Finding the chase and cutting to it

Mathematicians are not generally known for being team players.  Mathematicians are seen as being scary, clever in a sit down and think kind of way but definitely not team players.  You don’t think of Netwon in a lab surrounded by a bunch of fellow mathematicians or Einstein having a coffee with David Hilbert while discussing relativity.

Yet, by the nature of the mathematicians work, this stereotype must lack merit.  The letters between Isaac Netwon’s and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz are possibly the best known recorded discussion on how integral calculus should work and two minds working together on the problem, steering each other to very similar conclusions.

Pythagoras was almost certainly a group of philosophers discussing how geometry should work which almost certainly makes the formulation of mathematical language one of the earliest recorded theories reached by a group and not an individual.

The language of maths itself proves that it must be uniquely defined as a purely team activity or else why would a language have been formulated to express its ideas so eloquently?

I’d like to know who first established the idea of the solitary mathematician?  How did this stereotype come to be so readily accepted?

I’ve been diabetic a long time.  32 years in fact.  Way back then, juvenile diabetes wasn’t called type 1.  I was four, and very very lucky.  My mum recognised what was wrong with me: the thirst, the pain in my long muscles when I tried to walk, the fatigue.  She took me to the doctor, who tested me and found I needed insulin replacement therapy.

Being diagnosed was great, insulin made the pain go away.  32 years later, I still feel that way.  Insulin works: it lowers my blood sugar and enables me to use my food. Insulin is marvellous.

Insulin has problems though.  It’s not smart, it has no way of knowing how much I need.

Hypo heat rash

Having high blood sugar hurts, having low blood sugar hurts. The photo is the rash I often get when my blood sugar is low (I am told this is quite unusual, normally half an hour after my levels rise the rash will ease).

My insulin pump is a glorified syringe, it’s not much more, but it means no high lasts more than 8 hours and likewise with a low.  The pump doesn’t stop the variance, it just helps to control it.

Yet most people think the injections (and the pump) are the problem, because it’s needles and must hurt.  The fact that my injections really don’t isn’t considered by most people.  I have to say, needle technology has come a long way.  🙂

So the needle going through the skin is not the issue.  It’s the fact the insulin is dumb is the issue.

I play cards: I like bridge, whist, solo whist and cribbage. I learnt to play most of these between the ages of 8 and 10 and I do feel lucky to have had that experience. It’s a great way to learn probability and the application in decision making.

There’s a huge difference between the chance of a card being played and the actual decision behind playing a card. Sir Ken Robinson would probably say it’s our creativity that makes the biggest difference but most people have rules they believe in which make the biggest difference to them.

In a seminar, a chart was recently presented asking the probability of the Conservative party winning the next general election in the UK. Like most people I said originally it was 75-90%. But I ignored the real problem: I am not referring to first past the post in our democratic decision making either.

The UK, like the US, is in a mess. A real mess, chaotically influenced by many factors. One is the fact we have a democracy which we often believe to be a fair market place. We believe that through the press and the internet everyone has access to the right information to make the right decisions.

I do think that is true but given the same information people can make some really bad decisions: I think Germany was in a similar position 60 years ago and made a terrible decision for what seemed like the right reasons.  That electorate  made their decision based on their experience and promises to make their country strong.  It wasn’t the people who said it would be very long and difficult road that won but the party that seemed to have passion and conviction.

I am frightened that will happen in the UK.  I’m frightened the luck some parties will need will be good people not thinking they should vote because they don’t want to support a party who perhaps should win because indirectly that would show support for the Conservatives (this has happened before in the UK, we’re a fickle bunch).  I don’t want the people to be bothered to vote to be the ones who vote for a party that looks like it’s being unfairly portrayed, hell attacked, in the press.

I wouldn’t feel at all lucky if that happened.

As mentioned before, I like using computers to do the jobs that are boring and fiddly (if T3 ever comes to pass, I’m toast, but there, I’ve said it).  I hate to say this, but I want interesting and challenging tasks not boring and repetitive ones.

For me, a computer (and some software) are happy to do the tasks I need to do but don’t want to spend all my time doing.  As such, I have spent the past 24 years working out how to get the most out of them.

So what?  Well, we have a large number of books; mostly paper backed fiction but music books, atlases, language books, a variety.  It has to be said I only had around 100 when I met my husband – he came with a “library”.  As such, it was with keen interest I saw delicious being demoed by a colleague.

I took notes, bought a web cam and hurried home to buy a copy.  Only I don’t have a mac in the house.  Several versions of linux, several versions of Windows but no mac.  Delicious will not install on anything but a mac.

Fine.

I wait a little and sure enough, Amazon web services became public and various pieces of code started appearing allowing consumption of Amazon’s extensive catalogue of books.  Most were from the point of view of being an Amazon partner but ItemSearch works publicly.

Long story short, I wrote some code that would take the barcode number and enter the details held in Amazon against that book into a private database.  It checks for duplicates (we actually managed to lose a few books that’s to that feature) and even stores the location in the house.

QuickMark

I have also mentioned before now my Nokia 5800 – cool device very cheap and expendable memory.  I could rave about it all day.  For $7 I bought QuickMark which uses my phone’s camera much like delicious uses the mac’s web cam to decode a barcode on the back of an item, say a book.

