Looking Out To Sea

This is a wee announcement for anyone who wasn’t paying attention earlier. Philip Wadler will be the speaker at this week’s Café Scientifique, so I highly recommend you go.

Those details in full:

• Title: “Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing”
• Date: Monday 16th March
• Time: 8.30pm
• Place: Filmhouse cafe bar, Lothian Road

As the 19th century drew to a close, logicians formalized an ideal notion of proof. They were driven by nothing other than an abiding interest in truth, and their proofs were as ethereal as the mind of God. Yet within decades these mathematical abstractions were realized by the hand of man, in the digital stored-program computer. How it came to be recognized that proofs and programs are the same is a story that spans a century, a chase with as many twists and turns as a thriller. At the end of the story is a principle for designing programming languages that will guide computers into the 21st century.

On a related note, one of the Cafe Sci organisers has started a new blog, so go and visit to say hello. Welcome to blogging Ed!

I’ve just been reading through the blog from the Kamikaze Cookery people and I’m pretty disappointed to be honest. They don’t apparently seem to like food. Rice apparently “tastes okay”; peas, likewise, “taste okay”. And all the recipes from various books that they do seem to turn out really badly. Why is it we never have these problems?

I’d like to think that a food blog would be a tad more excited about food than this. I know Helen is a lot more enthusiastic than that, and I’m pretty sure it comes across in her writing.

I use an excellent collaborative spam filter on this blog. It harnesses the power of naive Bayesian classification to identify spam, and aggregates everyone’s spam to get lots of useful data. In short, it’s really good at identifying spam, for the same reason Gmail is really good — they have a large data set.

SPAM!
© Laura A.

But once or twice a comment by a genuine person (as identified by my patented Genuine Person Detector™) has been dropped straight into the spam bin. So I check through the spam fairly regularly, unspamming the occasional good comment and deleting everything else. It takes just a few minutes, but it’s really beginning to get to me.

It’s not difficult to spot the spam. And I’m really glad the spam-blocker does such a good job. But it just depresses me terribly that I get all this stuff in the first place. Since starting this blog I have had 310 genuine comments and 4627 spam. The vast majority of that spam has been tediously obvious “hot girls! viagra! stock tips! buy buy buy!” links, hundreds of them in a single comment and no content whatsoever. Just ugly link dumps. I just get so fed up scrolling through these things, even though I know they’re already binned by the time I see them.

I wish there was a Neighbourhood Watch badge I could stick on my blog, to say “don’t spam here, we’ll catch you”. It’s selfish and silly, but I just get so beaten down by the endless stream of automated, transparent, stupid crap that flows through this blog.

I guess there is an interface issue as well. It would be easier to sort through the crap if the spam folder were augmented a bit:

• Showing username, email address and website is enough to identify most spam. If there’s nothing obvious spammy in the comment itself then the submitted website will be a link to some dubious-sounding pharmaceuticals supplier.

  In this case, an abbreviated spam page that just showed the meta-data (and maybe the first line of comment, like Gmail) would be quicker to skim through. I would get more spam on a single page too, so I wouldn’t have to click “Next page” if there’s a lot there.

• Sorting by “spamminess” would be good too. I’m sure the spam blocker assigns a “probability of spamminess” to each comment. It would be nice if the “least spammy” comments were floated to the top of the page, so I could deal with them first and then kill the tedious stuff without looking.

I’ve submitted these suggestions to the developers. I would guess the first one is more likely to be followed through than the second. I get the impression that the Wordpress interface doesn’t actually know the probabilities, it only receives a thumbs up/down for each comment.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I’ve been variously too tired, elsewhere or just lacking in anything interesting to say. But it’s time for an update, I think.

The flat situation is idling at the moment. The surveyor was holding their verdict to ransom until we paid them. So, their fee was paid today and so the building society should have also received the valuation and will agree to give us money for that particular property.

When that’s out of the way the subject to survey bit will be done and, I suppose, a wee bit legal shenanigans takes place. After that it’s more or less over. Until then we still don’t really know when we get our grubby paws on the keys. Maybe a month, maybe more.

Meanwhile we have to think about letting our landlords ken we’ll be leaving — of course, we’ll need to know exactly when that is so we don’t find ourselves without a house — and look for furniture too.

You can see why I haven’t been blogging about this: it’s cos we basically haven’t a clue. ;-)

I’m currently sitting in the corner of the room, typing on my computer. I’m listening to The Reindeer Section’s brilliantly morose second album, but the speakers are behind me and pointing away from me. I’d much rather be sitting over there, on the sofa.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about laptops. And I honestly have to say I’m being quite tempted by the Asus eee-by-gum-lad. It’s cheap (+1), it runs Linux (+1), it has a small screen (-1), it has a Flash hard disk (+1), it has WiFi and Ethernet (+2, I’m looking at you Apple).

My only reticence is with the keyboard. I’d like a chance to play with one for a while but I can’t find any stockists that are likely to have them on display. (Apparently Toys R Us sell them, but probably locked in boxes if they have any in stock north of the Watford Gap.) If I can happily type on it then it looks like a winner.

A thought just occurs — does it have a hash key?

Edit: Naw, I’ve completely changed my mind. This is what the Dixons website says: “916 kg This is the weight of the appliance in KG”. I’ll never fit that in my bag! ;-)

I have an incredibly eighteen unfinished blog posts sitting on my computer and in WordPress, waiting for me to conclude… something. Probably that they’re useless and need to be completely rewritten, or that they’re completely out of date and shouldn’t even be published at all.

I will probably get more blogging done in the next week. Helen is going on holiday — skiing in France — and I’m staying here to enjoy the horizontal rain and furious umbrella-killing gusts that are typical of Edinburgh winters.

