It's now been about nine and a half years since I started a private diary in the form of a set of heavily encrypted text files on my computer. The intention of that diary was to facilitate my learning from experience, by recording any experiences I thought might be useful in future and which I might plausibly forget. Over the years it has proven its worth again and again, for this and other purposes. When I started it I had no particular intention to confine it to any specific subject area, but it's turned out to be almost entirely full of my love life, not because that's the most important thing in the world to me (it isn't) but because it's by far the most significant aspect of my life which isn't basically sorted.

It occurred to me recently that I seem to write more in that diary when something either bad or difficult is going on in my life, because that's usually when I need to do a lot of thinking (and hence writing). When things become good I record it, but if they stay good for a while I generally don't need to say much about it; for example, at one point there's a nearly complete lack of entries for a year and a half while I was going out with lark_ascending. (Mind you, this isn't universal: there's also a dearth of entries in late 1998, not because my life was good but because I was suffering from RSI at the time…) So I then wondered, what would happen if I plotted the frequency of my private diary entries against time? Would I see obvious peaks clearly attributable to specific events in my past, or would the highest points turn out to be conjunctions of several things, or would it mostly be random noise, or what?

So I've been having a go at this, on and off, for the past few days. The biggest problem is choosing a granularity at which to break the graph down: too fine and you get a huge number of tiny spikes with no clear pattern, but too coarse and two meaningful spikes merge into one and you start to lose interesting detail. Lacking any particularly clever means of picking a granularity, I eventually resorted to plotting the graph at a wide range of granularities and paging back and forth until I found the most meaningful-looking one. (Which turned out to be a standard deviation of about a month; I wonder if that in itself says something about the scale on which I perceive meaning in my life.)

As it turns out, at that resolution I do indeed see clear peaks which are nearly all attributable to specific incidents (and, given the predominant subject matter, in many cases specific people). There are a couple of exceptions (the second highest peak on the entire diagram, in particular, appears on close inspection to be a group of unrelated minor incidents all occurring around the same time for no obvious reason), but most of the major features on the graph are clearly identifiable.

It's quite tempting to start measuring the relative significance of the various incidents by the relative heights of the peaks, but it turns out that this is a granularity artifact: dial the granularity down and the highest peak divides into smaller ones and a different peak becomes the winner, but dial it up and the highest peak becomes shorter and squatter while several smaller peaks in a different area merge into one big one and collectively overtake it. I suppose each peak must be at its highest when the graph granularity is roughly equal to the duration of the incident that caused it. So probably what I should really be doing to measure the impact of each incident on the diary would be to measure the overall area under the graph which it caused, but that's not so easy to read off from the peaks and troughs.

If anyone has any useful input on the problem of plotting a usefully informative representation of a data set like this without needing an intelligence-guided choice of parameters, it would be welcome. In case it's useful to know, I'm currently plotting the graph by replacing each data point with a Gaussian (effectively a convolution, if you consider my original data set as a sum of Dirac deltas) and summing, rather than plotting a conventional histogram with fixed dividing lines between blocks (I was worried that a peak might look very different depending on whether it crossed a dividing line, so I picked a strategy which didn't run that risk); so ‘granularity’ means choosing the variance of the Gaussian appropriately. I'm vaguely considering the idea of picking the variance of the Gaussian for each data point differently, according to some metric related to the surrounding points, but no particularly sensible-sounding idea has come to mind yet.

A couple of months back I posted a couple of long and serious musings about what programming is all about and how you learn to do it. Today I'd like to talk about a more frivolous topic, which is what verb you should use for it.

Among actual programmers, the nearly universal usage is that what you do to bring a program into existence is to write it. There are a bunch of other verbs you might use if you want to emphasise particular ways of doing it (‘hack together’ or ‘hack up’ if you did it messily or in a hurry, ‘grow’ versus ‘build’ to indicate something about the development methodology, and so on), but if you're not saying anything in particular about the way you did it, you talk about writing a program. You might have ‘coded it’ or ‘coded it up’ in a pinch, but I think in general you wouldn't have ‘programmed’ it, because when ‘program’ is used as a transitive verb its object is the thing you're instructing, not the things you're instructing it to do. You program a computer, or a VCR.