Using this and the wi-fi, I could consume my library web service from anywhere in the house for free. 😀

Cool.

I worked really hard to catalogue 623 books before Amazon demanded the signature (8th Aug 2009 we did the run, 3 people 1.5 hours, plenty of tea and biscuits).

The signature requirement came in and I couldn’t get the encryption working but I waited a little and now everything is working again.

I have put the service in a protected area on my server and I really should do a proper search handler on it.  But it wows my man that we have a catalogued library (he really likes the fact Amazon tend to have pictures of the covers, so we can link to them).  Did I mention it was platform independant…

Is this for you?

Is this something you’d like to use?  Would it be useful to you?  Please use the comments to let me know what you think.

I’ve been a big fan of the smart phone ever since my husband came home with his Sony P800.

Work slave?

I hung on though and treated myself to a Siemens SX1: I never did get my mail to work reliably but we had browser email access, so in a real emergency, that was always an option.

Jon then got his first N80, and I was smitten. Wifi access to your work email. No clumsy phone to deal with either it seemed a good option. But then Jon managed to kill it and the second one never did do wifi properly.

So, I kept with the SX1 and waited. The iPhone arrived just after I got into internet tablets: my N770 seemed to cover the gaps. So, who needed a smart phone?

Last Feb, I bought my Nokia 5800 Music Express. Compared to my friends and family I am no audiophile but I love it’s prowess in music reproduction. Having a removable memory card means I can switch the play list easily too – no reliance on bits of cable and 8G cards mean I can carry a presentation around with me and keep it separate to my Dvorak and Guns and Roses. The video is pretty good too, especially when driving the TV, though to be honest we have other solutions round the house.

It’s the mail I really love though. My “mail for exchange” client runs between work hours and switches off automatically; I can still get mail, but I am not bothered if I don’t want to be. The client I have for my personal mail works at the same time. Fring handles my tweets which automatically handle my FB status updates. I can skype for free where-ever I can hook up to the wifi 😀

I have plenty of fun apps too. The one I have paid for allowed me to catalogue my books without having to buy and own a mac.

Heaven. And it’s all mine, so if I need to leave my company, it not an issue. Quality of life and ease of contact while working. It all sounds really good to me.

Back in 2006, I bought a naked (that means un-faired) CG125K6 and learnt to ride a motorbike. Like many, I found this bike easiest to ride but, like many, 3 months after gaining my license bought my semi-faired GSF650SAK5 (that’s a 2005 656cc Suzuki Bandit).

My first bike

After a couple of years, and 14,000 miles, I started looking at fully faired bikes. My Bandit was lovely, pictured above, so I could really take my time and find the perfect bike.  My 650 Bandit was lovely, but I do long journeys, several hundred miles in a day and the bandit was heavy and didn’t offer much in the way of protection from the elements.  I wanted a tourer.

Since Dec 2008 I have tried (in order) Kawasaki KLX250, BMW F800 ST. Suzuki GSF 1250 SAK8 GT (bigger version of mine, with luggage, very nice), Suzuki 2005 Hayabusa (loved), Triumph Daytona 675 (liked but didn’t feel good for long journeys), a 2009 Honda CBR1000RR aka Fireblade (mind blowing, really incredible but hard to ride under 30mph), a 2008 Hayabusa, a brand new BMW K1300S and BMW F650GS. I sat on a few that were too big and on others that didn’t feel right in the show room.  But those were the ones I took out on the UK highways and byways.

My bandit was hard to beat – it had luggage and heated grips, ABS, there was no hurry.  I could find the perfect bike in my own time and put by the money for the new bike.  I figured Jan 2011 at the earliest.

In my everyday life, I was sharpening my skills with lots of miles and IAM training. I belong to SAM and there are a great variety of bikes in the group. Some are lucky have have many bikes, it’s going to be a while before I ever get to that stage 🙂

Learning to ride naked again

The 2nd September, one of the few rainy nights for ages, I made a bad decision. A mile from home, with what seemed like ample in the tank, I rode past the last petrol station and the last 700yds before home. For the 2nd night, the A14 had been closed for some bridge inspection work and I was looking forward to drying off at home. 500yds into the road works, my tank ran dry.

Appreciating what had happened and what need to be done, I pushed the bike on to the grass verge, put it on its side stand, got the loose belonging off it, switch on the parking and hazard lights (my hazards turned off the parking lights which I wasn’t expecting, but it was lit like a Christmas tree, so…), and started to walk on while talking to my husband about bringing a jerry can with him when he brought the car to pick me up. I had my back to the bike when I heard a loud bang behind me; I had my helmet on, it had to be loud for me to hear it.

Two cars had hit each other and one of them had knocked my bike over. Stepping over the exhaust, I went to get details, and sort out getting my bike back on to its wheels. A long night saw my bike being carried home on a recovery vehicle (thanks Mike), and in the morning, I really believed it could be fixed and be back on the road sometime this year.

