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Bah! Missed.

Driving a carload of people to Owen's this evening, I reversed into his driveway, went a bit too close to a sharp bit sticking out of his gatepost, and tore a huge hole in one of my tyres.

This is, fortunately, what spare wheels are for. I'd never changed a wheel myself before, but it didn't turn out to be too difficult (apart from the fact that I somehow managed to break the handle off the wheel-changing tool holder while getting started!) and I've just got home in one piece. So tomorrow I suppose I'll have to go and get the tyre on the other wheel replaced; and in just a moment I'm going to go and have another try at cleaning the remains of the nasty oily gunk off my hands.

It hadn't been the best of days up until then, but that just pushed it over the line into One Of Those Days.

It's well known that endless editing and re-editing is a common activity among people who write; there's a strong tendency to be dissatisfied with your own words and always think you could just make them that bit better.

I don't often write in a creative fashion, but I do frequently find myself writing functionally, in order to convey concepts clearly to people. One of my key techniques for doing this well is to try to put myself in the position of the audience, i.e. somebody who doesn't already know whatever it is I'm trying to convey; it's very easy to leave a crucial fact or step out because you've forgotten that not everybody already knows it. Trying to imagine yourself in the position of the audience doesn't completely eliminate this risk, but in my experience it goes a long way towards it.

What seems to happen for me next is that I go a bit too far; once I've made the thing I'm writing as clear as I possibly can, I'm still dissatisfied with it because I'm imagining an even stupider audience. I seem to be reasonably good at not allowing this to drag me into endless re-clarifying; I do have the ability to think ‘right, that'll have to do’ and stop editing. But for a while afterwards I look at whatever I've written and can't help thinking it's completely incoherent waffle with no clear point and no relevance to its context (if any). And then I suddenly snap back from imagined-audience mode into me mode and realise that in fact it's absolutely crystal clear. That moment, when I suddenly realise that something I had given up on trying to make the least bit comprehensible has actually made perfect sense all along, is extremely weird.

I've been having this a lot over the past few days, so it occurred to me to wonder if anyone else gets anything like this.

When you have an opaque door with a push plate on one side and a pull handle on the other side, I'm always a little nervous when I approach from the pull side: if I'm just reaching out for the handle and someone pushes the door vigorously from the other side, it could hurt my hand, and I rely on my hands a lot. It's likely that my paranoia about this is unnecessarily strong; if so it's due to an incident when I was about thirteen and a kid at school kicked a door incredibly hard from the push side so that it swung through 90 degrees and then shattered the doorstop; nobody's hands were near the pull side at the time, but it always stuck in my mind that they could have been, and that whenever you approach an opaque door there might be a kick-happy rugby player on the other side of it.

Clearly the correct strategy given such a door is always to push it gently if you're on the push side, so that whoever's approaching the pull side has plenty of time to get out of the way, and if you're on the other side to keep your arm loose so that it will just be pushed aside rather than hit painfully if the door suddenly opens. I do both these things conscientiously, but I can't help wondering if there ought to be a better solution involving modifying the door itself to avoid this race condition entirely.

In most cases, the simplest answer is just to put a small window in the door, but that doesn't work when it's the door to (say) a toilet and half the point is that it doesn't have a window in. There must be other options, though. Perhaps if you made the door swing in both directions and put a pull handle on each side, so that simultaneous bilateral access would result in a harmless tug-of-war rather than a painful clobbering? But some people would probably push the door regardless, and I can't think of a cunning mechanism which allows a door to be pulled from both sides but pushed from neither. Alternatively, you could have the door slide open, so that you had to push sideways on the handle, and then simultaneous operation would merely cause it to open twice as fast; but that would require structural cleverness in the wall around the door, and might well turn out to be unacceptably fiddly to implement. I wonder what other simple solutions exist.

So, atreic and emperor got married yesterday, which was nice.

( wafflings on clothes, four-part harmony, ceilidh etiquette and exploding umbrellas )

I saw a web page just now which referred to Lewis Carroll as ‘the Reverent Charles Dodgson’.

I rather like that typo: ‘Reverent’ instead of ‘Reverend’. It suggests that what distinguishes a clergyman is not that people revere him, but that he reveres God more than most people. It carries connotations of humility and religious devotion; it suggests almost subliminally that the clergy are a means for exalting God, rather than vice versa. It's almost monk-like, somehow.

