I had a bit of an epiphany the other day about popular TV shows. As I mentioned in my last post the thing I like about The Simpsons is all the small absurd jokes they throw in all the time. But it's not the only show that uses this.
There's another show that me and my wife watch semi regularly, even the reruns, is Scrubs. Based on it's imdb rating I'd say it's a pretty popular show. That show is good for many reasons but one that I like in particular is the absurdities it throws in, all the weird behaviors and comments from the characters. While the humor is different from The Simpsons the concept is pretty much the same, although applied to a completely different show. And it works just as well in both.
Another example is Ally McBeal. The thing that made it popular and stand out was how it showed small clips of how the characters felt and what was going on in their minds. Not seldom was this rather weird and embarrassing stuff. Although different it is also in line with The Simpsons and Scrubs. Unfortunately the writing in Ally McBeal went downhill after a few seasons and the absurdities wasn't that exciting anymore. In my mind that's one important reason as to why it lost in popularity.
So there you have it. A nice ingredient for making a fun TV show. Have people say, think and do not only fun and weird stuff but push it towards the absurd. Now I only need to think of a set of characters and a cool environment for them and I'll start writing a pilot.
2007-08-20
2007-08-10
The Simpsons Movie
We went to see The Simpsons Movie earlier tonight. It was good but it wasn't as good as I had hoped. The problem? I think it had too much of a story.
The defining things about The Simpsons for me is all those absurd jokes they throw in constantly which are just out of the blue. Sure, the episodes in the series do have some kind of a plot or story. But I find it secondary, it just sets the scene where they can do all these short absurd jokes.
So the problem I have with the movie is that they've cut down on the short absurd jokes. All jokes are longer and relate much more to the main story than in your typical episode. I think it's for the worse.
But that being said, I still had a lot of fun and I would still recommend the movie. It just that I don't think that it lives up to the standard of the show. If you haven't seen it, it's a good hour and a half.
The defining things about The Simpsons for me is all those absurd jokes they throw in constantly which are just out of the blue. Sure, the episodes in the series do have some kind of a plot or story. But I find it secondary, it just sets the scene where they can do all these short absurd jokes.
So the problem I have with the movie is that they've cut down on the short absurd jokes. All jokes are longer and relate much more to the main story than in your typical episode. I think it's for the worse.
But that being said, I still had a lot of fun and I would still recommend the movie. It just that I don't think that it lives up to the standard of the show. If you haven't seen it, it's a good hour and a half.
2007-08-09
Who does what in the U.S. legal system
There is no shortage of crime shows on TV. Solving mysterious, perverse and/or obscene murders seems to be a very popular spectator sport. I also watch my share of these shows. Some of the ones I watch include CSI, Jordan, Law & Order, Shark and Numb3rs. But while I enjoy these shows they also greatly confuse me.
Solving cases typically involves evaluating evidences, interrogating suspects and witnesses, checking alibis and trying to fit all of it together. The peculiar thing with the crime shows is that all of these things are done by a single profession in each show, but the profession changes between shows. It ranges from the coroner, crime scene investigators to cops or lawyers, all depending the particular show.
The only show (or rather set of shows) that seems to have a more realistic tack is Law & Order. They have all the professions of the legal system represented and working together. It's actually kind of cool to see how the cases starts out with the detectives to eventually move over to the attorneys who needs to make the final conviction happen.
Sure, I realize that this discrepancy between between series is there to cut down on the number of main characters and make their work seems central and important. But when you compare CSI and Shark it just seems ridiculous. Obviously, they can't both reflect the reality. And even if the truth is somewhere in the middle the gap between them is so big that I think they're both pretty far from how it's really done.
Oh well. I'm glad I got that off my chest.
Solving cases typically involves evaluating evidences, interrogating suspects and witnesses, checking alibis and trying to fit all of it together. The peculiar thing with the crime shows is that all of these things are done by a single profession in each show, but the profession changes between shows. It ranges from the coroner, crime scene investigators to cops or lawyers, all depending the particular show.
The only show (or rather set of shows) that seems to have a more realistic tack is Law & Order. They have all the professions of the legal system represented and working together. It's actually kind of cool to see how the cases starts out with the detectives to eventually move over to the attorneys who needs to make the final conviction happen.
Sure, I realize that this discrepancy between between series is there to cut down on the number of main characters and make their work seems central and important. But when you compare CSI and Shark it just seems ridiculous. Obviously, they can't both reflect the reality. And even if the truth is somewhere in the middle the gap between them is so big that I think they're both pretty far from how it's really done.
Oh well. I'm glad I got that off my chest.
2007-07-29
The IQ of a group
A funny quote:
One of the teams in the ICFP programming contest had this as its group name.
The IQ of a group is equal to the lowest IQ of a member in that group, divided by the number of people in that group
One of the teams in the ICFP programming contest had this as its group name.
2007-07-20
Aptonym
I'm always excited to learn new, almost useful, funnily sounding words. Today I've learned a new one: aptonym. Wiktionary describes it as:
Unfortunately I haven't been able to think about any person who's name is an aptonym. However, the place where I learned about this word, this freakonomics post, called for it's reader to supply some examples. You'll find some really good ones there.
A proper name that aptly describes the occupation of the person, especially by coincidence.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to think about any person who's name is an aptonym. However, the place where I learned about this word, this freakonomics post, called for it's reader to supply some examples. You'll find some really good ones there.
2007-06-29
A bit of Wisdom
I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel something lacking in the blogosphere. I read a lot of blogs and sure, it's both fun and educational, I'll give it that. But it's often very shallow. Short pieces of text about some recent event which the writer has probably thought about for maximum a week. What I want is a little more contemplation, ideas which have matured from decades of experience, some deep thoughts. In other words, I want a bit of wisdom.
Now, wisdom is hard to come by, even in the real world. And even when you find it you won't always recognize it as wisdom. It can certainly feel a bit elusive that way.
But there is one blog that I read occasionally which I think offers a bit of wisdom every know and then. It's the raganwald blog by Reg Braithwaite. Somewhat surprisingly Reg's blog is mostly a software technology blog and I certainly don't expect to find any deeper thoughts there. Once in a while you can find some good advice on such blogs but anything out of the ordinary. But Reg has learned some hard lessons over the years and seems to be a contemplating man so he has some very valuable things to share. Although most of the things he says is phrased in terms of programming, software development or management many things are generally good lessons that have much wider applicability.
I will refrain from throwing out quotes here, instead I'll give a list of some of my favorite posts raganwald: What I've Learned From Sales, Part I: Don't Feed the Trolls, What I've Learned from Sales, Part II: Wanna Bet?, R-E-S-P-E-C-T and Still failing, still learning. I'm sure there are many more, I haven't read all of his posts. Also, many of the more technically oriented posts are very worthwhile reading, in case you're interested in the subject. Maybe I'll talk about that another time.
Now, wisdom is hard to come by, even in the real world. And even when you find it you won't always recognize it as wisdom. It can certainly feel a bit elusive that way.
But there is one blog that I read occasionally which I think offers a bit of wisdom every know and then. It's the raganwald blog by Reg Braithwaite. Somewhat surprisingly Reg's blog is mostly a software technology blog and I certainly don't expect to find any deeper thoughts there. Once in a while you can find some good advice on such blogs but anything out of the ordinary. But Reg has learned some hard lessons over the years and seems to be a contemplating man so he has some very valuable things to share. Although most of the things he says is phrased in terms of programming, software development or management many things are generally good lessons that have much wider applicability.
I will refrain from throwing out quotes here, instead I'll give a list of some of my favorite posts raganwald: What I've Learned From Sales, Part I: Don't Feed the Trolls, What I've Learned from Sales, Part II: Wanna Bet?, R-E-S-P-E-C-T and Still failing, still learning. I'm sure there are many more, I haven't read all of his posts. Also, many of the more technically oriented posts are very worthwhile reading, in case you're interested in the subject. Maybe I'll talk about that another time.
2007-06-27
End Credit Music
Which piece of music is the most important in a movie? Well, I'm a film score buff so I wouldn't start ranking the music but there is one piece of music that gets an awful lot of attention from the studios. It's the end credit music. It's the music that sets the mood when you leave the movie theater and you will carry with you when you've finished seeing the movie. So naturally quite a lot of thought go into getting the right kind of mood into that piece of music.
I usually don't write lists on this blog but today I give you a list of some of my favorite pieces of end credit music.
What's my criteria for good end credit music? The crucial thing is the first twenty or thirty seconds of the piece. It has to suggest the right kind of mood which has to be in accord with the rest of the movie. It doesn't have to be a very good song, for instance, I don't particularly like Wake Up but it's beginning fits very well in Matrix, and that's what's important.
I usually don't write lists on this blog but today I give you a list of some of my favorite pieces of end credit music.
- Extreme Ways in the movies Borne Identity and Borne Supremacy. My bet is it will be used for Bourne Ultimatum as well.
- Wake Up from Matrix.
- May it be from Fellowship of the Ring.
- Into the West from Return of the King.
- Lose Yourself from 8 Mile. I'm not sure about this song was actually the end credit piece as I've only seen this movie once but the song is good nevertheless.
What's my criteria for good end credit music? The crucial thing is the first twenty or thirty seconds of the piece. It has to suggest the right kind of mood which has to be in accord with the rest of the movie. It doesn't have to be a very good song, for instance, I don't particularly like Wake Up but it's beginning fits very well in Matrix, and that's what's important.
2007-06-17
iPod woes
It's supposed to be the best mp3 player on the market. For me it has meant nothing but trouble.
Where I work, at the computer science department at Chalmers, we have a very nice tradition to buy a gift for any person who successfully defends his or her PhD thesis. This spring it was my turn to get a present from my colleagues and to my delight they gave me a fifth generation iPod sporting 30Gb of memory and the capability of showing movies. Awesome. Or so I thought.
It all started when I unpacked my brand new iPod and plugged it into my computer. For once I had actually read the manual and did exactly what I was told to. Yet after a short moment the player became unresponsive and it seemed like there was no way I could get it to do anything with it, even turn it off. This is why one of the first things I learned about my iPod was that it has an equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Del, a key combination which reboots the player. So after rebooting things went fine for a while.
Unfortunately I've needed the rebooting feature quite a lot. It often happens that when I plug the iPod into my laptop it just freezes. But this is not the only annoying thing it does. Often when I've synchronized it with my laptop it seems like the iPod was totally erased! I can't see a single file, music or otherwise. The first time this happened I was quite alarmed. What had happen to all my music?
Fortunate things work much better when I synchronize with my wife's computer. First of all the iPod doesn't hang or lose all it's music. But what's even better is that it restores all the music that seems to have been lost. I think what happens is that the file system on the iPod becomes corrupted when I sync with my laptop and my wife's computer can somehow repair it.
What am I doing wrong? I'm running both the latest ITunes and firmware on my iPod and I haven't fiddled around with it in way that could potentially be harmful. I'm playing strictly by the book.
It seems there is a short term solution to this and that is to only use my iPod solely with my wife's computer. I find this rather unsatisfying as her computer is painfully slow and it makes me very impatient. I guess I'll have to buy her a new computer :-) But at the end of the day, I'm rather disappointed with the instability of my iPod. I had quite high expectations on the ease of use and robustness and it has failed miserably in this respect.
Steve Jobs, if you read this, please fix the software on your music player so that it doesn't behave like a Windows computer from the 90's.
Where I work, at the computer science department at Chalmers, we have a very nice tradition to buy a gift for any person who successfully defends his or her PhD thesis. This spring it was my turn to get a present from my colleagues and to my delight they gave me a fifth generation iPod sporting 30Gb of memory and the capability of showing movies. Awesome. Or so I thought.
It all started when I unpacked my brand new iPod and plugged it into my computer. For once I had actually read the manual and did exactly what I was told to. Yet after a short moment the player became unresponsive and it seemed like there was no way I could get it to do anything with it, even turn it off. This is why one of the first things I learned about my iPod was that it has an equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Del, a key combination which reboots the player. So after rebooting things went fine for a while.
Unfortunately I've needed the rebooting feature quite a lot. It often happens that when I plug the iPod into my laptop it just freezes. But this is not the only annoying thing it does. Often when I've synchronized it with my laptop it seems like the iPod was totally erased! I can't see a single file, music or otherwise. The first time this happened I was quite alarmed. What had happen to all my music?
Fortunate things work much better when I synchronize with my wife's computer. First of all the iPod doesn't hang or lose all it's music. But what's even better is that it restores all the music that seems to have been lost. I think what happens is that the file system on the iPod becomes corrupted when I sync with my laptop and my wife's computer can somehow repair it.
What am I doing wrong? I'm running both the latest ITunes and firmware on my iPod and I haven't fiddled around with it in way that could potentially be harmful. I'm playing strictly by the book.
It seems there is a short term solution to this and that is to only use my iPod solely with my wife's computer. I find this rather unsatisfying as her computer is painfully slow and it makes me very impatient. I guess I'll have to buy her a new computer :-) But at the end of the day, I'm rather disappointed with the instability of my iPod. I had quite high expectations on the ease of use and robustness and it has failed miserably in this respect.
Steve Jobs, if you read this, please fix the software on your music player so that it doesn't behave like a Windows computer from the 90's.
2007-06-07
Super Villain
Your results:
You are Dr. Doom
Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test
Apparently I'm Doctor Doom.
If you want to take the test yourself try it out at the "Which Super Villain are you?" quiz. Found via Andre Pangs blog.
You are Dr. Doom
| Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity. |
Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test
Apparently I'm Doctor Doom.
If you want to take the test yourself try it out at the "Which Super Villain are you?" quiz. Found via Andre Pangs blog.
2007-05-30
Silly bug in Gmail
Not long ago I wrote about how much I love GMail and about a particular feature that I like. Well, today's post is about a bug in GMail which just feels outright silly.