My insurance covers a loan bike: in due course a blue naked 650 K7 Bandit turned up on my doorstep. It was restricted too, but the lack of fairing was disconcerting. This bike was not going to be fit as a replacement for my own bandit – no fairing, no ABS, I drive on dual carriage way (did I mention the 33bhp too – my bike had been a git with the restriction on it).

I have to say, I was very pleasantly surprised. Needless to say, the accident (even though I’d not been injured in any way) had left me shaken. This naked bandit was fun, easy and a lot lighter than my own bandit. It was responsive and nimble and confidence inspiring. I nearly killed myself on an overtake the first ride as I was NOT expecting it to be restricted, yet if you accommodated that fact, the bike was good. The wind was not the problem I thought it would be and I did ride it on some windy days. For a long journey, it would be an issue, however the lack of fairing allows you to cut through the air really easily. It’s tiring on your arms and your head does get buffeted, but the first bend takes your mind off it.

So, as my bike has been written off, I’ve bought the 2008 busa. It’s glorious 😀 sublime, I am the slowest person on a 1300cc machine on the planet (possibly ever), but the machine is effortless, be it filtering or cruising, or taking a B road bend.

If I could have two bikes though, I’d like something naked too 😀

Part of my job is watching what’s happening on the web, but there’s been a lot happening so I hadn’t have a chance to do that since April.  I use Alexa.com’s top global websites, and checked out the state of play on the 22nd September 09.

Myspace is off the top ten, currently ranked 11th. 8/20 of the top twenty are search engines, only 3 are next gen services.

Facebook is second and the only social networking site in the top ten. Twitter is 13th globally (11th in the UK).

rapidshare.com is in the 17th slot worldwide, a file sharing site. Users can upload up to 100 meg files for sharing. Provides downloads of 100 megs per hour on the free service. Interesting as Flickr isn’t in the top 20.
So why have many social networking sites disappeared from the top ten? Surely, tough economic times really focus everyone on their relationships.

I do wonder if that is to do with both Google and Yahoo making a big play for the homepage market – both allow mail and apps to be accessed very easily from their users “own pages”. Are these efforts keeping the social networking sites at bay?

A new thing that’s been appearing on appraisals and references is “Integrity”.

I find it difficult to imagine integrity without honour – for me they are synonymous.  I appreciate that in work, one my find themselves in a situation where they are asked to do something unpleasant, even dishonourable but in these economic difficulties, it is interesting that integrity is seen as something to measure.

The key example I always think of is the Milgram experiment.  “The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology”.

I have to be honest and say I don’t know how I would react in that circumstance, which would have horrified me at the age of 12.  I like to think that I would not hurt people on the basis of someone’s whim just because I could abdicate responsibility.  But I don’t know…  My hope is that because Milgram exists do we have more right to say no than before?

Personally, I have made some cracking errors of judgement, and thankfully I have managed to learn from them. (I’m hoping by the time I get to 90, life is going to be much simpler).

Recently, I have found myself in a position where integrity and professionalism have conflicted.  In this, it’s a matter of personality differences.  I can be professional to the individual in how I treat them, yet there is no circumstance on this planet I could work for them.  I don’t trust them and that would damage my integrity.

Yet, is that integrity, honour or simply pride?

Have we seen the last of the device that does everything? The iPhone will now play flash video, Blackberries take pictures and every device has an MP3 player built into it. Does that make them “Jack of all trades, master of none”?

So what’s with the Flip? The Flip may be the number 1 stocking filler Christmas 2009. But what is it?

It is a very small, reasonable quality video camera. The Flip requires no cables to attach it to your computer (hence the name). It has an easy-to-use interface (we are talking the “iPod of the video camera” here) and it does what it says on the packet all for under £200.

The Flip is a video camera nothing more nothing less. You can take it to any activity and take footage. You can check the footage on the spot or share it with the people around you. Is this the way devices in 2010 will go? Small, cute and highly dedicated to one task?

One of the interesting things about the Flip is that the company has been bought by Cisco… Interesting mp3 on this from the Guardian’s technology blog, with Ray Sangster, Flip’s President in Europe, Middle East and Africa, listen here.

I find myself going to the dedicated device: I have bought a dictation machine which only through software translate will output into mp3. Why? Well, my phone just isn’t up to the job…

Last week saw the Murdoch group stating that payment must be made for content on the web. Services are continually changing and the recession has placed some of the cost recover models in jeopardy. So what models are appearing and how will they affect the web?

In the face of recession and drops in advertising revenue. the net is changing. On the 6 August, the FT stated it will charge for on-line media, possibly once you view more than a certain number of articles. Interestingly, the BBC gleefully reported this.

The BBC pretty much ruined this market six years ago: a BBC reporter can see an article in a pay-per-view site and report the news by correctly referencing it and thereby effectively undercutting the original provider. So long as the item is properly referenced there is actually nothing to stop the BBC doing this, outside of internal editorial policy.  And nobody anywhere needs to pay to access the BBC news site: it’s the best ambassador we have to the world.

So six years ago the market changed to being supported by advertising revenue, instead of subscriptions. As we are mid-recession this revenue stream has been severely challenged, so it will be interesting to see if pay as you go will prove more resilient to the BBC’s play.