Looking Out To Sea

Comment of the century, on the wonders of herbal medicine:

The great thing about British herbal medicine, of course, is that it’s automatically geared to be very compatible with your physiology.

That’s foreign herbs bad, native herbs good for those still boggling.

A few weeks ago Randall Munroe published XKCD 426: Geohashing and apparently invented a new sport…

The idea is quite simple. The world is divided into little degree-by-degree segments (by latitude and longitude). If you see these on a map they look mostly rectangular at the equator and gradually get more triangular at the poles, because the pole-wards side is shorter than the equator side. You can see a picture of the geographical segment around Edinburgh on the wiki.

If you imagine that each rectangle has a starting corner (the one nearest the equator and nearest the Greenwich meridian), which we’ll call (0.0, 0.0). We can identify any spot in your rectangle with a fractional offset from this point — like (0.456, 0.235).

If you want to know the major co-ordinates for your home then a good place to start would be this list for the major cities of the countries of the world.

I’ve put together a Haskell program to demonstrate the next stage of the procedure, though there are plenty of web-based tools to do the same thing. I just wanted to try out the new cabal-install package (akin to CPAN, gems etc for other languages).

Continue Reading »

Last Christmas, when I went home to see my parents we found a cookery book I used to like as a child, though I never made much from it: A Young Cook’s Calendar by Katie Stewart (Piccolo, 1976). A bargain at 40 pence!

One of the recipes I do remember making a lot was flapjack. (I’m still very scathing about the flapjack available in shops. They’re never right.) This is the charming little introduction it gives before the recipe:

Flapjacks are everybody’s favourites. If you are going out for the morning wrap up a few pieces to put in your pocket. Take an apple too and you should last until lunchtime.

Hmm, tempting…

This is just a rainbow of hilarious (yeah, I went that far):

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.

To think that there are genuinely straight Lesbians out there, and lesbian Lesbians too. Or is that Lesbian lesbians?

Either way, maybe this is the kind of thing the EU protected name committees should get involved in. You can’t have proper champagne unless it’s made in the Champagne region — and you can’t have proper lesbians unless they come from Lesbos! Ha, next I’m envisioning someone taking a pornographer to court for fraudulently labelled goods…

Still, the ambiguity must do wonders for their tourism. But finding websites for local companies must be a real pain.

Three silly websites for you:

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I “think” you’ll be “amused” by these photos of signs, advertisements and “serious” notices with excess punctuation.

Photoshop Disasters

Photoshop can be made to do amazing things in hands of a skilled artist. But skilled artists are expensive and won’t hang around doing DVD covers for straight-to-video slasher flicks forever, so these people made do with what they had. I nearly shot Fanta out of my nose while reading these…

Judge A Book By Its Cover

Laughing at dodgy book covers is a hobby in itself.

This is a round-up of things that don’t deserve their own blog posts.

• My birthday seems to fall right in the middle of Homeopathy Awareness Week. The ignominy.

• Last week Rowan Williams appeared to have contracted Hovind’s disease, a condition common in the United State of America, with symptoms such as absurd mischaracterisation of biological theories. The speech took place on 17 March as the first of three lectures, Faith and Science, Faith and Politics and Faith and History. The official transcripts of these lectures have not appeared online yet. I still don’t know whether he’s merely a nutty man with bushy eyebrows or something even weirder.

• I’m re-reading Neuromancer for the Nth time and I’ve only just noticed that the Finn wears a tweed jacket. I don’t know how, but I always pictured him in a dishevelled wax jacket. Also, despite the nay-sayers, it’s still an awesome book.

• I’ve decided not to wait to get myself an Eee PC. The beefier one probably won’t appear until the end of the year and I can always upgrade if it seems worthwhile. Now I just need to find someone who has them in stock…

• If you’ve got some time to spare, and especially if you hated learning mathematics at school, you should read Lockhart’s Lament (PDF). It’s captivating, entertaining and educational — even funny! — not to mention an extremely accurate picture of what school maths was like. (Incidentally, if you search for lockhart's lament there is a lot of discussion, and in nearly all of them someone has pasted the same mini-critique about it being in a “historical vacuum”. It starts “As I see it, Paul Lockhart’s essay would be much more powerful if…”.)