GMail has this feature that you can use it to handle other email accounts. It goes like this: you set your other email account to forward it to your GMail address. Then you can tell GMail that you want to be able to send emails using that email account. In order not to enable fraud or any wrongful impersonation GMail sends out a confirmation email to the address you want to use and if it comes back properly then you can click on a link which enables you to use the other email address when sending emails from GMail. Pretty straightforward.
The other day I was going to add another email address to my GMail account just as I described above. This is where I bumped into the bug. When GMail sent out a confirmation email it didn't come back. I thought that was odd and sent another one. It too seemed to disappear somewhere on the internet. Since this address wasn't very important to me I just left it alone and went to work on other stuff.
The surprise came when I opened the spam box to weed out the false positives (something which I get at least once a week). Lo and behold, there were the two confirmation emails sent out by GMail before.
Excuse me but this just seems silly? Sure I can see that the email has to go through the spam filter. But there are many good techniques for creating a little back door in the filter such that you can make sure the confirmation emails always goes through. This just shouldn't happen.
Well, I've reported it to the Gmail team. I hope they get around to fixing it soon.
GMail has this feature that you can use it to handle other email accounts. It goes like this: you set your other email account to forward it to your GMail address. Then you can tell GMail that you want to be able to send emails using that email account. In order not to enable fraud or any wrongful impersonation GMail sends out a confirmation email to the address you want to use and if it comes back properly then you can click on a link which enables you to use the other email address when sending emails from GMail. Pretty straightforward.
The other day I was going to add another email address to my GMail account just as I described above. This is where I bumped into the bug. When GMail sent out a confirmation email it didn't come back. I thought that was odd and sent another one. It too seemed to disappear somewhere on the internet. Since this address wasn't very important to me I just left it alone and went to work on other stuff.
The surprise came when I opened the spam box to weed out the false positives (something which I get at least once a week). Lo and behold, there were the two confirmation emails sent out by GMail before.
Excuse me but this just seems silly? Sure I can see that the email has to go through the spam filter. But there are many good techniques for creating a little back door in the filter such that you can make sure the confirmation emails always goes through. This just shouldn't happen.
Well, I've reported it to the Gmail team. I hope they get around to fixing it soon.
2007-05-10
Gravity Waves
The following video is an awesome time lapse showing gravity waves in the clouds.
When I first read that the video showed gravity waves I thought it was those pretty much undetectable waves generated by gravitons. But I can't say I was disappointed to see this magnificent display of rolling clouds. I hadn't heard the name "gravity wave" before but I'll be sure to keep it in mind. Oh, what I wish that I could watch these clouds in real life. Another form of wavy clouds that I really wish to see is Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds.
When I first read that the video showed gravity waves I thought it was those pretty much undetectable waves generated by gravitons. But I can't say I was disappointed to see this magnificent display of rolling clouds. I hadn't heard the name "gravity wave" before but I'll be sure to keep it in mind. Oh, what I wish that I could watch these clouds in real life. Another form of wavy clouds that I really wish to see is Kelvin-Helmholtz wave clouds.
2007-05-04
Memorable Defences
So it turns out I survived my PhD defense. It was held on Match 23, a month and a half ago roughly. I must say it went very smoothly, almost too smoothly perhaps. The opponent was Jakob Rehof.
I should perhaps say something about they way defenses work here in Sweden. They're always public, anyone can come and listen. There is an opponent who is an expert in the field and who asks most of the questions. Then there is a grading committee, usually consisting of three people, with varying degree of expertise in the field. My committee consisted of Fritz Henglein, Kostis Sagonas and Sibylle Schupp. They also get to ask questions, after the opponent is done. Lastly, anyone in the audience can ask questions to the defendant. After the defense the grading committee will meet and decide whether to pass or fail the candidate. They always pass. Some of you might think that I'm joking here but I'm not, in Sweden they always pass. The reason is that if the PhD candidate might not pass then the opponent should say so before the defense, not after. So once the opponent has agreed to having the defense you know you're going to pass.
Having had my own defense got me thinking about all the defenses I've attended through the years and I thought I'd give a little tour of the ones that I particularly remember.
The First Defense I attended I think was for my cousin Åke Wallin who did his PhD in the area of neuro-psychology. He studied the episodic memory of very old people, in their 80's or 90's. Studying such old people is rather unique, there are very few places in the world were there are large enough groups of old people to make experiments statistically valid. Stockholm is one of those places and is where he conducted his research.
The First Computer Science Defense I attended was that of Urban Boquist. He had written a whole program optimizing compiler for Haskell. I found his thesis a very exciting read, it's really well written and has lots of cool optimization described in a very clear and concrete way. Very appealing. A guy call John Meacham also found this appealing and has taken the ideas from Urban's thesis and put them into a publicly available Haskell compiler called JHC. John has also made sure that you can order Urban's thesis online.
The Best Defense is without a doubt that of Johan Agat. Johan worked in the area of computer security and studies timing leaks. He pioneered the technique of cross-copying to pad programs to eliminate timing leaks. The reason I found is defense so good is two-fold. First, the opponent, Jens Palsberg, gave an exemplary introductory explanation to Johan's work. Everyone understood it. It was as clear an explanation I have ever seen. Normally on these occasions it can be hard, even for other computer scientists who are not experts to follow these explanations. Second, Johan did an amazing job at answering all the questions he had. Even hard, deep question he had very good and well thought through answer to. Very impressive. For these two reasons I find this defense the best I've ever attended.
The Most Pathetic Defense was that of Koen Claessen. If you know about Koen you know that he's an extremely good researcher and his work during his PhD was no different. In fact, it was exemplary. Which is why the opponent and the grading committee really didn't have anything to ask about. It was all just praises from their side, no criticism or hard question. So it wasn't much of a defense, more like an appraisal. Hmmmm.
The Longest Defense goes to Karol Ostrovsky. The poor guy. It seems his opponent and grading committee wasn't properly informed of the standard procedures here in Sweden. Normally a defense take around two hours. Karol's must gone on for like four hours or so. And since it started at 10 am and going well past lunch there weren't many people left in the auditorium the last hours. I didn't stay either, I simply had to get some lunch. But eventually Karol also became a doctor.
The Most Nerve Wracking Defense was obvious that of my own. But as I said, it all went very well in the end.
I should perhaps say something about they way defenses work here in Sweden. They're always public, anyone can come and listen. There is an opponent who is an expert in the field and who asks most of the questions. Then there is a grading committee, usually consisting of three people, with varying degree of expertise in the field. My committee consisted of Fritz Henglein, Kostis Sagonas and Sibylle Schupp. They also get to ask questions, after the opponent is done. Lastly, anyone in the audience can ask questions to the defendant. After the defense the grading committee will meet and decide whether to pass or fail the candidate. They always pass. Some of you might think that I'm joking here but I'm not, in Sweden they always pass. The reason is that if the PhD candidate might not pass then the opponent should say so before the defense, not after. So once the opponent has agreed to having the defense you know you're going to pass.
Having had my own defense got me thinking about all the defenses I've attended through the years and I thought I'd give a little tour of the ones that I particularly remember.
The First Defense I attended I think was for my cousin Åke Wallin who did his PhD in the area of neuro-psychology. He studied the episodic memory of very old people, in their 80's or 90's. Studying such old people is rather unique, there are very few places in the world were there are large enough groups of old people to make experiments statistically valid. Stockholm is one of those places and is where he conducted his research.
The First Computer Science Defense I attended was that of Urban Boquist. He had written a whole program optimizing compiler for Haskell. I found his thesis a very exciting read, it's really well written and has lots of cool optimization described in a very clear and concrete way. Very appealing. A guy call John Meacham also found this appealing and has taken the ideas from Urban's thesis and put them into a publicly available Haskell compiler called JHC. John has also made sure that you can order Urban's thesis online.
The Best Defense is without a doubt that of Johan Agat. Johan worked in the area of computer security and studies timing leaks. He pioneered the technique of cross-copying to pad programs to eliminate timing leaks. The reason I found is defense so good is two-fold. First, the opponent, Jens Palsberg, gave an exemplary introductory explanation to Johan's work. Everyone understood it. It was as clear an explanation I have ever seen. Normally on these occasions it can be hard, even for other computer scientists who are not experts to follow these explanations. Second, Johan did an amazing job at answering all the questions he had. Even hard, deep question he had very good and well thought through answer to. Very impressive. For these two reasons I find this defense the best I've ever attended.
The Most Pathetic Defense was that of Koen Claessen. If you know about Koen you know that he's an extremely good researcher and his work during his PhD was no different. In fact, it was exemplary. Which is why the opponent and the grading committee really didn't have anything to ask about. It was all just praises from their side, no criticism or hard question. So it wasn't much of a defense, more like an appraisal. Hmmmm.
The Longest Defense goes to Karol Ostrovsky. The poor guy. It seems his opponent and grading committee wasn't properly informed of the standard procedures here in Sweden. Normally a defense take around two hours. Karol's must gone on for like four hours or so. And since it started at 10 am and going well past lunch there weren't many people left in the auditorium the last hours. I didn't stay either, I simply had to get some lunch. But eventually Karol also became a doctor.
The Most Nerve Wracking Defense was obvious that of my own. But as I said, it all went very well in the end.
2007-05-02
Quarter Finals
The quarter finals are under way in the snooker world championship in Sheffield. All the players that are left are all good candidates for the trophy. Well, there's at least one match that seems decided, Murphy has a really long way to go if he wants to beat Matthew Stevens. But still, there's a lot of good players in very good shape.
I'm tempted to make some guesses as to how this is going to end. But given that the candidates that I flagged for earlier are both out I probably shouldn't. Although it gives me some comfort that I did a little better that the Swedish commentator on Eurosport: he guessed Marco Fu and Ding Junhui in one of the semifinals, both of which were eliminated in the first round. Sure, I hope for Ronnie O'Sullivan, but Higgins is looking mighty good right now and may just prove to be too difficult. I'm also very impressed by Selby and Stevens. In the end, this is going to be a very tough championship to win.
I've had a bit of an insight about snooker while watching it during the last week. I'm really impressed by the mental strength of the players on the tour. They just never give up. Even when they need several fouls to beat their opponent in a frame they keep going. Likewise many players keep playing very well and fight hard even when their chances to win a match is pretty much zero. You don't see this kind of morale in many other sports.
I'm tempted to make some guesses as to how this is going to end. But given that the candidates that I flagged for earlier are both out I probably shouldn't. Although it gives me some comfort that I did a little better that the Swedish commentator on Eurosport: he guessed Marco Fu and Ding Junhui in one of the semifinals, both of which were eliminated in the first round. Sure, I hope for Ronnie O'Sullivan, but Higgins is looking mighty good right now and may just prove to be too difficult. I'm also very impressed by Selby and Stevens. In the end, this is going to be a very tough championship to win.
I've had a bit of an insight about snooker while watching it during the last week. I'm really impressed by the mental strength of the players on the tour. They just never give up. Even when they need several fouls to beat their opponent in a frame they keep going. Likewise many players keep playing very well and fight hard even when their chances to win a match is pretty much zero. You don't see this kind of morale in many other sports.
2007-04-26
The Principles of Pool and Billiards
In these days of intense Snooker watching I went looking for some information about the physics behind it. I've been doing some fiddling myself but I wanted to see if there was some more material which fleshed it out in more detail. And I struck gold indeed. The pearl of a web site that I found is this: The Illustrated Principles of Pool and Billiards. The web page is the online resource to a book written by an associate professor in mechanical engineering. But while most online resources to books usually don't contain that much material this one is absolutely packed with stuff. For instance is seems that all the formulas and their derivation from the book can be found on the web page. This includes stuff like Relationship between the amount of throw and cut angle. But the real fun is in the supplementary material not found in the book. Here he goes into explaining things like spin and other fun phenomena. Make sure to check out the "Post-impact cue ball trajectory for any cut angle, speed, and spin" derivation for instance. Now I got some nice reading in the breaks in the snooker matches.
Release Me
Saab has made a commercial which has turned out to be very popular. The thing that really sticks out is the music. It's a song called "Release Me" by a Swedish band called Laura. I hadn't heard of them before but apparently they've had an enormous boost from having their song in the commercial. As it turns out "Release Me" is currently the no. 1 selling song on the Swedish iTunes Music Store.
Like everyone else I also like the commercial but I don't think the song in it's entirety is as good as the special version they made for the commercial. It's still OK though.
Like everyone else I also like the commercial but I don't think the song in it's entirety is as good as the special version they made for the commercial. It's still OK though.
2007-04-22
Snooker World Championship
Ah. It's that time of the year again. The World Championship in Snooker, which means many ours a day in front of the TV.
Actually it already started yesterday and with one of the favorites being eliminated immediately. Graeme Dott, the defending champion and ranked no. 1 on the provisional world ranking lost against Ian McCulloch. It's clear that the pressure was too much to handle for Dott; McCulloch didn't win because played particularly good, he just had a lot of luck and could benefit from the fact that Dott's nervousness made him unable to pot. And so the curse is still unbroken: no-one has ever defended the world championship title when they won it the first time.
So who's going to win? It's harder than ever to predict winners in snooker tournaments but that makes it even more interesting to try. One player that has stood out this year is Neil Robertson, Australia's young snooker wiz. He's already won two tournaments this year, a feat in itself these days. I think he will make it quite far.
Another player which always plays well is Ken Doherty, Ireland's no.1 sportsman ever. He never has these slumps of bad snooker that some of the other top player has and so you always have to take him into account. Doherty plays a very graceful snooker and it would be good to see him make it far in the tournament. He has won the World Championship once before.
A lot of people has put money on Ding Junhui, the extremely talented Chinese teenager. However, his odds went down dramatically when it was revealed whom he was going to play in the first round: Ronnie O'Sullivan. That match is currently in a break and will finish tomorrow, but so far is seems that O'Sullivan is giving Ding the same treatment as in the Masters Final. Ronnie O'Sullivan currently has a 8 to 1 lead where they play first to 10. So I think we can safely rule out Ding Junhui from this years World Championship. It's actually been kind of sad to see him after the Masters Final. He hasn't been himself and hasn't played very well every since then. It seems he hasn't been able to recover from the total knockout he got from his idol. And things are not going to get better if he gets the same treatment in this tournament. I hope that he can pull himself together over the summer break and come back to the extremely fine snooker that he is able to play in his best moments.