Of course, as an atheist I have no personal interest in whether or not God gets exalted. But even to someone who doesn't subscribe to the belief system in question, it seems to me to strike a more constructive note: ‘Reverend’ suggests ‘I know the Truth and therefore I'm great’, whereas ‘Reverent’ is more like ‘I know the Truth and therefore I'm going to get on with doing stuff about it’, which seems like a more generally well-adjusted attitude to me. And it's less intrusive to non-believers, who might interpret ‘Reverend’ as an unwanted command to revere someone they don't feel like revering, but who can't argue with ‘Reverent’ as a purely factual description of what someone does for a living.

In the unlikely event that I ever get round to doing something about one of my SF novel ideas, I might stick a religious order in the book and use ‘Reverent’ as the official honorific for its priesthood. The more I think about it from any angle, the more I like it.

(Hmm. If a religious order couldn't decide which of the two honorifics to use and wanted to avoid a schism, would they hold a reverendum?)

Happy birthday, Niccolò Machiavelli!

(Oh, and me too.)

When I was at school, I had a decent run of being the best mathematician in the school. One of my good friends was the second-best. (Well, so I thought at the time; in fact if I remember rightly he turned out to do better at Cambridge than I did. Perhaps at school I just had the advantage of being a year ahead.) He was a more naturally sporty type than I was, and he once observed that it always made a refreshing change to spend time with me, because while to everybody else in the school he was primarily a mathematical genius, from my point of view he was first and foremost a rugby player.

I too fall between two obvious categories, in various contexts. For example, I'm a hybrid mathematician and programmer; so to my colleagues at work, I'm often the person they think of when they have problems of a mathematical nature, whereas my mathematician friends tend to think of me when they have computing-related problems. For another example, I dress in a way that makes me look somewhat like a goth at work but somewhat like a normal in a goth club.

I don't imagine this sort of thing is in any way unique to me; it seems obvious to me that very few people are going to fall at the extreme end of any spectrum you can name.

However, there are a few spectra of which I generally consider myself to be at or near one end, and on those spectra it's occasionally disconcerting to encounter someone even further towards the same end. One of those spectra is the one ranging from pure maths through applied maths to physics; I've always considered myself to be a pure mathematician through and through, with a general distaste for the sloppy and approximate world of applied maths and no time at all for the uncertainties of actual physics. I avoided all the applied courses I could during my degree, and never regretted it.

So it's been rather a surprise this morning to find myself being consulted on a physics-related maths topic, on the grounds that I was more of a physicist than the mathematician consulting me. I couldn't actually do the maths in question, but I was able to explain intuitively what it all (well, most of it) meant in physics terms, which was what I was actually asked for. Evidently I'm further away from the end of that spectrum than I'd previously thought.

The sentences ‘I don't care’ and ‘I don't care one way or the other’, used so often as near-synonyms, are just occasionally completely different.

This has probably been obvious to everyone else for ages, but I've only just noticed it. It's perfectly possible to care in general about a situation, so that the pain it causes becomes your own pain and so that you wish to lend your strength to help achieve the most favourable outcome, without having a strong opinion one way or the other about which of the mutually exclusive possible outcomes would actually be the most favourable.

(I'm having those half-asleep long thoughts again, I'm afraid. When I'm sleeping in until nearly noon and lazing around all day, they don't seem to be restricted to the early mornings any more.)

Way back in 1999, the_alchemist persuaded me to read ‘Paradise Lost’. For a while afterwards I found myself thinking in iambic pentameter; Milton's poetry warped my brain into a rigid column ten syllables wide. I got over that after a while, but since then I've had something of a fascination with sentences in normal speech which just happen to come out in perfect iambic pentameter. I always notice them when they go past; I point them out (and irritate my friends). I naturally speak them quite a lot; I've always wondered what this fact portends.

Just now I had a fit of silliness. I wrote a short program to go through a piece of text and pick out all the sentences it thinks are in iambic pentameter. Then I ran it over the entire archive of my various online diaries, to see what it would find.

It doesn't function quite reliably. It uses a pronunciation database I downloaded to tell it the stress patterns in each word, but without a lot more intelligence it won't ever be able to determine the inter-word stress pattern given by the sentence's overall meaning. So the output needs filtering by a human, to get rid of junk like ‘I do hope it gets its act in gear soon’. However, about 50% of its output turned out to be plausible, which I thought was pretty good for a first attempt.

It turned up a number of sentences which made surprising sense out of context and were pleasingly poetic as stand-alone iambic pentameters:

Another day; another interview.
I wonder if it's something in the air.
I have a microwave and no food yet.
At least there are no known bugs any more.
Intense peeve of the day: the Halifax.
Excuse me while I go and kill some things.
I've had a victory at work this week.
The port had cleverly run out, you see.
Suppose I'd better go and do that, then.
Well, that's most of the chaos sorted out.
And then it goes completely off the rails.

