Sound and Fury

It might already be apparent that I like anagrams. Well, I have just discovered this website. Which is much better at finding cool anagrams than trawling through all the hits on this website. Anyway, for your enjoyment I present you some anagrams of people’s names that I think are amusing.

• SEAMUS BRADLEY = A RUDE ASSEMBLY
• IMMANUEL KANT = AM MAN-LIKE NUT
• RENE DESCARTES = EARNED SECRETS
• WILLIAM HENRY GATES = THE MARGINALLY WISE
• ALBERT EINSTEIN = TEN ELITE BRAINS
• ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER = SHEER CRAP HUN AUTHOR

I might even change the name of this blog to “a rude assembly”…

I posted a while ago about a conversation I had in a pub about global warming. Well, I was recently back in that pub, not even with the same people and we ended up talking global warming again, briefly. But that wasn’t what I wanted to write about today. We also talked about the future of gadgets. It’s a platitude now to say that several gadgets are converging into the smartphone: phone (obviously), camera, PDA, music player… The netbook will soon be included in this gadget. That is, if all you want from your netbook is a little browsing and the odd note-taking, then your next-gen smartphone will probably do this… Next steps might involve your smartphone acting as a credit card or a house key. Obviously there are security issues there, but why not have everything you normally carry in your pockets coalescing into one chunk of high-techery?

So what other classes of consumer electronics will there be? The home desktop computer, TV and entertainment systems (games consoles, hifi…) could converge into one super-entertainment hub. This big computer system could also then perform those tasks associated with the idea of “smart” houses that generate some part of their electricity themselves and sell any surplus back to the grid.

So we have two classes of consumer electronics. The super portable pocket tech-chunk, and the super-unportable home HAL. There is, I think a middle ground. There is room for a gadget that is portable, but that doesn’t need to fit in your pocket. This gadget would essentially be a convergence of netbook (if you actually use your netbook for stuff you can’t get out of your smartphone) the laptop proper and the ebook reader.

So the point of all this uninformed speculation is basically that I guess the netbook is a transient phase of consumer electronics. It’s a kind of middle ground between laptop and smartphone. People buy them either for portability or price. Eventually, smartphones will be smart enough to claw away some of the netbook market (those who want portability), and laptop/ebook reader type devices will fall in price enough to take the rest of the market (those who bought a netbook for the price).

So that’s how things will look some time in the future. But further in the future we will be able to PLUG COMPUTERS DIRECTLY INTO OUR BRAINS! THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR! AND THEN THE MACHINES TAKE OVER! STEP FORWARD JOHN CONNOR! AAAAAAH!

I’ve not posted for a while: I’ve been busy doing things other than procrastinating! OK that’s a lie, but the procrastination hasn’t taken the form of blog posts for a while. My website looks much the same as ever, but lots has changed under the hood, as it were. It now validates as XHTML and the columns are the same height and extend to accommodate as much text as needed. Hoorah. I also have an essay I’m rather proud of. (Actual work, shock horror!) It is probably over long and not all that much of it can be adapted to fit into my literature review, but I’m still happy with the (almost) finished product. On an unrelated note, here are some poems that appealed to the geek in me.

Here is the halting problem proven in poem form.

A poem composed entirely of punctuation. (I may have linked to this before.)

I remember a maths lecturer at Warwick starting a lesson by telling us:
Integral t-squared dt
from 1 to the cube root of 3
times the cosine
of three pi over 9
equals log of the cube root of ‘e’.

More maths limericks here.

A history of Western philosophy in limerick form you say? Well why not?

And of course there’s limerickdb. The marked geeky charm of the top 150 indicates that this project is from the chap behind xkcd.

And while it’s not a poem, it’s certainly the same ballpark.

And finally my own contribution thanks to getting bored during measure theory lectures. I give you a haiku about basic measure spaces:

A finite union
of disjoint rectangles is
elementary

I have tons more of these on some scrap of paper in my old notes folder. I also wrote a limerick about Rene Magritte once… (I rhymed “Rene Magritte” with “ceci n’est pas une pipe”)