But I’ll be heading away to see my parents for the weekend, so probably no updates in the immediate future. But I must remember to take my CCNA book with me and do some studying.

It had been a quiet month for my companion and I. I had plenty to do at my work but, as ever, she was feeling unchallenged. In periods such as these, when problems were scarce, she would lose herself in the oblivion of the opium dens that exist near the dock yards. I would often go for days without hearing from my fellow lodger — or even seeing sign that she had visited.

It was in these darkest periods that she needed a challenge more than anything else, or I feared I might lose my companion for good. When she visited she would sit and stare into space, or idly check for new messages, then disappear outside again for days.

It was during the darkest stage that she and I were sitting indoors. I sat next to the fire, reading some papers for work. She stood at the window, hands clasped behind back, staring at the grim steel-grey sky. Suddenly there came a clatter, as of something heavy landing in the mailbox. She jumped into action (I suppose looking for any distraction, no matter how trivial). She returned from the mailbox with a large parcel, about the size of a hardback book, addressed in her name.

Inside was a book, and a slim, handwritten letter written in washed-out grey ink.

Dear Miss — —,

I have just received the challenge you have set me. It is unusual but I promise to attempt it to the best of my ability.

In return, you should find a complete book of recipes enclosed. My challenge to you is:

Make every recipe in this book at least once before the end of 2008.

Yours etc.

My companion read through the letter, and smiled slightly to herself. She turned over the enclosed book, to reveal the front cover: Nigella Express.

• Apologies to Arthur Conan Doyle, fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and anyone who can write. :-)
• The full challenge is available on the challenger’s website.
• Photo by user Kaptain Kobold on Flickr

Spent some time this evening setting up more blogging facilities. The WordPress Flickr Manager is a massive asset if you have a Flickr account.

Not only does it allow you to browse your own images from the page where you write your posts, but you can also browse CC-licensed public images from the rest of Flickr. You can do tag filtering, to look for cats or … well, cats anyway.

I really like the occasional photo to lighten up an otherwise text-heavy post, so this second feature is going to come in real handy. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious means of limiting searches to your listed friends on Flickr, but maybe that will come in future versions.

It will probably also mean that I make more use of my Flickr account. (I even went to the effort of finding out what my username and password for it is; I had long since forgotten.)

Cat photo taken by robad0b.

Spoof science stories are a bit of a tradition in the BMJ for their Christmas edition. I only read the journal when I’m at Helen’s parents’ house but even I’ve managed to spot the light-hearted articles amongst the serious science.

Alas, I seem to be in the minority. The BBC, for example are reporting one man’s adventures on a unicycle as the gospel truth. This is obviously pretty sad. I wonder how soon they’ll pick up another article in this year’s Christmas edition, looking at how magical ability in the world of Harry Potter relates to genetics.

Two things strike me. First, there’s what the original article says in the BMJ. Essentially, the author took up unicycling and recorded the reactions of strangers in the street. Young males reacted aggressively towards him: either physically or verbally. Older men, women and children did not have this reaction.

The BBC reported this as “testosterone causes humour”, something which isn’t even supported by the original article. What it actually says is that testosterone causes aggression, which evolves from violence into mocking humour as people grow up. Admittedly this wasn’t the clearest part of the article, but anyone who took the slightest time to read the content rather than the conclusion would understand completely.

This is a rare insight into the process of mainstream science reporting. The science wasn’t real science, in any way. It was meant explicitly as humour. The study was made up. It seems the only person who didn’t understand this was the reporter. The author points out all the areas in which his method was deficient — but these caveats are not reported by the BBC.

Second to the BBC’s response to the original article, are other responses to the BBC. The bloggers at Feministing have taken the gist even further: “Unicycle-enthusiast professor claims men are funnier than women”. It would seem in the interests of a feminist blog to correct, rather than spread, such silly rumours. Last I read there was a small comment war going on there over whether or not it was real, and whether or not Feministing, being “only a blog” should have to examine such stories further before reporting on them.

My opinion, of course, is yes, for pity’s sake, yes. But giving the benefit of the doubt, how easy is that to do? The only source cited by the BBC is “he told the British Medical Journal”, a fleeting reference with no mention of what his submission was called, which edition you might find it in, or anything else.

• If you Google for sam shuster (no quotes) you find several things he’s written and reactions to the BBC’s story. The fourth one on the list has done a bit of research and suggests that Prof Shuster is a “wind-up merchant”. This is not the first time his writings have been outlandish and absurd, yet reported with a straight face by people who should know better.

• Searching for sam shuster bmj reveals a list of useful publications. The first result is the BMJ’s home page, which contains a link to the original article by Prof Shuster. Oh, how difficult that was.

• Looking further down the page, what do we find? The next one relevant to this story is the all-knowing Language Log, doing what it does best: pointing out that the BBC are a bunch of idiots. To quote: “The practice of running spoof stories in the BMJ Christmas issue is not exactly a secret. … Apparently, it’s an equally old tradition for the reporters and editors at BBC News to swallow such jokes hook, line and sinker.” Look to the bottom of the page for a terrifyingly comprehensive list of other people who can’t tell humour from real science.

It doesn’t take long to find the original article, which you can read in all its gently silly glory.

I’ve finally got it together and installed Markdown here on my blog. It took a bit of effort to get exactly what I wanted so I thought I’d document.

I wanted:

• Markdown syntax (or similar) for writing blog posts. I’m sick to high heaven of WYSIWYG editors pretending to know what I’m asking for.
• Syntax highlighting for code snippets.
• Minimal effort to actually use both of the above.

The third point is pretty important because Markdown on its own doesn’t support any particular varieties of code, though it has good means of separating code from other information in a page. You can’t specifically say, “this snippet here, it’s written in Python, so I want you to highlight it accordingly”.

Continue Reading »