It's always faintly bugged me that not everybody knows this; non-programmers will occasionally use startling other verbs such as ‘making’ a program, or perhaps ‘creating’, or (as I heard today) ‘manufacturing’ one. This used to really annoy me when I was an arrogant teenager; but since then I've been gradually becoming more tolerant of this terminology, because it seems to me that it's just reflecting a difference of viewpoint between the programmer and the user. A programmer knows in their bones that what they actually do to bring a program into existence is to type in a large amount of text, hence ‘write’; but a computer-illiterate user just knows that they receive a consumer product ready-made from someone, and doesn't particularly want to have to distinguish it from any other consumer product, so they naturally use the same verbs they'd use for a physical object. So although this usage still jars me and grates against my intuitive sense of the appropriate terminology, I tolerate it on the grounds that there's nothing actually wrong with it.

(Also, I might do more than tolerate ‘make’ in some circumstances; a modern big-budget game, for example, probably involves at least as much graphic design and music recording and voice acting and 3D modelling and scriptwriting and other non-coding activities as it does actual programming, so I might plausibly feel that the correct term for the creation of the game as a whole was not in fact ‘write’. Given that, ‘make’ would probably be as good as anything.)

The verb I occasionally hear and can't justify on those grounds is inventing a program; this one is definitely inaccurate. ‘Invent’ describes the process of coming up with an idea, of working out a good way to do something. Many programs require no particular invention at all, and even when one does, you don't really invent the program, you invent an algorithm or a design or a structure or a game concept or some other high-level abstract idea which ends up embodied in your program but might also be embodied in somebody else's. Also, the process of invention only covers the formation of the idea: invention leaves you knowing how to do something, but having invented it you still have to actually do it, and that's where ‘write’ comes in.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of Programmers for Linguistic Pedantry. Thank you for your attention.

Addendum: Whoops, I left out ‘develop’, which is another entirely acceptable term used by the people in the know. It's a particularly appropriate term when the program in question is especially large, and/or the product of a big team rather than one or a few individuals, and/or was substantially put together from existing parts so that it wasn't literally written afresh for the purpose, and/or took a particularly large number of trial and error cycles to get to its eventual state :-)

Also during my busy weekend I drove lzz, a friend of hers and drswirly to Emmaus for random shopping. I came back with a big pile of books which is making me a little worried that a shelving problem might be looming in my near future. My lounge has little remaining space for new bookcases, the existing ones are nearly full, and I fear my book collection might have to overflow into the study soon.

During this trip I managed to buy two copies of the same book by mistake: I saw one copy on a shelf, debated whether or not to buy it, and eventually decided yes and added it to my pile. Fifteen minutes later I spotted another copy – same edition – on a different but nearby shelf, and I assumed that it must be the copy I'd seen the first time, that I must have forgotten precisely which shelf I'd seen it on, and that when I debated whether or not to buy it fifteen minutes earlier I must have decided no. Having made these three wrong assumptions, I then decided I'd changed my mind and would buy it after all, so I added it to my pile. Imagine how silly I felt when I unpacked my bag of books at home and found two copies of it, particularly since (as was required by the nature of the error) it wasn't even a book I'd been entirely sure I really wanted! Oh well, it's fodder for my giveaway books pile…

This weekend was the ‘Party to End All Parties’, at the soon-to-be-vacated Suite.

I had originally planned to go to this on the Saturday only, but a bit of schedule-squishing allowed me to find time to go to the Friday evening as well, albeit not drinking, and I was glad I did because it was a good fun evening involving several people I would otherwise not have seen.

On Saturday afternoon I found part of the party on Midsummer Common, where I briefly bruised my fingers on juggling clubs and then got inveigled into a game of three-way chess, which is very silly. Then, after detouring via jaylett's barbecue, back to the Suite for the Saturday evening stretch of the party, at which I more than made up for my sobriety the previous evening. I seem to have a mental blind spot regarding large wine glasses; I tend to think that if I've only had (say) three glasses, that surely can't be all that much wine. Oops. I also have a somewhat hazy memory of at least one person taking some things I said or did the wrong way, so when I go to the Calling tomorrow I fear one of my mission goals will be to make sure everyone I like is still talking to me. I'm probably being unduly pessimistic there, but I'd prefer to be sure.