What about Ronnie O'Sullivan then? He should surely be a favorite to win. Yes, he's always a favorite in every tournament but I don't have very big hopes despite his brilliant play against Ding. He has this problem of maintaining his good play throughout a whole tournament. Sometimes it seems as if he just can't motivate himself to play good snooker, especially against players that are not among the top ten. It's like it takes a real challenge for him to even bother. So, while I think that Ronnie O'Sullivan is the best snooker player in the world I'm also aware of his shortcomings. But I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
There are of course a couple of other players that are good contenders. Stephen Hendry, Peter Ebdon, Mark Selby, Shaun Murphy and Matthew Stevens are some of those to look out for. But the names I mentioned above are those that I wanted to comment on. It's going to be an exciting couple of weeks.
Actually it already started yesterday and with one of the favorites being eliminated immediately. Graeme Dott, the defending champion and ranked no. 1 on the provisional world ranking lost against Ian McCulloch. It's clear that the pressure was too much to handle for Dott; McCulloch didn't win because played particularly good, he just had a lot of luck and could benefit from the fact that Dott's nervousness made him unable to pot. And so the curse is still unbroken: no-one has ever defended the world championship title when they won it the first time.
So who's going to win? It's harder than ever to predict winners in snooker tournaments but that makes it even more interesting to try. One player that has stood out this year is Neil Robertson, Australia's young snooker wiz. He's already won two tournaments this year, a feat in itself these days. I think he will make it quite far.
Another player which always plays well is Ken Doherty, Ireland's no.1 sportsman ever. He never has these slumps of bad snooker that some of the other top player has and so you always have to take him into account. Doherty plays a very graceful snooker and it would be good to see him make it far in the tournament. He has won the World Championship once before.
A lot of people has put money on Ding Junhui, the extremely talented Chinese teenager. However, his odds went down dramatically when it was revealed whom he was going to play in the first round: Ronnie O'Sullivan. That match is currently in a break and will finish tomorrow, but so far is seems that O'Sullivan is giving Ding the same treatment as in the Masters Final. Ronnie O'Sullivan currently has a 8 to 1 lead where they play first to 10. So I think we can safely rule out Ding Junhui from this years World Championship. It's actually been kind of sad to see him after the Masters Final. He hasn't been himself and hasn't played very well every since then. It seems he hasn't been able to recover from the total knockout he got from his idol. And things are not going to get better if he gets the same treatment in this tournament. I hope that he can pull himself together over the summer break and come back to the extremely fine snooker that he is able to play in his best moments.
What about Ronnie O'Sullivan then? He should surely be a favorite to win. Yes, he's always a favorite in every tournament but I don't have very big hopes despite his brilliant play against Ding. He has this problem of maintaining his good play throughout a whole tournament. Sometimes it seems as if he just can't motivate himself to play good snooker, especially against players that are not among the top ten. It's like it takes a real challenge for him to even bother. So, while I think that Ronnie O'Sullivan is the best snooker player in the world I'm also aware of his shortcomings. But I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
There are of course a couple of other players that are good contenders. Stephen Hendry, Peter Ebdon, Mark Selby, Shaun Murphy and Matthew Stevens are some of those to look out for. But the names I mentioned above are those that I wanted to comment on. It's going to be an exciting couple of weeks.
2007-04-13
One of the things I like about gmail
I've been using Gmail now for longer than I can remember. And I still think that it's the best email solution out there, all things considered. Today I just want to write a few words about one of those little things that took me a long time to notice but which Gmail gets right. Please bare with me here, it's going to take a little while to explain all the background behind this.
Most email clients have a split view. One part of the screen shows a list of messages in the current mail box, typically the inbox. The other part shows the contents of the currently highlighted mail. Gmail does this differently. It starts out by showing only a list of messages (or conversation in Gmail lingo). When you select one of the conversations it changes view to only show that particular conversation.
When I use Gmail I mostly use the keyboard. To facilitate this Gmail has a little cursor which can be moved up and down between the conversations in the list view. When the cursor points at a specific conversation one can for instance open it, to see the actual conversation. When going back from the conversation to the list view the cursor still points at the conversation which we looked at last.
When viewing a conversation one can choose to archive it. If you started out from the inbox then that will mean that the conversation is removed from the inbox and Gmail switches back from the conversation view back the viewing the inbox. Now, here's the thing: since the conversation that we just looked at is removed, which conversation should the cursor now point to? It seems that there is no obvious right answer here. We could choose to point to the conversation above or to the one below, but any of those choices are bound to be wrong half of the time.
The way Gmail seems to do this is that it remembers the last two conversations that I looked at. If the second one I looked at is below the first then it will make the cursor point to the conversation below. Otherwise to the conversation above. For me this scheme works incredibly well! It does the right thing at least 90% of the time. I'm just so amazed at the fact that they've obviously given this very small detail a lot of thought and come up with an incredibly useful solution.
As always, hats off for Google.
Most email clients have a split view. One part of the screen shows a list of messages in the current mail box, typically the inbox. The other part shows the contents of the currently highlighted mail. Gmail does this differently. It starts out by showing only a list of messages (or conversation in Gmail lingo). When you select one of the conversations it changes view to only show that particular conversation.
When I use Gmail I mostly use the keyboard. To facilitate this Gmail has a little cursor which can be moved up and down between the conversations in the list view. When the cursor points at a specific conversation one can for instance open it, to see the actual conversation. When going back from the conversation to the list view the cursor still points at the conversation which we looked at last.
When viewing a conversation one can choose to archive it. If you started out from the inbox then that will mean that the conversation is removed from the inbox and Gmail switches back from the conversation view back the viewing the inbox. Now, here's the thing: since the conversation that we just looked at is removed, which conversation should the cursor now point to? It seems that there is no obvious right answer here. We could choose to point to the conversation above or to the one below, but any of those choices are bound to be wrong half of the time.
The way Gmail seems to do this is that it remembers the last two conversations that I looked at. If the second one I looked at is below the first then it will make the cursor point to the conversation below. Otherwise to the conversation above. For me this scheme works incredibly well! It does the right thing at least 90% of the time. I'm just so amazed at the fact that they've obviously given this very small detail a lot of thought and come up with an incredibly useful solution.
As always, hats off for Google.
Amazon embarrasing itself
I've complained before about Amazon's book recommendations that I get via email. But today's recommendation just totally baffles me.
Yesterday (or the day before, I forget) I pre-ordered "The Children of Hurin", the new Tolkien book from Amazon.co.uk. Today I get an email recommending this book to me and telling me what a great deal I can make if I pre-order it from Amazon. Well, doh!
Yesterday (or the day before, I forget) I pre-ordered "The Children of Hurin", the new Tolkien book from Amazon.co.uk. Today I get an email recommending this book to me and telling me what a great deal I can make if I pre-order it from Amazon. Well, doh!
2007-03-15
The Cloud Appreciation Society
I'm happy to announce that I am, as of a couple of days ago, a proud member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. More specifically I'm member no. 7719. I've had a thing for clouds for quite a while and once I leaned about the society I applied for membership right away. Those of you who've read my blog before will not be surprised by this as I have occasionally written about clouds and had some pictures here.
Even if you're not a big cloud fan I can still recommend the web site. The founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, is a guy with a lot of humor and he's a very good writer. Furthermore there are a lot of awesome pictures.
How did found out about this club? Sometimes coincidences work together it seems. Not so long ago my wife and I had our honeymoon which we spent in Dublin. As we both have a soft spot for books we went to a couple of book stores. One of the book stores had a popular science shelf which I browsed and found a book that seemed interesting. It was called the The Cloudspotter's Guide by a certain Gavin Pretor-Pinney. I didn't start reading it right away but I noticed that there was a URL in the book to the Cloud Appreciation Society and so I made sure to visit the website. And I was hooked.
As for the book, I've just started reading it. And I must say that it's absolutely delightful. As I wrote above, Mr. Pretor-Pinney is a very skilled writer and with a lot of humor and passion he writes about clouds and his love for them. He describes each kind of cloud in turn, but the book is so much more than a dry catalog of cloud varieties. He mixes the description with colorful stories from other books, actual event relating to clouds and various odd trivia. One example is that he retells the account of the only person who has fallen through a Cumulonimbus (you know, the one with a lot of rain, thunder and lightning) and survived to tell the story. A truly fascinating account.
I have a bunch of other books about clouds but none of them can compare in any way with The Cloudspotter's Guide. The Book of Clouds has a lot of nice pictures but that's essentially it. It's very thin on details and doesn't have the same passion about it. The Invention of Clouds on the other hand is very heavy on details, to the point where I almost lost my interest. And that's a bit worrying given that I'm such a cloud fan. The Cloudspotter's Guide really comes out on top of both these books. The only thing that it isn't so strong on is beautiful pictures. It's not that it doesn't have them, it's that they're not so many. But on the other hand, I don't really need pictures of clouds in a book. The whole point is that I can go outside whenever I want and take a look at the real thing. So the lack of pictures isn't really a problem.
So, finally I would like to do my job as a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society and urge you, my reader, to Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!
Even if you're not a big cloud fan I can still recommend the web site. The founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, is a guy with a lot of humor and he's a very good writer. Furthermore there are a lot of awesome pictures.
How did found out about this club? Sometimes coincidences work together it seems. Not so long ago my wife and I had our honeymoon which we spent in Dublin. As we both have a soft spot for books we went to a couple of book stores. One of the book stores had a popular science shelf which I browsed and found a book that seemed interesting. It was called the The Cloudspotter's Guide by a certain Gavin Pretor-Pinney. I didn't start reading it right away but I noticed that there was a URL in the book to the Cloud Appreciation Society and so I made sure to visit the website. And I was hooked.
As for the book, I've just started reading it. And I must say that it's absolutely delightful. As I wrote above, Mr. Pretor-Pinney is a very skilled writer and with a lot of humor and passion he writes about clouds and his love for them. He describes each kind of cloud in turn, but the book is so much more than a dry catalog of cloud varieties. He mixes the description with colorful stories from other books, actual event relating to clouds and various odd trivia. One example is that he retells the account of the only person who has fallen through a Cumulonimbus (you know, the one with a lot of rain, thunder and lightning) and survived to tell the story. A truly fascinating account.
I have a bunch of other books about clouds but none of them can compare in any way with The Cloudspotter's Guide. The Book of Clouds has a lot of nice pictures but that's essentially it. It's very thin on details and doesn't have the same passion about it. The Invention of Clouds on the other hand is very heavy on details, to the point where I almost lost my interest. And that's a bit worrying given that I'm such a cloud fan. The Cloudspotter's Guide really comes out on top of both these books. The only thing that it isn't so strong on is beautiful pictures. It's not that it doesn't have them, it's that they're not so many. But on the other hand, I don't really need pictures of clouds in a book. The whole point is that I can go outside whenever I want and take a look at the real thing. So the lack of pictures isn't really a problem.
So, finally I would like to do my job as a member of the Cloud Appreciation Society and urge you, my reader, to Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!
2007-02-28
A Crazy Period of my Life
I haven't been bloggin for over a month now. So I just want to write a couple of words about why that is. The reason is simple, it's been maybe the most hectic and also exciting month of my life.
To begin with I had a deadline two weeks ago. I had to send my thesis in to print. Which meant I had some pretty crazy weeks finishing it. It was really intense but I managed to send it in on time and it was a great relief. I spent a couple of days after that just staying at home watching snooker.
But I couldn't rest for too long. Coming up was out wedding. Even though we had everything planned in good time before there was a crazy amount of work to do the days just before. All the practical work has to be done like decorating the church and the place where the party was held. But it all went well and we had a wonderful wedding last Saturday.
Back to work on Monday, the day before yesterday. The thesis had been printed and I had to distribute it to all the relevant parties. It's not very complicated work but it takes time, especially since the printer had forgot to print the announcement leaflet which has to be distributed with every thesis. A funny detail about the whole distribution thing is that the first person to receive a copy was actually Simon Peyton Jones. He happens to be visiting our department and I just happened to walk by a room where he and Koen Claessen where working. Koen wanted me to come in to congratulate me for the wedding and the thesis and Simon demanded he got a copy of my thesis which I was happy to give to him.
Today, we're off to our honeymoon. It's really exciting. The destination is still secret but it's a place we're I've never been before and I'm really looking forward to going there. And of course spend time with my new wife.
So, it's been some crazy couple of weeks in my life. I will do some more blogging once I get back and life is a little more normal.
To begin with I had a deadline two weeks ago. I had to send my thesis in to print. Which meant I had some pretty crazy weeks finishing it. It was really intense but I managed to send it in on time and it was a great relief. I spent a couple of days after that just staying at home watching snooker.
But I couldn't rest for too long. Coming up was out wedding. Even though we had everything planned in good time before there was a crazy amount of work to do the days just before. All the practical work has to be done like decorating the church and the place where the party was held. But it all went well and we had a wonderful wedding last Saturday.
Back to work on Monday, the day before yesterday. The thesis had been printed and I had to distribute it to all the relevant parties. It's not very complicated work but it takes time, especially since the printer had forgot to print the announcement leaflet which has to be distributed with every thesis. A funny detail about the whole distribution thing is that the first person to receive a copy was actually Simon Peyton Jones. He happens to be visiting our department and I just happened to walk by a room where he and Koen Claessen where working. Koen wanted me to come in to congratulate me for the wedding and the thesis and Simon demanded he got a copy of my thesis which I was happy to give to him.
Today, we're off to our honeymoon. It's really exciting. The destination is still secret but it's a place we're I've never been before and I'm really looking forward to going there. And of course spend time with my new wife.
So, it's been some crazy couple of weeks in my life. I will do some more blogging once I get back and life is a little more normal.
