Hot Running Water!

After two weeks with no hot water or heating, (with the exception of the electric shower) the boiler man finally managed to fix the system today. I'm looking forward to a nice soak in the bath.

Observations

Here is a list of things that I have observed recently:

1) Unless the university is specifically training people to be stupid, stupid people are attracted to jobs in university security and or central administration, (not the lovely administrators in my department... they rock!) This means that placing adverts for university roles could be used as an elaborate trap for the dregs of society.

2) Marks and Spencers has big print chip and pin machines. This seems to say something about their target audience.

3) Biology is sometimes described as a "soft science", (generally by engineers and physicists.) I've spent a lot of time researching biology recently... it's very, very hard!

4) Bunnies are even cuter than the stereotype of cuteness that is portrayed for them by the media. There is no danger of a bunny looking at a cartoon or bunny-media figure and developing poor self-cuteness-image. So that's a relief.

5) The steering wheel in BMW cars is actually larger in radius than the indicator controls are in length. Thus obscuring them from view. This may explain why BMW drivers are so shit at signalling.

6) I like cheese.

Man Flu

I've been struck down by a bout of man flu. My throat hurts and I'm feeling a bit miserable. To make matters worse my boiler is still broken, so no hot bath to relax in!

I'm writing this whilst watching "Big Train" on UKTV Gold 2. It really is comedy genius. "At home with Ming the Merciless" is genuinely masterful.

I feel that my blog has lost a certain something recently. There's a reason for this. Things have been going quite well. Work is moving along, and in the evenings I'm just relaxing with my friends and generally having a good time. This, sadly, means that my anger levels are quite low, resulting in below par ranting.

I'm going into the office tomorrow if I feel better. I'm sure a better blog entry will be here soon...

Fun Weekend!

I went to Center Parcs in Nottingham this weekend. It was my friend Sarah's birthday so she, and a second girl, decided a joint celebration and a trip to the wonderful world of CP would be a good way to celebrate.

In the end, 11 of us went: myself and 10 attractive girls in two villas. My masculinity was in rapid decline from the outset, when I discovered that I had packed more pairs of shoes than most (all?) of the girls for the weekend. In my defense I did use all but one pair!

We went laser shooting, swimming (a lot), played badminton and squash and went roller skating. I had quite a good time, though every muscle in my body still aches.

Obviously, spending the weekend with 10 women has made me the envy of the computer science department. I was even able to tell them that I spent the weekend sleeping under a hot blonde girl... the truth being that she was in the top bunk, and the room was quite stuffy. She was the very best choice of roomy for me though, as I snore and she's deaf. My only real complaint is that, being blonde, she did pack my phone charger and not hers when she left, so for anyone trying to reach me on my mobile, this is unlikely to be effective as the battery is totally dead.

I had a really good time in CP, though I would have liked the opportunity to nip to the sauna, but it was very popular and booked up very quickly. It's a bizzare place with many strange hazards such as marauding children, high on fresh air and face paint, crazy cyclists who haven't ridden a bike for a good few years and think that it's acceptable to tear round blind corners at great speed and the tamest, (read "totally fearless") squirrels in the world. They're organised, dangerous and armed, (with nashy pointy teeth.) I wouldn't like to leave any small children unattended near them, I think that enough squirrels could take one out, unless of course the child was high on fresh air and face paint, in which case one could probably make money by taking bets on the outcome. "Tonight, a pack of evil squirrels vs Timmy, who at this moment in time thinks that he's a large cat of some kind. The arena is a large pit, with a block of CP nut fudge in the middle.... FIGHT!"

On a vaguely related note, CP has a shop called treats that sells mint choc-chip fudge. Buy some. It's awesome.

Any hoo - I'm off to do some work, but before I leave, I must recommend to all people who've ever played World of Warcraft, or has ever lost a friend to the only activity more addicitive than consuming crack, to watch the WOW episode of South Park. I saw it last night, and it is worryingly close to home for many of my friends, (I saw its power over them and I am yet to buy it on the grounds that I have enough pointless stuff to fill my life with instead of work... like this blog.)

Move Complete!!

I have officially finished moving house, a month after I started living in it!

What makes it official is that I have finally moved a desk into the middle room and set up my desktop PC, (I even fitted my poor baby with a new wireless dongle so it can communicate to the house network!)

Moving the desk was a mission. I dashed to Stoke to grab it in rush hour, (a mistake as I had the sun in my eyes for the whole journey!) Thanks to Mike for helping me to load it! It was so big that it blocked the majority of my rear window. The positive side to this was that when some prat came up behind me with their full beams on, swiftly followed by a huge truck thing that had headlights at rear-window level, rather than the usual blindness, I was protected by my massive table of justice!

I was fortunate enough to be followed down the country lane I had to navigate by a massive lorry, which no-one could get round, so the huge queue of traffic was held at bay, and I was able to travel very slowly, (still faster than the lorry) without being bullied! I even managed to get to my new house by the most direct route, (something that I have NEVER done before!)

