fivemack's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
fivemack's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | | 12:01 am |
The Books Of November
Cambridge library reopened at the end of September, and I made a small vow to stop buying books, and instead get them out of the library. This enforces a to-read pile size of no more than twelve, strongly encourages reading a book within a month of acquisition, and means I can acquire perhaps-mediocre books on a whim the moment I hear about them without worrying that I'm wasting money, and any books without worrying where I'm going to store them forever. I've taken to reading the book-review section of the Economist mouse in hand, ready to stick holds in the library on anything that sounds appealing (though I am 106th in line for their copy of "Wolf Hall"). Jo Walton gave me Francis Spufford's "I May Be Some Time" when I stayed with her in Montreal in the summer. It's an odd book; it's not a history of polar exploration, it pretty much assumes you know the history of polar exploration, but it's a history of the popular perception in England of polar exploration - of how every Victorian child got to know of the white bear and the igloo, of how chronicles of voyages were the permitted escapism of some of Austen's characters, of how Franklin's wife stage-managed the search for him and ruined the career of the man who proved him a cannibal. I think, though I can't prove it via Google, that Jo also recommended to me and to the world Frederick Pohl's "Jem". This one, go out and read, though be sure you're reasonably cheerful before starting the last hundred pages; it builds worlds on Earth and in the sky, the Food / Fuel / People blocs a way to think of the world that still works and is worth contemplating. Great aliens, good first contact, and the really worrying thought that there were millions of people in our world not long ago who thought for decades of the inhabitants of Russia and China in terms that could turn into Pohl's Russians and Chinese. Next one was Mat Coward's "So Far, So Near"; the author came up in an aside on Ken Macleod's blog, this was what the library has of his, and it's something like Ken mixed with Roald Dahl, with just a touch of Douglas Adams around the edges. A collection of short stories somewhere between the comically weird and the really quite creepy. Next one another Jo recommendation: "When the Kissing Had To Stop". A proper political thriller of a kind I'm not sure I've seen recently; again, Russians sculpted out of pure evil, and a bizarre conception of Britain's role in the world. Not too far off from a cold-war Farthing; though only two weeks later my memories of the book are mostly wood-panelled rooms and cold London fog. Then, a collection of translated Quebecois writing - chunks of novels, novelettes in the settings of novels - from the Bragellone publishing house, prepared for and given away at Worldcon. There's a Dumas-with-dragons, a disconcerting ogre-slave-PoV of a death camp, a rather arch tale of an author defended from his agent by his characters. It's all a few dozen degrees twisted from the English fantasy-writing traditions, a bit more willingness to have characters exposed to and damaged by the unpleasant parts of the world. Interesting, but I'm not drawn to buy any more of the works. The topic of Tony Faber's "Faberge's Eggs" is clear, though I'm really very shaky on the history of that part of the world; I had no clue that the Tsars were that direly and unrecognisingly autocratic, clinging to the Divine Right of Kings only twenty years before 'the Germans sent Lenin to them like some deadly bacillus in a sealed train'. And to keep on the theme of bacilli, at about the time that Faberge was really getting into the swing of his eggs, H G Wells three thousand miles away was writing his first short-story collection, "The Stolen Bacillus". This is one I read (in the bath) with flashes of recognition in every other page: it's what Clarke's "Tales from the White Hart" is shaped after, the narrators of "Aepyornis Island" or "The Diamond-Maker" could have showed up in the White Hart with not an eyelid batted. Perhaps the best book I've read this month was an unexpected one - the Economist had recommended Dan Cruickshank's new history of the Georgian brothel, and said his previous book was called "Adventures in Architecture". This the library had; this, too, I read in the bath, and this time the flashes of recognition were of myself. The man's travelled to sixty or so of the great architectural sites of the world, Istanbul to St Petersburg to Varanasi to Neuschwanstein, and in the places where our paths have crossed he's taken pretty much the same pictures I did. A lovely wry style for the writing around the pictures; a definite recommendation. Last book of the month, another patch of history where I knew some of the names but not one of the events: Robert Harris's "Imperium", in core a reconstruction of Tiro's lost Life of Cicero. I knew nothing of the Roman republic, my brain would jump from Lars Porsena to Caesar and have Crassus and the Gracchi as contemporaries. It's an utterly bizarre world: the government of six hundred lawyers where 'by tradition' the prosecutor acquires the rank of his most powerful victim, the shapes of popular democracy with an electoral college of tribes superposed and the whole drenched in half a yard of bribery, the power of life and death granted to provincial governors. | | Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | | 6:47 pm |
| | 2:58 pm |
If this won't cure my SAD, what will?