As you can probably tell from the above, frustratingly few of the sentences I turned up rhymed with one another, but just enough did for me to be able to put together this almost coherent piece:

Hello out there and welcome to the show!
For starters, getting here was half the fun.
Another interview has taken place.
But probably a fairly normal one.

I oscillate between two states of mind.
I've learned to canter, mostly by mistake.
That's the whole kitchen up and running now.
Last Saturday, I baked a ginger cake.

She tells me they were selling gothic rock.
I wonder why it didn't just say so.
It never happened and it ain't so hard.
Shame it had milk in it, but there we go.

I might not even get it back today.
I shall be happy when it's gone away.

No more work for two weeks :-)

A reasonably well known cliché among fantasy novels where the fantasy world is accessed from the real one seems to be that at the end of the series some action is taken which seals the two worlds forever apart (perhaps to stop the publishers continuing to demand sequels), and those real-world inhabitants who have memories of the fantasy world gradually find those memories fading and eventually seeming like no more than a childish fantasy, or a dream.

(I can't actually bring to mind the name of any novel which did this, off the top of my head, but it feels like the sort of thing which wouldn't surprise me in the least if it happened at the end of any given book.)

Last night I had a dream involving a fantasy world, accessed from the real one through a doorway. At the very end of the dream I performed a magical action which closed off the two worlds from one another and turned the doorway into a cupboard – making sure to keep a couple of physical souvenirs so I'd remember it had really happened and not come to believe it was all a dream, because I knew that usually happened in this situation in books.

Then I woke up, and now (of course) I immediately believe it was all a dream. I suppose I must have lost those souvenirs down the back of the sofa or something.

I've noticed recently that it seems strangely common for me to find myself thinking long, philosophical thoughts during the journey to work. I can only assume this is a result of striking just the right balance between the aftereffects of a night's sleep (which tends to make me more creative and imaginative), the complete absorption of about half my brain in driving (all the bits of my mind that are useful for thinking about concrete things and the here and now are busy doing so), and perhaps also an unwillingness to start thinking about anything more immediately useful because I'll only have to abandon it when I get there and switch over to work stuff. (I don't think about work outside work, to a first approximation. Being able to hang it all on the hook when I leave the office is something I've always valued.)

This morning's thought was introspective in nature, and concerned a strange contradiction I've just noticed in myself.

If somebody goes to war against you, it's usually because they want something specific. Assuming that something is not your complete and total extinction, it might be some of the land you live on, some resources you control, access to a holy place, régime change, you name it. Whatever it is the enemy wants, if you fight back at all it's because you want to keep it badly enough to fight: you judged the cost of fighting to be less than the cost of giving it up. But if the war grinds on and it gradually becomes clear you're losing, that judgment has to be re-evaluated: as the enemy, through superior numbers, weaponry or strategy, manages to make the cost of waging the war continually increase, you eventually reach a point at which it costs you less to just let them have what they want than to carry on fighting. At this point surrender is the sensible option: just give them what they're after, in the hope that they'll at least stop hitting you.

That's the rational view. Emotionally, surrender is a state of mind; you just feel ready to give in, tired of fighting. It's the emotion diametrically opposed to stubbornness; a willingness to follow the path of least resistance, no matter what implications it has for your moral integrity, your pride or your rational best interests.

When I go to bed on a Friday night feeling more tired than I have been in weeks (owing to a hectic week of doing urgent things at work, in particular finishing up an urgent project and finding another even more urgent one taking its place, plus a night of total insomnia in the middle of all that), and then I fail to get to sleep at all until nearly 2am and wake up at seven with absolutely no prospect of dropping back off, still tired but no longer the least bit sleepy … I start to have that feeling of surrender. Whatever impish agency in my mind determines my sleep cycle, it is clearly waging some sort of war against me, and right now I feel as if I should just give it whatever it's after so it'll at least stop doing this to me. Whatever it wants from me, it can't be as bad as having this happen to me on a semi-regular basis.

Almost more frustrating than having it working against me in the first place is the fact that my sleep cycle isn't a rational general; its hostile actions against me are without objective; there is nothing I can offer it which will make it stop. When I have that feeling of surrender deep in my bones, there is no path of lesser resistance than the one I'm already taking, and I really wish there were.

I've always been a little suspicious of attempts to design a human-like artificial intelligence. Of course it often leads to good SF, which I'm strongly in favour of :-) but many things which make good SF are not things you'd want to go round doing in reality.