2007-01-22
The Reason for Blogging
I regularly hang out at programming.reddit.com. It's a news site for programmers where visitors can vote up and down the news articles. I like it because it is geared towards programming language discussion rather than only focusing on how to use the most mainstream languages.
Mark my surprise when I found one of my own blog posts featured on the first page. It was the post from a couple of weeks back on Programming Productivity and Programming Languages. I was very flattered that people had found it interesting enough to post it on reddit in the first place and furthermore that it got enough positive votes to make it into the front page.
Of course I was eager to see the comments so I immediately open the comments page. What I found there was comments like the following:
and
I agree with these comments. The claims I made in my post were very much unsubstantiated and they were all ideologically motivated. Why then did I write the way I did? Clearly this kind of writing isn't very helpful for anyone reading it and so why take up any readers time with such obvious rubbish?
There is a bit of a problem with news sites such as reddit and digg and how they relate to the blogosphere. People can submit any blog post (or web site) that they see fit to these sites. It can be blog posts by anyone anywhere on the internet, written under any circumstances and in an unknown context. But when a blog post appears on these sites some people tend to read them as news articles written for general consumption. But that is in many cases not at all how they should be read. People write for many reasons and to please news hungry surfers is only one reason.
The reason I blog is not for someone to read what I've written. I started blogging to improve my writing skills. I've continued blogging because I like to write down things that come to my mind and it is a good help for structuring my thoughts. I blog for my own amusement.
But then, why do I blog, as opposed to just writing on a piece of paper? The reason for me is that the possibility that someone might read what I write helps me write. Blogging means that I have an (at least potential) audience which I can target my writing towards. This (perhaps imaginary) audience is very important for me, I wouldn't be able to write without it. I simply can't motivate myself to write only for my own sake.
So I was by no means put off by the comments my blog post received on reddit. My posts wasn't written for these people. But I am glad that there were a couple of people who actually liked the article and gave it positive votes.
I blog for my own amusement. That has and always will be the main purpose of this blog. But I've been thinking a lot lately about starting another blog where I will write about technical stuff, programming and programming languages. Why another blog? Because in my head the random ramblings that appear on this blog is very separate from my technical thoughts. The two blogs would also have very different intended audience. While this blog only has an imaginary audience the new tech blog would be directed towards programming and research peers. I think it's earnest towards both audiences to keep the blogs apart. Anyhow, if I decide to launch a new tech blog I'll be announcing it here so watch this space if you're interested.
Mark my surprise when I found one of my own blog posts featured on the first page. It was the post from a couple of weeks back on Programming Productivity and Programming Languages. I was very flattered that people had found it interesting enough to post it on reddit in the first place and furthermore that it got enough positive votes to make it into the front page.
Of course I was eager to see the comments so I immediately open the comments page. What I found there was comments like the following:
These sorts of articles aren't very useful. Lots of vague, unsubstantiated claims, especially when claims like
All those features such as purity, closures, powerful type system, laziness and STM which makes programming in the large easier come together very nicely in Haskell.
are made.
and
I agree. It's ideological rubbish. Maybe the author should argue with guys like this
http://wagerlabs.com/2006/01/01/haskell-vs-erlang-reloaded
instead of deducing the productivity of a PL from its feature matrix.
I agree with these comments. The claims I made in my post were very much unsubstantiated and they were all ideologically motivated. Why then did I write the way I did? Clearly this kind of writing isn't very helpful for anyone reading it and so why take up any readers time with such obvious rubbish?
There is a bit of a problem with news sites such as reddit and digg and how they relate to the blogosphere. People can submit any blog post (or web site) that they see fit to these sites. It can be blog posts by anyone anywhere on the internet, written under any circumstances and in an unknown context. But when a blog post appears on these sites some people tend to read them as news articles written for general consumption. But that is in many cases not at all how they should be read. People write for many reasons and to please news hungry surfers is only one reason.
The reason I blog is not for someone to read what I've written. I started blogging to improve my writing skills. I've continued blogging because I like to write down things that come to my mind and it is a good help for structuring my thoughts. I blog for my own amusement.
But then, why do I blog, as opposed to just writing on a piece of paper? The reason for me is that the possibility that someone might read what I write helps me write. Blogging means that I have an (at least potential) audience which I can target my writing towards. This (perhaps imaginary) audience is very important for me, I wouldn't be able to write without it. I simply can't motivate myself to write only for my own sake.
So I was by no means put off by the comments my blog post received on reddit. My posts wasn't written for these people. But I am glad that there were a couple of people who actually liked the article and gave it positive votes.
I blog for my own amusement. That has and always will be the main purpose of this blog. But I've been thinking a lot lately about starting another blog where I will write about technical stuff, programming and programming languages. Why another blog? Because in my head the random ramblings that appear on this blog is very separate from my technical thoughts. The two blogs would also have very different intended audience. While this blog only has an imaginary audience the new tech blog would be directed towards programming and research peers. I think it's earnest towards both audiences to keep the blogs apart. Anyhow, if I decide to launch a new tech blog I'll be announcing it here so watch this space if you're interested.
2007-01-21
Masters Final in Snooker
I've just finished watching the final of the Masters tournament featuring the rising star Ding Junhui from China and my favorite snooker player Ronnie "The Rocket" O'Sullivan. And what a match it was.
Ding Junhui is only 19 years old but is already ranked as number 5 in the Provisional World Ranking and has already won 3 titles (being the youngest player, together with John Higgins, to have won so many titles). In the semifinal he beat Steven Hendry with a brilliant and offensive play. After that match Hendry, who seldom gives any praise to other players, applauded Ding and said that there are only two or three players in the world from whom you can't expect a second chance in a frame. He said Ding was one of them (the other two being John Higgins and Ronnie O'Sullivan. Hendry also belongs to that list but naturally he didn't count himself.) Ding seemed to be in a very good shape before the final, he even said he hoped to improve his game from the semifinal where he beat Hendry. Earlier in the week he also made a 147 frame, the highest possible score in snooker (not counting fouls) and became the youngest player ever to have achieved that on live TV. The previous record holder was Ronnie O'Sullivan.
Ronnie, as I said, is my favorite snooker player. He has his ups and downs but when he plays his best snooker there is simply no one that can match him. It's like he ceases to be a snooker player and becomes a magician, using the cue as wand to cast spells on the white ball, demanding it to go where he wants. It's absolute magic and looks so effortlessly that it must be embarrassing for the other players. On top of that he is also more or less double handed. He can play as good with his left hand as with his right hand.
Given that Ronnie O'Sullivan is so good, why doesn't he win everything? I think the problem for Ronnie is that he is himself his biggest opponent. He's having trouble with motivation and his mental stability seems to be lacking. Last month he simply walked out from a game against Steven Hendry and that is a very unusual thing to do in snooker where every player is expected to behave like a gentleman. He also seems to have a problem with longer tournaments and to keep up his concentration during a whole week or so of play.
Ronnie O'Sullivan's way to final was very good example of his mood swings. He started out very strongly beating Ali Carter with 6-1. Then he just barely beat Ken Doherty currently ranked no. 1 but wasn't showing his best game. In the semifinal he was up against Stephen Maguire and that was the worst game of snooker I have ever seen. Even I could have beaten Maguire as he played in that game. It was obvious that he was just pumped with adrenalin for this match and he didn't manage to cool down, missing just about every ball. It's a miracle that he actually won a couple of frames. O'Sullivan also played really poorly and didn't really deserve to win either.
Given the two players previous performance during the tournament I held Ding as a favorite in the final. But just barely, as I'm well aware of O'Sullivan's qualities. And it turned out to be quite a drama. Ding won the two first frames showing some superb snooker, much like in the semifinal. That seemed to wake up O'Sullivan who after that took four frames in a row including two centuries. Ding then responded, making the score 4-3. After that it was all O'Sullivan. It just seemed impossible for him to miss. Ding didn't play badly, on the contrary. But no matter what he did O'Sullivan would still find balls to play with and once he started there was no looking back.
In the tenth frame though, it seemed like Ding might have a chance to get into the match again. He had scored 65 points when he finally missed a ball, leaving only 67 points possible on the table for O'Sullivan. "The Rocket" stole the frame with 66 points against Ding's 65. I think that frame was the nail in the coffin for the Chinese.
The pressure seemed to take it's toll on Ding Junhui. During the latter half of the game it seemed like he was almost weeping, sitting in his chair and watching O'Sullivan beating him. It didn't help that the audience was very much in favor of Ronnie O'Sullivan and could be quite loud and disturbing at times. Ronnie even asked that one particularly loud spectator be thrown out of the arena, and indeed, he got so see the end of the game on a TV.
After the twelfth frame, making the score 9-3, it seemed that Ding wanted to concede the game. He went to shake O'Sullivan's hand but Ronnie wouldn't accept it. Instead he put his arm around Ding to try and comfort him and led him out of the arena. It was very warming to see such a friendly gesture from O'Sullivan when his younger opponent was so obviously upset. Later Ding Junhui said that he thought that the game was over, being best of 17 frames. That might be true but I'm somewhat skeptical to that explanation. It seemed that Ding was almost crying and he had essentially given up the frame before with a very poor, and not even half-hearted defensive shot. So having Ronnie O'Sullivan as an opponent turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand Ding got a very tough lesson in snooker and in how bad the pressure can be in a final. On the other hand O'Sullivan turned out to be a very supportive friend who wanted to help him when he was almost caving in for the pressure. After the match, O'Sullivan made sure Ding Junhui didn't have to give an interview, which is otherwise customary. He could leave right after he received his second prize.
So it was a very good match to watch. Both a bit of drama and some of the best snooker I've ever seen, especially from Ronnie O'Sullivan. I hope he can pull himself together for some more stunning snooker later this spring. As for Ding I'm sure he will win many more titles and become one of the great names in snooker.
PS. For the record, the final ended 10-3 for O'Sullivan.
Ding Junhui is only 19 years old but is already ranked as number 5 in the Provisional World Ranking and has already won 3 titles (being the youngest player, together with John Higgins, to have won so many titles). In the semifinal he beat Steven Hendry with a brilliant and offensive play. After that match Hendry, who seldom gives any praise to other players, applauded Ding and said that there are only two or three players in the world from whom you can't expect a second chance in a frame. He said Ding was one of them (the other two being John Higgins and Ronnie O'Sullivan. Hendry also belongs to that list but naturally he didn't count himself.) Ding seemed to be in a very good shape before the final, he even said he hoped to improve his game from the semifinal where he beat Hendry. Earlier in the week he also made a 147 frame, the highest possible score in snooker (not counting fouls) and became the youngest player ever to have achieved that on live TV. The previous record holder was Ronnie O'Sullivan.
Ronnie, as I said, is my favorite snooker player. He has his ups and downs but when he plays his best snooker there is simply no one that can match him. It's like he ceases to be a snooker player and becomes a magician, using the cue as wand to cast spells on the white ball, demanding it to go where he wants. It's absolute magic and looks so effortlessly that it must be embarrassing for the other players. On top of that he is also more or less double handed. He can play as good with his left hand as with his right hand.
Given that Ronnie O'Sullivan is so good, why doesn't he win everything? I think the problem for Ronnie is that he is himself his biggest opponent. He's having trouble with motivation and his mental stability seems to be lacking. Last month he simply walked out from a game against Steven Hendry and that is a very unusual thing to do in snooker where every player is expected to behave like a gentleman. He also seems to have a problem with longer tournaments and to keep up his concentration during a whole week or so of play.
Ronnie O'Sullivan's way to final was very good example of his mood swings. He started out very strongly beating Ali Carter with 6-1. Then he just barely beat Ken Doherty currently ranked no. 1 but wasn't showing his best game. In the semifinal he was up against Stephen Maguire and that was the worst game of snooker I have ever seen. Even I could have beaten Maguire as he played in that game. It was obvious that he was just pumped with adrenalin for this match and he didn't manage to cool down, missing just about every ball. It's a miracle that he actually won a couple of frames. O'Sullivan also played really poorly and didn't really deserve to win either.
Given the two players previous performance during the tournament I held Ding as a favorite in the final. But just barely, as I'm well aware of O'Sullivan's qualities. And it turned out to be quite a drama. Ding won the two first frames showing some superb snooker, much like in the semifinal. That seemed to wake up O'Sullivan who after that took four frames in a row including two centuries. Ding then responded, making the score 4-3. After that it was all O'Sullivan. It just seemed impossible for him to miss. Ding didn't play badly, on the contrary. But no matter what he did O'Sullivan would still find balls to play with and once he started there was no looking back.
In the tenth frame though, it seemed like Ding might have a chance to get into the match again. He had scored 65 points when he finally missed a ball, leaving only 67 points possible on the table for O'Sullivan. "The Rocket" stole the frame with 66 points against Ding's 65. I think that frame was the nail in the coffin for the Chinese.
The pressure seemed to take it's toll on Ding Junhui. During the latter half of the game it seemed like he was almost weeping, sitting in his chair and watching O'Sullivan beating him. It didn't help that the audience was very much in favor of Ronnie O'Sullivan and could be quite loud and disturbing at times. Ronnie even asked that one particularly loud spectator be thrown out of the arena, and indeed, he got so see the end of the game on a TV.
After the twelfth frame, making the score 9-3, it seemed that Ding wanted to concede the game. He went to shake O'Sullivan's hand but Ronnie wouldn't accept it. Instead he put his arm around Ding to try and comfort him and led him out of the arena. It was very warming to see such a friendly gesture from O'Sullivan when his younger opponent was so obviously upset. Later Ding Junhui said that he thought that the game was over, being best of 17 frames. That might be true but I'm somewhat skeptical to that explanation. It seemed that Ding was almost crying and he had essentially given up the frame before with a very poor, and not even half-hearted defensive shot. So having Ronnie O'Sullivan as an opponent turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand Ding got a very tough lesson in snooker and in how bad the pressure can be in a final. On the other hand O'Sullivan turned out to be a very supportive friend who wanted to help him when he was almost caving in for the pressure. After the match, O'Sullivan made sure Ding Junhui didn't have to give an interview, which is otherwise customary. He could leave right after he received his second prize.
