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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 from Hilaire Belloc that Giles Brandreth recited handing Carol a bouquet:

From quiet homes and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends.

Secondly, this news pleases me more than it really should. Gambit’s omission from the X-Men movies frustrated me intensely, and Deadpool is simply excellent. Seeing them both (potentially) get the treatment that I think they deserve is delightful.

Three months since an entry – clearly [minus one point - Ed] another busy term in Cambridge has gone by. It’s been somewhat different to previous ones; living in an actual house has proved remarkably easy to transition to. I suspect a lot of that is based on the fact that, by chance, our natural sleep cycles and lecture timetables have such a disparity that very rarely has anyone ever been caught waiting to use the bathroom in the morning.

Fortuitously, I ended up with a lecture timetable that involved lectures only three days a week; this meant that I was more willing to do things in the evening, and more enthusiastically, which I really enjoyed. Two Fire Troupe sessions a week, Churchill College Dance Club once a week (when it didn’t clash with Troupe) and Pav (bien sûr) were the most regular activities I partook in. More occasional excursions included Salsa, going to see Nizlopi in London (with Jon and Kat, much to my delight) and the usual excursions to the Rainbow Cafe and, right at the end of term, a John’s formal for a birthday. My last 48 hours Cambridge were, for an alarmingly coincidental combination of reasons, a bit of a downer, but did little to take the sheen of what has been a marvelous term overall.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games. Work was pretty relentless throughout term, thought I managed to keep on top of it until the very end where – ironically – the Scholar’s feast meant that I didn’t get all my supervision work done for my final set of supervisions crammed into the last two weekdays I was in Cambridge. PhD applications are well under way, too – the forms for which are a challenge in themselves to fill in, with contradicting, misleading and generally unhelpful instructions. Still, at least everyone has to fill in the same forms.

The ‘winterval’ has arrived, bringing with it even less relaxation that usual. Part III has exams throughout the year so, five weeks today, I’ll have had my first exam of the year. The January exams make up a full third of the year’s mark, so I have to take them – unfortunately – pretty seriously, and do revision appropriately over the coming weeks. I’ve also got to get something tangible out for my Part III project whilst not going completely nutty. There are a few fun things planned for the holiday – notably an Evans Challenge Football match – and I am looking forward to them, but they are unfortunately going to have to be the exception rather than the rule this holiday, I fear.

I note, unfortunately that I’ve still not regained the passion I used to have for photography. I was understandably burned out after my Project365, but I was rather hoping to have regained it by now. I believe that part of it is due to my new camera which I received through the insurance company after I broke my old one. The new one is the technical equal or superior of the old one in every respect., bar one. That respect is that it makes a godawful fake shutter noise every time it is used. It’s a pet peeve that I have with technology these days and, unfortunately, it seems to be becoming more prevalent. It’s a lovely camera in every other respect, and it really deserves to be used more. A more gentle photography New Years’ resolution, perhaps, than my 2007 one?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few weeks, you know that yesterday the Large Hadron Collider went online, much to the joy of physicists everywhere. It will clear up a bunch of questions about the Standard Model and, more happily for me, it might confirm the theoretical existence of skittens. It also will not bring about the end of the world, regardless of what some people think, when it starts colliding protons and ramping up the energy in about a month and continuing to do so over the course of a few years. Theoretically, I wouldn’t mind a great deal about people scaremongering, but if it has real consequences then you do have to start thinking carefully about what you’re reporting.

Saying that, of course, there do seem to be some suspicious characters hanging around the LHC – posted after the jump…

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It seems like it’s a bad time to be a fan of anything I like. In quick succession we’ve had Nizlopi announce they’re not touring next year, one of the Barenaked Ladies get busted for drugs, another narrowly escape death and now Jasper Fforde, quite possibly my all time favourite author, is going to have to watch ‘Lost in Austen‘.

I’m not saying that it’s been directly lifted with the names changed, but it bears an astonishing resemblance to the Thursday Next series. In this new TV drama, a woman who lives for reading finds herself inside ‘Pride and Prejudice’, where she ends up accidentally changing the story. In the first of the Thursday Next books, Thursday finds herself inside ‘Jane Eyre’ chasing a villain, and ends up changing the story. I intend to watch it just so that I can see how many similarities there are for myself, but as Phil has pointed out, in the future there will be people who pick up ‘The Eyre Affair’ and think how much of a resemblance it bears to Lost in Austen – which is perhaps the worst aspect of it all.

