High pressure

Just been watching The Great British Weather on the BBC and felt I really should express the rage it caused me in the most public way I know how. (Hence this post...)

They seemed to assume that because I was British I wanted it to be hot and sunny. And then proceeded to tell me about all the places in the world where it is uncomfortably hot and how the sun is dangerous. I already knew that, which why I don't want it to be hot and sunny.

I already knew that it used to be fashionable to be pale, but that changed when the working classes moved from the fields to the factories. They failed to explain why so many people find it desirable to be tanned. I did learn that 59% of people in Liverpool use fake tan 5 times a year (or was it a month, I forget).

I really don't understand the appeal of heat. It just makes it difficult or uncomfortable to do simple tasks, like get where you are going, or cut the grass, or sleep. And I don't understand people's desire for tanned skin. I once knew a perfectly normal woman who was worrying about getting some fake tan before she went on holiday, with the justification,

"I can't possibly go sunbathing if I am all pale."

In other news, I had a productive day on Sunday. I did some gardening, and did all the usual things like make meals. I had a potter round the park with the family where I got to watch a few overs of cricket. Not only that, but I baked scones. The circle ones are regular scones with sultanas. The triangle ones are cheese. A jot of mustard makes them extra special.

New book

Yay, my new book has arrived. Let me tell you a little about it. I call it the bible according to Conway. Which is wrong in many different ways. I am (obviously) mixing two ideas: the Gospel according to X, and the Bible. Not only that, but this book isn't written by Conway - he only co-authored it. But, like the Bible, it is a collection of many different pieces all together in one hardback volume. It contains lots of lists and data on the best known results in many unsolved problems, some of which are already out of date. (Most notably, the status of the face-centred-cubic packing has changed from "the densest lattice packing and probably the best packing" to "the densest packing". But it's a great book and I am going to enjoy reading it.

It has already reminded me of the kissing number problem. In three dimensions you can fit 12 identical spheres around another sphere of the same size so that they all touch it. You can't do the same with 13 spheres touching the central one. This second fact has been suspected for centuries, but it wasn't proved until 1953. And the proof is quite simple, once you have developed your spherical geometry toolkit. I am tempted to look it up again.

This is Conway from the 70's (I suppose). When I did maths talks, I liked to use colourful props to distract from my lack of preparation. I am fairly certain that is an Escher on his shirt, surely used as a distraction from his hair. Nice beard though.

Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

SATA is one of those occasions when a new technology comes along that is better than its predecessor in every possible way. For those not in the know, SATA is the thing that is replacing (some of) those massive ribbon cables that inhabit computer cases. It is faster, and importantly smaller, meaning that air circulates more easily and computers run cooler. I am quite a fan.

And the little connectors are much easier to maniuplate than the huge ones on IDE cables.

I had no problems fitting my new hard drive, but it hasn't cured my BSoD like I expected.

Spring Greens


I discovered a new vegetable this week. Little did I know that I was eating it out of season, I guess the clue was in the name.

So many options how to cook them.

Lasagna

Made a lasagna the other day. Not bad for a first attempt, if I do say so myself. It all got eaten, so it passes the first test I suppose.

In my dim and distant past Sunday was the best day for food cos we got two main meals. A regular Sunday lunch, and then in the evening we had lasagna accompanied by chips and peas. Then we usually got cheesecake with an incredibly hard base. It was a fun challenge to cut through it (using a spoon) and keep it on your plate.

Anyway, I believe it is a controversial topic, so I would like to draw your attention to the poll about what to have with lasagna. If you want to go for "other please specify" then why not comment on this post?

Evgeny Lebedev

All of this noise about phone-hacking and invasion of privacy seems to have distracted us away from two very important points. I think it is time I reiterated those points lest they be forgotten.

1. It is the function of the media to criticise the government and the authorities.
2. Nobody gives a shit who Ryan Giggs* sleeps with.

I had to be reminded of this by Evgeny Lebedev when he was interviewed on the TV the other day. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to see things clearly. This man used to work for [own] newspapers in Russia where the press is not so free. He explained how in Russia, journalists have been murdered for writing unfavourable articles about certain people. Our press can write whatever shite they want, and we are one of the least corrupt countries in the world**. These two facts and not-unconnected.

If a newspaper taps some phones and discovers that a businessman is making a large "donation" to the government in exchange for a change to the law, and then exposes the thing. Then that is a victory for Britain. If they tap some phones and discover that some dude wot is occasionally on TV is sleeping with some woman nobody has ever heard of, then the newspapers are just pandering to their readers' base interests. They are just trying to make money and are forgetting point 1 above.

In case you missed it, I think injunctions and super-injunctions are a bad idea. Perhaps RG could have had more success and spent less money by just having a few people assassinated.

Why-aye pet! With this false beard and amazing Russian accent, nobody will ever suspect  I am secretly controlling the media for the purposes of keeping me and the other one on TV.

* Or Andrew Marr.
** Why the fuck is Mugabe still in power?

Scarborough

Not been to Scarborough for a while, so it was good to take the family there yesterday. We had only been there 10 minutes and we had walked into a "candy & novelty" shop. My wife had waved a lollipop at me shaped like a naked female torso, and my son had waved a lollipop at me shaped like a cock and balls.