So it was a very good match to watch. Both a bit of drama and some of the best snooker I've ever seen, especially from Ronnie O'Sullivan. I hope he can pull himself together for some more stunning snooker later this spring. As for Ding I'm sure he will win many more titles and become one of the great names in snooker.
PS. For the record, the final ended 10-3 for O'Sullivan.
2007-01-19
The Last Functional Programmer
One of the things our computer science department is famous for is its history in functional programming. People who have been working here include John Hughes, Lennart Augustsson, Thomas Johnsson, Niklas Röjemo, Jan Sparud, Urban Boquist, Magnus Carlsson, Thomas Hallgren, Koen Claessen and some people like Philip Wadler, Amr Sabry and Andrew Gordon have made longer visits here. All these people have made important contributions to the field of functional programming and Haskell in particular.
Given this dire history it was not without pride that I yesterday was given the title "The Last Functional Programmer" of the department.
The history behind this title is that a lot of the people do not work at our department any longer. The only two people left are John Hughes and Koen Claessen. John has switched over to Erlang and Koen mostly does hardware verification these days. So, when one guy from the proglog group needed a subreviewer for a paper relating to functional programming he was directed to me, being the last functional programming outpost at our department.
Although I was proud to be given this title it's also sad. Functional programming is really fun and I wish there were more people doing it at our department. There are people here who use functional programming and we can exchange some ideas but there's really no exciting research going on. I guess I'll have to move to a better place when I've finished my PhD. Or maybe I need to love some other field.
Given this dire history it was not without pride that I yesterday was given the title "The Last Functional Programmer" of the department.
The history behind this title is that a lot of the people do not work at our department any longer. The only two people left are John Hughes and Koen Claessen. John has switched over to Erlang and Koen mostly does hardware verification these days. So, when one guy from the proglog group needed a subreviewer for a paper relating to functional programming he was directed to me, being the last functional programming outpost at our department.
Although I was proud to be given this title it's also sad. Functional programming is really fun and I wish there were more people doing it at our department. There are people here who use functional programming and we can exchange some ideas but there's really no exciting research going on. I guess I'll have to move to a better place when I've finished my PhD. Or maybe I need to love some other field.
2007-01-10
Yak Shaving
Yesterday I stumbled upon one of the coolest and useful expressions I've heard in a while: Yak Shaving. What does it mean? Here's a quote from the link:
I recognize this situation so well. Sometimes I feel like I don't do anything but Yak Shaving. That can be really frustrating and drain your energy pretty fast. Which means it has to stop.
Now at least I have a name for it so I can say to myself: "I'm Yak Shaving. Stop doing that and go do some important stuff instead".
"I was working on my thesis and realized I needed a reference. I'd seen a post on comp.arch recently that cited a paper, so I fired up gnus. While I was searching the for the post, I came across another post whose MIME encoding screwed up my ancient version of gnus, so I stopped and downloaded the latest version of gnus.
"Unfortunately, the new version of gnus didn't work with emacs 18, so I downloaded and built emacs 20. Of course, then I had to install updated versions of a half-dozen other packages to keep other users from hurting me. When I finally tried to use the new gnus, it kept crapping out on my old configuration. And that's why I'm deep in the gnus info pages and my .emacs file -- and yet it's all part of working on my thesis."
And that, my friends, is yak shaving.
I recognize this situation so well. Sometimes I feel like I don't do anything but Yak Shaving. That can be really frustrating and drain your energy pretty fast. Which means it has to stop.
Now at least I have a name for it so I can say to myself: "I'm Yak Shaving. Stop doing that and go do some important stuff instead".
2007-01-09
Programming Productivity and Programming Languages
Recently I've read two blog posts about programming productivity and how it can be improved by better programming languages. I'd like to expand a bit on them.
The first post focuses on code reuse. The thesis is that the central thing that increases programming productivity is code reuse. As soon as you can reuse some bits of code you save effort. How does this relate to programming languages? One way is that programming languages can supply code in the runtime system, such as garbage collection. Thus, the programmer gets a well tuned bit of code which is most certainly correct and which he doesn't need to think about to use. Another example mentioned in the article is objects. It is indeed possible to program with objects in C but this programming pattern is captured by a language construct in object oriented languages and we can therefore reuse it.
The latter half of the post makes a case for standards. Having to choose from several libraries that does the same thing or programming constructs that can achieve the same thing are bound to make a mess. According to Murphy's Law, when you want to use libraries A and B, library A will use feature 1 and library B will use feature 2 and that will render them incompatible. So standards are good, be it libraries or programming idioms. They help making programs more composable.
Which leads me to the second post which talks about Composability and Productivity. This post starts out repeating a lot of the previous post but focuses on composability. But it goes further down the composability track talking about the problem with state. When composing two stateful pieces of software it might be important when the state changes happens and sometimes that leads to composability problems.
But there are even more interesting issues in composability and reuse that neither article mentions. One is concurrent programs. These are extremely hard to compose if they use ordinary locks and sometimes it is out right impossible to compose them. One promising line of work here is software transactional memory which can bring composability to concurrent programs. If think this sounds interesting you should check out the papers by Simon Peyton Jones on software transactional memory (or STM for short). STM has transactions, bits of code which either are run to completion or aren't run at all (perhaps due to a state change which happened while the transaction was running and which invalidates it's view of the world). The salient feature of STM is that it enables the programmer to compose transaction. Hence it increases composability.
The interesting thing is that this STM fits particularly nicely with Haskell. Why is that interesting? Because Haskell has some other very special features which makes Haskell programs more reusable and easier to compose.
One of the obvious benefits of Haskell when it comes to reuse is its strong type system. Writing reusable code is a lot easier if you don't have a very narrow minded type system which gets in your way all the time. To avoid that you can either ditch the static type system and go with dynamic types, which is what Lisp, Scheme, Ruby and Python does. The other option is to use a more fancy type system which lets give types even to the most abstract pieces of software. That way they can more easily be reused. This also improves composability.
One last feature of Haskell that I want to mention is laziness. Anyone who has ever heard of Haskell knows that this is the one feature which sets it apart from other languages (modulo Clean). Laziness makes evaluation order difficult to predict and therefore it is a bad idea to have state in a lazy language. Therefore Haskell is pure, allowing no mutable variables or IO except in a confined imperative sublanguage. As the first post I linked to above have already pointed out state is bad for composability. That should make Haskell programs more composable and reusable. While I think this is true it's not why I mention laziness. Lazy evaluation, used correctly, can enable a new kind of modularity which takes great effort to achieve by other means.
The standard example of modularity from laziness comes from John Hughes' classic article "Why functional programming matters" but I don't think it has gotten enough attention so I will repeat it here. Suppose you are writing an AI for some board game such as tick tack toe or chess. Writing good ones can be really tricky if the board game if moderately complex. In Haskell you would start out by generating a tree which models all possible moves from the current positions on the board. This tree can infinite. One can then write small functions which operates on this tree, such as pruning it or reorder branches to make things faster. Lastly one can compose these functions to construct the final evaluation function. The crucial thing here is that the small functions operating on the tree are highly reusable. It is very easy to cherry pick them and reorder them as you see fit. Therefore it is very easy to try out several different algorithms with very little effort. All this spells: Programmer Productivity. Lazy evaluation is crucial here in making sure that only parts of the tree that are actually needed are computed.
For those of you who think that this sounds horribly inefficient I have two answers. First, if you find a really good search algorithm this way then the constant factors due to lazy evaluation and many function calls doesn't really matter. Secondly, there are techniques to automatically remove the game tree which can make the program almost as fast as a hand tuned one.
One good example of where they've explored the modularity of laziness is the paper "Modular Lazy Search for Constraint Satisfaction Problems". It's one of my favorite papers and it's well worth a read. I have more to say about this paper but I'll save it for another post.
OK, so this post turned out to be a sales pitch for Haskell in the end. No one who knows me would be really surprised by that. But I really do think that Haskell has a lot of features that takes code reuse and program composition to a new level. All those features such as purity, closures, powerful type system, laziness and STM which makes programming in the large easier come together very nicely in Haskell. So it's no surprise that the latest revisions of C#, Java and VB all borrow heavily from Haskell and it's language kins.
I completely agree with the posts I linked to above: Reuse and composability are very good for programming productivity. And there's a whole lot of things that can and should be done at the language level to improve these issues.
The first post focuses on code reuse. The thesis is that the central thing that increases programming productivity is code reuse. As soon as you can reuse some bits of code you save effort. How does this relate to programming languages? One way is that programming languages can supply code in the runtime system, such as garbage collection. Thus, the programmer gets a well tuned bit of code which is most certainly correct and which he doesn't need to think about to use. Another example mentioned in the article is objects. It is indeed possible to program with objects in C but this programming pattern is captured by a language construct in object oriented languages and we can therefore reuse it.
The latter half of the post makes a case for standards. Having to choose from several libraries that does the same thing or programming constructs that can achieve the same thing are bound to make a mess. According to Murphy's Law, when you want to use libraries A and B, library A will use feature 1 and library B will use feature 2 and that will render them incompatible. So standards are good, be it libraries or programming idioms. They help making programs more composable.
Which leads me to the second post which talks about Composability and Productivity. This post starts out repeating a lot of the previous post but focuses on composability. But it goes further down the composability track talking about the problem with state. When composing two stateful pieces of software it might be important when the state changes happens and sometimes that leads to composability problems.
But there are even more interesting issues in composability and reuse that neither article mentions. One is concurrent programs. These are extremely hard to compose if they use ordinary locks and sometimes it is out right impossible to compose them. One promising line of work here is software transactional memory which can bring composability to concurrent programs. If think this sounds interesting you should check out the papers by Simon Peyton Jones on software transactional memory (or STM for short). STM has transactions, bits of code which either are run to completion or aren't run at all (perhaps due to a state change which happened while the transaction was running and which invalidates it's view of the world). The salient feature of STM is that it enables the programmer to compose transaction. Hence it increases composability.
The interesting thing is that this STM fits particularly nicely with Haskell. Why is that interesting? Because Haskell has some other very special features which makes Haskell programs more reusable and easier to compose.
One of the obvious benefits of Haskell when it comes to reuse is its strong type system. Writing reusable code is a lot easier if you don't have a very narrow minded type system which gets in your way all the time. To avoid that you can either ditch the static type system and go with dynamic types, which is what Lisp, Scheme, Ruby and Python does. The other option is to use a more fancy type system which lets give types even to the most abstract pieces of software. That way they can more easily be reused. This also improves composability.
One last feature of Haskell that I want to mention is laziness. Anyone who has ever heard of Haskell knows that this is the one feature which sets it apart from other languages (modulo Clean). Laziness makes evaluation order difficult to predict and therefore it is a bad idea to have state in a lazy language. Therefore Haskell is pure, allowing no mutable variables or IO except in a confined imperative sublanguage. As the first post I linked to above have already pointed out state is bad for composability. That should make Haskell programs more composable and reusable. While I think this is true it's not why I mention laziness. Lazy evaluation, used correctly, can enable a new kind of modularity which takes great effort to achieve by other means.
The standard example of modularity from laziness comes from John Hughes' classic article "Why functional programming matters" but I don't think it has gotten enough attention so I will repeat it here. Suppose you are writing an AI for some board game such as tick tack toe or chess. Writing good ones can be really tricky if the board game if moderately complex. In Haskell you would start out by generating a tree which models all possible moves from the current positions on the board. This tree can infinite. One can then write small functions which operates on this tree, such as pruning it or reorder branches to make things faster. Lastly one can compose these functions to construct the final evaluation function. The crucial thing here is that the small functions operating on the tree are highly reusable. It is very easy to cherry pick them and reorder them as you see fit. Therefore it is very easy to try out several different algorithms with very little effort. All this spells: Programmer Productivity. Lazy evaluation is crucial here in making sure that only parts of the tree that are actually needed are computed.
For those of you who think that this sounds horribly inefficient I have two answers. First, if you find a really good search algorithm this way then the constant factors due to lazy evaluation and many function calls doesn't really matter. Secondly, there are techniques to automatically remove the game tree which can make the program almost as fast as a hand tuned one.
One good example of where they've explored the modularity of laziness is the paper "Modular Lazy Search for Constraint Satisfaction Problems". It's one of my favorite papers and it's well worth a read. I have more to say about this paper but I'll save it for another post.
OK, so this post turned out to be a sales pitch for Haskell in the end. No one who knows me would be really surprised by that. But I really do think that Haskell has a lot of features that takes code reuse and program composition to a new level. All those features such as purity, closures, powerful type system, laziness and STM which makes programming in the large easier come together very nicely in Haskell. So it's no surprise that the latest revisions of C#, Java and VB all borrow heavily from Haskell and it's language kins.
I completely agree with the posts I linked to above: Reuse and composability are very good for programming productivity. And there's a whole lot of things that can and should be done at the language level to improve these issues.
2007-01-04
IMDB Top 250
I'm a huge fan of IMDB. I use it all the time to look up facts about various movies and actors that I've seen or am going to see. The site is just packed with information which makes it a gold mine for any film lover.
One page that I particularly like and visit every now and then is the Top 250 list. The site allows any visitor to vote on the movies and based on these votes this list shows the 250 most popular ones. It's a very good list if you're looking for a good film to watch.
Every now and then I check the Top 250 list to see which movies from the list I have seen and which I should consider seeing. And today I was happy to cross off one more movie on the list: Casablanca, current ranked as number 6 on the list.
Seeing a classic such as Casablanca can be difficult. When a movie have such a high rating it's hard not to have very high expectations. And in my experience older movies often have a much slower tempo which can make them difficult or even unbearable to see unless you're in the right mood. Because of these problems I often postpone watching classics indefinitely. I'm constantly waiting for the right moment to present itself, to get into the right mood for watching the movie. But somehow that moment never seem to come. We taped Casablanca many years ago but have never watched it.
