… and this is how.
2.4+2.4 = 4.8
If you round to the nearest whole number, that gives you
2+2 = 5.
QED.
October 10, 2009
September 29, 2009
Dreaming
So, last night I was asleep. Nothing unusual there (well actually given my sleep patterns recently, but that’s another post for another time!) except that I found myself dreaming – which actually isn’t that unusual either.
I have heard that you only know you’re dreaming when you’re not in a deep sleep, or that you can only remember that you dreamed if you weren’t in a deep sleep when you were dreaming. Anyway, I’ve digressed slightly.
Last night in my dream, I realised that I had come across an idea that I needed to remember. Of course, in that subconscious way you do sometimes, I knew that I was in a dream and that this idea needed to become reality so had to think of a way of doing this. The cartoon from XKCD as shown above came to mind, so I found a keyboard and started typing.
I could feel my real fingers moving as if I was typing, and I assumed that I was using my laptop keyboard to do so – my laptop being still switched on on the floor beside my bed (no officer, I wasn’t downloading anything…) so I assumed that I had managed to pick it up, open it, and start typing.
You can therefore imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up to find that absoutely nothing had happened. I hadn’t typed a message to myself in my sleep, nor had I remembered this idea that I needed to remember. Knowing my dreams though, it was probably either a very extraordinarily good idea or a pathetically bad one. I also found that my laptop had turned off as the night went on as the power went in the house at some point during the night and the battery ran out. This is also the reason why I was late for work, because I woke up and looked at my phone and realised that it was half past 8.
The moral of the story? Well, there isn’t one to be fair. There usually isn’t.
August 23, 2009
The Rice and the Chessboard – how the Internet has ruined life for the better
There is a story about a Chinese man who invented the game of Chess. The Chinese emperor at the time said something like ‘what can I give you for your reward?’. The gentleman replied that on his chessboard, he would have one piece of rice on one square, two on the next, four on the next, eight on the next, sixteen on the next and so forth.
I was told this story by my Granddad this afternoon, with the question ‘how many grains of rice were there in total?’. Being the former IT student that I am, I recognised this as being binary – which to a certain extent it is. A square on the chessboard is equivalent to 1 bit, a line on a chessboard is 8 squares, therefore a line is equivalent to a byte and would have 128 grains of rice on the line.
This is where things started to go a bit awry in my mind. Not having any pieces of paper to work things out on, and realising that it wasn’t simply a case of having 8×128 (the ninth square would be 256), I figured that this was impossible for me to work out. Nevertheless, I started to think that I might be able to work it out once I returned home and had the computer in front of me.
8×8 is 64, thought I, therefore a chessboard is effectively 64 bit, and the answer would be that number, multiplied by itself, minus 1 (which in binary would be 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111)
Thinking that it would be easy to work out what the 64th number in the binary world would be, I did a quick Google search but gave up. (I have since worked this out, see below.)
That is when I started to write this blog post, thinking that I could allow you all to see me work through this mathematical problem. To give the story a proper retelling, I then searched Google for ‘rice chessboard’ or something like that. What should pop up high on the list, but an article from good old Wikipedia, which not only told me the story – the Chinese gentleman was in fact an ancient Indian mathmetitian named Sessa so -1 point for my grandfather there – but also the answer.
The answer is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 – which when read out is eighteen million four hundred and forty six thousand seven hundred and forty four million seventy three million seven hundred and nine million five hundred and fifty one thousand six hundred and fifteen (I think anyway).
Now, having the answer to this conundrum has made me a much better person. Admittedly, I didn’t work it out myself (which actually would have made me a much better person) because I looked it up on the Internet. I was going to, but the Internet stopped me from doing it as it made it quite a pointless thing to do. The Internet has ruined my life. But it has made me a better person for it.
Possibly.
(To conclude, the 64th number in the ‘binary sequence’ is √(18446744073709551615 + 1) which is 4294967296. That bit was worked out by myself, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s wrong…)
July 12, 2009
Overheard
Overheard on a train. A man and a woman have just walked through the carraige, it’s late night (around 10). Conversation between two people behind me.
A – Did she just say ‘is this second class’?
B – I think she did
A – I’ve got a good mind to go up to her, crush a can of Stella on my head and urinate on her leg.