I had been hoping that the Party would fail in its stated mission of ending all parties, but when I got up on Sunday morning I suddenly wasn't so sure it would be a bad thing, because I had the kind of hangover that makes phrases like ‘never drink again’ spring rapidly to mind, along with ‘owowowow’ and ‘oh my god what did I do last night?’. The hangover itself vanished quite suddenly in mid-afternoon, to my great relief, and it seems likely that I won't in fact let it stop me drinking forever (it wasn't the worst hangover I've ever had, although it was probably in the top ten), but I might nonetheless avoid booze for a few days at least…

This morning I woke up when my alarm went off, pressed Snooze, and went back to sleep for another nine minutes. Or so I thought; in fact I'd absentmindedly mistaken Off for Snooze, so when I next woke up thirty-five minutes had zipped by and I was definitely on the late side. I don't remember ever having made this error before.

I think that if I was sleepy enough to get that wrong, it's probably a good thing on balance that I got the extra shut-eye…

It's early in the week, but I doubt I'll beat this in the next few days: yesterday evening I implemented a string search function (equivalent to Perl's rindex) recursively.

( because I needed to work around an LJ bug, and LJ made it difficult for me )

(I described this hack and the reasons for it at post-pizza last night and it got a spontaneous round of applause, which was unexpected and fun :-)

The first time I saw the road markings on red routes in London, I exclaimed ‘Ooh, red double yellow lines’. Then I laughed at myself for uttering such a self-contradictory phrase without thinking; but I later came round to the view that this is in fact a much better phrase than ‘double red lines’, because a listener previously unaware of the concept is likely to naturally infer from it that red double yellow lines are likely to appear at the edges of roads and have something to do with stopping or parking, whereas if you said ‘double red lines’ to someone who didn't know what you were on about then I'd only give fifty-fifty odds at best of you not having to explain that they were road markings rather than double red lines in some totally other context.

(The above paragraph is a perfect example of a curious tendency I've noticed in my writing recently: the entire paragraph consists of one short introductory sentence followed by one absolute monster sentence. I seem to do that a lot. Not sure why.)

Yesterday I checked with Google and was somewhat surprised to find that it disagreed with me:

Results 1 – 10 of about 636 for "double red lines". (0.37 seconds)
Results 1 – 2 of 2 for "red double yellow lines". (0.31 seconds)

I was reminded of this by yesterday's lunchtime trip to Tesco, during which I bought myself a pack of yellow pink wafer biscuits (gluten-free, naturally).

Last week I posted a lateral-thinking question and promised to follow up with a list of the responses I'd got when I previously ran this question in 1998.

Here were the 1998 answers:

• Become the Enemy (Amf)
• Build a third fortress inside the inner one (lovelyoliver)
• When the Enemy get in, show them a big bomb for which you're holding down a dead-man switch, and strongly suggest they go away again (lovelyoliver)
• Call on the power of Satan (lovelyoliver)
• ‘I'd read that the best weapon was the element of surprise. So I started to beat myself up.’ (drswirly; originally from a Paul Merton sketch)
• Perform an inversion with respect to the inner fortress, and then lay siege to them (drswirly)
• Cause the inner fortress to levitate and run away to elsewhere (bjh21)
• You shouldn't have built weapons that can point inwards as well as outwards in the first place (jaylett)
• Fill the gap between the inner and outer walls with glue (stephdiary)
• Flee through a trapdoor or tunnel (cowe and Brock, independently)
• You still have the tactical advantage that you know their new weapons intimately and they don't (cowe and me, independently).

This year's responses seemed to put much more of an emphasis on telling me I shouldn't have got into the situation in the first place; there were a lot of things like ‘of course you booby-trapped the weapons before retreating’, ‘revoke the firing codes for the weapons’, ‘broadcast the self-destruct codes for the weapons’ and ‘you're doomed anyway so you might as well sit down and have some tea and cake’.

