Well played, Steel Panther!

At the end of February, I attended the first day of the two-day Soundwave Music Festival, primarily to see the headlining Faith No More. I’d perused the rest of the lineup before the day but not to the extent of doing any research on the bands that I did not know.

One such band had just started their set when we arrived to check out the main stage in the early afternoon: Steel Panther.

The picture from the Soundwave App (above) probably tells you 90% of what you need to know. The accompanying blurb:

STEEL PANTHER’s latest release ‘All You Can Eat’ fits this rock ‘n’ roll opus perfectly. There are badass riffs aplenty, arena-size grooves, lyrics about sex, drugs, and senior citizens, and the lingering scent of whisky, a stripper’s perfume, and hairspray.

I’m actually a bit of a fan of hair metal, and Steel Panther have a sound that hits the genre perfectly. Lyrically, though, they were not quite Bon Jovi. They were Spinal Tap!

I commented on this at the time but did not realise that they really were like Spinal Tap, being a parody act complete with wigs. From a small dose it was not entirely clear, except in hindsight: they did it very well.

I have since got All You Can Eat from EMusic and, whilst not for the lyrically faint-hearted, it has some cracking tunes on it. I'm not sure that I would consume the whole feast in one sitting but it's a good one to dip into occasionally for some well riffed silliness.

New Zealand annexed by IGA for Australia

It appears that Putin is not the only one with a greedy eye on a smaller neighbour:

Don't panic!

And if you do, Google can help... (Happy Birthday, Douglas Adams!)

University of Southampton builds world's first Raspberry Pi supercomputer

It's a bit of a busy time of year, so blogging is on the back burner for a bit (and I'm accumulating half-written posts for later!) but this was just so weird and fun that I had to write a quick post. If you haven't heard of a raspberry pi computer before, you can find out all about them here. Basically, they are a very small, very cheap ($25) "credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard".



According to the FAQ:

It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

Well, Prof Simon Cox (and colleagues) of the University of Southampton decided to go one better and used a bunch of them to teach his kid how to build a supercomputer! You can read about it on the Computational Modelling Group website.



What can it do? Well, according to Prof Cox:

“The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”

I suspect it can do a bit more than that: the 64 processor system has 1Tb of memory! Not bad for £2500 (plus switches and, possibly, lego).

An ironic fortune cookie: it's not what you know...

I felt the need to get out the office for lunch today and combat the resumption of bad weather, so I popped to one of the local Chinese restaurants (Chan's) for Singapore rice noodles. And very tasty they were too. I was slightly amused by my fortune cookie, though, working as I do at a University (where knowledge is held in somewhat high esteem):

If only this were true, all of our students that are surfing Facebook when they should be revising (or even listening to lectures!) would have much better marks! I am sure that who you know is important at times to get ahead in life but when it comes to trying to build - or contribute to - an accurate model of the world around you, I'm afraid that it's still what you know that counts.

(Sadly, one of the things the author of this "fortune" did not know, apparently, is how to use apostrophes. If only (s)he had known a copy editor...)

Mystic Mog and the Exploding Tortoise: The Plan

My recent posts have been a bit dominated by the great National Trust YEC fiasco of late, so now for something completely different and altogether not-so-serious. Observant ones among you may have spotted a new "page" appear in the side-bar, linking to a new blog: Mystic Mog and the Exploding Tortoise. This is cross-post from that new blog, explaining what's going on - or hopefully will be going on, at least...

I was chatting to a friend recently about writing fiction and he asked me how I controlled the characters as they had a tendency, in his experience, to go off and do their own thing. Well, in the case of The Cabbages of Doom, I guess the answer is that I didn't! The whole thing started life as a random email to a friend as a bit of light relief, which was followed up the next day by another that picked up where it left off, and then another and another... until I found myself writing a novella. (Too long to be a short story but too short to be a proper novel!) I don't think it was until about half-way through that I really knew how it was going to end and, even then, it took the characters rather longer than expected to get themselves to that end!

The sequel started life almost as randomly, as a title: "Mystic Mog and the Exploding Tortoise". I can't remember how or why that title became fixed - it happened when I was a PhD student before the first story was even finished - but now it has become quite established and the story has grown (or continues to grow) around it. Finishing Cabbages gave me a bit more time to dwell on the plot of the sequel, so I have an approximate plan this time of where it is going, although some things - such as the end - are still lacking. What is really lacking, though, is the writing! Things were a bit slow with my iPad because it's not that great for heavy text input but now I have a MacBook Air, I am hoping this will improve.