This is the 85W-from-socket 425W-incandescent-equivalent-power lightbulb that I bought to see whether it would make me happy. For size comparisons, that is an Apple smallish keyboard, a real apple and a real kiwifruit. The fruit are normal-sized examples of their ilk, and the bayonet on the lamp is of the standard size. 
| | Thursday, November 26th, 2009 | | 3:13 pm |
Concert! 8pm! Today! In Jesus chapel! In Cambridge!
William Tell overture (we have three kettledrums), Schumann piano concerto, Villa-Lobos Sinfonietta. Featuring the astoundly talented Deborah_C on lead violin, the amazing lizzip on horn, and yours truly as assistant second oboe. Featuring one of the greatest cor amglais solos in the classical repertoire, played by someone else. It will all be fun, and some of it will be very loud indeed. | | Monday, November 9th, 2009 | | 9:38 pm |
Yet more demographics (or "why manufacturing industry?")
I've collected the CIA data on composition of labour force by employment sector (agriculture / industry / services), composition of GDP ditto, total GDP and total labour force, and by means of two multiplications and a division produced a table, per country, of GDP per person employed in each sector. Thirteen countries: the big five nearly-developed nations (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China), Peru because it had an incredibly small agricultural sector, Serbia because it had a very large industrial sector, Uganda as a developing nation, Thailand because we were talking about it on James Nicoll's LJ, the UK because I live there, the US and Canada because lots of people reading this live there, et la France, car c'est la France. Figures in thousands of US dollars per year at official exchange rate
| Country | GDP per agriculturalist | GDP per industry worker | GDP per service worker |
| Brazil | 5.6 | 33.6 | 16.6 |
| Canada | 82.9 | 124.0 | 73.1 |
| China | 1.4 | 10.6 | 6.8 |
| France | 53.9 | 86.0 | 110.7 |
| India | 0.7 | 5.5 | 4.3 |
| Indonesia | 1.6 | 11.8 | 4.4 |
| Peru * | 151.9 8.3 | 11.1 13.3 | 11.6 13.1 |
| Russia | 10.2 | 30.4 | 20.5 |
| Serbia | 6.9 | 8.9 | 44.7 |
| Thailand | 2 | 16.1 | 8.4 |
| Uganda | 0.3 | 4.9 | 4.1 |
| UK | 79.5 | 113.9 | 79.3 |
| USA | 184.8 | 78.5 | 95.8 |
* I believe the Peruvian National Statistics Office more than I do the CIA Spreadsheet here. I'm not sure I believe these answers, which means I suppose that I don't believe some of the input numbers. Western farmers are incredibly productive, yes; industry is almost always more productive per worker than the service sector, yes; but the Serbian service sector three times as efficient as the Brazilian? | | Thursday, October 29th, 2009 | | 10:11 am |
Fame!
My photo is on the cover of the IUCr (International Union of Crystallography) newsletter. Twice (out of a montage of six), once with colleagues from work and once with a table of postgrads at one of the student events. It would seem that, if you are walking round a conference looking to photograph a scientist, my hair stands out. ( Proof! ) | | Saturday, October 17th, 2009 | | 10:20 am |
Things which are obviously impossible but happen anyway
It turns out, and fortunately this cost me neither sleep nor hair, but only because I have taken some care to acquire an attitude of relative calmness and to fiddle with computers only when there are no urgent deadlines requiring those computers in the near future, that it is possible for a motherboard to be incompatible with a power supply. Specifically, on some Gigabyte motherboards, among them the MA78GPM-DS2H which I have, the USB ports don't work if you use an Enermax Pro 82+ power supply of the kind I just bought. Which is inconvenient, since on that particular system both the keyboard and the disc with the OS on were attached by USB. The wattage of the PSU is not the issue here, mine was the 625W version, which would be enough to melt a USB stick let alone power it. It's not a matter of damaging the motherboard; when I put the old PSU back in it started working again. I now have everything set up sensibly. It took me all morning. Particularly annoying was the moment that I discovered that the video card I was trying to install was half an inch too long to fit in the case I wanted to install it in, and so I needed to swap two motherboards round (that is, dismantle to total bareness two cases filled with fiddly electronics held in by multitudes of small screws and connected by python-like bands of cables, and reassemble the other way round). At least it's not covered in grease, you don't need a hammer to loosen it, little of it is particularly sharp, and