The window of McCambridge’s is one of the great places in Galway to have coffee. Looking onto the main shopping thoroughfare, it combines all that’s best about walking around town with all that’s best about sitting inside not doing that.
With our weather – and the last time I was here I watched a wooden forklift pallet being blown down the road – it’s a priceless resource.
The name of that thoroughfare by the way is Shop Street. I’ve always liked the excessive literalness of that. The adjoining High Street meanwhile is full of pubs. All we really need is for the banks to be down Arsehole Avenue.
But I must stop avoiding the issue, I’m here to apologise. This has been one of the longest breaks I’ve ever taken from writing here. What siren has lured me away with her haunted song? I’ll tell you honestly. Flagrant geekery. Part of the time it’s been Java. Not the coffee, the programming language. Part of the time it’s been Linux. All of it, in short, stuff that most people neither understand nor – and here’s the really tricky part – particularly want to understand.
So writing about them in an entertaining way may be a little tricky. But I will give it a go.
As we can see from this diagram, American football is basically a cross between armed combat and noughts & crosses
American football is like rugby with all the bits I understand taken out. Admittedly that leaves plenty to be getting on with, but it seems to consist pretty much entirely of men charging directly at one another. That can’t be the most efficient way to accomplish anything. To make it even more confusing, when I tuned in no one was doing anything at all. I’d heard there were pauses in the play, but hadn’t expected them to last half an hour.
I gather though that the power cut is not an official aspect of the sport. Which is a shame, in many ways it seemed the best bit. Like the half-time show but with far more scope for improvisation. You’d think this would be cripplingly embarrassing to the Americans, having probably their most-watched event globally turning into an advert for inadequate engineering. Fortunately however they can all blame it on the political party they don’t support, thereby avoiding any conception of collective failure. Democracy in inaction.
Seriously, we did this in class. OK, a lecture. It brought me back to a very different, though in some ways surprisingly similar, but mostly different school I went to many years ago.
I drew a house there too, maybe on my very first day. It’s certainly one of the first things I remember. I distinctly recall having trouble making the place I finished drawing the roof be the same as the place I started. Triangles are the hardest basic shape.
I recall my contempt for the children who drew their square windows in the very corners of their square house. Imagine that! Had they no powers of observation? Obviously the windows should be a little bit in from the corners. I mean, otherwise you’d see the edges of the side walls through the glass. Sheesh.
The biggest difference is that I drew that house with a pencil. Today in school we drew houses with the Java programming language. It’s harder, drawing your house with the Java programming language. For example, at the age of four I didn’t spend a weekend staring at my pencil and paper going “How the **** is this supposed to work?”
So you’re seeing here the first thing I ever made in Java. I really do feel a little like a small child in school again. At the end of the class I printed it out and gave it to the teacher.
There’s nothing wrong with horse meat. Horses are healthy, clean, athletic, and mad. Their flesh is low in fat and full of flavour – rather like Labrador. No, the problem is not with horses per se. There are other, quite valid, reasons to object to this animal turning up unexpectedly in your burger.
The first of course is that an animal has turned up unexpectedly in your burger. It’s more than a bit disconcerting. And, disrespectful. If a waiter brought you something you didn’t order and when you objected told you it didn’t actually matter what you ate, you’d be annoyed. We want to know what we’re putting in our mouths. To an extent I mean. We’re all aware that sausages are made out of eyelashes and earwax, but we’re prepared for that. Beef – or ‘beef’ – we at least expect to be made out of cows’ eyelashes and earwax.
And then there’s this worry: Remember bovine brain and spine matter. How can we feel sure they’re successfully keeping that out if entire horses can slip in? It’s an awful thing for the image of the food industry. Now probably it’s perfectly good terribly bad meat, sourced on the continent as a legal, safe, and seriously cheap filler ingredient for barely-edible bargain burgers. It’s just that somewhere along the way someone missed a memo about what is considered a food in some markets and a friend in others.
So I think it shouldn’t be destroyed. I’d eat it. Once they test it for everything from BSE to cat AIDS, I’d eat it. Whatever about the morality of meat, it’s clearly immoral to kill something and then refuse to eat it – not to mention rude. And as meat in itself is incredibly wasteful – the same amount of land feeds around twenty times as many people on a vegetable diet – it’s just stupendously wasteful to waste meat.
Or well, waste hair follicles and mechanically recovered connective tissue.
I was doing an electronics job, replacing the LNB on a satellite dish. That’s the receiver bit at the focus there; it’s much more than just an antenna though. Controlled by the set-top box, the LNB is actually re-tuned to the particular frequency you’re looking for. The microwave signals are too tenuous to bring down a wire to a tuner, so it has to be done right here. Which is why you can’t watch one satellite channel while recording another, and have to find something on RTÉ to watch instead.
Before I understood this I’d tried to split the signal from a dish into two boxes, with predictably unpredictable results. What you need is an LNB that has multiple outputs. Here we went with four, so you can record two satellite channels while watching two others. Say.
A word of warning if you’re considering doing this – I got the LNB in Maplin. Don’t do that. Maplin are well known to be on the pricey side for some things, but in the case of the LNB I paid at least double what I could’ve got this for online. They provide a great service and I like to patronise them, but that’s a bit much.
Especially as it wouldn’t fit. The current LNB (pictured) has an integral bracket, The new one doesn’t, so I had to go back for one. Also – now that I’d actually done research – some silicone grease and self-amalgamating tape. The former is a jelly-like waterproofing agent in a tube, the latter a strange sort of rubbery tape that melds with itself to make seals for the cable connections. And if the LNB was overpriced, these accessories were eye-watering. The bracket, a small piece of plastic that bends into shape, fetched €16.49. Here’s the same thing for a fiver. The job could have been done for half nothing with a little planning.