• Our internet connection still seems well screwed up so I can’t access Delicious from home. So if anyone checks my saved links you’ll not find anything new. Sorry about that.

• Alien loves Predator has been updated for the first time in what feels like forever. Now when is Everybody Loves Eric Raymond going to take the hint and follow suit?

That’s all folks.

I took it upon myself, to save you the effort, of collecting together some of the interblag’s lists of common denialist arguments. Feel free to add some more interesting ones in the comments.

• The best place to start is John Baez’s Crackpot Index, a scoring system to help you decide if someone’s personal system of “advanced”, “revolutionary physics” is merely common-or-garden delusion or something altogether grander.

  Many of the ideas in this list can be easily applied to other pseudosciences. Ben Goldacre recently posted a horrifying “lecture” from a homeopath that invoked Einstein, Hawkings (sic) and so on in the same vein. Only stupider — much much stupider.

• And on the related topic of science journalism, Black Stacey has a list of Science Story Tropes which crop up all over.

  It’s honestly hard to choose which one I hate the most. The “folk wisdom” stories are probably the most dangerous because people have a hard enough time disbelieving things they’ve “always known” — having distorted scientific evidence just makes things worse.

• If you’re not sick of people taking liberties with reality and science from that homeopathy video, how about some Creationist Bingo? With a leap and a bound and some long-since refuted talking points you too can call the Earth an even 6000 years old.

• Last on the list is Global Warming Denial Bingo with a useful set of links to refutations built in. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

Are there any more good pages of a similar nature? I was surprised not to find a general woo/pseudoscience checklist. Maybe a gap in the market?

This story is just too funny not to pass on: PZ Myers gets barred from entering a screening of Expelled, a film whose message is basically “the Darwinists (sic) are intellectual frauds who have kept real science out of biology”.

Read his account in full, I urge you — there is a most fantastic twist to the tale.

Watching how the ID supporters attempt to spin this story will be amusing. The producers delved too deep in the Mines of Irony and who knows what they awoke in the darkness?

Last week the kettle died at work, but on Monday a shiny new one arrived that even has a little button you can hit with your thumb to open the spring-loaded lid. Brilliant! Our current kettle at home is a real hassle to get the lid off.

But we’ll be leaving it behind soon. So should we go for the kettle that changes colour as it boils or the one we can send text messages to?

Some random thoughts on intelligence, language and related matters.

Creating intelligent agents must be done organically

Human babies don’t learn about the world through databases, but through the input of their own senses. So to create a human-equivalent agent it makes sense to give it the equivalent set of sensors and effectors as a human being.

This also suggests that any agent modelled on something else — a spider, a cat, a condor — would be as alien in thought from us as the animal it is designed after.

If you can’t understand how your cat thinks, how can you expect to find something in common with a being whose only knowledge of the world is through a text terminal or a single fixed camera?

Human languages are too opaque for serious use

“Normal” — accepted (behaviour) or average (production) or perpendicular (line)? No wonder people spend so much time arguing.

Shibboleths are words which mark you out as a member of a particular group. What’s the word for a word which different groups have in common, but with wildly different definitions?

Creating a more explicit imperative language

In light of Simon Peyton Jones’ remark of Haskell being an excellent imperative language, what exact combination of “programmable semicolons” is needed to recreate something like C?

newtype C a = C (ReaderT Const (StateT Global IO) a)
    deriving (Functor, Monad, MonadIO, MonadState Global, MonadReader Const)

(The above example is basically just the X monad from the window manage Xmonad.) Is there anything else? Disregarding syntax, is the C monad equivalent to a standard imperative language? (In fact it maybe be more like Python than C, given its higher-levelness.)

Language ambiguity redux

Can we create a similar stack of environments and assumptions for conversation, from more primitive/abstract building blocks? (Obviously, short answer is no. But bear with me.)

More useful would be a type checker for internet arguments that spits out the following when required:

Error: Ambiguous context for keyword `normal' at line 17.