Freesteel

Rather than take still photos, here’s a camera video of the ingenious pump sump down in Ireby Fell Cavern at the weekend of 12 July 2008.

I’ve been helping out with drawing the map (and updating the special software to help with drawing it), written in Java — a language which someone has called “the COBOL of the 21st Century”. Ouch!

Here’s a sample of the map at that section, which I don’t have time to do my XML sit-ups necessary to put in the colour.

Key: The Crossed region is the sump (a water filled passage you normally need to cave dive to enter. The squiggly passage at the top is at least 50metres higher in a dreadful area called Cripple Creak. Gotta go.

Julian noticed a lot of spam showing up in the html sources of the side bar, as hidden text. So finally there was a good reason to give in and update to the latest version of WordPress. We also threw in a few more plugins to protect us from further spam bot attacks (or whoever spammed this site).

dunno what technorati is, but I’m s’posed to include the following text into a post:

Technorati Profile

While the coolest people on the internet carp on about 3D printing for figurines and candy, some people get on with it…

The glove box is to give it a good washing. Because it’s not possible to levitate parts of the model above the base, it’s necessary to lay down support material under the over-hangs. In this case it’s a different type of plastic whose residue can be washed off after it is peeled.

These models are for use in some of Becka’s haptic psychology experiments. To the extent that you can identify objects by their shape when you fondle them with your fingers, suggests how you might represent them in your brain. After all, it’s not surprising you can recognize a small horse in a photograph, because often the animal stands far away and doesn’t occupy much area on your retina. However, if you can recognize it’s a horse from a piece of plastic in the palm of your hand that is in no way similar to the size of a horse, then that tells you something else.

While in Tuebingen I did get a chance to witness the most outrageous machine ever, which is being built in this room of the Cyberneum, next to the other room with the big shiny robot arm that seems to serve no other purpose than to fling people around. (I seem to remember some discussion over how to program that robot to make sure that it could never move through a position where it would mangle the human against itself.)

What was being built was a 2-way conveyor belt.

Sadly, I didn’t have my camera with me. But if you can imagine a ten metre long powerful conveyor belt that’s strong enough for a man to walk on, and then stack about 50 of them side by side on rails so the whole chain can wrap round underneath, you have the picture. It’s ridiculous; there has to be a better way of doing it (they tried using a floor composed of ball-bearings, but there was too much friction).

So, that’s the state of Virtual Reality technology today. It’s worth doing it once, just to see if it can work. But all those cyberpunk lost-in-VR SF stories are now looking as quaint as the let’s travel to the Moon stories did when the first thirty storey high Saturn V rocket rolled out onto the launch pad. Since then, gravity has gotten no less, and the energy density of liquid hydrogen has gotten no more, so the reaction is still valid even if there are idiots who forget it.

My guess is that this is one of the most used lies in the world of business.
But sometimes it’s true, like yesterday when I called a company a second time to chase up an invoice that was well overdue. On my first phone call I was told that somebody would call back but never did; and on my second call a day later I was told that a “cheque is in the post”… I can’t help but see a connection here, or do you really believe the cheque would have been in the post without my insisting phone calls, after nearly 2 month since I sent the invoice?

Luckily I knew about the late payment legislation and how to word an invoice: If the money is not handed over after 30 days of your invoice date you can claim compensation for debt recovery as well as interest for every day the payment is late.

Funny that the company who owed the money probably know all this from writing their own invoices: They are charging their customers periodically for their products, and I bet you that any overdue payment is dealt with in a swift and efficient way, much more efficient than we are.

Finally the cheque arrived today, and my invoice for debt recovery and interest will go out today as well. I will keep you posted on the next cheque that should be in the post soon.

I remember the spray-painted message that appeared on the concrete underpass when I was twelve. It said:

“Borrowed time.”