But anyway, armed with all the right bits today I climbed the ladder, undid the cable and pulled off the old LNB, pushed in the new one with its bracket, did up the cable, came inside and turned on the TV. And this is where the weird thing happened.
It worked first time. No hitches, no inexplicable problems, no wasted hours figuring out what I did wrong. Swap the units over… TV pictures. I didn’t have to alter the positioning of the LNB, futz with its polarisation angle, re-scan the channels, nothin’. The job was just done.
An earlier, failed attempt at calendrical simplification
In many ways today is already the first day of a new year. Christmas is the de facto midwinter festival after all, and we’re already a week into the actual solar year. I wonder aloud, was December 25th chosen because it was the halfway point between the logical (but pagan-associated) solstice and the incorrect but well-established Roman new year?
So to start the year I will deal with some unfinished business. I’ve been promising to return to the topic of calendar reform since… January, gawd. As you’ll no doubt remember, I reached the conclusion that it would be nice if we could have one that keeps time with both the sun and the moon. The obvious problem here is that in reality, the periods of day, month and year just don’t divide into one another evenly. Why should they, after all? They’re just rocks spinning around in space.
The trick then is to find approximated versions of these periods that fit together neatly enough. Many civilisations have tried only to give up. Islam settled on a fully lunar calendar, which is why it is about 11 days shorter than the solar Christian one. That itself still has a vestigial lunar element; its months were originally in time with the moon, but various reforms have broken this almost beyond recognition.
Not though, beyond repair. They managed to square the solar cycle by adding an extra day every four years; we just need a similar idea to fix the months, so that the waxing and waning of one moon fits precisely into each. Because that would be cool. I put a lot of work into this, and figured out that it could be done quite easily. The real month is very close to being 29.5 days long, so we could simply have alternating calendar months of 29 and 30 days. No problem!
OK, months of that length don’t fit evenly into a year. There will be twelve and a bit between every winter solstice. But that’s the whole point – there aren’t an even twelve months in a real year, and trying to make it be that way has wrought a world where we all have to memorize a stupid rhyme. We just need to accept that and then we can move on.
But what we do want is for the months to stay, at least approximately, at the same time of the year; April will always be Spring, September Autumn, and so on. And as it turns out, just two “leap months” in every five years is sufficient to keep them aligned with better than 98% accuracy. Add a couple of minor rules and the cycles can be kept in time for thousands of years. I checked this out thoroughly, even using spreadsheets to painstakingly project the cycles centuries into the future. Incredibly, it stays in time. It seems almost too simple. Why had no one thought of this before?
Well of course, someone had – quite some time ago. After several days of calculations, I realised I’d basically just reinvented the Jewish calendar. It’s a fine piece of astronomical workmanship with roots going back to the very beginnings of civilization, and has been successfully keeping sun and moon in harmony for a very, very long time. Why don’t we use it, or something like it? I strongly suspect, simply because it is Jewish.
Woah. Well we got our term assignment project in. I have to admit, it was a pretty messy last-minute rush. Which is funny because it’s about Project Management, and in it we go to great lengths to display our knowledge of all the techniques and methods you can use to make sure that your project is not a messy last-minute rush. The irony is intoxicating.
Kinda head-wrecking too. It’s a project, about doing a project. It’s our Project Management project management project… project? I can’t tell any more. To make it worse still, there is no real project involved. I mean, it is a real project. But our real project is to describe a project we had to make up – ours was installing a computer system into a retirement home.
We didn’t actually get to create a system that elderly people would be depending on, thankfully. But we did have to research and understand the obstacles we would face if we did. So we went around and asked questions to a lot of real retirement home owners and staff, who were all very helpful. That was a good exercise, but still it was weirdly detached from reality. In an actual job like this, what would you be spending most of your time thinking about? Your client of course. Trying to please the bastard. We had no client. One of the members of our team tried to pretend, but it’s just not the same. Her interests are our interests.
So our objective, in our project about our imaginary project, was to please ourselves. No wonder it was hard to keep focused.
Incidentally, the picture has nothing to do with the post – as far as I know. I just thought it was time I used it. It’s a lovely brass electric candle-offering machine from a church in Castlebar, Mayo. You put in money, press a button. and that’s lighting a candle for someone or something. Oddly un-prayerlike, but kind of beautiful nonetheless.
They carry him back to their village and worship him as their god
You might expect someone who thinks so much and so deeply about mathematics and science to be socially uncomfortable with the normal humans, but Randall Munroe is an engaging and amusing speaker – both in front of a lecture theatre audience and over dinner later.
OK, how many people have I lost already? I need to remember that not everyone is immersed in Geek culture, even now. Randall Munroe is hugely famous; possibly the second most famous person I’ve met. After Colonel Sanders.
But he’s not… TV famous, for want of a better term. Not public property.
I spend much of my social life in a world where everyone but everyone knows who Randall Munroe is. That world is congruent with the other one – you’ll find XKCD fans in every country of every continent – but it is still a shadow world. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Geek culture is mainstream now, what with everyone being on Facebook and all, but really most people just hang around the gateway to the other realm.
And so he can have literally millions of fans – of which I am certainly one – yet still speak at an obscure conference in a small city, and have a quiet dinner after with friendly and only slightly overawed strangers. If you’re going to be famous, I think that may be the way to do it.
The window of McCambridge’s is one of the great places in Galway to have coffee. Looking onto the main shopping thoroughfare, it combines all that’s best about walking around town with all that’s best about sitting inside not doing that.