It's better to do what we (me and my fiancee) did today, watch the movie when it runs on TV. Don't record it, don't rent it, just take the time to watch it when it actually runs.
It's not difficult to see why Casablanca has become such a classic. Despite being recorded in 1942 the movie feels very modern. The dialog is absolutely fantastic and the movie is fast paced, not boring for a single moment. It is also filled with quotes that have gotten a life of their own: "Play it again, Sam", "We'll always have Paris", "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine." etc. (More quotes here.) All I can say is, if you haven't seen it yet I can heartily recommend it. It's worth every bit of it's status as a classic.
Despite being a big fan of movies I am a little embarrassed to admit that I haven't seen the top three movies on the list: "The Godfather", "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Godfather: Part II". Watching the Godfather trilogy is one of those projects that I suspect will never happen. The pressure of finding the exact right moment and mood to watch these movies is so big that I'm afraid it will never happen. As for "The Shawshank Redemption", I've bought the DVD so I hope it will lower the threshold for me to get around and watch it.
To make it a little easier to see what movies I have seen on the Top 250 list and what I thought of them I wrote a little greasemonkey script which adds an extra column to the list. This column shows for each movie what vote I have given to it. I've made the the script publicly available in case you would like to try it out yourself. Of course if you install the script it will show your votes, not mine.
One page that I particularly like and visit every now and then is the Top 250 list. The site allows any visitor to vote on the movies and based on these votes this list shows the 250 most popular ones. It's a very good list if you're looking for a good film to watch.
Every now and then I check the Top 250 list to see which movies from the list I have seen and which I should consider seeing. And today I was happy to cross off one more movie on the list: Casablanca, current ranked as number 6 on the list.
Seeing a classic such as Casablanca can be difficult. When a movie have such a high rating it's hard not to have very high expectations. And in my experience older movies often have a much slower tempo which can make them difficult or even unbearable to see unless you're in the right mood. Because of these problems I often postpone watching classics indefinitely. I'm constantly waiting for the right moment to present itself, to get into the right mood for watching the movie. But somehow that moment never seem to come. We taped Casablanca many years ago but have never watched it.
It's better to do what we (me and my fiancee) did today, watch the movie when it runs on TV. Don't record it, don't rent it, just take the time to watch it when it actually runs.
It's not difficult to see why Casablanca has become such a classic. Despite being recorded in 1942 the movie feels very modern. The dialog is absolutely fantastic and the movie is fast paced, not boring for a single moment. It is also filled with quotes that have gotten a life of their own: "Play it again, Sam", "We'll always have Paris", "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine." etc. (More quotes here.) All I can say is, if you haven't seen it yet I can heartily recommend it. It's worth every bit of it's status as a classic.
Despite being a big fan of movies I am a little embarrassed to admit that I haven't seen the top three movies on the list: "The Godfather", "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Godfather: Part II". Watching the Godfather trilogy is one of those projects that I suspect will never happen. The pressure of finding the exact right moment and mood to watch these movies is so big that I'm afraid it will never happen. As for "The Shawshank Redemption", I've bought the DVD so I hope it will lower the threshold for me to get around and watch it.
To make it a little easier to see what movies I have seen on the Top 250 list and what I thought of them I wrote a little greasemonkey script which adds an extra column to the list. This column shows for each movie what vote I have given to it. I've made the the script publicly available in case you would like to try it out yourself. Of course if you install the script it will show your votes, not mine.
2006-11-21
Peter Jackson will not make The Hobbit
Crap! It seems that because some petty little dispute over some accounting issues Peter Jackson will not go on to make The Hobbit. It's really sad to hear. Especially since PJ seemed like he would have enjoyed making the movie. I'm not sure I'm looking forward to this movie anymore. With a new production team the end result can be pretty much anything.
Searching Haskell Code
Whoho! Google Code Search now supports Haskell code!
I've had some fun with Google Code Search since it was launched in early October. Among other things I've used to motivate changes to the standard libraries in Haskell based on how people write code. But not having proper support for Haskell has been a little awkward. One has to fiddle with file extensions to make it search in Haskell files. And it's always this suspicion that the search doesn't cover all that many Haskell files since the crawler presumably doesn't look for them. But all that is gone now, and I'm much happier. I've already put the new feature to good use.
I've had some fun with Google Code Search since it was launched in early October. Among other things I've used to motivate changes to the standard libraries in Haskell based on how people write code. But not having proper support for Haskell has been a little awkward. One has to fiddle with file extensions to make it search in Haskell files. And it's always this suspicion that the search doesn't cover all that many Haskell files since the crawler presumably doesn't look for them. But all that is gone now, and I'm much happier. I've already put the new feature to good use.
2006-11-17
Football technicalities
There is something that I've been wondering about for many years. It concerns football (or soccer if you prefer). It's the following question:
What is the purpose of the goal area?
Do you know? I'd be surprised if you did. Do you even know what the goal area is? In case you don't: it's the little rectangle inside the penalty area and just in front of the goal. I think even most hard core football fans don't know what purpose it has.
Today I decided to look it up. And wikipedia is helpful here as usual. It turns out that "Indirect free kicks awarded to the attacking team within the goal area must be taken from the point on the line parallel to the goal line nearest where an incident occurred; they can not be taken further within the goal-area. Similarly drop-balls that would otherwise occur in the goal area are taken on this line." Indirect free kicks are awarded for technical fouls such as offside and usually happens far away from a teams own goal. Indirect free kicks within the penalty area are extremely rare. I've only seen it once. The reason the judge awarded the foul was that he thought the goal keeper took too many steps with the ball in his hands. This particular rule has now been dropped in favor for a six second time limit.
I should add though that I'm not that crazy about football as this post might suggest. I do like to watch a game every now and then. But I almost never watch more than one game per week and often it is much more seldom than that. I like to watch when Sweden's team is playing an international match. Every now and then I also watch one of the major clubs in the Spanish league play, as they play very good football.
What is the purpose of the goal area?
Do you know? I'd be surprised if you did. Do you even know what the goal area is? In case you don't: it's the little rectangle inside the penalty area and just in front of the goal. I think even most hard core football fans don't know what purpose it has.
Today I decided to look it up. And wikipedia is helpful here as usual. It turns out that "Indirect free kicks awarded to the attacking team within the goal area must be taken from the point on the line parallel to the goal line nearest where an incident occurred; they can not be taken further within the goal-area. Similarly drop-balls that would otherwise occur in the goal area are taken on this line." Indirect free kicks are awarded for technical fouls such as offside and usually happens far away from a teams own goal. Indirect free kicks within the penalty area are extremely rare. I've only seen it once. The reason the judge awarded the foul was that he thought the goal keeper took too many steps with the ball in his hands. This particular rule has now been dropped in favor for a six second time limit.
I should add though that I'm not that crazy about football as this post might suggest. I do like to watch a game every now and then. But I almost never watch more than one game per week and often it is much more seldom than that. I like to watch when Sweden's team is playing an international match. Every now and then I also watch one of the major clubs in the Spanish league play, as they play very good football.
2006-11-16
An Open Mind
Today, for no apparent reason, I ran 'fortune' and got the following quote:
The man behind the quote is William Orton an American politician from way back.
I featured a similar quote here on this blog about a year and a half ago.
If you keep an open mind people will throw a lot of garbage in it.
The man behind the quote is William Orton an American politician from way back.
I featured a similar quote here on this blog about a year and a half ago.
2006-11-03
The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy
Maybe a week or so ago I stumbled upon an article via reddit called "Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++". It was a terrible article. The author had some pretty bad misconceptions on how to produce fast code, which was what the article was most about. I just couldn't let that stand unchallenged so I wrote a comment which you can find if you scroll down on the page of the article. I will not repeat is here. If you're interested go to the page instead.
I was rather frustrated by the fact that this story had made it to the front page of reddit. Therefor I was pretty happy to see that a few days later there was another story on the front page debating the above article: The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy. He makes pretty much the same argument as I did but he writes a lot better and have some good concrete examples.
The bottom line in both my comment and the other article is that functional languages are catching up pretty quickly when it comes to speed.
I was rather frustrated by the fact that this story had made it to the front page of reddit. Therefor I was pretty happy to see that a few days later there was another story on the front page debating the above article: The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy. He makes pretty much the same argument as I did but he writes a lot better and have some good concrete examples.
The bottom line in both my comment and the other article is that functional languages are catching up pretty quickly when it comes to speed.
2006-10-22
Scrybe
So, it seems we're getting another web-based calender/information manager. The new one is called Scrybe. And as a matter of fact it looks pretty interesting. Most of its old competitors are all variations on the same theme. So what does Scrybe has that makes it stand out from the rest?
Those are the main features that will be useful for me. There are many more cool features in Scrybe, all explained in the video on their homepage. It's going to be interesting to see the launch of Scrybe and what will happened with the company in the future.
- It has support for working offline. This is perhaps going to be the killer, the feature which makes Scrybe take over the market. Having offline support is just
- Very well crafted user interface based on the focus+context principle. It simply looks and feels very intuitive.
- Synconization with paper. I've *so* wanted this from other applications I've used. The possibility to print out the schedule and todo list and carry it around in your pocket for those occasions you don't want to bring your computer.
Those are the main features that will be useful for me. There are many more cool features in Scrybe, all explained in the video on their homepage. It's going to be interesting to see the launch of Scrybe and what will happened with the company in the future.
2006-10-20
Amazon's accurate recommendation
I got an email today from Amazon with a book recommendation. And they really nailed it this time!
They recommend a book on flowers because I own a book on functional data structures?! Well, the reason is pretty obvious. They're mixing up authors with the same name. There is a professor at Oxford by the name of Richard Bird which does a lot of functional programming. If he wrote a new book I'd be very happy if Amazon sent me an email telling me about it. He has already written the standard text Introduction to Functional Programming, a nice introduction to Haskell. But he does not write books on flowers.
And yes, I know for a fact that the Oxford professor doesn't write books about gardening on his spare time. The two different Richard Bird authors have different middle names.
Well, Amazon. You gave me a laugh today but if you keep it up I'm going to get bored in the future. Make sure to fix this.
We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in books by Chris Okasaki have also ordered 300 Flowering Plants by Richard Bird. For this reason, you might like to know that this book will be released on 27 October 2006. You can pre-order your copy for just £7.99 by following the link below.
They recommend a book on flowers because I own a book on functional data structures?! Well, the reason is pretty obvious. They're mixing up authors with the same name. There is a professor at Oxford by the name of Richard Bird which does a lot of functional programming. If he wrote a new book I'd be very happy if Amazon sent me an email telling me about it. He has already written the standard text Introduction to Functional Programming, a nice introduction to Haskell. But he does not write books on flowers.
And yes, I know for a fact that the Oxford professor doesn't write books about gardening on his spare time. The two different Richard Bird authors have different middle names.
Well, Amazon. You gave me a laugh today but if you keep it up I'm going to get bored in the future. Make sure to fix this.
2006-10-15
2006-09-26
Haskell @ Google
The other day Google showed a list of various prizes Googlers had achieved recently. One competition which is of special interest for me since I've participated in it (although not this year) is the ICFP programming contest. I was impressed to see that two different teams from Google had taken both first and third place. And moreover, the winning team had actually used Haskell! So Haskell has a foot in the door at Google! That's great news!
2006-09-20
Some Science
I just want to mention two articles I read today.
The first one is from Scientific American and talks about what it is that makes a genius. Or, rather a grand master in chess. Most of the article talks about how the mind works for the best chess players and then generalize about the theories to other disciplines. So, how does experts think, and what makes their brain work this way? The answer is both rather surprising and liberating. It seems that to acquire the mental model of an expert all that is needed is practice. Experts learn to see patterns and these pattern evolve in the brain through practice, practice and practice. So, what about wonder kids? They just start early and work hard. And working hard is an important ingredient. You have to keep challenging yourself with problems that are slightly more difficult that what you can handle, thereby constantly pushing yourself. So, anyone can be an expert, it just takes passion and perseverance.
The other article really surprised me. It's a list of bogus science that nevertheless have had an impact on what we believe. Take a look at item no. 4. It discusses an observation about moths changing colors. This has been used as an example of evolution happening right in front of us. And I've taken it as proof that evolution really happens today. But it seems that it was all totally bogus. So have anyone observed evolution happening without relying on old fossils and various dating methods? It would be interesting to know.
[EDIT: It seems I shouldn't have been so quick to believe that web page. Here are some links that goes in to a bit of discussion around the peppered moth experiments.]
The first one is from Scientific American and talks about what it is that makes a genius. Or, rather a grand master in chess. Most of the article talks about how the mind works for the best chess players and then generalize about the theories to other disciplines. So, how does experts think, and what makes their brain work this way? The answer is both rather surprising and liberating. It seems that to acquire the mental model of an expert all that is needed is practice. Experts learn to see patterns and these pattern evolve in the brain through practice, practice and practice. So, what about wonder kids? They just start early and work hard. And working hard is an important ingredient. You have to keep challenging yourself with problems that are slightly more difficult that what you can handle, thereby constantly pushing yourself. So, anyone can be an expert, it just takes passion and perseverance.
The other article really surprised me. It's a list of bogus science that nevertheless have had an impact on what we believe. Take a look at item no. 4. It discusses an observation about moths changing colors. This has been used as an example of evolution happening right in front of us. And I've taken it as proof that evolution really happens today. But it seems that it was all totally bogus. So have anyone observed evolution happening without relying on old fossils and various dating methods? It would be interesting to know.
[EDIT: It seems I shouldn't have been so quick to believe that web page. Here are some links that goes in to a bit of discussion around the peppered moth experiments.]
2006-09-14
Six = Infinity?
Gee, this piece of news really made me dissillusioned. You've probably heard of the theory that all people in the world are connected in at most six steps. This urban myth sprung out of an experiment made by a guy called Stanley Milgram. He performed an experiment to see if he could get letter to a specific person far away from himself by only using a chain of friends. The result? On average it took six people to get to the final destination.
