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| Saturday, May 5th, 2012 | | 7:03 pm |
International Ceilidh, 11 May
On 11 May, at St Andrew's Street Baptist Church, between 8pm and 11pm, there will be an International Ceilidh. It will be called by the far-famed and fierce-bearded Jacob Steel, and there will be a live band including me on the bassoon. Tickets £5 for students and £6 for real people; or £4/£5 if you email dance@friendsoffreetown.org.uk first. The hope is to raise enough money to build one well in Sierra Leone. | | Monday, March 19th, 2012 | | 7:12 am |
| | Sunday, February 26th, 2012 | | 10:42 pm |
Tired now
First CTC ride of the year: out on the Coton footpath, Madingley Road, old-A428, Knapwell, Conington, Hemingford Grey, St Ives, tea and cake. Wiggle cross-country through Huntingdon and Brampton, over the A1 and down to the top of Grafham Water. Track around Grafham Water to the visitor's centre at the south (amused by universally ignored 'cyclists dismount' signs at the top of all the interesting descents), pie and orange juice.  South to Little Staughton (I think), into St Neots at Eaton Socon, riverside paths then out of St Neots on the B1046. Abbotleys, Waresley, hot chocolate and more cake. Gamlingay, past Little Gransden airfield, back onto the B1046, Longstowe, Bourne, Toft, Hardwick, back onto the old-A428 and back home. 110km in total; I could have given two decimal places had my bike computer not totally reset itself at about the turning off to Hardwick (99.some km) and then not admitted the existence of the sensors. I made it, but I was really struggling up some of the hills between St Neots and Waresley (dropping 250 metres behind the back-marker and unable to summon up the strength to close the distance). Apparently frequently cycling distances you can just about manage is a good way to get better ... There's an official write-up of this ride on the CTC Cambridge blog; I am visible in two of the photos, with this one placing me in an unrepresentative position in the pack. | | Friday, February 3rd, 2012 | | 7:42 pm |
Lovely vet seeks placid cats
A friend of mine is a final-year vet student in Cambridge with a project about using ultrasound to locate blood vessels in the skin of cats. If you're a Cambridge person with a 'normal, healthy, good-tempered' cat that would be happy with
The ultrasounding is entirely non-invasive, it just involves the cat
sitting on a table for a while and having an ultrasound probe placed
against their shoulder and their stomach. The fur has to be wetted slightly
with ultrasound gel. It would take no longer than half an hour, but we
would stop sooner if the cat started to get agitated.
then get in touch with me (comment here or email) and I'll put you in touch with Faye. | | Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 | | 11:49 am |
Avian folly, but cute
Pied wagtails, sometimes two at a time, have been flying up to my window, landing carefully on the sill, and tapping on it with their beaks all morning. I could think of this as attacking the wagtail in the mirror, but in that case I don't see why the wagtail appears indifferent to the real wagtail next to it while it taps away. PS: they're long-tailed tits not pied wagtails; fluffier, a bit smaller, brown bits on the side of the neck - I had wondered whether juvenile pied wagtails had the brown bits, but they don't. | | Saturday, January 28th, 2012 | | 6:35 pm |
Because Sunday should be raw fish day
I have some vouchers which make sushi at Yo Sushi! cost 40% less than it usually does, and which expire at the end of tomorrow. Accordingly, I wonder if anyone would like to join me at 1pm on Sunday 29 January, at the Yo Sushi at the end of Lion Yard, for lunch made of 60% more raw fish than you would otherwise get for the money. | | 12:18 pm |
Books! Books! Get them while they're hot!
The book stall at the Rose Crescent side of Cambridge market has clearly got a new batch of used review copies from a local reviewer in. I've picked up a new Greg Egan of which I was previously unaware, Novik's sixth dragon book, the third in Durham's Acacia trilogy, and the seventh of Tchaikovsky's insect books, for a little over twenty pounds. The hoard has not been much picked over. | | Saturday, January 21st, 2012 | | 7:49 pm |
| | Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 | | 10:51 pm |
| | Saturday, January 7th, 2012 | | 9:26 pm |
Holiday-planning question
I've just watched a rather impressive programme about Caernafon castle, and am pondering doing something castle-based on a bike over one of the Bank Holidays (late May probably - might well want to go to Spain and avunc for the other one) this year. It looks as if you can leave Cambridge Friday afternoon and get to Conwy (London, walk across to Euston, Chester, Conwy) late Friday evening; the three castles Conwy .. Beaumarais .. Caernafon seems possible on the Saturday unless they're sufficiently awesome that you can't fit three castles and 60k flattish cycling into a day. Caernafon to Harlech over Beddgelert looks good (if knee-eating) fun on the Sunday morning ... what's the next stop after that? To Machynlleth in the evening, see the Centre for Alternative Technology Monday morning and then afternoon train through to Cambridge, or is there another castle practically available? Am I missing something critical which would make this either unexpectedly more awesome than it looks, or completely miserable? | | Thursday, January 5th, 2012 | | 4:40 pm |
I'm an uncle!
