So it’s the Christmas holiday – unfortunately, it’s the shortest holiday that I’ve had for years: a scant two weeks. The Ph.D. is certainly going, though not necessarily where I originally thought it was. That’s not anything out of the ordinary though, so I’m not going to dwell on it.
The work I’ve done so far [...]
Well, if there was previously any doubt that I should be doing a Ph.D., that has been easily assuaged by my week in St Andrews at the STFC Summer School. The people there were all about to start Ph.D.s too, and they are exactly the right sort of people from my point of view. We [...]
So, bizarrely, in two days I’ve been mentioned on the front page of two webcomics. The first is Dinosaur Comics which I wrote this mashup for, which Ryan North graciously linked. It seems to have been one of the more popular things I’ve done; I’ve enjoyed reading people’s thoughts on it over the course of [...]
Well into the summer now (half-way, if we count from the end of exams) and having a real whale of a time. It’s my last ‘long’ holiday for a long, long time, so coming in I consciously decided that I wanted to try and make the most of it. The month that I’ve been at [...]
So I now have fancy letters after my name as something to show for the last four year’s hard work and a lot of money. Even better, I have a Ph.D. lined up doing something that I’m sure I’m really going to enjoy. But as a consequence, I’m also losing a lot. Sure, I’m going [...]
Take one arbitrary limitation (Twitter only lets you send 140 characters). Note that Twitter allows you to use UTF-8 characters. Add a course in information theory. Roast under the heat of procrastination for several hours until juicy.
In english: I wondered just how much information you could send in a single tweet, and decided [...]
Jon Stewart had a pretty great interview last week with Cliff May where they discussed the merits of torture, which was excellent on many levels. What got a lot of traction was Stewart’s assertion that Truman was a war criminal for using the A-Bomb against Japan; he acknowledged that he could understand the decision at [...]
The Wii can now boot backups off of a hard drive. “Excellent”, I thought to myself. “I have an iPod sitting around, and if I backed up Brawl onto it, I’d be able to play Brawl without listening to my Wii’s DVD drive grinding itself away to dust”. So I set about obtaining the relevant [...]
Yet another entry during term?!! Killing some time before going out, a quick post on some topics that have been circulating in my mind for the last few days.
My week five blues seem to have arrived exactly a week late. This is unsurprising, as lectures didn’t start for me until week two, so they could [...]
The last episode of Countdown with Carol Vorderman aired yesterday (the final conundrum was, appropriately, ‘Era Closes’). It was the final of the current series, and was competed between two PhD students from Cambridge and Oxford. Unfortunately, the Cambridge guy lost narrowly (four points), but I was struck by how much I liked the poem [...]