Also various people dealt with the problem by positing facts which simply made it not a problem: you might have run out of ammo, for example, or the enemy might be too stupid to use the weapons anyway. Two people independently pointed out that siege weapons and anti-siege weapons aren't the same thing (the former are anti-structure whereas the latter are anti-personnel) so the enemy might simply not have had much use for my weaponry after all. Notable in this category was damerell who suggested (as he put it) a large-corporate answer: the reason we lost the outer fortress in the first place was because none of the heavy weaponry ever actually worked or it was more dangerous to the operators than to the targets, and so if the enemy tries to use it all we have to do is sit back and have a laugh.

cowe had the new and entertaining idea of hiding all my valuables in one of the outer weapons before retreating to the inner fortress, presumably in the hope that the enemy would get into the inner fortress, ransack it, find nothing and go away again.

mooism suggested escaping by means of an enormous catapult, which I'm frankly astonished nobody thought of in 1998 given that at the time my social group had a running in-joke all about enormous catapults. He also suggested calling on the UN for help, which I suppose is a better bet than Satan. Maybe.

So I posted a month ago about the police suspecting me of growing cannabis due to the tinfoil light-proofing over my bedroom windows. Among the responses to that was one from shermarama, who pointed out that hydroponics shops will actually sell you reflective plastic sheeting designed specifically for keeping light in or out, and that this might work better than tinfoil.

In fact the tinfoil, although the best idea I had yet come up with, is not terribly easy to work with due to tearing very easily. I made a couple of biggish holes in it when I put it up, and then there were an enormous number of pinpoint holes which it seems to have been gradually developing over a year by no terribly obvious mechanism. So at the weekend I placed an order over the Internet, and yesterday I celebrated the summer solstice by taking down my ad-hoc tinfoil and replacing it with proper blackout sheeting designed by professionals.

The same shop also supplied a 50m roll of light-proof metal foil tape to fasten the sheeting with. This impresses me in particular because I'd previously bought metal foil tape from Mackays who charge several pounds for a three-metre roll; I had assumed the high price was an unfortunate consequence of the nature of the stuff, but now I've bought 50m for under a tenner I suddenly believe Mackays' price to be an unconscionable rip-off.

Actually putting the stuff up was surprisingly fiddly. The most difficult bit was cutting the sheeting into the right size pieces, because it's so big (I got a 2m × 5m piece) and staticky and slippery that it's almost impossible to lay it out flat and measure right angles and distances on it. I think I know how I'd do it better the next time (start by measuring all the pieces you're going to need, work out the smallest rectangle of sheeting you can cut all those pieces out of, cut that rectangle off the main sheet and then you might have a fighting chance of opening that out flat for subdivision), but this time was quite a pain.

But once you manage to get the stuff up there, it works extremely well; I recommend it. Definitely better than any of my previous solutions. My windows are still not perfectly light-proofed (the main source of leakage is now crinkles in the metal tape where I put it up incompetently), but I've now reached the point where more light is coming in round the bedroom door than through the windows by a full order of magnitude, and that's more than good enough.

And now I've got reflectively covered windows, high electricity bills (well, in winter at least) and a paper trail linking me to a hydroponics shop. The search warrant can surely only be days away :-)

When I walk from the office to Tesco at lunchtime to buy my lunch, I will occasionally also buy some chocolate to cheer myself up, if I'm having the sort of day where I feel I need it.

Usually what then happens is that six hours later I get home entirely un-cheered-up. The reason for this is not, as you might immediately suspect, that chocolate is a transitory thing and any self-respecting source of angst can easily outlast a sugar rush. It's because, nine times out of ten, I then completely forget about the chocolate and so I don't eat it! I suppose the advantage is that I don't bloat like a balloon in times of great woe, but it generally makes me feel somewhat silly later on.

I've just found a pack of Minstrels from one of the bad days last week. I'm actually more cheerful today and don't need cheering up that badly, but I'm going to eat the Minstrels anyway because I know if I don't then they'll only lie there forgotten for anything up to a month or so.