In particular, I feel strongly that making a computer behave like a human mind misses the vital point about computers, which is that they're good at things humans are not, such as repeatability, reliability, extremely fast linear processing, not getting bored and so on. The most sensible way to use a computer, it therefore seems to me, is to apply it to jobs where those features are virtues, not to try to convert it into a second-rate human. Also, if you want a human-level intelligence, it's surely easier just to hire one: there are a silly number of billions of us in the world already, and quite a few are looking for work!

Every so often I notice a particularly unhelpful feature of the human brain which reinforces this opinion, by making me feel even more strongly that what we need is a partnership with devices which don't have the same weakness, not an attempt to construct yet more things which do.

In what order would you naturally list the four suits of a pack of cards?

While I'm posting silly and inconsequential things, a fun thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. You know those price signs you get in supermarkets which advertise (for example) 1.5kg of flour for 41p, and then say ‘(27p per kg)’ so you don't have to work out the overall value for money yourself? It occurred to me that it would be fun to apply that to the clothes section: imagine a pair of shoes, and a price tag saying ‘£35.00 (£17.50 per shoe)’. Or better still, trousers: ‘(£11.00 per leg)’. It wouldn't do to be swindled by pack prices :-)

stephdiary wrote yesterday about having been pestered by a ‘God-botherer’, as he put it, while stuck on a broken-down train. It's obviously the weekend for it: this morning I heard beckyc's doorbell ring downstairs, and shortly afterwards my own doorbell rang. On the way to answer it I decided it was most likely Jehovah's Witnesses or similar, since they seemed the most plausible people to be going door-to-door on a Sunday morning; and sure enough, when I looked out of the window above my door, there were two people waving a ‘tract’ (their own word) at me entitled ‘All Suffering Soon To End’.

I get a lot of mileage out of that little window. For those who haven't visited me: I live in a first-floor flat with internal stairs down to my own front door at ground level. One of the hall windows is directly above the front door. So when my doorbell rings and my fifth sense tells me it's an unwelcome door-to-door pesterer of some kind rather than someone I actually want to see, I don't bother going down to the door; I just open that window and ask what they want from up here, saving me the effort of going down and up the stairs and also protecting me from any attempts to get a physical or psychological foot in the door.

That said, I would actually quite have liked to have talked to them on this occasion. Owen's comment yesterday had reminded me of the fundamental curiosity I always feel about proactive religious evangelists of this nature, and I've never yet managed to actually ask one about it. Sadly, when I do encounter one it never quite seems to be the right time; in this case I was half way through my breakfast and it would have gone soggy if I'd left it too long, so I just said ‘no thanks’ and shut the window again.

( the description of my fundamental curiosity gets a bit long )

On my work machine, I've just discovered, /usr/share/dict/words contains no uncapitalised words beginning with ‘x’.

(Debian doesn't do much better, but Red Hat takes the cake.)

You know it's going to be a bad day when something topologically implausible happens to you before you even step into the office.

As usual, I took the excessively cold-sensitive hard disk cartridge out of my car stereo this morning and put it in my coat pocket so it could come inside and keep warm during the day. Today, I missed the pocket and accidentally dropped the disk down the hole in the coat lining, so that it fell down into the cavity between the lining and the main coat fabric.

That's not too surprising; that hole has been steadily growing for a while and it probably wants fixing now. What was odd was that I then stuck my hand into the hole in search of the thing, but when I found it there was a layer of lining fabric between it and me. Huh? Did it go into the pocket after all? <grope> No. Are there two different holes in the coat lining? <examine> No. Are there in fact two layers of lining at all to make this occurrence topologically feasible? <rub between fingers> Apparently not. So how the devil has the wretched thing managed to be separated from me by a layer of fabric no matter what I do?

I did get it out in the end, but not by any means that yielded a greater understanding of what had happened. That coat has served me well for <counts> seven and a half years now and survived several major repairs, but I wonder if it starting to flout basic mathematical principles might be a sign that it's time I finally started thinking about getting a new one.

We've been having some problems with the electronic door locks in the office this week. At various points they've stopped being able to recognise our pass cards. On most of these occasions they set themselves to always-unlocked, which was unhelpful in security terms but at least not a serious inconvenience to the building's population of legitimate employees; on one occasion they set themselves to always-locked, so people were actually trapped in the building (though only briefly).

I had assumed that these two failure modes covered the full extent of the ways in which an electronic door lock could plausibly fail. Foolish me. This afternoon the speakers which make the locks go beep on unlocking have jammed on, so that all the locks in the building are emitting a continuous high-pitched whining noise.

I think this is the locks' way of letting people like me know that they haven't nearly exhausted their options yet; they're only just getting started, and doubtless have several more acts of imaginative malice lined up for the near future.