On a lighter note, work has continued on our ongoing Dalek Project over the last four days, and we’ve made a lot of progress by virtue of spending all our time at Ben’s. There was a small incident with an accidental wheelie, and putting 24V through a 12V relay, but nothing that can’t be repaired. It’s really coming along well (and now has an eye stalk – which it didn’t when those photos were taken). It’s not going to have some features real Daleks have, but equally it will have some features that real Daleks don’t – and by virtue of those features, will be excellent.

It’s funny how two radically different times between first and second, in the context of races, can both be so newsworthy. Between Michael Phelps getting his seventh gold of the games by a mere 100th of a second, and Usain Bolt absolutely destroying the competition in the 100m sprint by 0.2s (without even trying, and with his shoelaces undone), these games have certainly been one of extremes.

I finally saw The Dark Knight yesterday at the IMAX. Seeing a film that I wanted to see so long after it comes out – especially one so hyped – is foreign territory to me. However, a bunch of us had agreed to see it at the IMAX, so I thought I’d make the effort to see it for the first time there, dutifully avoiding all spoilers. It says a lot that coming out, after all the hype, I was not even remotely disappointed. My one reservation was who they killed (carefully avoiding spoilers for the three people who haven’t seen it yet, mostly the bad guy that copped it), but I can easily forgive them that slight transgression for what was otherwise a masterclass in cinematic and dramatic entertainment.

Doubling up with The Dark Knight in London, I also went to see Avenue Q in the early evening. I’ve had the soundtrack for a couple of years, which I enjoy a great deal, so it was quite exciting to get to go see it live. It too lived up to my expectations, and was a relief. I had somewhat put it on a pedestal over time, but I thoroughly enjoyed the two hour show, and felt afterwards that it had been well worth my money.

I had my last day in the lab today. I’ve enjoyed my summer job there, but I am very much looking forward to going home – I’ve basically had two terms rolled into one, so I rather feel like I’ve earned a break. I’m headed home tomorrow, and TPJ is having another tarpaulin party which I’m being dropped off at on the way – the perfect start.

Audiophiles have long been known as having a subset of idiots, who will spend ludicrous amounts of money on anything claimed to improve the sound they think they hear. A CD stabilizer takes the biscuit though. My favourite part of the description:

To see if the stabilizer is compatible with your transport, try loading 2 disks at the same time. If it works, the mat is compatible.

Presumably, what they’ve left out is ‘if it doesn’t work, you’ve broken your CD player’.

Lastly, as a bowling team name, I came up with ‘No split, Sherlock’ this evening. Heh heh.

It’s been a mixed week. Work has been frustrating, in that nothing that I’ve built or made works quite how I want it to, so I’m layering bodge job upon compromise upon approximation. If I have got anything remotely resembling science out at the end of next week, it’s going to be a small miracle.

To keep my mind off of this fact, however, I’ve been enjoying the Cambridge Busking Festival this week. I’ve spent my lunchtimes on the streets of Cambridge, enjoying a variety of acts. The most notable, however, was Kenneth Lightfoot. He’s a street magician with charisma in spades, and it says a lot that I caught him multiple times. He had an excellent ambitious card routine, complete with bending and initialing of multiple cards. The most amazing effect, however, was one that I’d not seen before.

He’d give a spectator a piece of paper, on which he was to write a two digit number, and then put it in an envelope in his pocket. He’d do a couple of illusions in the interim (he did this quite often; start things and then return to them later – an excellent way, I note, to keep a crowd) before returning to the spectator. He’d ‘read his mind’, and draw up a four by four grid, inside which he put numbers, seemingly at random.

One of the times I saw him, the number was in the grid, and he got a small child to wave their hand over the grid, and stop where they liked – stopping, of course, on the chosen number. The other time, the number was not in the grid, so he omitted this. In both cases, the grid, of course, was a magic square for the chosen number – and spectacularly so. Diagonals, rows, columns, corners, center four, opposite pairs, the works.

I’ve worked out part of the trick (at least, how I’d do it if I were instructed to come up with the effect), but obtaining the spectator’s number in the first place eludes me. My mother can read what you’re writing just by watching the top of your pen with surprising accuracy. It feels like cheating, but that’s the best that I’ve come up with so far.