B – She’ll probably get her butler to beat you up
Well, I thought it was funny. Perhaps you had to be there…
(I later found out that these two people on the seats behind me didn’t know each other before they got on the train.)
June 13, 2009
Alice and Kev…
It’s not often that I will link to another website in a post.
Well, that’s a little odd to say given that I haven’t really done that many posts here (I started with good intentions, but meh).
It is quite often that I find myself in a situation where I really feel for a fictional person. A few years ago, author Tim Bowler came to my secondary school and before that I read his book Shadows. I found myself very affected by this book for some reason. There have been other instances where this has happened but I won’t go into them now.
I was recently shown this blog about Alice and Kev (http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com) , where these two characters, child Alice and her father Kev, have been made in The Sims 3, been made homeless, moneyless, and with certain personality traits. It could be considered a social documentary on the homeless, an amusing yet toughtful story, or somebody with nothing better to do playing The Sims and writing about it on his website.
I’ve often thought about the homeless, especially homeless children. As I write this, I am lying on my bed, fairly comfortable (aside from the fact that I’ve done my back in) and the fridge downstairs has food in it, I’ve got clothes in my wardrobe, and am typing this on a computer bought within the past couple of weeks. I’m lucky, I also live in an area where there isn’t homelessness. But even twenty miles up the road in Barnstaple there are people living homeless, some by default some by choice. I don’t know what the case is with children being homeless, but I know there are some.
Reading through Alilce and Kev, I got this overwhelming urge to find Alice and just give her a hug. A few times I’ve wanted to be able to do something with homeless children but don’t know what.
There is something else that I won’t go into now though about something that happened a while back that I haven’t forgotton about.
Anyway, I’d go and read Alice and Kev if I were you. It’s being updated daily (or so it seems), and if you don’t start feeling for Alice then I think there’s something wrong with you.
April 24, 2009
Pay your PIN by PIN
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a rant about using PINs to pay for your items with credit cards (though while I’m at it, all the leaflets and stuff that were going round at the time that Morrisons changed said that using PINs were more secure – surely it is much easier to remember a four-digit number than it is to copy somebody’s signature… on the upside it means that I am able to use my mum’s card to do the shopping which, given that she’s pretty much housebound now, is a good thing!)
I was in a shop the other day and they were using a card terminal that wasn’t part of the till itself so they had to type in the amount I had bought.
And that lead me to think…
Has anybody ever bought something that is the value of their PIN?
For instance, if my PIN was 4253, and I bought something that was £42.53 then that would be a yes (remembering of course that when values are entered into tills and card units, it is always done by pence so that they would enter in 4253 and so would I).
(And, no, that isn’t my PIN, I’m not that stupid. I did consider double-bluffing you too as that is the sort of thing I would do, but even I have a line that I daren’t cross on the Internet, and publising my PIN is about 250 yards away from that line! As an aside, I used to, when I was with friends and getting money out of a cash machine, say four random digits as I entered my PIN just to confuse them. Of course, me being me ended up confusing myself on a number of occasions resulting in me not putting the number in correctly. But I digress.)
Of course, there are some problems with this theory. Depending if you’re rich or poor, or your PIN is a number in the low thousands or the high thousands. One of my PINs is quite a high number, and I think I’m quite unlikely to come across this situation myself with that card, while the other was what started me thinking as the amount I bought was rather close to my PIN. If you’re rich, with a high number, say 9835 then £98.35 is nothing to you and you’re quite likely to spend that, yet with a low number PIN (say, 1378) then £13.78 is such a low amount that you would probably just hand over a twenty pound note. On the other side, if you’re poor with a low number then £13.78 is, not a lot of money, but something you’d use a card for. £98.35 would probably be a weekly shop or something so something that would happen infrequently if at all.
I can honestly say that this has never happened to me. I just think these things up, honestly. I don’t know why or where but they do show up in my mind.
I shall let you know if it ever does happen to me, and I’d be quite interested to hear if it has happened to you – though I’d advise against publishing the actual amounts and therefore also your PIN!
