Parky’s new Brain

I have started using Tumblr as my new blogging engine, and my new blog can be found here.

Just in case you’ve ever wanted a simple way to work on a paper or proposal in LaTeX in collaboration without having to email around the draft continuously, there are two websites that you may find helpful WorkingWiki and ScribTex. I haven’t really used either of these in earnest, so I can’t testament to their utility. Please comment if you try one of them and find it to be useful (or not!), or if you have another method that works well.

Update: According to one of my collaborators, ScribTeX doesn’t cope with non-trivial LaTeX document classes which use non-standard extensions, which rules it out for many of the journals he submits to. I guess it still has some way to go before it is as rigorous a tool as everyone would like.

On the 12th of July I will be running the British 10k London Run. My mate Dave did it last year with no preparation (he claims), and invited me to join him this year. I have never done anything like this before, but decided that it might be an interesting thing to do, and a good way of keeping fit (something that is on my mind more recently, as I have entered my fourth decade of existence). I have been training, and feel relativley confident that I should be able to complete it in a reasonable time (about an hour).

I am also trying to raise money for charity, by having people sponsor me. The charity I have chosen is Cardiac Risk in the Young. A friend of mine died suddenly last year of some previously undiagnosed heart problem, and CRY was the charity that his family suggested we donate to. I have set up a Justgiving page, if anybody wants to sponsor me.

Wish me luck!

When most people learn to write computer programs, the first program they write is a Hello World program, a short program that produces the output “Hello, world!” in some form. The earliest example of this is from Kernigan and Ritchie (still a seminal work, even though procedural languages are becoming less fashionable).

I have started learning R, and I was talking to a friend of mine who had also looked at it in the past, and he said: “I can’t work out how to write `Hello World’ in R”. I realised that was not the point, R is not an imperative language like C or FORTRAN, its a declarative, functional programming language. Input/Output was not the goal of such a programming language, instead its all about writing functions, and setting up ways of manipulating numbers. This is the problem that faced me when I started looking at functional programming: you need to give up control. Its not about telling the computer what to do anymore, its about setting it up to help you solve problems.

Ultimately, you have to stop thinking like an engineer, and start thinking like a mathematician.

I don’t play a lot of video games. I bought Spore when it came out, because the concept appealed to me. I have played some of the more well known games in the last few years, such as Halo, Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed and Guitar Hero. All of which were great fun while I was playing them, but I never felt the need to become obsessive about playing games. I have enough vices, I don’t need to add another one.

It is curious then that I am recommending a couple of games here. The first is Don’t Look Back by Terry Cavanagh (if you don’t want to play it on Kongregate, the developers site is here). I don’t know what it is about the game that makes it so appealing. It plays just like the platform games I played as a kid during the 80′s. But I like the idea of any game based on the myth of Orpheus, and it has the right ending. And the music, the modern, somber strings, really adds something to game.

The other one is Auditorium. I haven’t bought it, but I played the demo a few months ago, and I found it to be awesome. The simple idea of changing paths and colours of light to create a piece of music, is so simple yet so elegant. I would challenge anyone to try it and not be instantly hooked.

Depletist
1. An individual or group demonstrating apparent negligent or reckless disregard for the environmental consequences of their actions.
2. An individual or group that exhausts non-renewable resources and rejects positive environmental strategies.

http://tankofthinkers.wordpress.com/about/

An interesting idea about how to change people’s attitudes to environmentalism.

The svn server at work went down when the main web-server went down last week, and the sysadmin is yet to restore it. This is highly irritating to me, as I had two projects where I was using svn as the revision control system for the projects I was involved in.

Instead of waiting for the sysadmin, I decided to look at other svn servers on the web, and came across Beanstalk, which seems to do the job nicely. I was previously using svn from the command line (through the ssh protocol), which Beanstalk does not support, so I have switched to using svnX from my mac. While the change in interface will take some getting used to, it might actually be the thing that convinces my collaborators to use some cvs-like system as well. We will see what develops.

Whenever I go to Hawaii (ok, I’ve only been twice so far) I never seem to take enough photos. During my recent trip I only managed to take three good ones, and they are all around the hotel.

In this article in the Guardian today, about the decline of maths in schools, the former chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, made the following comment (when asked to solve a simple maths problem aimed at 10-11 year olds):

“I can’t do that off the top of my head; I’m happy to admit that. I don’t think that’s the kind of everyday maths that people need.

I think people need to be able to check their change when they go to the shop, they need to be able to calculate what they’re owed. That’s the kind of maths people need.”

I get really upset when people say this. Firstly getting the right change is the most trivial piece of maths in existence, simply a matter of adding and subtracting. I think people would learn how to do this, even without having to go to school. But how about calculating the best interest rate for the mortgage, or predicting how much food prices will go up beased on the current rate of inflation, or knowing enough basic statistics to tell when a government minister or medical advertising campaign is lying to you. All of these things are necessary to live and thrive in the western world today.

But beyond that, mathematics is a part of our culture. We live in a scientific civilization created by mathematics, and it is just as important to know about it as any other part of our cultural background. Pythagoras’ theorem is as important as Homer’s Iliad, calculus as important as Shakespeare’s plays. Its almost fifty years since C.P. Snow made his famous two cultures lecture, and it seems we still haven’t got very far bridging the gap. Without mathematics, we may never do this, and end up with a kind of society described in The Time Machine.

(And if so, I say, “Long live the Morlocks!”)

Ok, its a few months old now, but I still like this piece from wired magazine on How To: Stop a 500-Foot Monster. Its quite amusing.