quick update: I got the place at HP (no I wasn't expecting to hear back from them this quickly, but hey, I'm not complaining), but I need to go back there pretty soon to meet someone who wasn't around today, to sort out which of 2/3 potential projects I'll actually be doing. This is very very cool.

Meanwhile I have lots to do for the next couple of days, so things may be a little quiet on this site for a day or 3. I guess my next expansive post will be on Saturday after a nice long lie-in....

Oh yeah, and my compulsive teeth-grinding while I'm hard at work has a purpose after all - chewing gum aids cognitive function

posted @ 7:35 PM -

manipulative sellers of widescreen television

This story broke yesterday and I wasn't very interested at the time, but that was because I hadn't realised the full strangeness of it. I think I'll let it speak for itself, so here are a few key extracts:

A mentally-ill gunman apparently unhappy with widescreen televisions has shot himself dead in an Amsterdam office building after a seven-hour siege.... ....A spokesman, quoting the fax, said he was angry that new television screens were being promoted as "better looking than normal screens".... ....During the day, the man admitted he had entered the wrong building...

I won't even pretend to understand.

posted @ 12:17 PM -

rhetorical retaliation

Having been a tad offended by the criticism of them in the recent US human rights report, China have decided to issue their own report on human rights in the USA. Perhaps unsurprisingly it makes some reasonable criticisms of the US while completely failing to convince me that the US' criticisms of China were unjustified. Still, in context the first paragraph or two of the press release read as a very good joke, as does China's 'shock' at being regarded as a threat by the US....

And in other China news, it looks like the Three Gorges Dam will need an IPO to raise capital. It doesn't sound like the most attractive of investments, so after the failure of all protests good old market forces may just be what decides whether this project actually goes ahead....

posted @ 11:22 AM -

the courage to refuse

The last week or two in Israel has become even more depressing and hopeless than the past few months have been. I don't want to say much about that, because I really have nothing to contribute, but I would like to draw attention once again to the group of reservists who are refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, and a page I've just noticed on their site about why Judaism endorses their conscientious objections.

In a time of increasing polarisation I think it is important to remember that not all Israelis think with one mind, and not all Jews are Zionists. I am more worried than ever about anti-Zionists expanding from their dislike of Israel to a more general anti-Jewish prejudice, and I am seeing and hearing rhetoric that leans dangerously in that direction.

posted @ 9:18 AM -

we look before and after

This is my last week of tuition on the MSc. I have one seminar left on Friday, and then months of coursework to do on my own with no externally imposed structure. I have two relatively small pieces to do (a philosophy essay and a neural simulation programming project), then I have my main MSc dissertation to do, which will occupy me full time until late August.

This is a good time for me to reflect on the past year and a half and on where I am going now. First of all, I would like to say to anyone who is contemplating being a part time student - try to find and alternative if you can. I don't regret doing it this way, because what I've done with the other half of my time has been worthwhile, but it is much harder than being one thing full-time. It's also partly my own difficulty with task switching; when I start the day doing one thing I'm very bad at switching to another activity, and I waste huge amounts of time switching. Still I don't think this is the whole problem - I'm studying things I am passionate about, and it's intensely frustrating having to switch away from such things on a regular basis. From now on all my studying will be full time, whatever other sacrifices I might have to make to sustain this. That's not to say I won't teach - it would be great to get the chance to teach some classes at whichever University I do my PhD at - but I don't want to take on too much teaching work, and I want to devote very little time to off-campus work.

The teaching has been a very positive experience, and I think the difficulties of being a part time student have been justified by the fact that I've had the chance to do this. It's a fun job, it's a highly rewarding one, it's one that I got into entirely by accident and then discovered that actually I'm quite good at it, and it's a really good thing to have experience in, especially for someone who wants a career in academia. Looking back to 2 years ago when I was deciding how to approach this MSc, I wouldn't choose differently, and the teaching is the main reason for that.

Student politics has probably been the biggest disappointment of this year, though that's partly because between everything else I haven't been able to put as much time into being Postgrad Officer as the job deserved. I only started the job because no-one else came forward, so I have nothing to feel guilty about because I've done something rather than nothing, but it's the one sphere in which I feel like I have achieved very little this year. It's not just my lack of application behind this; student politics is a very difficult area in which to really make any difference, and the student body have rejected this year's less-apolitical-than-usual Union Exec, so in a sense inaction is appropriate representation for this group. Looking back to one year ago when I decided to take this job on I probably wouldn't do it again, but I can still honestly say I have learned from the experience.

Meanwhile the future has some interesting potential. I'm off to Bristol tomorrow to meet some people at HP labs, and see if I can arrange doing my dissertation there as part of the Biologically Inspired Complex Adaptive Systems group. It would be wonderful if this were to work out, not least because it would be the first time I could actually realise my ambition of being paid to do what I would choose to do with much of my spare time anyway. I also think it would be interesting to see a commercial research environment, having limited myself to academia until now, and commercial research is really the only future path I can see myself finding rewarding other than one in universities, so it has to be a good thing to see the inside of such a place now. This would also involve relocating to Bristol at fairly short (6 weeks or so) notice, but that would also be good. I'm getting increasingly itchy feet, because I've been in Brighton since leaving school, and while I still love the place and still think it's one of the best places in the world to live it's just been a bit too long in one place for someone of my (ahem) tender years. Add to this the fact that it looks like HP Labs have a nicer working environment than any university I've seen on this side of the pond, and that it would be much easier for me to keep my work seperate from the rest of my life (if only because a fresh start would help me change bad habits), and you can probably see why I've gone for this....

