In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
A cargo cult religion, then, would be an act of apparent religiousness that doesn’t mean anything — it has no meaningful content at all. Not stories, parables, histories, ethics or in fact anything else.
I am really struggling to make a serious point, but the silliness of the video is fighting back. It’s a tiny child going through all the motions of fire-and-brimstone preaching with none of the real words. Maybe I should just leave it there.
Yesterday we went to see Emily and watch the entirety of The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition on DVD. We started about 11.30 and continued with reasonable breaks until just after midnight. People dropping in and out of consciousness for much of the afternoon, being variously sustained by crisps, bread, cups of tea and falafel and dips.
It was an arduous task and not everybody had the stamina to stay the course. (Though they all produced excuses like “I have to meet a friend” or “I left my spinach puffs in the oven!” we knew these were just fabrications designed to save face.)
It was a really good day, and I’m keen to do it again (maybe after some time to recover). It will be hard to get something as cohesive as The Lord of the Rings to watch next time. I’m not really as excited about a Matrix-fest. Watching the entirety of Firefly in a single day might be worth it, or worth something anyway, but I can’t remember how long they are. Probably less than an hour though, so not longer any longer than this altogether.
We went television shopping today. We’ve found something we both quite liked and I’ve found some good reviews online too. Maybe soon enough we’ll be able to return the favour and get everyone over for a marathon of TV.
One of the first things I wanted to do when I added basic text support to the Diagrams package was to put the text in speech bubbles. But it was really difficult for the same reason the text support in the first place was difficult — you couldn’t tell ahead of time how big the bounding box around the text would be. It all depends on font styles and whether you use monospaced or proportional fonts.
So my latest addition has been an “encapsulating” layout Wrap. It’s used with a single helper function called wrapWith. You pass in the inner Diagram that you want wrapped, and you pass in a function to create the outer Diagram. The function has a type signature of Double -> Double -> Diagram, where the two Doubles are the width and height respectively of the inner Diagram.
A short example. roundrect takes width and height arguments and creates a rectangle with rounded corners. With this we can write text into a box:
text 16"Hello, World" `wrapWith` roundrect
The layout doesn’t add any padding, so the bubble looks a bit close around the text. To loosen things up a bit we can add some explicit padding:
pad 1010(text 16"Hello, World") `wrapWith` roundrect
This gives the text a bit of room to breathe. If you want to adapt the padding around the inner diagram proportionally you can use the empty function, which creates a big invisible rectangle in the specific dimensions you specify:
-- Add 30 percent to the width and height around the text box.(text 16"Hello, World") `wrapWith` (\x y -> empty (x*1.3)(y*1.3)) `wrapWith` roundrect
You can see that several diagrams can be wrapped around each other like onion skins. The three snippets produce these three results, respectively:
We were invited out by a friend for “a cup of tea” last night. The cup was actually made of glass and the tea of the Sauvignon blanc variety from Chile. A bit bold for a Tuesday night but there you go.
After the second “cup of tea” I moved onto actual tea, and a slice of lemon, basil and poppy-seed cake. I’d never tasted a cake with basil in it before. Really good stuff. When I get a free moment maybe I should make some more cake.
In fact, Nick mentioned the other night that The Breadwinner are doing classes in cake, pastry and breadmaking. So maybe I’ll just get Nick to make all the cakes instead. How’s that sound, Nick?
I need to concentrate on the breadmaking anyway. I had intended to do some last night, but found I was short on flour and had the above invitation, so put it off. I did bake two more pains de mie on Sunday night, which make good sandwiches for lunch.
Finally, on the subject of food and cooking, this is how the Nigella challenge looks at the moment:
Recipes to go 103
Days to go 126
We’re not quite at the one-a-day stage yet but we can’t afford to start slacking. We are 46% through the book and 66% through the year. We got through two recipes last night and there will be at least another one tonight. At this stage we have to start planning things with a bit more precision. It would be very easy to end up with some very awkward banquet dishes to work through in the last few days of the year.
We will probably be calling on volunteers. If you think you’re up to the challenge, of course.
On Monday the talk at Cafe Scientifique was given by New Zealand’s contender for the 2010 Winter Olympics in the skeleton bob sleigh event. He’s also doing a PhD in related areas — studying how the sledge interacts with the ice, and how the drivers’ wind profile and helmets affect their performance.