So what the problem? The problem is that in 97% of all the letters sent didn't reach its target at all! So drawing any conclusions on the 3% that's left is just totally bogus.
You can read a more detailed article over at BBC in the article Connecting with people in six steps.
So what the problem? The problem is that in 97% of all the letters sent didn't reach its target at all! So drawing any conclusions on the 3% that's left is just totally bogus.
You can read a more detailed article over at BBC in the article Connecting with people in six steps.
2006-09-13
Good film news
The other day tripped over some really pleasant film news. First and foremost: The Hobbit is going to happen! But it still remains to be seen whether it will be Peter Jackson who makes the movie. If he's going to make it it's not going to be anytime soon as he's signing up for quite a lot of projects right now. I would love for Peter Jackson to do The Hobbit though. Considering how Lord of the Rings turned out I don't think there is a single Tolkien fan who doesn't agree with me.
So they're going to make a Terminator 4. Which makes me skeptic. With no Linda Hamilton and no Arnold Schwarzenegger they really have to reinvent the whole concept to make a good movie out of it. I just wonder: Why? The first two Terminator movies are true classics. They don't need to undo film history as the Wachowski brothers did with the Matrix trilogy.
If I may digress a bit I'd like to take the moment to say a few words about Terminator 3 which I saw a few months ago. It wasn't as good as the first two but it wasn't that bad either. The movie didn't quite have that creepy feeling of the first two, the feeling of constantly being hunted by an unstoppable terminator. And the dystopic vision of the future wasn't quite there either. Also the choice of actors wasn't a very good one, especially the actor playing John Connor wasn't a very good choice. What really saved the movie was the ending.
The Thomas Crown Affair is getting a sequel which I think is exciting news. I like the movie a lot and the final heist in the movie is quite enjoyable.
Finally, not mentioned on the webpage I linked to above, it seems they're making a National Treasure 2. This is good news to me. National Treasure is one of those movies that I can watch over and over again and still enjoy it. I guess a lot of American history teachers are using it as it contains many highlights from American history. And I suppose there are enough interesting historical people and events in the US to make a second film. I'm looking forward to it.
So they're going to make a Terminator 4. Which makes me skeptic. With no Linda Hamilton and no Arnold Schwarzenegger they really have to reinvent the whole concept to make a good movie out of it. I just wonder: Why? The first two Terminator movies are true classics. They don't need to undo film history as the Wachowski brothers did with the Matrix trilogy.
If I may digress a bit I'd like to take the moment to say a few words about Terminator 3 which I saw a few months ago. It wasn't as good as the first two but it wasn't that bad either. The movie didn't quite have that creepy feeling of the first two, the feeling of constantly being hunted by an unstoppable terminator. And the dystopic vision of the future wasn't quite there either. Also the choice of actors wasn't a very good one, especially the actor playing John Connor wasn't a very good choice. What really saved the movie was the ending.
The Thomas Crown Affair is getting a sequel which I think is exciting news. I like the movie a lot and the final heist in the movie is quite enjoyable.
Finally, not mentioned on the webpage I linked to above, it seems they're making a National Treasure 2. This is good news to me. National Treasure is one of those movies that I can watch over and over again and still enjoy it. I guess a lot of American history teachers are using it as it contains many highlights from American history. And I suppose there are enough interesting historical people and events in the US to make a second film. I'm looking forward to it.
et al.
Do you know what the acronym "et al." stands for? It's the kind of expression you see every day and roughly know what it means but never quite know what it comes from and what it stands for. At least, that's the case for me. So, today I decided to look it up. And Answers.com gave the following definition:
So, it's Latin. No surprise there. And it's short for et alii. Which really baffles me. Why on earth don't we write out the whole et alii? Replacing the last to i:s with a dot only saves one character. It seems totally silly to me. In fact I'm thinking of using the full form, et alii, from now on. It's simply not that difficult to write out the whole thing.
A last thought. Why do we use Latin at all? "and others" is not that difficult to write. "and so on" is in many situations preferable to "et cetera" or "etc." I guess it is an old relic from the time when English children had to study Greek and Latin. Spicing your language with a bit of Latin was perhaps a way to show off and as time passed some phrases became standard. Personally I don't mind these Latin abbreviations but I can't help feeling that the language would be simpler without them.
et al.
Latin
et alii (and others)
So, it's Latin. No surprise there. And it's short for et alii. Which really baffles me. Why on earth don't we write out the whole et alii? Replacing the last to i:s with a dot only saves one character. It seems totally silly to me. In fact I'm thinking of using the full form, et alii, from now on. It's simply not that difficult to write out the whole thing.
A last thought. Why do we use Latin at all? "and others" is not that difficult to write. "and so on" is in many situations preferable to "et cetera" or "etc." I guess it is an old relic from the time when English children had to study Greek and Latin. Spicing your language with a bit of Latin was perhaps a way to show off and as time passed some phrases became standard. Personally I don't mind these Latin abbreviations but I can't help feeling that the language would be simpler without them.
Modern life leads to more depression among children
I've blogged before about the mental illness of children and teenagers. Yesterday 110 teachers, psychologists, children's authors and other experts sent an open letter to the brittish paper Telegraph with the title Modern life leads to more depression among children. The letter is short and doesn't get into any details. The main purpose is to start a public debate about these questions.
Together with the public letter the Telegraph also had a short article around these issues "Junk culture 'is poisoning our children'".
This letter cause a bit of a stir in the blogosphere. Slashdot had some surprisingly good comments about this. And via Planet Haskell (yes, believe it or not) I stubled upon an interesting post about parenting.
I'll refrain from commenting about all this as I'm not a parent myself. But make sure to read the articles I've linked to. It's both interesting and thought provocative.
Together with the public letter the Telegraph also had a short article around these issues "Junk culture 'is poisoning our children'".
This letter cause a bit of a stir in the blogosphere. Slashdot had some surprisingly good comments about this. And via Planet Haskell (yes, believe it or not) I stubled upon an interesting post about parenting.
I'll refrain from commenting about all this as I'm not a parent myself. But make sure to read the articles I've linked to. It's both interesting and thought provocative.
2006-09-08
Lunar Eclipse
So, we've just had a very small partial eclipse. Did you see it? Well, I managed to capture it with my camera so you can see how it looked on the picture to the right. Not too exciting, but still.
Lunar eclipses are nice in the way that they can be seen from many more places than a solar eclipse. Basically half of the world can watch it at the same time. But I guess that solar eclipses are cooler because they're so hard to catch.
If you want to know more about lunar eclipses Wikipedia is helpful as always.
2006-09-05
Programming Quotations
It's quote time again! This time a whole heap of Programming Quotations. There's lots of classics in there but most of them I haven't heard before. And some of them aren't specific to programming.
Some of my favourites:
Some of my favourites:
It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets. -- Alan Cooper
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them. -- Laurence J. Peter
A notation is important for what it leaves out. -- Joseph Stoy
I've finally learned what "upward compatible" means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes. -- Dennie van Tassel
2006-09-01
The Scientific Refereeing Process
Via shapr's blog I came across an article by what seems to be a very bitter mathematician yelling about the way scientific journals and conferences work.
In my experience the situation is not as bad as he describes it but there is a point to what he is saying nevertheless.
One reaction againts crappy researchers who organize conferences with no refereeing might be to fire them. The problem is, the universities that hire them might not be too keen on firing them. Why? Well, every university need to have its quota of scientists, right? It would look really bad for a university to not have any scientists. And since the number of research positions in universities is a log bigger than there are good researchers then universtities will fill their positions with lesser researchers.
Sigh. What to do about this whole mess? Well, I find comfort in that there is a lot of good research going on too. And I just try to do my part in increasing our knowledge, which is what science is all about.
In my experience the situation is not as bad as he describes it but there is a point to what he is saying nevertheless.
One reaction againts crappy researchers who organize conferences with no refereeing might be to fire them. The problem is, the universities that hire them might not be too keen on firing them. Why? Well, every university need to have its quota of scientists, right? It would look really bad for a university to not have any scientists. And since the number of research positions in universities is a log bigger than there are good researchers then universtities will fill their positions with lesser researchers.
Sigh. What to do about this whole mess? Well, I find comfort in that there is a lot of good research going on too. And I just try to do my part in increasing our knowledge, which is what science is all about.
Why People Don't Use Mass Transit
I bought a car a year and a half ago. For quite some time I didn't use it to drive to work but lately I've abandoned the tram in favour for the car. But I keep thinking about switching back.
Since I'm thinking quite a bit about these questions I was delighted to find a page explaining Why People Don't Use Mass Transit. The author of this piece takes a purely economical view of the problem. And his main point is that if you put a price tag on time then it's really hard to beat using the car. How do one put a price tag on time? Well, what do you earn for 40 hours of work? Divide that amount by 40 hours and you have a price per hour. Using the salary to measure the cost of the time taken to travel may not be exactly what people use when deciding whether to take the car or not. But it is clear that people do value time since they take the car to such a large extent, and using the salary is in my opinion a pretty good instrument here.
So, have I decided to use the car since I read the article? No. I'm leaning towards switching back to the tram. But I keep postponing the switch. The car's just to convenient.
Since I'm thinking quite a bit about these questions I was delighted to find a page explaining Why People Don't Use Mass Transit. The author of this piece takes a purely economical view of the problem. And his main point is that if you put a price tag on time then it's really hard to beat using the car. How do one put a price tag on time? Well, what do you earn for 40 hours of work? Divide that amount by 40 hours and you have a price per hour. Using the salary to measure the cost of the time taken to travel may not be exactly what people use when deciding whether to take the car or not. But it is clear that people do value time since they take the car to such a large extent, and using the salary is in my opinion a pretty good instrument here.
So, have I decided to use the car since I read the article? No. I'm leaning towards switching back to the tram. But I keep postponing the switch. The car's just to convenient.
2006-08-30
Electric Mini
OK, here's a bit of bit of prejudice for you. I believe most guys have a particular car which they long for to have. I know I do anyway, despite my rather low interest in things-with-motors. And it's the Mini (note the cool url).
I just read an article about a modified Mini, called the
Treehugger: Electric Mini. The novel thing with this car is that it has the engines in its weels and is driven mostly by electricity. Though strictly speaking it's a hybrid car. The advantages with this approach are interesting: it's both more environment friendly and it gives the car more power. Though I bet it costs alot more.
Before the Electric Mini there were only four custom made Mini's that were electric. Those for were made for the 2003 remake of the movie The Italian Job. The thing was, they wanted to drive the cars around in the subway, but weren't allowed to bring any combustion vehicle down there. So they called BMW and had four cars custom made with electric engines only.
I just read an article about a modified Mini, called the
Treehugger: Electric Mini. The novel thing with this car is that it has the engines in its weels and is driven mostly by electricity. Though strictly speaking it's a hybrid car. The advantages with this approach are interesting: it's both more environment friendly and it gives the car more power. Though I bet it costs alot more.
Before the Electric Mini there were only four custom made Mini's that were electric. Those for were made for the 2003 remake of the movie The Italian Job. The thing was, they wanted to drive the cars around in the subway, but weren't allowed to bring any combustion vehicle down there. So they called BMW and had four cars custom made with electric engines only.
2006-08-24
The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
I just happened to trip upon what is "one of the sharpest pieces of satire to appear on the web". It is The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation by Peter Norvig(head of Google research). The reason he made it was to show just how bad PowerPoint presentation get the message across. His initial intent was to spend a lot of time finding bad colors and fonts but he found that the Autocontent Wizard did all that work for him. Hilarious.
2006-08-16
Trivia
Today I discovered a rather unexpected piece of trivia about two actors. I was watching the end of the movie Addams Family Values and I noticed to my delight that Peter MacNicol was in the movie. He seems to be a very funny guy, all the characters I've seen him portray have been very special.
When the movie was over and the end titles flashed by I thought I recognized one name. The name was David Krumholtz. And no wonder I recognized him. He's the leading actor in Numb3rs playing the young mathematics professor who helps FBI solve crimes. But when he did Adams Family Values he was only 15 years old. So I don't blame myself for not recognizing him in the movie.
And now for the fun part. Both Peter MacNicol and David Krumholtz had roles in the Adams Family Values. As it turns out they would reunite 12 years later in Numb3rs. Peter MacNicol plays the somewhat eccentric physicist who is the best fried of the mathematics professor portrayed by Krumholtz.
You don't think it's funny? I know it's kind of random. But it's just that I like Numb3rs and discovering that MacNicol and Krumholtz was in the same movie way back was a bit like being struck by lightning. Or something like that.
When the movie was over and the end titles flashed by I thought I recognized one name. The name was David Krumholtz. And no wonder I recognized him. He's the leading actor in Numb3rs playing the young mathematics professor who helps FBI solve crimes. But when he did Adams Family Values he was only 15 years old. So I don't blame myself for not recognizing him in the movie.
And now for the fun part. Both Peter MacNicol and David Krumholtz had roles in the Adams Family Values. As it turns out they would reunite 12 years later in Numb3rs. Peter MacNicol plays the somewhat eccentric physicist who is the best fried of the mathematics professor portrayed by Krumholtz.
You don't think it's funny? I know it's kind of random. But it's just that I like Numb3rs and discovering that MacNicol and Krumholtz was in the same movie way back was a bit like being struck by lightning. Or something like that.
2006-08-07
IntroComp 2006
I spent a couple of hours last week playing text adventure games. Text based games are a relic from the 70's and 80's but they still enjoy a small and devoted community. And people are writing a lot of new games still.
The games I played were all submissions to the contest IntroComp 2006. This contest has a rather interesting setup. Each participant is invited to submit a game which isn't finished. Only the introduction in the game needs to be done. The submissions are rated based on how much the voters want to see the whole game finished. There are some real money involved when winning but there is a caveat. You only get the money after you've finished your game. And the higher your ranking, the more money you get when you finish your game. It's a pretty nice setup to increase the incentive for writers to actually finish their games. Of course, games which are just slapped together to get the money will not receive any.
