The new dogma.

If you say to someone "I like science" then they often respond "yeah.. Me too"

If you say "I'm really keen on theoretical physics" then people say " ohh-kaay.. Hmm, interesting, you mean like atoms and shit?"

If you say "I have developed a serious and plausible contender to both string-theory and the standard model and what's more I can make it work right back as far as the precise moment of the big-bang and explain why gravity cannot be unified with electromagnetism and explain the physical mechanism behind momentum and inertia and I know where Einstein went wrong" people's ears clang shut, they put their hands over their ears and they shout LALALALALA. Really loudly.

Google Anti-Trust?

I have the following settings in my Google Chrome startup page:

None of my Chrome installs on _any_ of my devices will show this as a home page.

Go figure!

East Enders

Today I have learned about pre-cambrian fossilised arthropod brains, seen how the angular projection of Voyager 2 is comparable to the size of an e-coli bacteria when projected onto the ground, read how the biggest star ever discovered is tearing itself apart and seen how a big piece of a russian meteorite has been found in a lake.

I have never watched an episode of East Enders or Breaking Bad and the last time I saw a game of football was in 1995 and that was to be polite to my neighbour.

Life is too short to waste it on crap when there are still a billion new things to understand.

Doing the math

I'm sorry to keep harping on about this now but I have just had another sort of epiphany regarding math.

It seems to me that math has become the be-all and end-all of physics simply because making a mathematical approximation of something that works to n decimal places is deemed to be good enough.

Well, here's the thing. Schrodinger made a shitload of pretty math that describes electron orbitals. This math is fairly dense and difficult to understand. However, if you take a four dimensional figure with varying phase changes then you can exactly duplicate the result of those equations without ever having to resort to the pretty math. Which one is correct? The dense math because it looks cool if you can do it or the brute-force because it works?

I just wrote about fifteen lines of code that spits out graphical representations of electron orbitals and never goes near Schrodinger's equations.

Now then. When was the last time anyone actually saw an electron orbital in the flesh?

Atomic force microscopes are cool but they show little spheres.

Conspiracy theory?

So I have given up using iGoogle as my favoured home-page and have gone back to my.Yahoo
The odd thing is that Chrome seems to ignore the fact that I have set my homepage to Yahoo!. Is this grounds for an anti-trust case?

Higgs Bogon

The Nobel prize for physics is as much of a disappointment this year as the peace prize.

The committee have awarded Peter Higgs for the prediction of his eponymous particle that "confers mass on matter"

Well, actually the results show a "particle", in an energy range that did not correspond to Higgs' first choice of ballpark figures and that has no recognised function. This is like awarding an explorer who declared himself to be looking for Yeti as the greatest Yeti hunter who ever found an ant-hill. There is no Yeti as yet but there is definitely a bump full of something.

So, the big question is: What are Higgs' Bosons made of? What is this "particle" and how can such a thing confer mass by making the things that contain it stick more strongly to the magical Higgs Field? BOGUS!

I can't believe in this stuff any more! I was such an avid science freak and wolfed all this sort of thing down as gospel but now I look upon it all with pity for a bunch of misguided and short-sighted people who are too busy slapping their own backs to see the real world.

We have physicists jumping up and down and peeing in their pants because of a data blip. All of the math that was done since 1926 is wrong! The first term of the first line of Einstein's equation was WRONG! DELTA T is BOGUS!!! There ain't no frikkin delta in t, get used to it!

Nobel Peace Prize is bullshit.

Over the last few years I have been astounded at the Nobel Committee's unflinching and shameful pandering to political pressure and inability to nominate a peace-prize winner who truly makes a difference.

The nomination of Barak Obama, despite my admiration for the man as an intelligent force for progress in  a country that needs progress more than most, was a weak and sorry excuse that made no mark on the world.

To ignore Malala Yousafzai in favour of a Qwango is worse than their refusal to award Mahatma Gandhi for his efforts. A girl who's life might so easily have been destroyed by religious extremism and who escaped that fate by such a slim margin to make a cause for the rights of simple respect and education for female children shouldn't be ignored. Peace is about people.

Goodbye to Google

I switched to iGoogle as a home page many years ago and have been using it every day and indeed every time I hit the web ever since.