I’ve also had the distressing news that Nizlopi, who I love and see live whenever the opportunity remotely presents itself, will not be touring in 2009 at all. I also cannot make it to any of the farewell tour this autumn (all the gigs are during term time, none of them are in Cambridge, and the London date is a Wednesday). I’m going to have gone almost two year without seeing them live (best case scenario) by the time I next see them. At least I got a signed copy of Extraordinary last time I saw them.

I tragically broke my Sony DSC-P200 camera just before May Week this year (meaning that I only have limited May Week photos – but they are great). Having suffered drops, hits, crushes and everything I’d been able to throw at it (or throw it at), it finally bit the bullet when it fell out of my pocket onto the ground.

And then fell over the landing onto the floor below.

I can’t really begrudge it for calling it a day at that point, but it was so close to still working that it was a bit tragic. It still turned on, the lens still extends, but when you tried to take a photo, the LCD went black forever. Fortunately, I had accidental damage on my insurance, so I was able to get a nice new shiny camera.

I managed to talk the insurance company into giving me a better camera than they were going to (the old camera was insured for what we bought it at, and they were offering a camera that was barely half that. It didn’t even have the (limited) manual exposure options that my old camera had), and Friday a shiny new DSC-W300 showed up. My main concern is that it has too many megapixels. I’m never going to use a 13.6 megapixel photo for anything; I thought that the 7.1 megapixels the P200 provided was too much when I first got it, and in the last three years it proved itself to be more than enough. With so many megapixels though, on a compact camera’s sensor, I’m going to end up with more noise than before. I don’t know whether reducing the resolution that I shoot at helps, but I guess I’ll give it a try.

The second of the new pages is now up and running, which shows the Bruce Dickinson screenames that my friends and I have had over the last few years. There are a lot missing, and I’m going to be working on tracking down some of the missing ones, but I’m not holding my breath. All future ones should be captured, however, which is something at least.

I played badminton in the heat this afternoon, got incredibly sweaty, and just as we were walking back a massive thunderstorm started. It was immense fun.

I went to a talk by Cory Doctorow last night on the Information Economy, and it was incredibly interesting. He made a number of points that, while not terribly complex, I’d not heard presented in such a succinct manner before. For example, he noted that while the internet is very good at being a large copying machine, it’s actually even better at reducing overhead and costs for getting people together to do superhuman (in the literal sense) stuff. Indeed, Boing Boing has recently had to hire someone to do the stuff that needs co-ordinating, as they’re so bad at it, simply because they’re so streamlined at stuff that doesn’t need co-ordinating.

He also used the phrase “Paris Hilton’s genitals have joined the undead and will roam the Earth forever” – or in less exciting terms (if indeed exciting is the right term to use when discussing anything related to Paris Hilton’s genitals. I have my doubts.), once the internet knows something, it doesn’t forget it if it is sufficiently interesting. There’s going to be a video of the talk going up, allegedly, and I may well watch it again should it appear as promised.

I ran across one of the new coins for the first time today; a penny. I’m going to keep hold of it until I get one of each, so I can make the coat of arms. It’s very impressive the amount of detail they have on them – the pictures don’t really do it justice. I do wonder how attractive they’ll be once this detail has worn off after a few years, though – but having said that, it’s not really something we concern ourselves with regarding the current coinage.

I’ve run across quines before (programs that print their source code), but I ran across polyglots for the first time the other day. These are programs that compile to do the same thing in multiple languages. This lead me to their inevitable unholy spawn: polyglot quines. Or quine polyglots, if you prefer. The mind boggles at how you would even go about beginning to come up with such a program.

One of the new pages is present in its prototypical stages – Einstein Says, in the sidebar. There’s a description of what it is there, and thanks to Flickr and the phpFlickr library, it’s going to be dead easy to keep updated.

Lastly, I learned something today in the lab. There are two types of BNC connectors – short ones, and long ones. Confusing the two, especially having finished making your cables, is likely to cause intense frustration.

I’m getting things across to Wordpress okay. I’ve still got the auctions to move across (not sure how to do that cleanly – I might just leave them in their own table of the database), and I’ve got a couple of ideas for new pages that I’ve had for a while. By my estimation, one will be liked by six specific people, and the other might be liked by a few more. I’ve got to have something to tinker with, though.

Today at work, I built two things out of LEGO, and did a brief experiment into the flammability of Sellotape. Working in a lab is fun.