So, last week was generally frustrating in a wide variety of ways, at work and at home; it culminated in Friday evening, in which I sat in the Castle with a bunch of people expecting to see taimatsu, only by 10pm she hadn't shown up so I wandered over to the Carlton to see nassus who turned out to have already left. Can't help feeling I got something wrong there; also, the evening going like that was a microcosm of my entire week.

Saturday was better, though. I went down to London for my sister's cunning plan to take Mum up the London Eye. I'd never done that before, and it was great fun; extra points for the terribly civilised idea of having a premium ticket which not only cuts down your queueing time massively but also gets you a glass of champagne during the ride. (Or ‘flight’, as all the official text insists on calling them; looks as if British Airways' involvement has had a linguistic as well as an engineering influence.)

The security checkpoint confiscated my Leatherman before I got on the Eye, which I thought was odd. They gave it back when I got off half an hour later, of course, but I confess I'm not sure what kind of serious threat they were expecting someone to be able to pose with a penknife, even a largish and quite sharp one. On an aeroplane I would naturally assume they were scared of me pulling a 9/11-like stunt, but that fundamentally relies on aeroplanes being steerable; even if someone did take over a London Eye capsule at knife point I think it would be a bit tricky to fly it into the Houses of Parliament! (In fact, if I really wanted to do such a thing I wouldn't go for the capsule at all; I'd go for the motor control centre, wherever that is, and rev it right up. It'd certainly work in a cartoon, and it might even work in a Bond film :-)

Sophie asked the guide when was the best time to ride on the Eye, to which he responded ‘between 7 and 9pm on 5th November’. Brilliant. And apparently they don't even charge extra for that…

Then we went to a fish restaurant, which is only about the third time I've eaten out anywhere since being diagnosed coeliac. They actually had a special list showing the allergy information for all their dishes, which was impressive service; sadly it was obviously inaccurate in two places, which was less impressive. We pointed that out after the meal and got it corrected, but it did leave me less than confident that it wasn't non-obviously inaccurate anywhere else :-/ Still, the food was excellent.

Now back at work, and hoping that something might go my way this week.

‘Do you know what I want right now, more than anything else in the world?’

‘No … ?’

‘Neither do I. ’

A couple of weeks ago I posted a question asking my readers to gauge their general life luck using the metaphor of some dice which might or might not be entirely random.

I expected the answers to divide into two categories: simple answers giving a number in the range 1 to 6, perhaps with some justification, and clever lateral-thinking answers which stretched or extended the metaphor in order to express something more complicated. I wouldn't have been surprised if the former class of answer had given rise to some sort of debate about what level of luck we take for granted in the privileged western world and whether it's plausible for (say) anyone at all who isn't homeless or starving to rate their overall luck at anything below (say) 4.

Instead, somewhat to my surprise, every single answer I got was a clever lateral-thinking answer; everyone who had an opinion at all felt that a single number from 1 to 6 was insufficient to adequately summarise the nature of their life. The overwhelming consensus, as I see it, was that life simply isn't that simple; and as I entirely agree with that (my own answer wasn't simple either), this absolutely delighted me.

It also made me think that an audience of this nature might appreciate me re-running a lateral-thinking audience-participation question I posted in this diary way back in 1998, when LJ hadn't even been thought of and this diary only existed on Monochrome. When I posted it, I didn't particularly intend to solicit answers from the audience; I was mostly whinging, in a cryptic and metaphorical way, about some things which were happening in my own head at the time. As it turned out, though, I received a wide variety of excellently lateral responses, some of which even made sense when translated back through the metaphor. On the basis that many of my current readers were not my readers then and might enjoy coming up with their own answers to the same problem, here it is in full:

Picture this.

To protect yourself against the marauding Enemy, you have built two fortresses, one inside the other. In the inner one go all the things you really can't afford to lose; in the outer goes the less critical stuff. Also in the outer goes an absolute shedload of heavy weaponry, for defending the walls.

The Enemy comes, as you knew they would, and you fight them. You successfully hold the wall for over ten years. Then – for whatever reason, maybe an Act of God, perhaps a tactical error, possibly a genius taking over on the other side – the outer citadel falls. You'd hoped this would never happen, but you'd been prepared for the idea that it might; so as you'd planned, you retreat to the inner fortress, which should have enough weapons in it to protect the truly vital things therein.