there is no risk that it will disintegrate while I'm relying on it to keep me from driving into a lorry at 70mph: I am not one of nature's garage mechanics. A discovery that may be useful to other people: the little hexagonal stand-offs for attaching motherboards to cases are not standard either in diameter or in top or bottom thread pitch between case manufacturers. So if you have mixed the bags that came with two cases, you have to try at least two screws in each stand-off to see which fit, and if you need to fit extra stand-offs you will have to try lots to find one which fits. The stand-off most inaccessible on the motherboard will, of course, be the one in which you have to try most screws. | | Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 | | 12:39 am |
Top-heavy marine device falls over, film at 11
http://www.tridentenergy.co.uk/index.phpI don't quite understand how what these people are trying to do makes any kind of sense at all; their Web site looks like the write-up of a good A-level design technology project, and says in pieces dated February that they're about to start the test that clearly just failed to start in mid-September. The design seems to have a single guidance bearing taking all the sideways force of North Sea waves, held up on a remarkably flimsy-looking tower, and their prototype is made of eighty tons of steel and using four quite complicated linear generators to generate twenty measly kilowatts. I admit that I was slightly surprised that any marine engineers were involved in the endeavour at all. What have I missed? I'm sure it's unfair to compare the cost of tidal equipment to that of wind or solar; there's been, what, three orders of magnitude more money available for optimising wind and solar. But I can't help feeling there's a conclusion to draw from the fact that almost every story I read about wave power involves a wave-power demonstration, set up by a small company and producing less power than the smallest wind turbine Vestas will deign to sell, being destroyed by the wrath of Poseidon. | | Thursday, September 17th, 2009 | | 11:04 am |
Carbon sequestration
It is reasonably clear that, having decarbonised world energy production, it will also be necessary to take CO2 out of the air; indeed, if the Siberian permafrost starts to thaw and turn into an efficient methane factory, it will be essential at the hang-the-cost mobilise-now level. The straw-man carbon sequestration process is to grow plants, cut them down, put them in a sealed box, and throw it in the sea in a subduction zone. Let's see if this is cheap enough to do on a personal level: The convenient subduction zones are just east of the Caribbean, just south of the Java-Sumatra island chain and just east of the Philippines - there are also ones just west of British Columbia, just west of Chile and along the Aleutian islands, but those aren't on shipping routes from Britain to anywhere that ships normally go, and I suspect the 'just' means they're within territorial waters. It looks as if a used twenty-foot shipping container costs about its weight in scrap iron, which is a few hundred pounds, is reasonably sealed for these purposes and holds eighteen tons (ah, bother, it's 30 cubic metres, so it would float, and if you make holes in it then creatures will come in and eat the compost which defeats the point of the sequestration. I have the strong impression that the compost made from collected domestic compostable waste in Cambridge is essentially free; use of small bulldozer for a couple of hours to load eighteen tons of it into the container, use of lorry to transport container to Harwich. Container shipping is currently extraordinarily cheap (though maybe that's only to Shanghai via the Malacca Strait, and to get over a subduction zone you'd need to ship to Bali, Manila or Caracas). The show-stopper is convincing the crew of the ship to load your container on the outside and to push it over the edge somewhere just south of the southern edge of Indonesian territorial waters; container ships don't have the cranes on them to move the containers. What have I missed? Aside that it looks as if it would cost about a thousand pounds to transfer twenty tons of compost to the bottom of the Philippine Sea, whilst www.puretrust.org.uk will buy and retire ETS carbon at £13 the ton. Maybe if you bought an exceedingly rust-bucket container ship and a medium-sized escape boat, and sunk the whole ship and five hundred containers as a unit ... claiming it on the insurance afterwards would be wrong. | | Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 | | 10:58 pm |