Before that I had a Yahoo! page that I had various news and science widgets installed on.

Recently I've been looking for an alternative to my iGoogle page and logged in to my old Yahoo! one to find settings from a decade ago still there and still usable. It was like coming home to the farm and finding Old-Yeller romping down the drive to meet me.

Goodbye Google. Hello old friend...

Back up at long last

Poor old Octogig has stood in a corner unused for about four months. Today I managed to get it installed at the hackspace and I have my own four square feet of desk!
The network is nice and quick so I updated the web site with some minor cosmetic changes and now I actually have Windows dev tools again I will be able to do some proper work!

2hack or /2hack = true

I just joined a hackspace!

I've been living in a tiny house for the last few months and I've been used to having a big workshop, a man-cave style shed and room to put all my projects and electronic junk wherever I liked.

I hadn't realised just how much actual room I needed for an electronic workbench, oscilloscopes, test meters, screens and dev kit!

There is a hacker-space near to me and so I've taken full membership and will have my gear installed including full logmein access to Octogig and all his development goodness before the weekend.

Ahh. I can feel the inspiration rising...

Is this the real one?

I've been giving a lot of thought to virtualization recently. Some while ago I wrote a Z80 emulator and the experience taught me some interesting things.

I think that an algorithm, given the correct system of inquiry, can ascertain that it is an algorithm.

I think however that an algorithm cannot discover the structure of the machine that ultimately underlies it's embodiment.

This is to say that there is no guarantee, for example, that a simulator is not itself running inside yet another simulator and indeed that it might be running encapsulated in yet another ad-infinitum.

There is therefore a certain level of abstraction that cannot be comprehensible to the system that is doing the work.

I think for example that I could write a program that ascertained the registers used in the program within a Z80 assembly code system and could test and analyse the various instructions used in such a way that the program could map its own flow and internal storage. However, if that system were "hosted" on a PC running a Z80 simulator then the system would necessarily stop at the boundaries of what it must consider as it's own "universe"

This means to say that a Turing machine can know that it is a Turing machine but never be sure that it is not encapsulated within another Turing machine.

Interesting eh?

Not enough danger

Today, a parent will say to a child; "Do (insert something here)" and the usual response is "Why should I"

It used to be that the Father would say "Climb that tree!" or mum would say "Don't touch that" and before the child had the chance to stop and ask "Wh..........." something large and dangerous would have ripped the little bugger's head off and be chewing on their genitals or the kid would be foaming at the mouth and rolling its little eyes back in its head from the bite or the toxic plant effects mum was just telling them about.

Nowadays they just say "Why should I?" and there isn't a real excuse to turn around and suggest that "if you don't you will die in a horrifically-painful-and-not-neccesarily-quick way"

Oracle and Entity Framework a bad mix

I've been working with entity framework since it came out. For so long in fact that I wrote my first EDMX file by hand instead of using the designer which wasn't finished. I get along ok with EF but for the first time this year I've been using it on an Oracle database. What a miserable experience that is!

I was unable to begin with a Code-First approach because our local DB guru created a database in the PL/SQL designer. This apparently presented no problem when creating the EDMX file except that for some reason the database was not generating unique primary key IDs for any of the rows.

A bit of digging showed that the Oracle tools refuse to propagate the StoreGeneratedPattern="Identity" back into the model so each time you do a database refresh you have to go an add these back in by hand. You could write a macro or make some sort of XDocument parser/munger to do it but why the heck should you?

Another problem is that the Oracle EF components are uniquely 32 bit. This has proven to be a nuisance when writing for a system that cam pre-loaded with the corporate 64 bit drive image.

Ellison's hate of all things Microsoft shine through on this one. If you have a choice of database. Go with SQL Server.

A month without Windows

I've used Windows at work this month because I do programming on that platform but since moving house, poor old Octogig has sat in the corner and has not been powered up at-all. I've used Apple devices, the Mac Mini, the Air and various iPads and iPhones for all my computing needs, even writing a quick app in Xamarin Studio to fiddle with some graphics.

This is the first time since the late 1980s that I have not had a Windows PC running in the house!

