The Telegraphic

Just to let you know I’ve made it to Japan safely. I’m currently enjoying a hot Milo and a beer with Corey and Kimmy in their Leopalace.

More to come later. Until then!

The new Radiohead album has had quite a few spins already. That is, if I *could* spin it, I would have, but had to settle on using my mp3 player. I get real pissed off at the tab sites, so I made a list of the better tabs here. Some of them aren’t complete, but you get the gist.

15 Step
Bodysnatchers
Nude
Weird Fishes / Arpeggi
(All I need)
Faust Arp
Reckoner
House of Cards
Jigsaw Falling Into Place
Videotape

I am the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, the noose and the rapist, the field’s overseer. The agent of orange, the priest of Hiroshima, the cost of our desire. Sleep now in the fire.

I just read an article on queuing on the ABC website. Apparently some cultures don’t have queues, so the English are starting a school on the Isle of Wight to teach queuing theory so they don’t miss out on either “the British way” or the brilliance of four vowels in a row (matched only by continuum and vacuum for coolness). The bit that got my attention though, was:

“One social anthropologist believes Britons are even capable of forming one-person queues at bus stops.”

Have to say, I expect it from Today Tonight, but not the ABC. Why would you believe that? And why Britons, not Americans? Do Briton’s queuing skills surpass the rest of the world SO FAR that they alone can make one person queues?

I’m excited, I’ve been thinking about “the infiniteness of infinities” instead of studying for exams. In fact, I’m so excited I thought I’d get it written down so I didn’t forget:

• Imagine an infinitely long piece of string. It extends from -∞ to ∞. Now, imagine a 3D network of n intertwined strings, each end going off to ±∞ in the (x,y,z) directions. Could the latter be expressed as n times more infinite? Are the directions in which the infinites are pointed of interest?
• As n approaches ∞, we get an infinite amount of infinities. Does defining “finitely-infinite” and “infinitely-infinite” lead to constructions we can compare? Or could we define the “un-infinite” part of an infinity?
• After a little research (i.e. wikipedia-ing), if found this: Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel. Clearly if infinity was defined along these “finite-infinite” lines, we could avoid some of the paradoxical outcomes. It looks like there have been some attempts to do so in set theory.

Just for some contrast to that over-thinking, Ahmad Fatfat has one of the funniest names ever.

“If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

This is perhaps one of the most overly analyzed questions in the world. So, I’ll attempt to answer it to be one of the cool kids. I assert that it does make a sound - making the following assumptions:

• The forest has air in it. This is a pre-requisite for forest formation, at least on planet Earth. Perhaps there are airless forests on other undiscovered planets, in which falling objects would not make a sound. Trees would of course need to be transported to that planet, by some sort of interplanetary transport ’ship’, in numbers great enough to constitute a forest. This could perhaps be done by taking some seeds, nutrients and air with you, terraforming the planet, then removing all the air, uprooting a tree and dropping it, without noticing that you had done so.
• The tree does in fact fall, as the question states. I am in no way saying that trees that appear to have fallen have made falling related sounds in the past. In fact, I believe it important to prove the tree fell before making rash claims like ‘it made a sound during a fall that may or may not have occurred’.
• Neither the tree nor the forest is moving at highly relativistic speeds. The amount of energy needed to accelerate a tree/forest system up to a relativistic velocity would no doubt cause all the particles to form a degenerate gas. It would be near impossible to define ‘falling’ and ’sound’ in a system such as this. Of course, this assumes that we roughly know the velocity of the forest, which I think is a fair enough assumption, seeing as we know that there is a tree, which falls, in a forest.

So I’m basically saying that the tree makes a sound because it’s in a forest and falls, which moves the forest air around it. This is sound by most definitions. You could of course define sound by other, less intuitive and practical definitions. I invite you to do so. If you can’t speak/read English well then you may have an entirely different answer, like “qe?”.

I like PNG files. It’s probably a hangover from using Fireworks too much. After finally opening my site in IE7 however (still avoiding opening it in IE6), I noticed that the colours were all noticeably out of whack with the CSS. It seems there’s a gamma issue with PNG files that never gets implemented right. The choice atm is to remove the gamma info or to go back to gif and jpeg.