 This is James and Marian's son Oliver, born about ten hours before this photo was taken, weighing 2.155kg. I will be seeing him in Madrid in about nine days. Current Mood: avuncular | | Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 | | 2:53 pm |
| | Monday, January 2nd, 2012 | | 12:55 pm |
Where the money went in 2011
 This is not the chart of a prudent year (and nor really was last year): in May I bought a large computer, which cost roughly all the savings I made in 2011. The large computer came with an implicit obligation not to buy any more computers until 2014, and indeed I have sold four computers this year. The holiday was in southern India, mostly on a bicycle, and was generally awesome; photos are here, unpruned pictures here but will take more than a little while to load. | | Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011 | | 5:50 pm |
Alliterative assertions of incompetence
On a local IRC channel, I pointed out 'I know less of iOS development than a camel does of canoeing'; I'd previously used 'than a walrus does of wind-surfing'. Alliterative expressions of animal incompetence are clearly fun to produce:
| rejs+fivemack | than a badger does of baseball (originally 'basketball' but I think the trochee sounds better) |
| mdw | than a hamster does of hang-gliding |
| rjk | than crocodiles do of cross-stitch |
| senji | than an egret does of epistemology |
The important things are assonance and a strong mental image ... Go ahead! The comments are open! | | Saturday, October 29th, 2011 | | 5:05 pm |
'could the band please dress as Victorian explorers', they asked
 Since I have a khaki safari shirt, why not wear it? I assert that a Victorian explorer would remove his waistcoat and bow tie only when fighting a crocodile of unusually prodigious size; after battling a tiger it is permitted for the bow tie to be somewhat askew. | | Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 | | 1:56 pm |
A silly game
Recently, thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) mobbsy, I have been playing quite a lot of SpaceChem. I suppose it's most like Peeko Computer on the BBC Micro, except that the machine model is multi-threaded (yay!) and lacks jump instructions (less yay); you're given a set of primitives with slightly awkward behaviour and a task to perform, and you have to write the best program to do the job. It seems that I can usually write programs that work, but they are much bigger and slower than the optimal ones whose existence is suggested at the end of the level; and the game doesn't tend to give you advice on style and efficiency. See: large, slow acetylene and ammonia factories   I know that a lot of my friends play this; how does one build smaller, faster factories? | | Saturday, October 15th, 2011 | | 3:03 pm |
Tedius census (an Asterix character)
I recently took out £200 in two-pound coins, as part of a plan to make carrying large sums of money around with me sufficiently uncomfortable that I'd stop doing it. In particular, if I've just put three two-pound coins in my pocket to buy lunch at the canteen, I don't need to have a wallet, and so I don't have my credit-card readily accessible. I spent some of them, and counted the rest. Two weeks later, I did the same again; in early January 2012 I did the same again and managed not to spend any before counting them:
| Coin type | 15 October (93) | 29 October (87) | 7 January (100) | 25 February (99) |
| Normal Isaac Newton gears | 80 | 69 | 80 | 87 |
| Darwin-and-ape [2009] | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Thistle-and-portcullis jigsaw [2007] | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Rocket steam-engine [2004] | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Paddington station arches [2006] | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Rugby World Cup [1999] | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Broken-chain abolition-of-slave-trade [2007] | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| Auld Lang Syne [2009] | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Brunel's mighty hat [2006] | 0 | 3 | 5 | 1 |
| St Pauls [2005] | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Marconi [2001] | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Gunpowder plot wheel-of-symbols [2005] | 0 | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| DNA [2003] | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 |
| Commonwealth Games (Scotland) [2002] | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Florence Nightingale hands [2010] | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
I think the little-locomotive £2 coin is about the best piece of currency ever issued.