What I don't understand, is why Scarborough isn't full of all kinds of terrible diseases. I think it has all the things you need to make disease. It is full of nasty fat people who, when the aren't smoking, are stuffing a burger or an ice-cream into their face. There is discarded food all over stinking in the sun. And the whole place is covered in sea-gull droppings. And after 6 hours parked there, so was my car. There are obviously loads of people bringing their germs in to the town then distributing new ones around the country. Why aren't these disgusting slobs poorly?

I saw some walking miracle in the morning who was eating shrimps out of a polystyrene cup. Fair enough I thought, it looks gross, but I am all for fresh local produce. But later on I saw them shutting up the seafood snack stall (between the burger stall and the ice-cream/doughnut stall) and they were covering all their prawns and crab sticks and stuff with cling-film. Thereby destroying all my picture of fresh local produce.

On my entrance to one of the public toilets I was passed my a man sweeping black slurry out of the toilets. Good thing I had put my disposable flip-flops on, and had changed out of my best work-shoes. (See, that's me being positive.)

Scarborough castle, from the north.

The day promised to be really nice in the morning, so we went preparing for scorchio. I should have known better, and it clouded over in the afternoon. And before you know it, I was half a mile out into the north sea with no jacket, and no shoes. I was a bit chilly. Still, it was an interesting setting to learn that the town had coped perfectly well after European law-makers has stopped the local fisherman from going out and raping the oceans everyday.

There is a new addition right in the middle of this picture.

Nice little Italian-style restaurant on the waterfront. It's got a veranda and lots of views.

Before we left to come home we went to Ask for dinner. I was a little hesitant, as my previous experiences with that chain have been medium to poor, due to the slow service. But I needn't have worried - it was fine. It is definitely a welcome new addition to the town, I am not sure what occupied that prime piece of land before. It is right in the middle of the waterfront with great views and they must surely get lots of passing trade. It is like a beacon of cleanliness in a sea of shit. The food was good, but the best bit was that I could use a clean bathroom to wash my hands before I ate. I don't really understand why places like that pretend to be more Italian that then really are. Maybe all those waiters and waitresses really are Italian, or maybe they are faking. I neither know nor care. But it was really refreshing when I walked into a Pizza Express in London and the waiter said,

"Good afternoon luv, I'll be your waiter. My name's Gary."

"Seasonal produce at its best" with Greg Wallace

I had to share this example of "celebrities" endorsing food ranges. Who wouldn't want to buy some value potato wedges with this inane slapper gurning at you?

The making of

It seems a requirement these days, that whenever somebody makes a film or TV show, they also have to make a documentary explaining how challenging it was to make the film or TV show. Following in that tradition I will explain the angst that I went through to demonstrate the strength of 2 pi.

I put a lot of effort into that post about pi. Maybe you noticed. Even so, I bet it is riddled with typos and mistakes. I put in many hours that I could have chosen to spend playing Starcraft.

It was clear to me when I was doing my Ph.D. that a typical mathematician spends 20% of their time working on content and 80% making their work look pretty. I don't have the time or effort to make my internet maths look pretty, and the result was, as with all things, a compromise. I figured it would be a good idea to hunt around for a sensible and quick way to get the maths in my blog looking good. I am not sure I have found it yet.

Let me rant about some of the choices I was faced with and the frustrations I had as I prepared to educate the world about 2π. Mathematicians write real maths in LaTeX. Which is good at what it does, which is typesetting. I have done a bit of LaTeX in my time, and almost without thinking, started getting it all installed so I could prepare my thoughts. But then I paused and considered, "How am I actually going to do this?".

I hunted around the internet for things to convert my LaTeX into HTML. There are some things that will do it for you, but very few of them are maintained. I was amazed how many broken links and webpages from 2002 I found. And things only written on linux that I can't even uncompress without getting some extra software. Maybe that is not the way you want to do it then. But I did find a good discussion on precisely the problem I was facing: how to display maths on the internet. It pointed out that HTML does not do typesetting. (I had chosen to forget this.) Instead it lets the browser decide how to lay out text, with (ideally) just a few hints from HTML tags. This makes it incredibly difficult to get good looking formulas actually encoded into HTML.

Then it occurred to me that I had spent hours reading wikipedia to remind myself about the Reimann zeta function, and I had been staring at a good example of how to do maths online. Their solution is to make each formula an image. Which is quite a lot of work unless you have some clever tool to do it for you (which I don't). And in the end that is what I did for all the big equations. Which took me some time.

So, I get all my post written with images in it and stuff and I press "preview". And it looked rubbish.

The whole thing was about "pi" so I really needed every "pi" on the page to look nice. But for some reason google have decided to use different fonts in the blog composer to the actual blog. The pi in the preview looked more like two T's next to each other. I made the decision to change the font of the whole thing to something that I hope will have nice curly pis on most browsers. But that completely messed up all the line spacing and makes that post completely inconsistent with the rest of my blogs. I still feel it was the right decision. It would be wrong to spend all my time faffing around turning every last symbol into an image when I could be having fun. And it would also be wrong to have people read "Why 2TT is better than TT", they would be like "huh?".

That was all fairly dry and boring. So here are some photos of a knitted hat to lighten things up.