For statistical purposes the country has been divided into small blocks of land called Output Areas. These allow us to look in more detail at smaller local areas. Output Areas have been combined to form two layers of Super Output Areas known as Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) and Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs)
Quoted from here

I live in an area of Liverpool that has been a ‘Neighbourhood Renewal Area’ for a number of years now. There’s a long (more than 20 years) history behind it:
The Granby area of Toxteth had it’s share of rioting back in the 1980’s and also later. It was about mainly black youth being fed up with the police harassing them for no other reasons than their skin colour. I don’t know too much about the housing situation back then. One problem must have been that ’slum landlords’ neglected the houses, only interested in the rent they could squeeze from people at the bottom rank of the social ladder. People who cared tried to change this by getting the authorities to use compulsory purchase orders (CPO) against irresponsible landlords to take these houses into public ownership and improve living conditions. CPOs had not been used like this before, they were meant for road building, for airports and so on. Now these houses were given to housing associations who gave them to tennants that needed the social welfare system to find somewhere to live. Houses and living conditions were improved.
But over the years the area became more and more a dumping ground for people who were not wanted in other, more afluent, areas of the city. Eventually plans emerged to demolish the whole area and build something new. The housing associations were all for it and stopped using the houses for tennants. Instead the houses were tinned up, after stripping them of pipes, light fittings, toilets, sinks… things that you need to live in a house. Windows were smashed, roof windows left the inside open to the destructive forces of wind, rain and pigeons.
Deteriortation of the area was sped up and with the empty houses came other problems: Squatters, drug abuse, fly tipping…

But times have changed and my neighbourhood is trying to leave the bad reputation it still has, not just in Liverpool, behind. The few neighbours left are really nice people, there is a sense of community. We have window boxes with flowers in front of the houses, including the empty ones. We even won an award in the North West in Bloom competition for Improvement. My neighbour from opposite goes round and clandestinely paints butterflies on to the boarded up windows of empty houses. She calls the tinned up houses voids.
There are now four streets left, and the latest scheme to take away the houses is called Housing Market Renewal Initiative. The people who live here, including me, want to keep their houses. We have to fight the plans of a developer called Lovell, a company liked by Liverpool City Council and chosen to be their preferred developer for Granby Toxteth. The other day was a meeting of the ‘Three Parks Neighbourhood Committee’ where the residents organised in the Granby Residents Association were allowed to make a presentation about the effects the plans already have and will have on us. While trying to find what this committee actually does I came across the quote on top. The meeting went well, we got applause and the councillors present made the right noises signalling that they are sympathetic to our cause. But the decisions are made somewhere higher up, we are waiting for the executive board of the council to approve the plans Lovell has presented. Then the next stage in the fight to keep our houses will start.

Just wasted two solid days editing a few new entries onto wikipedia. It’s really addictive, and better than blog posting because there’s a good chance it will be read by people in a long time to come.

This session got sparked off by the headline news on the radio in Denmark which Peter translated during the drive into Cimco one morning. It was about a seven man terror cell that had just been arrested in Miami with plans to blow up the tallest building in America.

It sounded to me like sham, and I got criticised for saying so and not taking these frightening events seriously. I got a reputation for being like a wacko peacenick who always thinks the government is lying. (Funny how no one gets a reputation for being a gullible fool on these matters.) Such is the distinction between perception and reality. Perception is the headline news that embeds certain notions in your mind, and reality is forgotten when there is as usual no follow-up to correct such notions.

Anyways, the result after a great deal of editing is: Wikipedia Sears Tower bomb plot. I’m insanely proud of this article. I think I’m the first one to dig up the fact that the incident occurred just in time for the FBI Director to mention it in his threat of homegrown terrorism speech that afternoon. In his speech he mentioned two other terrorist “incidents” that I also followed up and made pages for. You can find them all at the bottom of the List of terrorist incidents in the U.S. page in the arrests section. Both of them are pitifully weak. They include four armed robbers who founded a terror cell while in a jail cell, and a group of three who were going to use a car dealership business as cover for flights to Iraq.

My mind boggles. I don’t know how they can make these accusations with a straight face. Back in the old days you could be burned at the stake for committing witchcraft, which at least meant you were supposed to have had done something dodgy at midnight with a goat. But what exactly do you do to found a terrorist organization? Are there forms to fill in? I think we should be told. There may actually be some credible terrorist threats out there, but this clowning around and posing as the only al-Qaeda agent in town has nothing to do with finding them. People will believe anything in the land of the UFO abduction.

Same garbage happens here in the UK, where I started the List of terrorist incidents in the UK, which is gradually filling up. It’s pretty full of IRA stunts, but the most important sections relating to politics today are at the bottom, where there are several fake incidents as well as the case of the London nail-bomber, which was exactly like terrorism, but didn’t get designated as terrorism, because — I presume — it didn’t fit into the narrative that our politicians are spinning.