Why David Attenborough's people buy the expensive lenses
 (click and it gets bigger, but sadly in two cases no sharper; this is with the smallest and cheapest readily available large expensive lens, a second-hand Sigma 70-200/2.8 with 2x teleconverter. Picture 2 isn't too fuzzy, though f/11 isn't really enough for dimly-lit lions far away) Also, in honour of Galileo:  | | Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 | | 12:35 pm |
Mary Elizabeth Hodges, 23/09/1916 - 08/09/2009
Betty died this morning, sitting in her room at the old-folks home after having her breakfast porridge, with one of the staff holding her hand because she'd been sounding rather ill. She'd been unwell for most of the last year, but lucid to the end. My last grandparent; I'll miss her a great deal. | | Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | | 8:41 pm |
Tom's gym habit
I try to go twice a week, and to do something like the set of activities below the cut. I'm not quite sure what I'm aiming at; I'd like not to weigh a hundred kilograms, but abstention from chocolate puddings seven days a week is more the way to do that than gym twice a week; I'd quite like to be able to pull myself up by my arms, and there are moments when I feel it would be very cool to be able to do back-flips, but I don't think anything short of wizardry can convert me to a body shape capable of doing back-flips. While on the arc-trainer and cross-trainer I read books on my iphone; currently a late-19th-century history of geography from Aristotle to Henry the Navigator. I didn't know that the Arabs had trade down to Madagascar, run by essentially a single family whose attempts to put their head on the Caliph's throne had not met with success and so had decided to do something else somewhere very far from Baghdad, starting as early as 800AD. ( Read more... ) | | Monday, August 31st, 2009 | | 3:11 pm |
Some statistics about lemons
A small lemon from Tesco costs 25p (£1 for four) and weighs 84 grams. If you squeeze it, you get about 30 grams of liquid+pips, and about 25 grams of liquid, so making lemon-juice out of lemons is about 30% efficient, and lemon-juice made out of lemons bought from Tesco costs about a penny a gram; a bit more expensive than decent non-AOC cheese. Jif lemons cost 65p and contain 55ml of lemon juice, so it's cheaper to get lemons if you've already got a lemon-squeezer; a lemon-squeezer lasts forever and costs a pound and ninepence, so repays itself over buying Jif lemons after about the first pint of lemon juice. Tesco 'fresh-squeezed lemonade' is £1.95 for a litre, and 17% lemon, so slightly more expensive than buying the lemons; on another hand, in the 'traditional home baking ingredients' part of the store you can (according to the Web site) buy 500ml of lemon juice for 97p. It's been dehydrated and reconstituted, but I don't know to what extent that spoils lemon juice. Juice of one lemon and 25 grams of sugar, topped up in a pint glass with strong green tea and ice cubes, is a nice cooling drink for a summer day. 15 grams of sugar isn't quite enough. | | Friday, August 28th, 2009 | | 10:20 pm |
To continue the trend of photos of unreasonable size
 |
The American GOES-14 satellite has an imager which produces full-disc images of Earth at roughly one-kilometre resolution.
It's over the Galapagos islands at the moment (they are conveniently located at 90 degrees west on the equator), so the image shows all of North and South America, much of the north Atlantic and a fair chunk of the south Pacific. I don't know if they'll be releasing full-size images routinely; I think the satellite is being tested at the moment and will then be moved fifteen degrees further West and kept as a spare for when GOES-10 runs out of fuel in January.
Full resolution (110MB!) (12837 * 12332 pixels!); Quarter resolution (3209 * 3083 pixels, 1.8MB); about three times the size of the screen in each direction.
It's a scale at which you can most easily tell the planet is inhabited because the flights out of San Francisco provide nucleation trails which have turned into lines of cloud in the mist; it's a scale on which the major feature of Earth is the water cycle. If you peer at the full-resolution image, Buenos Aires is a slight brightening in the grey scale.
The diversity of shapes of tropical clouds is just awesome. The full-resolution version has some gorgeous paisley vortex trails from islands just west of Baja California (see the picture on the left); even in the low-resolution one you can see, at the bottom just left of centre, thunderheads rising up and casting shadows in the oblique light.