Thanks to Markus, who helped me lug the bloody thing into the house!

Anyway, I am now knackered so I'm off to watch an episode of scrubs with J&M before going to bed!

Intelligent Design

Of late I've heard a lot of people talking about intelligent design. These people generally fall into two categories. Scientists that I respect from their past work, (who think that it is a collection of poorly-formed pseudo-scientific ideas used to shoe-horn God into science in an overly simplistic way) and fanatics, (who lovingly embrace any scientific theory that seems to support their own biggoted views of the world.)

Today I went to a seminar about evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming. One of the reasons given for why one of the applications didn't work was irreducable complexity. This troubled me as a concept for two reasons. One is that increasingly, it seems that evidence points towards this not being a biologically feasible theory, and if its not biologically feasible, I find it difficult to beleive that it would magically appear in a simulated version of the process, (unless it was a bi-product of the simulation being too simple.) Secondly, the more I looked at the application, the more it seemed like the problem stemmed from the representation that had been used to solve the problem not the evolutionary technique.

Whilst I appreciate that not everyone who reads this blog is a computer scientist, has anyone else ever encountered a valid example of "irreducable complexity" in a GA? The application is actually quite a trivial one, using GP to generate a multiplication algorithm in a univeral machine. Anyone seen this being solved?

Congratulations All Round

There are many congratulations to hand out for events that have occured recently and whilst I was on my blogging break. Apoloigies if you're one of my friends and I failed to include you in this list for something awesome that you've done!

Congratulations to Alice who has returned from a month in Ghana on a teaching placement. She went as part of a large charity, and funded a large amount of the trip herself. She sounds like that she had an awesome time, and though she'd never admit it, it sounds like she did a great deal of good work too!

Congratulations to a very clever Jools who won the best paper award at the International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems. It's further evidence of the massive amount of hard work that she has put in recently, as is the fact that she is now sick as a dog from all the pushing herself too hard. Get well soon!

Congratulations to Mark and Hellie, who are now engaged. Congratulations in particular to Mark who actually managed to find someone as nice as he is!

Congratulations to Em, (Bluemonki's girlfriend) who was recently awarded a Pass with Merit in her Medical Physics Masters. Again, another testement to the powerful combination of hard work and talent!

A good couple of weeks for the girls especially!

Microsoft Robotics Studio Part II

A while ago I said that I would get back to you with more info about the MS robotics studio.

Today I finally got round to playing with the simulator.

I was quite impressed with the real-world physics and the speed with which the simulator ran. There were four of us playing with it, and within about 30 mins we had a little robot running around a virtual world under control from a separate program. Both the world and the control program had been pre-written by MS and provided as part of their tutorials.

I now only really have three concerns.

1) I need to explore if the simulator can be pumped up to run faster than real-time, (if I want to evolve my robot's behaviour, then I'm going to need to have a few thousand trials on the simulator. If I do that in real-time, I'm going to be an old man before I get any results!) I will explore this soon.

2) I don't know how easy multi-robot simulation is. It would appear that all I need to do is set up another service attached to another robot object and it will just work.

3) It still isn't fully clear how portable the robot control software is. Can I keep linux as the OS on my robot and still run the code on both the robot and the simulator? As all of my existing code essentially communicates via sockets I would hope that the manufacturer will be providing some kind of cross-platform service that will translate the standard ARIA commands into the MS socket stuff, but I'm not sure!

Any hoo, that's where I am. The robot group that I'm part of is keeping a wiki about what we play with and how to repeat our results on our website. You can find that HERE.

Chav Theatre

This morning I was awoken by the sound of a domestic disturbance from the chavy family next-door. "Chav Theatre" is a much under-appreciated art form.

The main theme of the piece was a farce about the son not geting out of bed early enough to be in school. The mother was shrieking at him and throwing him out of the back door, weeping, with no breakfast as punishment. The father was trying to calm her down, but I get the feeling that the underlying subplot was that she was going through some rather severe biological changes and was drunk on testosterone, (or is just generally an unstable psycho.) Either way, chav Jnr was on the receiving end of some quite major anger transference. Her mouth was shouting "You never get up early enough", but I get the feeling that her heart was shouting "I'm not going to be happy until I have a lover half my age and a gin habit."

As they were coaxed back into the house by daddy chav, they let the dog, now wound up into an emotional frenzy, run round the garden to blow off some steam. As it sprinted about, whimpering and crying I was forced to contemplate the notion of how animals end up being reflections of their owners. That obviously wasn't the first thing I contemplated. Top of that list would be largely unrepeatable and involved a tranquilizer gun with a scope and a cheese grater.

Whilst I'm ranting I will allow a rant from the weekend overflow into this entry. When in a crowded shopping area, I should be allowed to kill anyone who gets to the top of an escalator and then stops. It should be one of the bonuses I get for not being an abject moron.

Thank you for your time.