Membres de la danse

Researchers looked at 132 studies done over the course of 40 years, and came to the conclusion that women may have lower sex drives due to guilt.

...linguafranca!

HAPpy happy happy BIRTHday!
HAPpy happy happy BIRTHday!
HAPpy happy happy BIRTHday
To YOU to YOU to YOU!
(Ole!)

In mid-job, this morning, my printer decided that it didn't believe that Drawer 2 was not empty and/or open. I opened and shut it, I took the paper out and put the paper back in, I added MORE paper, I took the drawer completely out, blew some canned air into the space, and put the drawer back.

I restarted the printer. Twice.

I finally gave up and called IT.

The IT guys came out and did exactly the same thing that I had done.

They tried to use their iPhones to shine light into the space for the drawer, but that wasn't working. So, I pulled the sonic screwdriver toy I had in my purse, and we used the light on that to shine into the printer. (Complete with whirring sound effects.)


Suddenly, the printer worked!


None of us know what we might have done to garner a different result, so clearly the answer is that the sonic screwdriver did it.

Ive been feeling increasingly out of tune with the "Church", especially its language, more so yesterday when the minister at Haughton Green who in his prayers used the expression "Praise Lord Jeeesusssss" almost as punctuation in his extemporised prayers, almost every other word. I simply could not pray. I found the style of prayer and the language used simply not wrong and was even unable to turn off and have silent prayer. heyho. To be honest, the closest I feel to God and also relaxed and getting toward being centre is at Meeting.

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If you're in the US, today's date (01/02/2010) is a palindrome.

If you live anywhere else, you'll have to wait until the first of February. (;

I have a fan heater in my bedroom. Given I'm not happy running the warm-air furnace full time at the moment, it gets a moderate amount of use when quick temperature rises are required.

The fan heater has 1kW and 3kW power settings. When it's run for a long time — an hour, say — on the higher setting the plug/socket assembly gets quite warm.

I'm wondering whether that's normal, or whether it's something I need to worry about. I can't find any good online reference for how much contact resistance UK mains plugs and sockets should exhibit; this page of general audiophile madness suggests an MK socket to MK plug gives 5mΩ. That may not seem much, but at 13A through both live and neutral, it means 1.7 watts; the plug and socket I'm using are doubtless inferior.

And I now realise I don't know how hot something in the 1-5W range would feel. Anyone happen to know this stuff off the top of their head?

Happy birthday, ozswede!

HAPpy happy happy BIRTHday!
HAPpy happy happy BIRTHday!
HAPpy happy happy BIRTHday
To YOU to YOU to YOU!
(Ole!)

So this year I am going to try to focus on (in no particular order)

Eat better and get more active; write myself a new structured gym routine with goals, keeping a log of my progress better, and take Andy to the gym at least twice a weak.
Taking up some old hobbies as a way of relaxing more.
Relying on my friends more - they are there, they do care for me and I can turn off around them.
Get to know my friends more and spend more time with them (including those in Wakefield and Sheffield, not just Manchester).

In other news, Ive an interview in Bristol the week of 11th January...but its going to cost me over £100 to get there by train. MEEP!

Happy new year, everyone!

Do you think I should e-mail the C++0x standards committee and ask which timezone they're using?

It's very nearly the end of 2009! I want my rvalue references, move, forward, type inference, delegated constructors, variadic templating!

I've always been a big fan of the Asterix books, and for a long while have appreciated the level of artistry that has gone into their English translations: in many ways, Hockridge and Bell improved on the original.

My favourite linguistic trick relates to Obélix's dog, Idéfix. The dog appears during Asterix and the Banquet, following Asterix and Obelix around France, but only subsequently got a name and became a regular feature. The name Idéfix — "fixed idea" — was apparently suggested by readers.

And then the name gets translated into English as… Dogmatix. Brilliant! Not only does it keep the original notion of the French name, but adds an extra layer of puns. It's almost as though Hockridge and Bell deliberately rigged the original French name somehow.


But Anthea Bell has done a lot more besides, including translating Władysław Szpilman's "The Pianist" from Polish into English. She's also translated professionally from German and Danish.

This kind of thing runs in the family: her father, Adrian, wrote the first Times cryptic crossword and her brother is Martin Bell. Her son, Oliver Kamm is also now a journalist. I've heard Anthea talking on Radio 4 about the similarity between the art of the cryptic crossword and the job of translating puns; it made interesting listening.


Today, I found out two new things about Anthea Bell: firstly, she lives just outside Cambridge, in Histon; secondly, she's just been awarded an OBE. The latter, especially, pleases me greatly.

TIGAH

Christmas Sans Mum
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Presents and things
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Instrospection
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Discusion with Rachel
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Well, in the end I did go to Arundel for Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and the nights before and after. It wasn't ideal, but it kept the family happy and I had a reasonable time of it.