March 5, 2009
More Snow
Yes, OK – my life is this dull that two snow days on the trot I’ve made a post of photographs. Still, it’s not every day that it does snow and apparantly it’s going to all disappear by the weekend. Quite a bit of it has disappeared here today to be honest which actually is a bit of a shame as despite the inconvenience of not being able to get to work and suchlike, I like snow. I like the feeling that it makes under your feet when you’re the first person to walk over it. I like the way it makes everything look bright and clean.
(There is a paragraph about this in Rob Grant’s book Incompetence but I can’t find it at the moment – if you have the book it’s in the Prologue which you will find after Chapter 2.)
I also found out this morning that it’s surprisingly fun to drive over. For reasons that still aren’t quite clear to me, I decided that I should continue with my normal ploy of turning off the Link Road and nip the rest of the journey to Tiverton on the back roads to avoid the traffic that usually builds up around the Bolham Road roundabout.
Anyway – here are some photographs. Again, taken on my phone and while some are from the inside of the car I was not driving at the time, again caught on the roadworks just south of Knowstone. I will probably at some point touch some of these photos up in Photoshop but these’ll do for the time being.
More Snow March 2009
A361 near Knowstone |
A361 near Knowstone |
A361 near Knowstone |
A near Knowstone |
On the Back Roads |
back roads |
Back Roads |
Near the ground on the back roads |
March 4, 2009
Snow day… maybe
So when I got out of bed this morning, I was greeted with the horrible sound of my mum attempting to sing ‘Winter Wonderland’. Because it had snowed overnight.
It was still relatively OK though, but quite white outside. That was, until I got into work…
Snow March 09
View from my front door, 7.50am |
A361 near Knowstone, around 8.15 |
Obliterated Roadwork Signs on A361 near Knowstone, around 8.15am |
Still on the A361 near Knowstone, probably around 8.20am by now! |
... yet this was the view out of my office when I got in to work, around 9.10am. |
(all photos taken on my phone, and honestly I was not driving while some of these were taken – there were traffic lights on the A361 which caught me up! Images hosted on Picasa)
Admittedly mainly this afternoon the weather down here has turned a bit so it’s a bit more snowy, but it’s not settling. I don’t think I could cope with another snow-day to be honest as I just get really bored. I’m just amazed at how different a few miles can make in the weather – although it was a little cold it still looked rather summery down here when I got here this morning!
March 1, 2009
Welcome…
Yes, I’ve decided to give up on coding my own and have joined the masses who have gone over to WordPress. I’ve copied the posts over from the old site too which was a bit of a pointless gesture really but I’ve always tried to keep the same things up and running and it was just the database of the site collapsing a few years back that meant I’d lost things.
I will at some point – possibly – copy over the rest of the pages and the photo gallery thing that was also up, and possibly revert back to the old design depending on if I can be bothered to transfer it to a WP theme.
Hopefully I’ll be updating this site a bit more too – well, today has had two posts in one day but I can’t guarantee that it’ll be the same always. There has been a lot of stuff going on in my mind, not all of it good unfortuately, and I will probably try and note down those rambling thoughts .
So… well, there’s nothing left to say really so I’ll stop.
Laters dudes.
Musings on the Internet how it used to be
I’ve been thinking a bit recently on how the Internet has changed a little bit. For instance, I first discovered Google when first introduced to the Internet, by the fact that Yahoo!’s search was back then powered by Google. I thought that if the Yahoo! search is being powered by Google, then surely I’d get quicker results by going directly there. Now Google owns my life, not only in how I search the Internet, but I recently became the owner of a G1 mobile phone.
Yesterday while I was in the shower, for some reason I started thinking about the designs that have been on this very website in the past. I remember posting a copy of an old design which I found that had been done in MS Word, and other designs had been completed in MS Publisher and Dreamweaver before I started coding the pure HTML of sites. One design that I remembered yesterday was composed mostly of lego, where all the page headings and the like were created in Lego and then photographed. I mention designs because I’m currently contemplating switching over to WordPress so I’ve actually got a website that works…
I’ve also been looking at some old websites that are still around, and earlier on today came across this little snippet of text: “If your browser can cope with it, there is a bigger version of this photo (1402×1170 pixels, 168 KB).”
I very much doubt that you’d need to put that on images any more…
I’ve also forgotton what the main point of this post was except to say that I’m still alive… Take care all.