Archive for the ‘Distractions’ Category

Yesterday, I blogged about Poker Stats Library, a couple of scripts I wrote which I’ve now published on Github. On Saturday, it was time to try them out.

I headed down to Grosvenor to take part in their freeroll tournament. I say freeroll, it was a £10 rebuy tournament, which gets you twice the number of chips, so almost everyone buys in again. As I sat down at the table I found myself sitting opposite a guy named Christopher Norfolk – while I’m aware of the laws of probability, it’s still an amusing coincidence.

I ended up placing 11th, out of the 79 that entered. I was doing quite well but having started at 2pm, I had arranged to meet Elina at 6pm and by this time it was 7pm, so I went all in on an ace high for boom or bust and lost. Still, an enjoyable evening none the less.

Recently, Jason recommended I check out a series called Human Planet, which first aired earlier this year. The series looked at how humans have adapted to live in every environment on Earth, and it was incredibly interesting – so you’ll imagine how shocked I was when I found out it hard first aired on BBC One ;).

Some of the stuff just seems impossible – one guy can free dive without coming up for air for over five minutes. As the show suggested, I tried to hold my breath along with him, but even before he had got half way down I was gasping for air, let alone the time it takes for him to walk around down there and spear the fish.

Other highlights included hunters in Africa who would just walk up to lions and take their meat, then get out of there before the lions realised what was going on, and tribes in Brazil who build their houses at the very tops of trees in the rain forest. Long range photos of uncontacted tribes in the rainforest were also pretty breathtaking.

You could also tell when they were showing you mother nature at it’s biggest and best, as occasionally they would be describing an event, and then zoom out into orbit – and you could still see it!

Great series, well worth checking out. You can find out more information on the BBC website.

Last week I made a very embarrassing mistake.

The tread was getting rather low on my types, so I decided to change it myself. I managed to get the wheel off easily enough, put the fresh one on and screwed it back in place and then set off to work.

However, I only made it 5-10 metres before I realised my mistake – I hadn’t actually screwed the wheel nut on and the wheel was now at risk of flying off the car altogether!

Oh no wait, this wasn’t me – this was a guy whose sole job it is to screw the wheel nut back on. Unlucky :D.

Still, at least we got to see Patrick Stewart.

Earlier this month, the Top500, the project which measures and ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers, unveiled the latest instalment of their twice-yearly list. It had a new number one – Japan’s K computer.

Of course, an even faster computer is in itself very exciting, this is especially exciting because the project, pronounced kei, aims to be the first computer to reach ten petaflops per second when it becomes fully operational in November 2012.

Ten petaflops is a key number because, despite there being much discussion of its accuracy, ten peraflops is the number put forward by Kurzweil for the upper boundary of estimates on the processing power of the human brain.

That means that, once the K is fully operation, for the first time we will have a computer more powerful than the human brain.

That’s pretty exciting!

Of course, it could be entirely inaccurate. Some think the brain is capable of 38 petaflops per second, or even higher – other estimates have suggested 100, or even 1000 petaflops.

But considering the exponential growth of computer power, even if that is true, that doesn’t actually delay the arrival of such a computer that much time.

Consider Cray’s new XK6. It is aiming to hit 50 petaflops (http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/229700091) and they say it will be ready later this year! Of course, it hasn’t been delivered yet, but presuming it does, this represents a significant step forward in the chase to beat the brain.

Even if you assume that the brain does, in fact, operate at 1,000 petaflops per second, 100 times faster than Kurzweil suggested, the release of the XK6 this year means that within seven years, 2018, we will still achieve a computer faster than the human brain. Soon enough that I very much hope my grandparents will still be around to see it.

I finally got round to watching the first episode of Secrets of the Superbrands which looks at technology.

I’ll be honest, the presenter, Alex Riley, really failed to endear himself to me with his surely attitude. I’m sure he’s an intelligent guy who on purposely plays the fool with comments like “iPhones, and iPads and 3gs and stuff like that.”

In fact, these go on and on with comments like “that’s a massive electromagnet, so if I brought in anything that was metal it would fly over there and rip Adam’s face off” or “is there any time when you think eww, it’s a brain, it’s horrible” to which the woman succinctly answers “no.”

Anyway, as we are all aware, marketing these days is brilliant. It’s amazing. Remember the last time you went round Tesco – did you buy something that wasn’t on your list? Buy an extra one because it was two for one? That isn’t an accident. You didn’t go out to buy that stuff, but you did, and it might sound like a simple thing, but millions of pounds of Tesco’s money goes into making sure it happens, every time you walk in that door.

Apple especially have some amazing marketing too. People hang off Steve’s every word.

But I really felt the show suggested that Apple were somehow tricking us into buying their products. Missing the point – that Apple produce really, really good products. So they should be – they are really expensive. But isn’t that just how the world works normally? You pay more, you get a better product? I don’t buy Apple products because it’s a cult, I buy them because I have enough disposable income to buy better products.

As for his treatment of Microsoft, there seemed to be disdain in his voice when he said they spend $5.5 billion on research and development. Of course R&D helps their profits in the long term, but it’s also giving back to the community (OpenOffice is great for example, because they just copied Microsoft Office which is great is because of all the money Microsoft spent making it great).

Also some of it was just factually incorrect. Microsoft’s income isn’t dwindling, they’re setting new quarterly records.