I even copied my Windows virtual machine onto a hard drive and deleted it from my macbook because the 63 gigabytes it was taking up was hogging up the main drive which only has a 120 GB capacity anyway.

Running absolutely everything on Apple stuff is a bit strange. Thinking back though, I remember trying to use the Mac I had some years ago and it was no use to me at-all. Perhaps times have changed, or maybe I have.

Second thoughts

Ten years is too much to throw away. Publish and be damned. There is much more to come. Thanks to those of you who were kind enough to say that I would be missed and that you read this. One anonymous person commented and a bunch of you sent e-mail of a more personal nature which I greatly appreciate.

Ten years

I've been writing this blog on and off for ten years.
I'm bored of it.
Goodbye.

Strange conclusions.

I've been working for about a month on a job that initially had little appeal for me. The work was inconsequential, had development practices that were more than primitive, had inexperienced, although very pleasant and likable folks on the team and was far below the rarified atmospheres of sophisticated companies in places like Paris, Seattle and San Francisco. 

However, Today is a Sunday evening and rather than dreading Monday I am quite looking forward to it. Over the last week I have introduced a sort of Scrum-Light to the Microsoft Project driven development practices. I've been able to show my manager the benefits of using Code-First on an Oracle database, just to keep from having to use that awful PL/Sql developer shyte. I have finished tasks that were in the project plan as n days in literally n minutes and the place is situated right next to a first class restaurant to boot! What the heck is wrong with that???

People are just getting dumber.

Fluoride has been shown to have adverse neurological effects. I wonder how a data mashup for health conscious and proactive societies might correlate the incidences of petty crime, antisocial behaviour, poor literacy and general bread-and-circuses mentalities in populations? 

Interestingly, my older children, one of whom has quite problematic learning difficulties and the other who i suspect shows very depressive tendencies drank heavily treated town water for most of their young lives. My younger children who have no such problems have, apart from a couple of short periods, drank well water pumped from deep below ground. Things to make me go "hmmmmmm"

Feynman

I finally get Feynman diagrams! Of course it took Feynman to explain them because I just watched the Aukland University lecture tapes. Who better to do that?
If the diagram is projected across space and time then Feynman's own explanation of the positron and antiparticles in general seems to imply a reverse direction in time. Perhaps the implication and Feynman's own reluctance to engage upon that subject suggests that it is a gray area. 
Time's demonstrably unidirectional nature is, i beleive, nothing more than conservation of energy relating to entropy. To undo an entropic action would require the application of energy that must come from the universe in general so entropy is consequentially always increased no matter how litte actual "work" one does in a Sadi Carnot sense.
If however a feynman diagram were to be applied to space, that implies three dimensions and a fourth dimension not of time but an actual and concrete physical dimension of bidirectional values, then the Feynman diagram would take on a different aspect.
Imagine, given the technology of today's 3D graphics, a Feynman diagram as a full interactive 3D movie would afford views of the various interactions that would provide very different perspectives.
Looking down onto the top of a diagram to change the perspective on time or from the side to change 3D position might be a useful visualization tool.

Life in the slow lane

I am a careful driver. I took a road safety campaign that was shown in England in the 1980's very much to heart and I drive by that standard all the time. The campaign went "Only a fool breaks the two second rule" and showed that a two second gap between two vehicles was a good margin for safety.

Being used to French drivers I find myself constantly in the situation of either being hugely annoyed or feeling totally assaulted by drivers that insist that they have to get past, even though one is driving at the speed-limit, or have to drive a couple of feet from ones rear bumper. In the latter case I have the habit of turning on the hazard flashers for a few seconds and if they don't back off I brake HARD.

On a recent trip to Ireland I was wondering why the car in front was driving along on the road margin. I was a good two seconds behing the car and certainly at a safe distance but after a few minutes of this I realized that the driver was inviting me to pass. Even my very safe two-seconds isn't enough for most Irish drivers!

Day after day in France I am almost violently assaulted by dangerous drivers either from behind or who think that the way to overtake a large lorry is to cram as close up behind as possible and then dodge out quickly to see if it's safe to pass. The number of times I almost get smashed by an oncoming car is incredible!

In Ireland I drove around for five days and only had a single driver who drove too close while using his cellphone and picking at his spots in the rearview. Vive les irish,