Upon a bit of googling I stumbled across a few PNG utilities which can do the job:

• PNGOut: Crushes PNGs into smaller files sizes by utilizing “magic”. It’s a command line utility. There’s also a Windows frontend, PNGOutWin, which you can use if you want to pay money. Very easy to use though.
• PNGUtils: A big load of PNG utilities for Windows.
• PNGGauntlet: A GUI that uses PNGOut to crush PNG files. It’s free as in beer.

I just read Shaping the Future by Charlie Stross, which presents a plausible extrapolation of what the future of information might be like. I’d like to present a second, less likely view - one in which we have a backlash against information, in which the cat is alive and our curiosity is the dead one.

It is often said that the quest for information is “the human condition” - that ever since the first fateful bite of that apple in Eden, we’ve been on a never-ending search to collect knowledge. It’s an instinct I know well, and I haven’t lost it after 18 years of education. However it’s taken me 18 years to get to a point at which I haven’t really discovered anything new, which is a bit sobering. And it’s just going to get worse.

One of the interesting numbers extrapolated in Charlie’s post is the amount of storage space required to store one year of somebody’s videotaped life: 10¹³ bits. He claims that this isn’t really a big number when you compare it to the number of atoms in a mol: 6.022 x 10²³ atoms. Our entire lives could fit into a handful of sand. With CCTV, internet cookies, credit card logs and ID cards, our information is already in transit to the sandpit.

Scientists have long been sand-men. Countless specific books and journal articles line the shelves of University libraries and Wikipedia grows by more than one person could possibly read by the day. For me to know everything about one person, including myself, I’d need to digest 10¹³ bits a year. Reading a book is sadly a lot slower - my ‘bandwidth’ is definitely less than 500 words a minute, or:

500 words x 5 letters (average) x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365.25 days x 8 (ASCII bytes to bits) = about 10¹⁰ bits a year

So that means I could only digest about a 1000th of my life, ignoring the fact I don’t remember everything I read (and that video bits probably shouldn’t be compared with word bits). This calculation is of course flawed - the important point here is that there’s a maximum amount of data our brains can process, and there’s already easily enough ‘information’ to saturate ourselves in.

That’s exactly the problem I foresee - that to get to the cutting edge of science, one has to wade through a lifetime’s worth of theory, calculations and data. Is it possible for the answers to become so complex that you can’t begin to answer them? Of course, the way forward is made easier by the stepping-stones laid by our scientific forefathers, but what if these stones are too far away to aspire to - if we can’t get there within a lifetime?

For me, the obvious answer is the end of science. We will have reached the point at which we can’t possibly know more about the universe. This really represents a question of complexity: Is the universe too hard for us to comprehend? If not, it may be possible for us to reach the ‘answer’, whatever it may be, and when that happens, science becomes moot. In either case, if we can survive as a species long enough to reach an information limit, the world will be a very different (and possible boring) place.

MathML is probably the least likely markup language to get you chicks. Perhaps this explains the comparative lack of interest and support. Below I’ve collected a list of useful stuff for the budding MathML coder to get their hands dirty with.

• MathML fonts - if you wanna view MathML in Firefox, you’re gonna need these. As usual linux users have more hoops to jump through. I suspect they’ll appreciate the challenge.
• Mathplayer plugin - if you wanna view MathML in Internet Explorer, you need this. It’s 3rd party. Obviously Microsoft have been trying to impress girls with their flashy Vista GUI, so left MathML support to someone else.
• ASCIIMathML - A javascript that turns equations (in `backticks`) into well formed MathML, meaning you won’t actually have to know what you’re doing to get it working. It’s as easy as Pi *hahahaha*.
• Math Symbols - Character references for symbols and Greek letters, as well as the rendering of each in your browser. Useful for if you’re planning on writing MathML using ASCIIMathML above.
• MathML How-to - A quick guide to making an MathML page, by the W3C.
• HTTP Headers How-to - MathML won’t work unless the browser is told by the HTTP Headers that it’s XML. This method, apparently, makes Opera and Camino “cough up hairballs”, so you might want to read this @ Musings as well.

Want more? Give Wikipedia’s MathML article a shot. I reckon the W3C’s MathML homepage is crap, but you can try it if you like.

The Savage stood looking on. “O brave new world, O brave new world …” In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision! Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. “O brave new world!” Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. “O brave new world!” It was a challenge, a command.