody needs to buy soap, because they can just rub up and down against the wall for a bit and then hose themselves off (you installed a hose instead of a shower head for greater flexibility). After a few days, though, the drawbacks become obvious, because rats start eating the soap. Every morning the owner, Susan (let's say), enters the bathroom, chases away the rats, rubs up against the wall and hoses herself off. You know you should fix the rat problem but it's too expensive to replace the wall, so you just mix rat poison in with the soap. Now Susan's boyfriend is complaining that she smells of zinc phosphide and there's a growing pile of dead rats in the bath. No problem though, because you hired a man to clean them out. Every week, on Thursday, sometime between 7am and 3pm, a big, burly man shows up with a spade, lets himself in, shovels up all the rats, puts boot prints on the carpet for no obvious reason, dumps the rats in the front garden, and leaves. Of course, nobody can use the bathroom while he's in there, so anyone who wants a shower on Thursdays (and many people do) washes in the kitchen sink instead. You do a deal with a builder and soon your soap wall / kitchen-sink shower houses are everywhere. After a couple of months owner's clubs pop up where residents talk about how great it is to wash yourself in the sink because then you can get all your daily chores done from the one spot. |
| Friday, August 3rd, 2007 | |
| 8:48 pm | Red wine is good for you, because it contains polyphenols which probably act as antioxidants and reduce the risk of heart disease. On the other hand red wine contains alcohol, the regular consumption of which marginally increases the risk of malignant tumours of the lower colon. So that's pretty great: choose between a heart attack and arse cancer. This is right after the hilarious study that reported that marijuana's active ingredient may fight lung tumours. There is so much of this that it's starting to get to the point where if you pay too much attention to the latest back-and-forth on it you will go insane. Of course, then there's the theory that if you're already insane perhaps you won't notice that you're insane. I think this is a silly theory. It should be very easy to tell that you're insane because everybody looks at you funny. |
| Saturday, July 14th, 2007 | |
| 3:28 am | Three "Chinese Room" Limericks (Machine-translated version) Dihansaier, it is clear that the thinking machines cognisable just ridiculous. In Syntax, he can dogma : The mind is the internal body. Sale said, because he drank his tea, "I have my criticisms and joy! Their thinking Workstation is only simulation: They will not learn the deeper meaning of L IKE so. " You will find it very simple : Breakfast is a language game understanding? What, if it looks like it will be? But I do not think Sale share. |
| 3:28 am | Three Limericks on the Topic of John Searle's "Chinese Room" Thought Experiment John Searle, it is clearly cognisable, Thinks thinking machines are just risible. In matters syntactic He can be quite dogmatic: The mind is inherently physical. Said Searle, as he sipped on his tea, "I respond to my critics with glee! Their 'thinking workstations' Are mere simulations: They won't learn deep meaning, like me." You might think it's perfectly plain: The Room's just a linguistic game! Understanding? What of it, If it looks like it's got it? But I don't think that Searle feels the same. |
| Thursday, July 12th, 2007 | |
| 8:30 pm | Panama Rather than write what is going on in my life right now, here is me reading a palindrome (from here) about Panama: panama.mp3 |
| Sunday, July 1st, 2007 | |
| 12:06 am | Catie didn't give a good answer, so I am asking you, Internet You know how wizards have to actually say the magic words in order to get the magic out, right? Do you think trainee wizards learn tricks like, say, squeaking out the magic words with their armpit, or whatever? So they'd all be at a formal wizard dinner and little Jimmy would do that trick with his arm and suddenly the head wizard's beard would catch fire? |
| Thursday, June 28th, 2007 | |
| 6:41 pm | To be honest option #2 seems pretty unlikely
- Wikipedia, Computational Tree Logic |