Archive for the ‘me me me’ Category
Blog hiatus explanation
I do not post here very much, do I? In my defense, I have been posting:
- At the PhilTeX blog I mentioned
- At the TeX.stackexchange blog
- And at this philosophy of science blog
So I’ve not been slacking. Oh I’ve also had that whole “thesis” thing I’m supposed to be working on. I’ve nearly finished working on a paper about imprecise probabilities and decision making. It still needs some work, but once it’s out of the way, I hope to spend a little time working on the disagreement thing I mentioned in my last post…
The start of something beautiful
Today is the official launch of my website! It took a looming essay deadline to motivate me into the epic procrastination that was this weekend. The links section isn’t working, I haven’t configured the stats things yet, and I haven’t migrated this blog over to its new home, but all that is stuff that I haven’t got time to do at the moment; I actually need to get back to writing my essay now…
Please notice the random quote generator in the footer – it took quite a while to get right… I’m afraid it’s a little too subtle and people might not notice it.
Philosophy and classic arcade games
In my LaTeX files, I leave myself notes about bits I still need to write. Sometimes they are fairly mundane: “Weyl/Klein on locally Euclidean.” But ocasionally I leave myself a note that makes me laugh when I go back to find out what I still need to do. The note in question was “Giaquinto pacman triangle.” For a good few minutes this meant as little to me as it probably does to you now. I flicked through the book in question (Marcus Giaquinto’s Visual thinking in mathematics) and found what I was talking about. They do indeed look like Pacmans (Pacmen?)…

Pacmen eating an invisible triangle
Just below this is another note which just says “triangles vs space… asteroids?” I still haven’t worked out what I meant by that one. Perhaps I was thinking of having my whole essay structure based around different classic arcade games. It must have been a long day…
We are all going to explode tomorrow.
Today’s Guardian had a cool little special section about CERN. It is available here. I now have a false colour bubble chamber image as my desktop background. So the LHC hasn’t blown us all up yet, which is nice. If it ever does, I might feel the tiniest bit responsible, since I’m signed up to the LHC BOINC project…
In other news, the nine-point circle is my favourite fact about triangles. I will try and mention it and its relation to incircles and excircles in my dissertation. Hopefully with gratuitous use of diagrams drawn in Kig. If I can be bothered to learn how to get pictures to work in LaTeX… Another thing I’d like to do is learn how to write chapters as separate files and include them in some master file. For 15,000 words it’s hardly worth it, but it’ll be useful for next year. I’d also like to change the default font to Gentium, for no other reason than to make a move away from default LaTeX formatting…
I’m having one of those things… A headache with pictures…
So I looked into it and Topology and sigma-algebra are distinct things. Apparently a sigma-algebra need only be closed under countable intersection, whereas a topology requires arbitrary intersections to be included. Also topologies won’t necessarily be closed under complement, whereas sigma-algebras will be. But the smallest sigma-algebra containing some topolgy is called the “Borel sigma-algebra.” So that’s that all cleared up…
I took out a book on Euclidean geometry today written by none other than Charles L. Dodgson; better known as Lewis Carroll. Cool huh? And what is more, it’s written as a dialogue! I also recently managed to find Alfred Renyi’s Dialogues on Mathematics. So I’m pleased with both of them.
What with various talks and my being quite lazy I haven’t really managed to get a whole lot done today. And I’m to a conference tomorrow. So this week has been a bit of a write-off really. The real proper work on my dissertation kicks off on Monday. Hoorah!
Supercollider? I hardly knew her!
From now on, if I can’t think of a title for my posts, they will all be Futurama references. Until I run out of them (in, like, 400,000 posts time) when I shall move on to Kung Pow, then Commando and so on, in that fashion.
So I went to Rock am Ring at the weekend. I got rained on and sunburned. I also saw lots of bands and so on.
My new favourite thing is the Burnt Pancake Problem because bacteria are better than computers at solving it. Also because both Bill Gates and David X. Cohen have written about it. Incidentally, if computing the nth digit of pi P or NP hard? Apparently there is an algorithm which allows you to compute digit n without having computed all lower digits. That is pretty cool.
How do you find the centre of the circle? And some miscellaneous ponderings.
Given a circle, what’s the best way to find it’s centre? Is it true that the midpoint of every chord of a circle goes through the centre of that circle? How would you prove that? I’m sure it would only take a minute to show if I could be bothered (and if it is true, obviously).
I’m glad to see that none of the restrictive amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill got through the free votes over the past few days.
I just found a great way to end my essay on Galileo. It’s a shame I still need to write another 1000 words, because coming up with such a great conclusion makes me feel I’ve finished. I really am running low on stuff to say now. Essay fatigue has really set in.
Also I am physically exhausted because I went to the gym yesterday and foolishly agreed to go through my friend’s gym routine. It was a bit much for me. However, it was good to do some exercise.
8 days to go until essay deadline frees me from this niggling feeling I should be working harder. At least for a while. Until I begin to feel I should start working on my dissertation.
Successful day. For me. Not for Mark Selby.
I have now officially applied for my PhD at LSE. That’s rather exciting. I’m sure my research proposal thing could have been better, but I need to concentrate on getting my essays finished and the application had been a distraction. So that’s a weight off my mind. My essays are going well too. And I got my iPod working properly. AND I managed to get a birthday present for the ladyfriend. All in all, one super successful day. But it’s now twenty to six and already I can’t be arsed doing any more work. Sigh. I’ve run out of relevant stuff to read for the part of the essay I’ve been working on today and I don’t want to start the next thing now. (That’s a lie. There is another article I should read. But it’s crap…) I really should work more…
In other news, it’s a shame to see Mark Selby out of the Masters already… Other big names out in the first round: Graeme Dott, Steve Davis, Stephen Lee, Matthew Stevens. I wish I could watch more of the snooker this year. But I don’t have a TV. I wonder if I can catch the highlights on BBC’s iPlayer thingy… I have been using that quite a bit recently. I wonder if I should be using it. I mean, I couldn’t see anything in the conditions about it only being available to people with TV licenses…