The most surreal Earth view is here; it's a wavelength emitted by water vapour. Play the 24-hour animation, and watch the little white cotton-wool puffs which are tropical thunderstorms of the most spectacular kind. | | | Thursday, August 27th, 2009 | | 10:40 am |
| | Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 | | 4:07 pm |
| | Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | | 5:59 pm |
| | Sunday, August 16th, 2009 | | 10:36 am |
I love my brother
I went off to Canada in a bit of a hurry, leaving a sink full of washing-up and half a loaf of bread in the bread box. I got back at 10:15 this morning, thoroughly zonked by a red-eye flight on which there was no electricity to the chunk of seats I was in (and therefore not only no entertainment system, but no reading lights) and not in the mood to deal with three-week-old bread mould, to discover that my fantastic brother Ben had done all the washing up, tidied the kitchen, and even put a new loaf of bread into the bread box. I rang him up and the first thing he did was apologise that I'd had to come back from the great time I was having in Canada. I really don't deserve so wonderful a brother. | | Saturday, August 15th, 2009 | | 4:45 pm |
Montreal is fantastic
I should have posted something about Worldcon earlier, but it's been winding down very slowly: there are still dozens of lovely people staying in Montreal and I never managed to get round to sitting at a computer for half an hour when the alternative was sitting around a dining-room or a restaurant or a pub table with people like the Nielsen Haydens, Dave Clements, Greer Gilman, Jon Singer, Alter Reiss, Ada Palmer, Ian Tregillis, Geri Sullivan, Cat Valente, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) txanne ... I think I've had ten restaurant dinners in twelve days, and some restaurant lunches besides. I've been staying with Jo Walton since last Tuesday evening - I'd planned to jump on a plane immediately after Worldcon and go to Halifax, but, discovering that Halifax and environs weren't remotely public-transport-explorable and that I'd much rather imitate a sloth for three days and then make my way relaxedly to Montreal airport than fly out to stay in an awkwardly-located hotel which I hadn't booked yet six hundred miles from anyone I knew, I cancelled the flight. Anyone interested in C$405 of Westjet credit? The programming at Worldcon was excellent; I wish I'd been on more of it, but I filled in my programming form as an unmitigated scientist so only got put on three science panels. Two of which were great successes - extemporising on the joy of astronomical stamp-collecting for twenty minutes while the projectors got set up for the other talks, and one at lunchtime on Monday with Jordin Kare, Ian Tregillis, Jon Singer and Peter Watts about the Fermi Paradox which had to be moved to a bigger room because they were running out of standing space at the back, and which could easily have lasted two hours. The one I'd expected to be mostly brain implants and turned out to be mostly computer security wasn't quite so good, the audience ran out of steam roughly as we did and had dropped to half its original size by the time we stopped. Otherwise I did my normal convention thing, writing myself a schedule of panels to attend that left no time to eat and then waiting until I found someone (usually aardvark179) in the corridor eating with whom seemed more appealing than going to the next planned panel. I didn't manage to face more than an hour of Worldcon parties on any night; the rooms are incredibly full, everything's very loud (maybe I need to get my ears cleaned with one of those mini-sized pool-cleaning squirters again), and the windows don't open, it just wasn't an environment where I could make conversation with new people. Two strangers in a group of six people the rest of whom I know is fantastic; ninety-seven in a group of a hundred distinctly less so. Mostly after Worldcon I've been recovering - I climbed up and down the mountain with Sasha on Wednesday to see all the city outspread, but most of the big tourist attractions I've been to on previous visits. I'm used to the city being covered in dirty snow under lowering skies, so 29C with 80% humidity is quite a change; it's so green now. Yesterday I devoted the afternoon to reading: Bujold's excellent Passage and very good Horizon, and John M Ford (much-missed; there was a great panel appreciating his life)'s fantastic Scholars of Night. I have ice cider in a sillily-shaped bottle, dulche de leche, rilettes de canard, and a quantity of maple-based sweets; actually very few books (some of them in French - Alire tried to sell me a subscription to Solaris, the Quebecois equivalent of F&SF, and I might even take them up on this if I enjoy the sample issue I bought), since my trip to the dealer's room was at a time when I feared I'd have to carry every book I bought around Halifax in a rucksack for three days. | | Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | | 6:28 pm |
Insufficiently often appreciated
Yay for waterproof trains. This is by Cambridge standards quite a thunderstorm, flash and bang five seconds apart, and in this train I can ignore it. Owing to a satellite outage, VIA Rail wifi is of degraded quality, and accordingly free - not a line I've seen in sci-fi though Clarke would have liked it. Ottawa is beautifully sited and the National Gallery is pretty good: a fine place to spend an afternoon. Public transport in Kingston is not great and the Kingston Mills locks turn out to be a 10km walk from Fort Hemry and markedly less impressive than the flight of locks in absolutely-central Ottawa. The kite-surfers on the lake at Kingston were amazing, and the shipboard B&B a fine recruiting tool for at least the officer-level positions in the 1960s Canadian coastguard. |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
3 (6.0%)