It was a damn interesting talk. We had to rush off to catch the final performance of the Antonion Forcione Quartet, but it would have been really great to stay behind and ask more questions.
The film we saw before was as good as I remembered, though Helen slept through it. Last time I took her to see a Japanese film she said it wouldn’t happen again. So it’ll be A Fistful of Dollars and Magnificent Seven from now on!
Nick was waiting in the queue for Forcione when we arrived, so we got good seats (in the third row, left of centre). There were two annoying guys behind me that would gasp and squeal and exhale sharply every time Antonion Forcione did something impressive (which of course was all the damn time). I really didn’t appreciate this running commentary. It got to the point where I would cringe after every display of virtuosity because I knew there was going to be a ridiculous exclamation from behind my right ear.
Show was awesome though. Band were really tight and enjoying themselves too. Apparently he’s been playing the Edinburgh Fringe for about 17 years now… see you there next year!
In completely unrelated news, we received a flyer through the door on Sunday for the Islam Festival in Edinburgh, that had been running concurrently with all the other festivals in August. Including a 3-day conversational course in Arabic! That would have been seriously cool — where else can you get nine hours tuition in beginners’ Arabic for fifteen quid? If we’d received the flyer when the festival started instead of when it ended that probably would have been the impetus I required to ask for time off.
There’s a lesson — don’t hand out flyers after the event has finished.
Monday night we’re going to Cafe Scientifique. That was the plan. Then we decided we really wanted to see Antionio Forcione again, with his quartet this time. So after Cafe Sci we’ll be heading straight over to the Assembly Rooms for that show. Then I noticed that the Filmhouse are showing Yojimbo as part of their Akira Kurosawa season at 6pm. And Cafe Sci takes place in the Filmhouse bar, so it’s not like we’ll have to rush out of one to the other… so we’re seeing that as well.
In theory the days from Tuesday to Thursday are free, but I’ve committed myself to baking on some of those days for events later in the week.
Friday is another stupidly busy day. At lunch-time there’s a work barbeque at The Sheep Heid Inn, with genuine sink-a-ship skittling balls. Should be fun. In the early evening Helen’s work are also having a barbie (two in one day is just tempting fate I think) which I’m going to. By this point I will be ready to explode.
But to make matters worse we’ll be going on to Martin’s place for a flatcooling party there. The next day, at a bright ‘n breezy 11am, we’ll be joining Emily for an all-day Lord of the Rings marathon. I presume it will be the extended versions — what would be the point otherwise? Anyway, I said I’d bring some bread along to sustain us. (I know, it should be lembas, but the damned elves have the kept the recipe a secret! I did find this recipe — do you think I should try it or will that be too nerdy?) I haven’t decided what to make yet, but I’ll need to part-bake it some time this week so that I actually have enough time on Saturday morning. (Also, I envisage getting up at the last minute.)
I completely forgot to mention this last week. Last Saturday Helen was already in Glasgow because she’d spent the night with friends there. I went through at midday and we went to an exhibition at The Lighthouse called Haptic.
The purpose behind the exhibition was to follow through on one designer’s idea that more designed objects should cater to the sense of touch — that you should be able to tell something about an object through how it feels, or to have the feeling of the object reinforce the visual information. The finest example from this exhibition was a set of drinks cartons designed to feel like they were made of fruit skins. The banana carton had wide strips with sharp angles running the length of the carton, and waxy skin. The kiwi fruit carton was actually slightly hairy!
It’s a brilliant idea, and I’m trying not to enthuse too much about it or go off on some design-tangent. The important message is that this exhibition was really rubbish for two main reasons:
Most of the designers clearly didn’t understand the brief. You’d look at an object and think well what has that got to do with anything? There were so few exhibits (less than twenty, I think) that it was really obvious how many of them were useless and had totally missed the point.
The exhibition was designed such that you weren’t allowed to touch the exhibits. I know. It’s kind of like putting an art exhibition in a room with no lights. Instead, there was a finished object on the plinth in front of you, and a sample of the material they’d used that you could touch. These samples were often the unworked raw material, so didn’t feel like anything in particular. The fruit cartons had postage-stamp sized squares for each fruit skin, which had long since been worn smooth by two months of curious-fingered visitors. Some samples were missing altogether.
