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Work
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on WorkI don’t really like to talk about my university studies here, but I think this warrants mentioning, especially since it ties in with Neal Stephenson, who’ll you remember is speaking at Trinity tomorrow. In Cryptonomicon, Stephenson makes the following observation: [Randy is talking about complicated computer stuff to Chester.] Chester nods all the way through…
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Kurzweilwatch
Interesting to see that Ray Kurzweil (so-called AI pioneer) is still using his same old Ramona demonstration at conferences nearly two years on from when I first saw it. Come on Ray – it wasn’t that good the first time round, and it certainly isn’t now.
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I don’t understand
The three words which I find most difficult to say are, ‘I don’t understand.’ Today, I was doing a bit of programming to do with convolving histograms and the like, and I had to sort out the axes. I asked my supervisor, who tried to explain it to me. “What you have to do is…
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An Evening with George Dyson
A review of a lecture given by George Dyson about Project Orion, America’s planned nuclear bomb-propelled spacecraft.
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VOR
Are you short or long-sighted? Go and lower your glasses so that your visual field is split in half horizontally (in other words, perch your glasses further down on your nose). Now move your head from left to right, and look through your glasses. Then do the opposite, and look above your glasses. You should…
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Eyes for you
This optical illusion has been making the rounds on the Internet recently, and most people are astonished to find that the A and B squares are the same shade, to the extent that they consult Photoshop to confirm that A is not darker than B. The explanation for this is simple – the eye is…
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Charlie
An excellent article in the Times today examined the content of Prince Charles’ letters to ministers, and found them sadly lacking in logic and facts. I’m not too concerned about Prince Charles writing to government ministers since this article echoes my thoughts that the letters don’t say anything useful anyway, apart from woolly heartful platitudes.
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James Webb telescope
For several years I’ve been reading about the Hubble Space Telescope’s successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope (now renamed the James Webb Telescope). I’d always assumed that it’d simply be a bigger, more expensive version of the Hubble – hardly anything worth writing home about. I was wrong; the people at NASA have been busy…
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Dancing
In case you’re interested, it might be worth checking out the BBC2 documentary The Dancer’s Body, on Saturday nights; I’m told it’s pretty good. An added bonus is that you should see Prof. Ramachandran on it either this week or next week, since he was interviewed for the programme while I was in the US.…
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Pretty girls and hot stoves
Ever heard the famous Einstein quote, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”? It was an abstract of a paper that’s now online, and if anything, the…
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