I am still finding it a bit hard to make the time, though, particularly as I am stuck in a bit of tricky spot - over 44,000 words are already written but not for quite a long time, so I need to try and refresh my memory (and edit) somewhat before really launching back into it. With so much of the story still to go, however, I have this "will I ever finish it?" feeling that keeps clawing me back.

Time to take action, and that action is to serialise it in the Mystic Mog blog! I've never blogged a story before, so I am not entirely sure how, or even if, this is going to work but the rough plan is essentially to follow the original genesis of The Cabbages of Doom, releasing one "episode" (snippet) each day or so until completion. I have fifty or so such snippets largely ready to go (with a bit of neatening and editing) and a whole 'nother bunch planned, so I should have enough to keep going for a while. The hope is that, in the meantime, I can write some more and keep ahead of myself. (I probably won't post every day.) If nothing else, the commitment will hopefully keep me going!

Once it's "finished", much like with The Cabbages of Doom, I imagine I will go back over it and edit out the bits that don't work, fix a few continuity errors, flesh out some weak bits and whack it out as another eBook. So, if you liked the first one, or just want to help be a "muse" (and, with luck, amused), do sign up and join me on my journey to more madness. I hope to post the first snippet in a day or so.

A trio of piddle

It's American Independence Day and so (for some reason) I thought I should publish a distinctly British post... and what can be more British that a double entendre (no, they don't have to be rude) and some great beer. These fine ales are all products from the Dorset Piddle Brewery. I particularly recommend the Jimmy Riddle and Silent Slasher!

PS. Thanks go to the Flying Fish for the great birthday present! (And apologies for being a dumbass and getting that wrong in the original post. In my defence... beer kills brain cells! :op)

Afrotheria Artstudio-style

I've been taking a bit of R&R from the exam marking this evening and indulging my artistic side. I'm not entirely sure that I have an artistic side but I've been meaning to find out for a while as I used to really enjoy art at school before being encouraged to not to take it at GCSE in favour of a "more academic" nature. (History. Something I still consider to be one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Dropping Art, that is, rather than taking History. Not that I ever used it again.)

Recently, I bought a stylus for my iPad, as I thought this would be a good medium to play around on. Plenty of opportunity to undo! After a bit of on-line investigation and browsing in the App store, I also invested in a copy of ArtStudio, which at £1.99 (or $2.99) is a real bargain and packed full of features. I am still finding my way with it but here's my first offering from a collection simply called "Afrotheria". (Inspired by one of this year's exam questions in which the Superorder Afrotheria - which includes elephants, elephant shrews, aardvarks and sea cows - was used as the Outgroup for a tree of placental mammals.)



I think they need a little work but not bad for a first draft concept piece!

Credits. The animals themselves were copied from a PNAS article by Blair Hedges, "Afrotheria: Plate tectonics meets genomics". I hope the author doesn't mind.

CGI, where've you bin all my life?

I'd been meaning to play around with CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programming for some time as a way of making simple functional websites. I finally got round to it last month, thanks to a great introductory page at Tutorials Point. What I did not realise is quite how easy it was.

I've still only really scratched the surface and scanned over the page to get something up quickly but, in essence, you only need three things:

1. A webserver that supports CGI.

2. An html page containing some "form" code that contains a submit button and (optionally) some input options (e.g. text boxes or checkboxes).

3. A python script (or another language) that generates HTML code based on the variables and values from the form.

And that's essentially it. Actually, you don't even need (2), as you can feed variables directly to the cgi script, but it makes it easier for the user, I think.

My first attempt at this can be found here. It's a bit of silly fun but it shows what can be done with just a few simple lines of code. I've cheated a little bit by using an existing python module to generate the middle of the HTML code but, in a way, that's the point - you can easily adapt existing functional code to output text.

In this case, I use the random "Zen wisdom" text strings that are generated in my code to lighten up error messages when I'm debugging. (If you ever use one of my programs, you sometimes come across such an error message, which always causes confusion (and usually embarrassment for me!) but I think it's a small price to pay for making debugging more fun!) The scary thing is how often the random Zen Wisdoms sound deep and meaningful, e.g.