It was such a good idea and such a poor execution that I really wish they would do it again, but do it properly this time.
This evening I’ve been smoothing out my additions to the Diagrams library I mentioned yesterday, and making an example program to show it off. Well, I think showing it off is a rather strong term. We’ll call it demonstrating which sounds less grand.
The output is the Snellen eye chart you see there. (I didn’t know they were called Snellen charts either, but that’s the wonder of Wikipedia for you.) The code is below:
module Main whereimport Graphics.Rendering.Diagrams
main = renderAs PNG "snellen.png"(Width 400) snellen
snellen = vcatA hcenter $ zipWith text sizes letters
sizes = [36,24,18,12,9,6,5,4,3]
letters = ["A","D F","H Z P","T X U D","Z A D N H","P N T U H X"
,"U A Z N F D T","N P H T A F X U","X D F H P T Z A N"
,"F A X T D N H U P Z"]
Quite simply we have two lists — in the first we store all the point sizes from largest to small, and in the second we store all the lines of text. (Painstakingly copied out from one of the images online. No expense spared for you guys!) We zip the two lists together, combining sizes with strings using this function:
which takes a font size and text string and produces a corresponding diagram (black text only, for this function at least). Then we stack our newly created diagrams one above the other, centring each on the page. The thing gets rendered into a 400px width image and written out. Easy!
If anyone has a good idea of examples that I can make (or work towards) with this new feature it would be great to hear. As I hinted at above, there is a facility to change the colour of outline and fill of the text which I didn’t demonstrate here.
One of my recently discovered blogs is Separated by a Common Language, a sort of extended series of notes about the differences in UK and US English. The author is a linguist at some university down south.
I was recently looking through the archives and found an early post about “roiling and broiling”. The commenters were discussing types of boil, and I particularly liked this comment:
I would also note that my family has two useful terms for two stages before that:
‘thinking about boiling’ — when you can see lots of tiny bubbles stuck to the sides and bottom, but it’s not actually boiling yet
‘talking about boiling’ — visually very similar to last stage, but you can hear a rustly/ticking noise that implies it’s about to start boiling anytime, really, once it gets around to it.
We went out again this Wednesday. Even more frantic than last time, though with more sauerkraut to compensate.
Pappy’s Fun Club: Funergy
Matt was late turning up (damn you Matt!) so someone had to wait outside. That was me, in case you hadn’t guessed (damn you Matt!). The show had been going ten minutes by the time we managed to brag our way in. We only got in because our ticket stubs had already been ripped, so the capacity crowd inside technically included us too.
But like I said, we missed the first ten minutes. (For anyone who’s seen the show, we arrived as The Internet was about to have a “knowledge-off” with a Wise Owl.) It was a loosely plotted sketch show about a kid’s entertainment troupe, like a sweary Singing Kettle. They had a fun-o-meter that was going to solve global warming.
The jokes were more hit-and-miss than I expected, given the hype Pappy’s Fun Club have been getting for a while. The problem seemed to be, alternately, a lack of coherent ideas and a strange embarrassment at being on stage. Amusing, but I don’t think I will be rushing back.
Miles Jupp
This is the second year we’ve seen Miles Jupp doing his stand-up routine. Last year we also saw him with Simon Munnery in Johnson and Boswell. Both were excellent, so we’ll have to see Elizabeth and Raleigh to round everything off.
Anyway, Jupp was excellent. He does a fine line in barely suppressed British rage — hilariously twattish and sympathetic at the same time. It’s the same kind of social status comedy that Fawlty Towers was so good at portraying.
Antonio Forcione and Adriano Adawale
Virtuoso Italian guitarist and Brazilian percussionist. Simply stunning. I can’t stress enough how much you have to catch this one. If you even thought to yourself who’s the successor to Michael Hedges? then you need to see this show.
Both players were amazing. Adawale does some amazing percussive magic that you have to see. And he has bells on his toes (well, ankle).
The two of them will be playing in a quartet until Monday, doing different material. I’m keen to see them again.
This evening I’ve been smoothing out my additions to the Diagrams library I mentioned yesterday, and making an example program to show it off. Well, I think showing it off is a rather strong term. We’ll call it demonstrating which sounds less grand.