Longer term future is still fuzzy, but I will do a PhD, and I won't go straight into that this autumn, which is why I can afford the plan not to be too specific yet. I need to get some things out of my system before I finally set myself on a long term path; I need to travel a bit and I need to work full time for a while as well. I have a few months to put these things into place, but I'm looking forward even to making the plans.

posted @ 7:20 AM -

drinking and driving

I used to be fairly casual about drinking and driving. I don't think (though I can't be as sure as I'd like to be) that I've ever driven while over the legal alcohol limit, but I also always realised that the limit is high enough and I am enough of a lightweight that I can be unfit to drive while still legally allowed to. Then I spent much of the last year of my BA working on research into how drivers process and respond to visual information, and I became very strict indeed about alcohol and driving. Nothing I was working on was directly related to this issue (my own work had flaws characteristic of undergrad research, and if anything what it did demonstrate was that myopia is less of a handicap to drivers than I expected), but in the background reading I saw some frightening information about exactly how much drivers' eye movement patterns change after consuming just 1 unit of alcohol. Now some researchers have come up with a behavioural way to measure how drunk a driver is, by monitoring precisely these changes in their eye movements. Just one more illustration of why if I'm planning on driving anywhere (which is pretty rare anyway what with me not owning a car) I don't drink anything at all.

Coincidentally, as I was writing this, a story has appeared on my desktop news ticker about the danger of driving under the influence of drugs. This, along with the arbitrariness of a blood alcohol concentration based limit (I weigh twice as much as my daintiest friends, so I can drink twice as much as them without being over the limit, but this doesn't change the fact that I notice my own reduction in co-ordination and alertness after 2 pints) underlines the importance of introducing behaviour based tests for fitness to drive.

posted @ 8:46 PM -

Mr. Eaves and his magic camera

I've just stumbled across a funny story with some really lovely pictures. One day, Farrell Eaves dropped his camera into a pond. He decided to rescue it and repair it in a mysterious way, which made it take pictures again, but not in the camera-never-lies way we usually demand from such machines.

I like these pictures so much I'm wondering if I shouldn't try to resurrect my old camera, which was injured in active service when I tried taking it up a mountain in Canada at -10° or so. It too still takes photos, but very badly. I'm just wondering if by tampering with it (seeing as it's pretty useless in its current state, and would cost more to fix than it did to replace) I can make it do something interesting rather than just overexposing each photo.

posted @ 7:55 AM -

guestmap

I've just added a new feature to this site - the guestmap lets you mark your location on a world map so we can all see where my 3 readers actually come from. If it turns out I actually do have more than 3 readers this could be quite interesting....

posted @ 7:35 AM -

...the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness

I had been looking for a copy of Howl by Allen Ginsberg for a little while on paper, and I've just stumbled across an online copy, as well as a surprisingly good pastiche - Howl.com.

How do I love Google? Let me count the ways....

posted @ 6:50 PM -

Zimbabwe

I find the voter apathy in the UK quite disturbing, but other people have tried to convince me that in fact it is a sign of a healthy country - many people just not being angry enough about anything to bother voting. Looking at the voter fanaticism in Zimbabwe this weekend makes me wonder if perhaps they are right. Just as Zimbabwean voters are fanatical about making sure they can vote, because things are so bad there that they appreciate the huge importance of doing so, UK voters don't care because ultimately political parties aren't doing things like beating up their families. Framed in that way I'm definitely happier to be in the apathetic country....

posted @ 6:22 AM -

control of information

A Bill currently before parliament threatens to give the government the power to require that people have licences to discuss potentially sensitive (defined in a very broad way) research with foreigners. Considering how much good research involves at least one of foreign students, foreign faculty or collaboration with foreign institutions, if the Bill were to go through in its current form it would make science and technology research completely unworkable, which is an unbelievably stupid move by the government, because it wouldn't stop such research at all, it would drive researchers abroad, which would just leave the UK less able to benefit from such work. We really badly need a government that actually understands science and does something to support the activity - this is one of the things America does best, and it's one of the biggest reasons why yhe US is so much wealthier than the UK (as well as a reason why I might well end up there for my PhD, but that's another story for another day)....

posted @ 5:47 AM -

no more Bush legs

Russia has just banned imports of chicken from the US. Depending on whose story you choose to believe, this is either retaliation for the steel tariffs or a genuine attempt to protect Russian consumers from unsavoury chemicals used in US poultry rearing, but even if it is the latter it seems implausible that the US import tariffs didn't have some influence on the decision, if only in sending out a signal that this is an acceptable way to do business between countries.

posted @ 5:17 AM -