"It is bold to play jenga with blocks of passion."

Well, maybe not that deep and meaningful!

Flying squirrel Google Psyche

Following my earlier post on Flying Squid, I thought I'd do a bit of Google Psyche on the subject, just out of curiosity. I'd got as far as "flying squi", however, when I realised that flying squirrels were much more intriguing Google Psyche subjects!

I think "pet" and "facts" speak for them themselves. I had also known about the "flying squirrel suit", although I did not realise that it came in a "cuddly" Halloween variant.



The pizza is probably most disturbing thought but it turns out to be the name of a Seattle pizza restaurant, rather than a particularly avant garde topping. Meanwhile, "flying squirrel wrestling" is also not quite as cruel as it sounds but is instead the name of a wrestling move. What a weird and wonderful place the world is!

Santa's reached Germany!

Thanks to Google and NORAD teaming up, I have been tracking Santa's progress this year. He's reached Germany now, so time for bed soon, I think!

Update...



Of course, the actual NORAD Santa Tracker website was even better. You can even watch videos of Santa visiting various major cities and landmarks. Good to see some of the US defence budget being spent on stuff for the good of mankind.

Ode to a Troll (Part 2)

Following up from this morning's (now slightly revised) Ode to a Troll, here is a second ditty about those who love to knock discussions off-topic by repeatedly posting nonsense as "Anonymous".

An interesting group, the Anonymids,
A paraphyletic sub-group of hominids,
Their identities veiled,
Their coherence de-railed,
They still moan, "I didn't say what you think I did".

(This one was in response to one "Anonymous" poster complaining that someone else was posting as "Anonymous" and confusing the issue by misrepresenting their position.)

Ode to a Troll

I'm not sure if a limerick can be an ode but mine is anyway. In case it isn't obvious, this is about a (possible) troll who would post comments only as "Anonymous", repeatedly fail to acknowledge the many (correct) responses to his (or her) challenges and fail to respond to the majority of questions. Eventually, all serious attempts at discourse dried up and all that remained were increasingly fantastical posts. It has nothing to do with the civil disobedience group "Anonymous", as far as I know!

There once was a poster, Anonymous,
Whose refusal to listen was ominous,
With the traffic one way,
Only he can say,
Why he stays here and continues boring us.

(Inspired by real events. I won't mention names, except "Anonymous", which doesn't count.)

Our cats don't like cat scans

In addition to interesting titbits about science, Jerry Coyne at the Why Evolution is True website likes to post about cats. (Having two cats, I can appreciate this!) One of the more recent ones was about cat scans (and a contest). In case you've not come across this, there is a whole website dedicated to "cat scanning" - literally putting your kittie on a flatbed scanner and scanning it!

Inspired, we decided to have a go ourselves. It turns our two are not big fans of the cat scanning! Not even a strategic use of cat treats could overcome their suspicion of the moving (and whirring) white line. A couple of spectacular dismounts left me with one bit of advice for would-be cat scanners: put the scanner on the floor!

Oh well. They won't be winning any prizes but here's our offering to the crazy world of the cat scan:

I eat waffles, therefore I waffle

I just changed my profile picture to this one of me eating a lovely Belgian waffle in Bruges and it got me thinking about food/verb homonyms - words that are food but also verbs. Like waffle. I like waffle. And, I like to waffle, as you (and my poor students) can tell.

But then I got thinking about other ones: cake, chip, chop, cream, fish, jam, juice, milk, toast... all yummy things. Sprout. Hmm. (Actually, I like sprouts.)

Some of these of course, are foods named after verbs. Chips, for example, are chips because they were chipped from potatoes. Likewise, chops were chopped and toast was toasted. Some are the other way round: you fish to get fish, milk to get milk and juice to get juice. Not so sure about cake, though. And back to waffle... Where does that come from?

Then we can cast the net wider with homophones: I drink wine, I whine; I eat meat, I meet; I eat a plum, I plumb. OK, so I might be scraping the barrel with that one. (I'm a bad plumber, clearly.) I'm sure I had some better ones when I started writing this post but my mind's gone blank. Oh well. Perhaps they will come back to me. In the meantime, I think I shall go and chock a lot.