So I had some fun playing the games in this competition and I participated as a voter. This was the very first time I participated in any way in such a contest and I'm quite likely to do it again. One of the most amusing things with this contest was the announcement of the results. This happen in the IfMUD. A MUD, in case you don't know, is like an online text adventure game. The interface is completely text based and you can walk around in the world and meet other people a solve puzzles. The IfMUD works more like a chat than an ordinary MUD though. The announcements of the IntroComp contest was made in a particular room inside the MUD. I really liked the experience, there was a lot of funny people there and the general atmosphere was very inviting. I'll probably spend some time in the IfMUD in days to come.
Lastly, here are some reviews of the games in the competition.
The games I played were all submissions to the contest IntroComp 2006. This contest has a rather interesting setup. Each participant is invited to submit a game which isn't finished. Only the introduction in the game needs to be done. The submissions are rated based on how much the voters want to see the whole game finished. There are some real money involved when winning but there is a caveat. You only get the money after you've finished your game. And the higher your ranking, the more money you get when you finish your game. It's a pretty nice setup to increase the incentive for writers to actually finish their games. Of course, games which are just slapped together to get the money will not receive any.
So I had some fun playing the games in this competition and I participated as a voter. This was the very first time I participated in any way in such a contest and I'm quite likely to do it again. One of the most amusing things with this contest was the announcement of the results. This happen in the IfMUD. A MUD, in case you don't know, is like an online text adventure game. The interface is completely text based and you can walk around in the world and meet other people a solve puzzles. The IfMUD works more like a chat than an ordinary MUD though. The announcements of the IntroComp contest was made in a particular room inside the MUD. I really liked the experience, there was a lot of funny people there and the general atmosphere was very inviting. I'll probably spend some time in the IfMUD in days to come.
Lastly, here are some reviews of the games in the competition.
2006-08-05
Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math
I stumbled upon some nice piece of advice for writing articles today. It's called Three Sins of Authors in Computer Science and Math. And I know I'm guilty on all three accounts. But I just got a paper accepted which needs to be finished pretty soon so I'll have a good opportunity to use the advice right away.
2006-08-01
Brought up to mental illness
One thing that's been on my mind a lot lately is the mental health of youngsters in our country. A recent article in our local newspaper reports that 1/4 of all 16-year-olds have hurt themselves in one way or another. This is a really scary figure. A lot of young people are feeling bad today and even has to go to such lengths as hurting themselves to get some relief from their mental suffering.
I've always assumed that the fundamental reason for this is that parents doesn't care enough about their children. Sweden has a very self centered culture and that can make children be less important that the parent itself. So my suggestion to solve the problem has been to spend more time with and care for the children.
But today I read a very interesting article in Psychology Today called "A Nation of Wimps". This article suggest rather the opposite of my assumption. The problem is that parents micromanage their children, keep them away from anything that might hurt them or make them sad and they do just about anything to make sure that their children get high grades so that they can attend prestigious colleges.
It this way children have no chance to develop the right cognitive tools to make it through life.
True, the article from Psychology Today concerns the US. But it might be relevant to Sweden as well. The International Herald Tribune has a very nice article about Swedes as 'safety junkies' and 'curling parents', a swedish expression for overprotecting parents. It might be that swedish parents are just as bad when it come to overprotecting their children.
It seems that we have somehow forgotten what good parenting is. And commercial interests have invaded the whole parenting area and profits from anxious parents.
The political party Kristdemokraterna (roughly Christian Democrats) is the party which profile itself towards families. Their suggestions for the upcoming election is to put the parents in charge of their children's upbringing and kindergarten and give parents more time with their children. I've always thought that this sounds like a really good idea and a good way towards making young adults feel better. But the above articles suggest that this line, while not bad, won't help this particular problem.
So what can we do about it? I don't know. Parenting courses? But who's to give them? But clearly we need a solution soon. There's a lot of young people who are not feeling well right now.
I've always assumed that the fundamental reason for this is that parents doesn't care enough about their children. Sweden has a very self centered culture and that can make children be less important that the parent itself. So my suggestion to solve the problem has been to spend more time with and care for the children.
But today I read a very interesting article in Psychology Today called "A Nation of Wimps". This article suggest rather the opposite of my assumption. The problem is that parents micromanage their children, keep them away from anything that might hurt them or make them sad and they do just about anything to make sure that their children get high grades so that they can attend prestigious colleges.
It this way children have no chance to develop the right cognitive tools to make it through life.
True, the article from Psychology Today concerns the US. But it might be relevant to Sweden as well. The International Herald Tribune has a very nice article about Swedes as 'safety junkies' and 'curling parents', a swedish expression for overprotecting parents. It might be that swedish parents are just as bad when it come to overprotecting their children.
It seems that we have somehow forgotten what good parenting is. And commercial interests have invaded the whole parenting area and profits from anxious parents.
The political party Kristdemokraterna (roughly Christian Democrats) is the party which profile itself towards families. Their suggestions for the upcoming election is to put the parents in charge of their children's upbringing and kindergarten and give parents more time with their children. I've always thought that this sounds like a really good idea and a good way towards making young adults feel better. But the above articles suggest that this line, while not bad, won't help this particular problem.
So what can we do about it? I don't know. Parenting courses? But who's to give them? But clearly we need a solution soon. There's a lot of young people who are not feeling well right now.
The Weakest Link in Security
A while ago I attended a workshop drawing together most of Sweden's PhD students working in one way or the other with security. As you might expect the program was pretty diverse ranging from very hard core technical stuff to very fluffy stuff bordering on politics and human computer interaction.
There was one talk that I'd like to comment on. It was titled "Are Humans The Weakest Link In Security?" or something like that. The speakers intention with the title was to be a bit provocative. Many of my fellow PhD students which lean more to the technical side smiled at this title: "Of course humans are the weakest link!" They seemed to think that the question was rather silly.
I have a different opinion. My answer to the question is rather "Humans SHOULD be the weakest link". Otherwise technology has failed. Technology is here to help us. Sure, some of us like technology just for the fun of it. But the adoption of technology can only be motivated if it helps us in some way. This is especially true when it comes to security. If technology is a weaker link than its users what good is it then.
I don't think the question posed by the speaker was silly. I think it is good to ask such questions and ponder upon the answer. It might not be as straightforward as you might think.
There was one talk that I'd like to comment on. It was titled "Are Humans The Weakest Link In Security?" or something like that. The speakers intention with the title was to be a bit provocative. Many of my fellow PhD students which lean more to the technical side smiled at this title: "Of course humans are the weakest link!" They seemed to think that the question was rather silly.
I have a different opinion. My answer to the question is rather "Humans SHOULD be the weakest link". Otherwise technology has failed. Technology is here to help us. Sure, some of us like technology just for the fun of it. But the adoption of technology can only be motivated if it helps us in some way. This is especially true when it comes to security. If technology is a weaker link than its users what good is it then.
I don't think the question posed by the speaker was silly. I think it is good to ask such questions and ponder upon the answer. It might not be as straightforward as you might think.
Learning Haskell
John Meacham has his own way of explaining how it is to learn Haskell:
From the Haskell-Cafe mailling list.
It is best to think of haskell primitives as something completely new, they reuse some naming conventions from OO programming, but that doesn't mean they suffer from the same limitations. It took me a few trys to wrap my brain around it. I liken learning haskell to tipping over a vending machine. you can't just push it, you gotta rock it back and forth a few times building up momentum until bam! suddenly the flash of insight hits and it all makes sense.
From the Haskell-Cafe mailling list.
2006-07-31
Scientists Say Erie Mirage Could Be Real
I've had a very nice and relaxing holiday for the past couple of weeks. That's why there's been so little blogging. But since I started work today I thought I should do some blogging. So I'll start with a link to a story found via Reddit about an mysterious whether fenomenon acting as a lens. abc News has the story:
Scientists Say Erie Mirage Could Be Real
Scientists Say Erie Mirage Could Be Real
2006-07-10
Dynamism
I hang out at Lambda The Ultimate, a site for discussing programming language design and implementation. Contrary to most such discussions this site usually has very well informed arguments and is almost free of flame wars.
One of the best posters at Lambda The Ultimate is Frank Atanassow. He is very knowledgeable, very brainy, is very good on theory and above all, very funny. I'd say he wins the humor contest hands down. And today I read a post by him which cements his position as the no. 1 humorist on Lambda The Ultimate. You can find the original post here, although I quote it in its entirety below. Enjoy:
One of the best posters at Lambda The Ultimate is Frank Atanassow. He is very knowledgeable, very brainy, is very good on theory and above all, very funny. I'd say he wins the humor contest hands down. And today I read a post by him which cements his position as the no. 1 humorist on Lambda The Ultimate. You can find the original post here, although I quote it in its entirety below. Enjoy:
"Dynamic" is technical jargon used by programmers, meaning "good". It derives from the Latin dyno mite, meaning "I am extremely pleased", and is first recorded in the historical work Bona Aetas of noted Roman sage and pundit J.J. Walker. Its meaning evolved in the 4th century after monks copying an obscure manuscript on programming linguistics in their ignorance tried to deduce its meaning from context.
In this (occidental) manuscript, the Lingua Lambda, the author described how he had stumbled across Miranda, an early ancestor of Haskell, a typed language that had found its way to the West from the Orient, and which, though crude in some ways, supported many fine features and was, in fact, lauded as the language for discriminating hackers. The author wrote an essay about this language, describing its features, and noted (Miranda dyno mite!) how pleased he was with it.
These monks had lived in monasteries for most of their lives, programming only in C; most of them had never heard of languages like ML or Miranda, and, if they had, would have dismissed them as Oriental nonsense. But this century was, for these monks, also a time of change; the last barbarian invasion had been repelled, but the fleeing barbarians had left behind their legacy, the untyped programming languages. Many of these were adopted by such monks — and thus we now call them "scripting languages" — who were dazzled by features such as "blocks" and "duck typing". (One can still detect in these phrases the vulgarity of their barbarian progenitors. Naturally, the West promptly plunged into a dark age...)
In the Orient, though, typed languages had long supported features such as higher-order functions, structural typing, automatic garbage collection, REPL-style interactive interpretation and user-definable syntax. But for the monks laboring in darkness, these were thoroughly new ideas, and they reasoned that they must be uniquely characteristic of untyped languages.
So it was that they translated Miranda dyno mite as Miranda is untyped, and now we must live with that confusion. Given the meaning of the words in our everyday language, it is, when you pause to think about it, strange that when a programmer asks you how you are, the proper response is "Dynamic, thanks!" if you are feeling well and "Kinda static today..." if you are ill, but the history of language is full of twists and turns, and, after all, far from rational...
2006-07-05
The Shallow Roots of the Human Family Tree
Yahoo News has a very interesting article called Roots of human family tree are shallow. It's essence is this: Not too long ago, say 2000 to 5000 years, there lived a person which is an ancestor to all now living people. And a little longer while back, between 5000 and 7000 years ago, every person living then either an ancestor to all people living today or their line died out.
It's pretty amazing and sounds ridiculous until you read the article. The math needed to get an intuition for this is dead simple. I won't spoil the fun here, I recommend instead that you read the article. It's a lot of fun!
It's pretty amazing and sounds ridiculous until you read the article. The math needed to get an intuition for this is dead simple. I won't spoil the fun here, I recommend instead that you read the article. It's a lot of fun!
2006-07-03
Time out of mind
In today's very science oriented society we learn that time is something very exact. To illustrate time we draw a straight line and place the time units on equal distance between each others. Each second arrive at a constant rate and disappears just as quickly.
Yet our subjective notion of time is quite different. When we sleep we have little notion of time, for instance. Just as when we're having a lot of fun. Then time seems to go very fast. On the other hand when we are in a car accident time seems to slow down. We seem to be able to perceive things and react much more quickly.
One interesting question is how the physical and our mental notion of time relates. The other day I read about a truly clever experiment which tries to test whether our brain actually works faster when we are in a stressful situation. The setup goes like this: a man is set to do a backwards free-fall of 33 meters. With him he will have a small wristwatch-like device which will switch blindingly fast between two different images. One of the pictures will be a number. Under normal circumstances a person cannot make out the number since the device flickers so fast. But if time actually slowed down for him he might be able to see the number on the screen. It's a pretty clever setup.
How did it go? When the test person landed he said he had seen the number "98". The actual number shown was "96". Close enough for me. Further experiments yielded similar results. So it seems that our brains actually works faster in some situations! Very intriguing.
You can read about the experiment in the bbc article Time out of mind. It has some further goodies on time as well.
Yet our subjective notion of time is quite different. When we sleep we have little notion of time, for instance. Just as when we're having a lot of fun. Then time seems to go very fast. On the other hand when we are in a car accident time seems to slow down. We seem to be able to perceive things and react much more quickly.
One interesting question is how the physical and our mental notion of time relates. The other day I read about a truly clever experiment which tries to test whether our brain actually works faster when we are in a stressful situation. The setup goes like this: a man is set to do a backwards free-fall of 33 meters. With him he will have a small wristwatch-like device which will switch blindingly fast between two different images. One of the pictures will be a number. Under normal circumstances a person cannot make out the number since the device flickers so fast. But if time actually slowed down for him he might be able to see the number on the screen. It's a pretty clever setup.
How did it go? When the test person landed he said he had seen the number "98". The actual number shown was "96". Close enough for me. Further experiments yielded similar results. So it seems that our brains actually works faster in some situations! Very intriguing.
You can read about the experiment in the bbc article Time out of mind. It has some further goodies on time as well.
2006-07-02
More Mammatus
More mammatus clouds! This time it's a link to WEATHER WARS, via reddit. Make sure to scroll down a bit to get to the nice pictures. The clouds shown there look very odd, they don't have the usual bubble shape. More like waves, like an upside down ocean. Anyway, totally sweet.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