The Enemy masses for its assault on the inner fortress, your last line of defence. As they prepare for their attack, an icy feeling sweeps through you. You've just realised that the Enemy is better armed than you'd expected. Why? Because they've taken over all the weaponry in the outer fortress.

What do you do?

In a week or so I'll post the answers I received in 1998.

I went to taimatsu's birthday picnic yesterday, and now my knees hurt.

This is because there was a load of juggling equipment there, and several people actually using it, so I picked a few balls up and joined in for a while. Juggling when I haven't done it recently (which, these days, is most of the time) always hits my leg muscles hardest, because while the actual juggling is not particularly strenuous the crouching down to pick things up requires me to lift my bodyweight a metre into the air repeatedly, usually in a hurry and at a strange angle. So I generally end up with my legs feeling a bit wobbly from fatigue, and then painfully stiff the next day. And lo, this has happened. I never learn.

On the plus side, thanks to Lucy cunningly situating the picnic in the shade of a ginormous tree, I am only slightly pink-tinged rather than painfully sunburned, and that without having to use any suntan lotion. (I hate that stuff; it's slimy and horrible and hard to wash off. The only thing more unpleasant than suntan lotion is sunburn. If I can possibly get away without either, I prefer to.)

It was a good picnic, containing a good combination of lovely people I already knew and lovely people I hadn't previously met. Special mention in the latter category must go to huggyrei, for living up to her name and also startlingly lifting me into the air in the middle of a conversation. (The conversation was about physical strength, so it was relevant to the point she was making; nonetheless it was the most unexpected thing that's happened to me in mid-conversation for a while.)

Today I plan to do as little as possible for as long as possible with all the windows open. Bah, hot weather.

It's happened a couple of times before that I somehow get confused in the middle of the night as to what the time is, either because my alarm clock had got confused or because I had. Well, it happened again this morning; I woke up at what I thought was 6am, went to the loo, went back to sleep, and what felt like several hours later I woke up again feeling much more rested and the clock said 6am. I have no idea whether the clock got confused in the middle of the night or whether I somehow dreamed I'd looked at it but hadn't, but either way it was confusing. I checked to make sure the clock hadn't been right the first time and wrong the second time, but my emergency backup timekeeping device agreed with it the second time, so I have no idea whether it was me or it the first time.

Today at work I have to write a document, which reminds me that a conversation I was part of in the pub last night invented the fabulous word bibulography, which is a section you put in an academic (or other) publication giving due credit to all the alcoholic (or other) beverages which sustained the author(s) through the writing of said publication. The front cover of ‘Asterix and Cleopatra’ has one, for example.

Gosh, that has to be typo of the day. While typing ‘writing’ in the above paragraph, it came out as ‘wronging’. How on earth did I manage that, I wonder?

I've mentioned before that I often find myself noticing fundamental bugs in the way the human brain works and wishing my brain was better designed.

Here's another one: my brain is often very bad at predicting how it would behave in dangerous or scary situations. It's annoyingly common for me to evaluate several courses of action in advance of an event, decide which one I like best, and then when the time comes to actually commit myself then I discover that the one I'd chosen is terribly scary now that it's actually physically staring me in the face rather than being considered as an abstract strategic puzzle.

If I were designing an ideal intelligence, I would give it a properly working imagination. It would be able to set up a hypothetical situation, put itself into that situation, and then reason exactly as if it were real. It would either be able to temporarily completely suppress the knowledge that the situation wasn't real, or alternatively it would just be able to reliably inhibit that knowledge from impinging on its reasoning processes. In fact, now I've written that either/or, I'm not entirely sure I can robustly define the difference between those two possibilities; but either way, the fundamental architecture of my intelligence would be designed in such a way that if it decided it would react a certain way in a scary situation, you could depend on it being right.

At stephdiary's house last night there was a silly conversation about papal infallibility, and how the Pope is only infallible when he specifically says he's being infallible. It occurred to me that this was probably just as well, since you'd hate to be burdened with the responsibility of infallibility when you'd just got up and were wittering incoherently over your breakfast.

