Myself, Coding, Ranting, and Madness

Music Tagging: 'Titles'

I originally brought up my tagging system late last year, and then failed to follow-up on what I had to say. I (briefly) caught up on tagging music itself, so it felt like a good time to catch up on this, started with what is possibly my most hated tag

Illness

So, I have unfortunately gone from the end of term into illness with precious little time in between. I had hoped that this was just going to be over in less than a day but, as it is, I'm actively considering dragging myself down to the doctors.

That partially aside, I can't really post Doing the Impossible and then flunk out of a weeks worth of posts because I'm under the weather — especially when I'm aware that Courtney is going for a post a day for the entire month. So, instead, I thought I'd immortalise one of the ‘remedies’ that I've been trying out over this time.

Doing the Impossible

The words on the back of the store-room door in Bristol Grammar School's Mackay Theatre, where I learnt how little is actually impossible, if you're willing to push people to their limits. To the best of my knowledge, that sign is still there to this very day — along with one of my larger tool boxes — looking down on the people I left behind to run that theatre.

Lack of a Post

Silence has somewhat fallen over the blog due to the combination of the end of term, running out of buffer and — contrary to what first thoughts might tell you — far too much of interest going on. So, today, we have a brief overview of what's been happening politically in (roughly) chronological order:

Relative and Absolute

Facts — often misleadingly called statistics — are wonderful things. People have a wonderful tendency to throw them about without too much thought to what they really mean.

The one which got me today was a list of registered interests for the Conservative party with relation to the Health and Social Care Bill — something that I have, so far, avoided saying too much about. The list is long, and appears to have been researched rather well. But, it has some real problems

Tidal Locking

Tidal locking is a phenomenon that I, when starting this post, didn't really understand. I knew that it's a term used for (astronomical) bodies that rotate on their own axis at the same rate as they orbit their parent body - or, seen another way, the day and year have the same length.

An example that is close to home is the Moon, which has a period of approximately 28 days. It is this property that causes the Moon's surface to always look the same - the famous valleys and mountains in the night's sky

100th Post

This short, sweet post will be the hundredth post for this blog. I'm been at this for coming two and half years, although the actually active months probably come out to about one year. I'd like to thank my little group of regular readers (there will be hugs for you all) for the corrections, ideas, and occasional comments typed into the comment box.

Reliably Testing Randomness

We interrupt the regular stream of posts for an open question to the few readers I have - a very serious one:

Testing for true randomness is easy enough - you can just look at the entropy of the system, in whatever measure it is in. In random sourced data, the entropy should be zero - each piece of information tells you nothing about the next. However, most 'random' processes are actually entropy generators. Take, for example, a Bernoulli Process, which is the sum of a series of independent Bernoulli Trials. The probability of a particular value being sampled in a Bernoulli Process will be known to most people as the Binomial distribution.

Bra-Ket

The way that vectors and matrices are taught has always struck me as somewhat odd. Even the fact that we think of them as separate concepts is a bit weird, because they are just a particular type of vector. There again, schools do take a good long while to get past the fact that squares are nothing more than a special case of oblong, so maybe it's a teaching thing in general that is shown to be general better for helping people to learn.

Digital Economy Act: Appeal Lost

So, who remembers the Digital Economy Act? It was passed in something of a rush at the end of the last Parliament, and was then challenged by . They lost, rather conclusively, after four days of a hearing around February. It took them a couple of weeks to announce an appeal. In mid-July, I posted that the appeal had been thrown out of the High Court.