 |
| An iPhone 4S costs three treasure-chests like this | | | Thursday, October 13th, 2011 | | 3:47 pm |
Keeping jobs assigned to the right processors
I have been know to factorise large numbers from time to time. I have a fairly ludicrous computer with 48 processors. Processors 6n .. 6n+5 share a memory bank. When I do 'mpirun -n 24 [job]', I find that the speed of the job changes substantially, and often for the worse, every couple of hours. I suspect the scheduler is shuffling the jobs around the processors; even when I use a taskset to restrict the 24 jobs to 24 processors, it's shuffling them within the taskset. Since memory is allocated in the bank associated to the processor that the job doing the malloc is running on at that moment, and thereafter never moved, this means I end up with jobs running with all their memory accesses to a different bank; this is slow. My current best-bet is: taskset -c 0-2,6-8,12-14,18-20,24-26,30-32,36-38,42-44 mpirun -n 24 msieve ...Allow the job to start (in particular, to allocate the enormous arrays it needs) for u in $(for v in $(pidof msieve); do echo $v; done | sort -n); do grep -H "heap" /proc/$u/numa_maps; done to determine which bank the memory has been allocated on, and then manually write a set of taskset commands to get each job onto a core associated with that memory bank. At least the one time I've tried it, precisely three jobs ended up allocated to each memory bank, though the ordering was 723154106374602651025347. This seems to work reasonably well, but I feel there must be a less crazy way to do it! Any advice? PS: it turns out that the right answer is to use options in mpirun: taskset -c 0-47:6,1-47:6,2-47:6 mpirun -n 24 --bind-to-core --report-bindings numactl -l ~/msieve-mpi/msieve/trunk/msieve -v -nc2 3,8 where the taskset clause restricts the job to running on a subset of processors the mpirun options bind each job to a single processor the numactl option forces the job to allocate its memory on the processor it's bound to | | Saturday, October 1st, 2011 | | 12:36 pm |
Books of September
Eleven books this month: I've been making rather more use of the Kindle, and been on more train trips than average. Greg Egan's Oceanic. Egan has written some of the best SF short pieces that I've read in the last decade, and this volume includes several of them. There's a little more idee-fixe coming in at the edges than in Axiomatic, a few stories which assume that the reader finds the quantum multi-world theory as philosophically alarming as Egan or the characters in the story do, but generally it's pretty excellent. library. Jean Johnson Theirs Not To Reason Why is a piece of formulaic milsf, but you can feel the writing straining with the difficulty of using precognition as a story element. kindle. Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island, because it was free on the Kindle and I hadn't read it yet. kindle. Daniel Abrahams The Dragon's Path is very well-executed, but felt like extruded fantasy product where what was being extruded was a compote of early-21st-century fantasy; Abercrombie characters in a Scott Lynch world. kindle. H Rider Haggard Allan Quatermain which is a classic of the Great Imperial Adventure. kindle. Charles Darwin Origin of Species. Surprisingly comprehensible and clear; I suppose that was why it made such an impact, but I had thought that Dawkins and Gould existed because Darwin couldn't be read on its own, and I don't think that's the case. kindle. Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm. This one's a famous, broad lampoon of books I hadn't read; there are some beautiful passages, but the sexism fairy has not been kind with it; pulling women out of the morass of rural existence and turning them into the non-working wives of local gentry doesn't feel as much of an improvement as it might have in 1933. A tale of a 1930s rural household being set into well-meaning well-ending upheaval by taking in a relative. kindle. CJCherryh Regenesis. First-person writing from the point of view of a princeling, born to power (shaped to power before her conception), trying to figure out how to use infinite power in an unforgiving society on an unforgiving planet, and figure out who murdered her mother into the bargain. Paranoid in a very Cold War and fairly explicitly Soviet mode, though everyone around is an awful lot nicer than any senior Soviet I've read about. library paper. Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief. This one had been pretty widely praised, and I'd carefully avoided reading reviews of it, but, well, it's extruded Stross product wrapped around the Count of Monte Cristo. I didn't find that the writing made the concept of alternating lifespans as human and as golem anything like as terrifying as it should have been. kindle. Stella Gibbons Nightingale Wood. A tale of two stereotyped 1930s aristocratic households being set into well-meaning well-ending upheaval by taking in a relative; quite a well-written domineering father. Again turned into social history by the passage of time, since everything depends on nearly all the female characters being too posh to work. kindle. Neal Stephenson's Reamde. It's a romp in Stephenson's inimitable style - effectively a series of braided chase scenes covering eight hundred pages - set in the contemporary world and rather reminiscent of the early thrillers co-written with Stephen Bury. kindle. | | Monday, September 19th, 2011 | | 12:06 am |
Out of the shadows ...
As a present to the world to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the NRO has declassified its 25-year-old spy-satellite programmes GAMBIT (KH-7 and KH-8) and HEXAGON (KH-9) http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/GAMBHEX.htmlThese are the ones that took photos on film and then returned them to Earth in containers that look a little like Mercury space-capsules; KH-9 is a survey satellite, and is an enormous beast: three metres diameter, too long to fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay, and with two 2000mm f/4 lenses taking images onto a hundred kilometres of 16.5cm-wide film. KH-8 is a smaller satellite containing a bigger camera (110cm-diameter main mirror, so half the size of Hubble, fed by a larger 45-degree mirror with a hole in the middle), with 3.75km of 12.5cm film. Probably the documents with the greatest potential of having interesting lines to read between are http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/gambhex/Vol%20IIIA%20GAMBIT.pdf and http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/gambhex/Vol%20IIIB%20HEXAGON.pdf which are the few-hundred-page official histories of the programmes. The prices and the exact locations of the places the development was done have been redacted. It's interesting to note that the early Lunar Survey workup for Apollo was done using cameras from a 1960 spy satellite, 'provided through clandestine channels' - I suspect the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently in orbit around that planet has an awful lot of spy-satellite heritage too, though more openly produced (in that the aerospace contractor Bell provided the MRO optics and also clearly provides a lot of optics to unspecified customers) |
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