This morning I got up, saw the ‘1’ on my calendar, and while still half asleep said to myself ‘oh yes, it's July now’. I think that proves my point. If I'd been the Pope and my infallibility had been always-on, there's no telling what might have happened to the nature of time and causality as a result of that absent-minded misstatement!

I decided the other day that it was about time I did some spring cleaning; specifically, scrubbing the encrusted gunk and scum off various kitchen and bathroom surfaces. The scouring pads I normally use for washing up are the kind designed not to annoy non-stick saucepans, which makes them far too feeble for a task like this. So I wrote ‘vicious scourers of death’ on my shopping list and went out to Sainsburys.

The scourers I came back with have a fantastic warning message on the back of the pack: ‘CAUTION: This Scotch Brite® scour pad is a highly effective scouring tool.’

The warning then goes on to explain that you should therefore not use them on anything scratchable, polished, varnished, non-stick or otherwise vulnerable to being fatally scoured, and gives a lengthy list of unsuitable surfaces, which is all reasonable enough; but I can't help but find it slightly amusing that consumers have to be warned with dire capitals and boldface that a product performs its intended function well. One is left with the feeling that perhaps the quality of other scouring pad products have conditioned people to expect mediocrity so that they might be startled at not getting it.

I suppose it's not actually all that silly: other very efficient products might also carry semantically similar warnings. Superglue tends to be sold with warnings pointing out that it sticks things together so well that it can easily be inconvenient and/or dangerous; and it wouldn't be too unreasonable to put a warning on a kitchen knife which was above-averagely sharp. So I think it must just be the wording of this particular warning which amuses me. Also, there's the interesting fact that if the same sentence had appeared on the front of the pack I would probably have dismissed it as self-serving marketing propaganda bearing no relation to product quality, but seeing it in the warning section on the back makes me believe it more readily and think ‘aha, just what I need’.

Still, the scourers didn't disappoint; several bits of my flat are now cleaner than they've been in years. In fact the draining board on which I put dirty crockery is now so clean that I'm reluctant to put any dirty crockery on it, which is clearly a risk I should have anticipated!

mooism recently posted a link to a web game called ‘Tringo’: http://www.donnerwood.com/tringo.html.

He said his current high score was 278, so I had a go at the game to see what would happen. For those unwilling to go and play it themselves, the game involves trying to fit a sequence of loosely Tetris-like pieces into a square grid, and getting points for forming a complete rectangle of filled squares which then vanish. If you can't fit a particular piece in at all, you can skip it, and points are deducted.

I immediately found a strong sense of motivation to get through a round without having to skip a piece. However, having succeeded at that (and scored somewhere in the region of 240) I felt no urge whatever to try again and attempt to finish with a higher score.

I think I'm fundamentally far more motivated by the desire to achieve specific qualitative goals than I am by quantitative challenges such as scoring as much as possible on the way to those goals. I'll pay attention to score-maximising play if it has a material advantage to me (such as an extra life or power-up every N points) which might help me reach a qualitative goal, but otherwise I generally have very little interest in score compared to more ‘natural’ milestones: if one person reaches level N of a game, whereas another person dies on level N-1 but has a higher score, I will not consider there to be any particularly interesting way in which the latter has done better.

(And no, I can't generally persuade myself to see ‘complete this game with a score of at least <previous high score> + 1’ as a you-either-do-it-or-you-don't qualitative goal; I spot immediately that it's a quantitative goal wearing a qualitative hat and am not fooled.)

I've been meaning to post this mild frivolity every time I hear or think of the NMA song I just listened to. This time I was at a computer when it went past, so it's time I actually got round to it.

My dice still roll in sixes
And yours still turn up ones
And I've taken my good fortune
And I've run, and run…

– New Model Army, ‘Marrakesh’

What kind of numbers do your dice turn up, in general?

I think for my own answer I have to assume my life is governed by more than two dice; most of mine reliably produce fours, fives and sixes, but a couple of them seem to turn up almost nothing but ones and the occasional two.