Given the weather earlier in the week, the journey down from Cambridgeshire was astonishingly uneventful. There was a bit of rain, a bit of misty fog… but almost no traffic. I chose to go clockwise around the M25 and things were free running through the Olympic widening works. The less major roads down near Arundel itself were also fine, apart from five miles where I got stuck behind a clapped-out Land Rover. Any other day, I'd have overtaken, but after a week of ice-shod doom, with the temperature low enough for black ice, I decided to put up with it. I got to Arundel refreshed, having almost forgotten what it's like to drive when traction can be relied upon!

Immediately on arriving at the place, I noticed something. The (only) photo supplied by the proprietors online is this one:



…which looks fairly sensible and respectable. Unfortunately, what I found was this:



In fact, the situation was twice as serious as the photo shows: it was all stroboscopically flashing, so half of it is extinguished in the photo. I boggle.

Inside, the place wasn't too bad. The decor was pleasant enough, though tended towards giving the impression that no expense had been spared to give the impression that no expense had been spared: brass light switches, a job lot of passably oriental rugs strewn everywhere, flagstone floors using that curious stone only B&Q can slice so thinly, etc. There was secondary double glazing, the locks didn't work on either toilet door, the over-bath shower had no curtain, the dishwasher's timer was broken so would never stop washing and the only table large enough to play board games was in an underheated conservatory. My bedroom, against all reason, had a leopard-print duvet cover. The pillows were much too soft: one wasn't supportive enough, and two would plump up enough to press against my nose when I lay on my side. Everything had been laundered in something that seared the flesh; I'm going to have a rash for a few days. The bedstead had very free-running wheels but was on a wooden floor: it rolled around whenever I turned over in bed, and getting in and out of bed was an interesting challenge. As a final clincher, the curtains served merely to funnel dawn's rays straight onto the head of the bed.

Oh, and the headroom at the bottom of the staircase was restricted. This wasn't a problem if you could see what you were doing, but I did bang my head once when going to the loo in the night.

And the largest glasses in the place were a pair of half-pinters. But one broke the very first time we put it through the dishwasher. And none of the other glasses were anything approaching cylindrical. Suddenly, diluting Ribena became a very inexact science.

I'm very glad I didn't agree to stay a week there, and very glad I didn't agree to pay a third of the £900 for a week. But for a couple of days of playing boardgames, it sufficed.


We played Settlers, Carcassonne, Trivial Pursuit (there was a set there, with questions we didn't already know), Ticket To Ride, Careers and Mine a Million — a reasonable mixture of traditional games and more modern ones with greater sophistication to their gameplay.


Food-wise, I made myself a cheesy loaf. I also noticed I had a jar of Tiptree Cranberry Jelly that I bought in Harrod's a few months ago, so took that along as suitably festive. We ate various other assorted nibbles, including some Morrison's own-brand cocktail snacks that were impressively bland: my mum preferred those; she doesn't seem to appreciate any kind of strong flavour any more.


On Boxing Day, we drove out to Bosham and had lunch at the Anchor Bleu. I winced at the Franglais, but the pub was cosy, nicely-presented and bustling with friendly locals. The pub grub was passable, though far from brilliant. On the way back to the car I was pleased to find a shop selling Loseley ice cream. We then went to Chichester, where we spent 45 minutes looking around the fine cathedral followed by ninety looking around the same shops you'd find on any high street anywhere — which struck me as very much the wrong way round. The cathedral is very fine, and contained surprise Gustav Holst tomb, which was nicely seasonal given my favourite Christmas carol. There was also a fine old Dominican hymnal, a Roman mosaic and some fascinating portraiture on old wood panelling. The pipe organ left me indifferent; then I realised I'd only seen the nave organ and the main instrument was a far more splendid affair. They also had the Hurdis organ: a small pipe organ from 1780 that has been carefully restored and fitted with an electric blower and is still used today. Wikipedia says there are even a couple more lesser pipe organs hidden elsewhere.

What I didn't do was visit Arundel Castle, and it does look worth visiting.


On the journey home, the M25 was messed up, so I took a meandering route via Hindhead, the Devil's Punchbowl, Chertsey, Virginia Water, Egham, Old Windsor and Denham before finally joining the motorway at Rickmansworth — I added an hour to my journey time but I was in no hurry and the time spent following the meanders of the Thames easily beat mingling with all the poor deluded fools queueing to be cavity-searched on their way to the USA via Heathrow.

And now I'm back in Cambridgeshire, which for the time being is feeling uncannily empty of people I know…

Today's XKCD (the large version) set me thinking.

So the Earth's gravity well is only 6,379km. A tiny amount of maths indicates this is 17.4 kWh per kilogram. British Gas will sell me 17.4 kWh of gas for about sixty pence. So enough gas to launch a 100kg person out of Earth orbit costs £60.

There are, of course, some problems:

• After a while, you run out of oxygen in which to burn the gas.
  
• Natural gas has a typical energy density of 17.1 kWh/kg.
  
• Even extremely efficient vehicles needs 0.28 kWh/kg to travel 6,379km on the level.

Even so, we're now almost 1% of the way through the third millennium; where's my flying car, dammit?