There is nothing wrong with his Nokia 6330 Classic but it’s just silly to take an attitude of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” when new phones are adding some amazing new features bringing you better communication to those you care about and access to the sum of all human knowledge.

As for, us getting better software because they get our details to target ad at, surely that is actually a good thing? How many boring ads do you sit through on TV ad breaks? Most of them don’t target you, so there is no point you looking at them. What if you could just watch the one advert and then get back to your programme? That is what targeted ads offer.

And seriously the presenter was very, very annoying. No surprise he labels himself as an agnostic. And who asks the man behind Kinect if he was abused as a child? He’s like annoying, offensive, shit version of Louis Theroux.

Anyway, rant over lol.

I recently took a quick glance at my stats to see, well I would say how many people read my blog, but what you really get is how many spam bots have hit your blog. In any case, it was interesting to see some of the search terms that people have used to reach my blog:

• dogging
• red light area in london
• hamster birthday
• chicken brain
• osama bin laden death photo
• sue my chin buff my pylon
• dont buff my pylon
• cottaging blog
• daily star they ve stolen all our jobs
• bejeweled illuminati
• talk to dead ancestors
• water way to have a good time

Dogging I can understand, though I imagine people will be quite disappointed in the content they find when they get here. Chicken brain comes from the time we went to Nando’s for my birthday and found a chicken brain in our food.

The buff my pylon stuff is a reference to Brass Eye while the last term is a reference to Alan Partridge, though the blog post itself is nothing to do with that.

The Daily Star reference refers to a headline they ran in 2008 claiming immigrants had taken every single unskilled job in the past few years.

Beyond that, I’m a little lost though. I don’t have any pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s dead body, I’ve never tried cottaging and I’m fairly sure that Bejeweled is not a product of the Illuminati designed to control our minds. And even if I did, I certainly haven’t expressed that opinion on my blog!

EDIT: Actually, while I didn’t say that, I did suggest PopCap might be the new Illuminati.

Last Saturday saw the final of the 2011 Indian Premiere League. The two teams who were fighting out were the Chennai Super Kings and the Royal Challengers Bangalore.

The Super Kings made a fantastic start, reaching 205 runs by the end of their innings. This left the Royal Challengers with a huge hill to climb and when Chris Gale fell in the first few balls, you knew it was all over.

The cricket was followed by the UEFA Champion’s League final between Manchester United and Barcelona. Man Utd played reasonably well but were ultimately completed outclassed by a team with mirrored the superb play of the World Cup winning Spanish side.

The biggest surprise of the day however was that I actually spent some time watching sport. Could it be that two years working in the sports betting industry has finally got to me? Is this s a sign that the rapture is on its way after all? Only time will tell…

Last week I headed down to York Brights for their monthly meeting. It was the second time I had been to the city in a month, having visited North Yorkshire Humanists two weeks prior.

The topic of much of this week’s discussion was Derren Brown. Derren has done amazing things for reviving the art of magic, but it always a divided opinion in the skeptics community because although he says it is all magic, he then goes on to pretend a lot of what he is doing is real.

Take the example, when he correctly predicted the lottery numbers. Of course, he didn’t, it was a simple camera trick. But be started the show by saying “this is all magic” and then took you on an hour long journey about the wisdom of crowds, which is of course nonsense. I spoke about this at Skeptics in the Pub in 2009.

One of the group members, Michael, went on to explain just how much of Derren’s material relies on this. Take for example his TV show Trick of Treat, although he claims to use no actors, they almost certainly did, partly because some have been identified as actors but also because you just can’t morally do a lot of that stuff to unsuspecting members of the public.

You could argue of course that that is part of the show though. When we watch fiction or magic, we suspend our disbelief for the purposes of entertainment (deep down, we all know there probably isn’t a man traveling around space and time in a vehicle disguised as a blue police box but it’s fun to pretend for those 45 minutes), and maybe it’s just part of that.

Many of us feared that when Terry Wogan stood down from presenting the British coverage of Eurovision, that it was all over. But, having sat down with Norm and Elina for a bit of a Eurovision shin dig last week, I’m fully behind Graham Norton as a worth successor.

It proved to be a hugely entertaining evening, with us gathering more points by the first few results than we managed in the whole competition last year. That said, I’m no longer friends with Elina after Finland failed to give us any points.

The competition is of course ridiculous – the phone lines open before the songs have even been performed. Is it just me that thinks it would be nice if we at least pretended it was about the music, rather than people just tactically voting for their neighbors? Not to mention that the best song, ultimate didn’t win.

Special mention goes to Estonia, for the campest performance I have ever seen:

Her dress is also adorable. Second special mention goes to Georgia for actually being good:

But ultimately, there was only just one song that deserved to win. Despite Graham Norton’s mocking, Moldova’s So Lucky was clearly the entry of the competition:

Martini. Whiskey on the rocks. Life on the top, my party never stops. So lucky! I think Elina is starting to get sick of those lyrics being sung into her ears…

Btw, does anyone know where I can get her some unicycle lessons?

Myself and Norm recently headed over to Manchester to see Uncaged Monkeys – a popular science stage show based on the radio show Infinite Monkey Cage. The show featured Brian Cox, Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh, Matt Parker and a host of other sceptical faces, all anchored by the always entertaining Robin Ince.

Not only was the show entertaining, but it was also great to go to a gig where we actually felt far younger than the average audience member, rather than far older (such as here or here for example).