This narrative requires the report of a certain level of violence — or promised violence — directed towards us by people associated with the middle-east in order to justify the awesome level of violence we are dishing out on them. I’m not making this up. When politicians are forced to tell us something about the massacres they are presiding over in Iraq, they usually change the subject to the war on terror, and run through the same embarrassingly short list of incidents to balance it out, often feeling the need to pad it with false accusations such as these. And whenever one of these accusations can no longer be supported, like Iraq’s WMD, it simply disappears from the list. No further mention is voluntarily made. No acknowledgement that they got something wrong. No reconsideration of the policy that it was supposed to have justified. Nothing. They’re like salesmen, puffing up their product for sale rather than working out what’s actually needed.

I am so looking forward to a day when politicians start to Get Real, and are willing to observe reality, and deal with it. I posted up another page on related stuff I know about New Labour Terrorism Laws, which gathered all the warning wikipedia flags within minutes. The first version deserved it, but now I think it’s good, and stands as a good complement to the list of actual terrorist incidents, of which you would have hoped it was a reflection.

Oh well. I have actually done a bit of programming between these distractions. I’m going to wiki-ize the machining parameters in the camkernel, me. No one else seems to be doing it. The problem is exactly as we had with Machining Strategist, where you make up the necessary parameters to control the algorithm you are writing in the hope that you are going to come back and sort them out at a later date when they’re all done and you know what they are. (Of course, you never do.) The naming convention gets a little screwed, but the names are pretty bad anyway, so what?

One of the Danes decided to improve it yesterday by changing the capitalization of some of the letters. So, “stockzhi” became “stockZHigh”. I am not sure this was enough of an improvement in the names to warrant the inconvenience of breaking the code. I tried to argue about it, but have just given up again. As was stated in the Python style guide:

A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds

I couldn’t have put it any better. However, this doesn’t really help, because it doesn’t advise what to do when you encounter a little hobgoblins going around and screwing up your code. “Oh, but it’s got to be consistent,” I get told. Well, it doesn’t ever seem to need to be consistent with anything I write ever, does it! He puts two line functions in the middle of thousand line “.cpp” files, and insists on using this crappy curly-bracket layout that’s different from everything else that’s there, including this pointless “throw()” statement at the end of every single function declaration that’s said to gain half a percent in speed from the idiotic compiler that’s apparently too stupid to work out that a function consisting of the single statement “return bFlag”, isn’t going to throw an IOException. I tolerate this crap with great patience. But I won’t tolerate any lectures about “consistency” from people who do this kind of thing!

Rant!

The few times (maybe too few) I check this blog for unmoderated comments I tend to find spam, and it seems that there is more of that than genuine comments.

I hope this problem is solved now after installing a spam blocking plugin.

Come on you lurkers, write to us. You know who you are. We do keep an eye out on the Apache logs, so we know something is going on, even if we don’t know what it is.

Is it the chatty front page with its rarely documented historical facts that makes you nervous? It doesn’t look professional and corporate enough, does it? Do you prefer it when all companies in this industry drape themselves in a venier of business perfection which is wholly devoid of life-forces? What’s that all about?

For another project, I’ve recently been scanning through old issues of “Time” magazine, and “The New Yorker” on the open shelves of the Liverpool Central Library where they go back to 1947. I am disappointed to report that nothing whatsoever appears to have changed to the sound of the business news, which is almost all the news. They still took interviews from CEOs and top management only, and they still spoke in the same boring content-free way with no hint of what was happening then, or going to happen in the future, a future which thirty years after the articles were printed I could remember. It’s like there’s some kind of mask you have to put on when you work in a company which makes you measure your words or, better yet, not speak aloud.

Hmm. Maybe that’s is why the internet hasn’t made the political difference everyone expected it would, which is why all the attempts by governments to clamp down on it early on have largely gone away. Its great weakness and strength is that everything that goes through it winds up on the record, in the way that spoken conversations do not, so people subject themselves to extreme self-censorship. And except for management people, politicians, and official spokesmen, most human beings don’t have the confidence to know that they can talk in the absolute platitudes which can’t possibly get them into trouble. So they stay silent.

Meanwhile, I think I’ve halved the time it takes for the Adaptive Machining algorithm to complete in certain examples. Depending on the blood pressure of the salesman, this is considered either a 50% or a 100% improvement. But it doesn’t sound like anyone is particularly interested. Let’s get back to real things like gas prices.

(Rant continued at The Myron Ebell Climate.)