One of the things I was given for Christmas, was a book that you may have heard of. It's called "Freakonomics" and it provides a rather unconventional look at the way the world works, tackling such issues as eduction, parenting, crime and so forth. It's fairly well written and makes for a pretty compelling read. It's occasionally guilty of the third kind of lie, but generally speaking the arguments and reasoning appear sound, if a little of the wall. The tone errs on the side of editorialising, but this is aimed at being a popular paper back for the casual economist, so that goes with the territory. Either way, it's a good read and I'd recommend it, if only to those with a passing interest in statistics and the like. Yesterday I read a chapter concerning the fall of crime in the USA during the late eighties and early nineties, which surprised everyone as crime was expected to skyrocket at that point. The authors debunk various theories - improved policing, gun control, strong economy among others - and settle, with a knowing air of controversy - on the notion that it was the legalisation of abortion that led to falling crime. The argument goes that unwanted children are more likely to turn to crime, so as the legalisation of abortion (Roe v Wade 410 U.S. 113, for those of you who really want to read a full case note. For the less keen, the edited highlight can of course be found at Wikipedia) leads to less unwanted children, less crime logically follows. The reasoning is persuasive, albeit somewhat distasteful, and it certainly treads a fine line between utilitarianism and Machiavellianism. The idea that we can reduce crime at the cost of however many million unborn babies is certainly difficult to weigh up. I am reminded, at this point, of another economic notion that I have come across in my limited flirtations with the subject. There exists a logical fallacy, known as "the parable of the broken window" which was conceived by a French economist in 1850. The fallacious argument goes that if a window happens to be broken, this is a good thing, because it makes work for the glazier, who can then spend his earnings on bread, such that the baker then has money to buy a pair of shoes from the cobbler, and so forth. The factor that is overlooked is of course that the owner of the original window has paid out the cost of the repair, and has nothing to show for it. He has borne the cost of the improvements to the rest of the economy, and the end result is that the system as a whole is worse off to the tune of one window. It may be a sound argument to say that the abortion of many children is a good thing if it reduces crime. Society benefits from lower crime, and there is much rejoicing. The problem that is overlooked is that society has lost millions of children, and has arguably committed an act of corporate murder, depending on where you stand on the abortion issue. As for myself, I come at things from a Christian perspective, albeit a fairly liberal one. I disapprove of abortion for reasons of lifestyle, laziness and contraception, but I think it's probably OK if there is a great risk to the child or mother. All of which leaves me in the position of considering the cost of abortion to be a pretty steep one to pay for the prize of lower crime rates. The real difficulty with this sort of thinking is that I'm pretty much bound by the nature of this life to think in terms of "the lesser of two evils". The thing is, I don't want the lesser of two evils. What I want is no evils. I don't want to have to pick between two bad things to try to achieve one good thing. The brick wall that I come up against is that this world is fundamentally broken, and no amount of chopping and changing can fix it. The window was broken way back in The Garden of Eden, with the apple debacle, and we've been attempting to pay off the glazier ever since. The sad truth is that the system can not be fixed from within, and requires an outside influence to sort things out - in short, it can only be done by God, by way of salvation through Jesus. That's the only way that this particular window can be fixed. Any other solution is short term and limited. We may fix one thing, but it will always be at the cost of something else, until we look for something beyond this world to help us out.
Well, considering one of my New Year's Resolutions was to blog more often, I'm so far doing a pretty shocking job. Still, on the off chance that anyone's still reading, hello! I've just paid my subscription for my web hosting for the coming year, so I guess I'd better make the most of it.
Christmas was good, New Year was OK, that's about all there is to say about that. Beth got oodles of presents, all of which had to be unwrapped for her as she is too little to have a clue what's going on. Still, we all had fun. I spent a couple of nights with my parents to give Ali a break from Beth, which went OK. Kinda better than expected, given that it's the first time I've looked after her on my own. It meant I could go and see some friends on the Wirral, which was good as I'd not seen them in ages and most of them hadn't seen Beth before. The manager of the coffee shop where we met, where I used to work, didn't believe Beth was my baby. Perhaps I don't seem the type to be married with a baby. Still, there you go. That being said, one of Alison's mum's friends future son-in-laws who incidentally works at the estate agents that have just sold my house (small world, etc) was amazed that I've managed to get through uni, get a job, get married and have a baby by the age of 24. Anyway.
So... what's happening? Well, work is going well. I've not been away to London in ages, so I've had a good run at things in the office, rather than just the usual 3 week gaps between training. I'm feeling pretty settled in the office, and I think I'm doing OK at stuff, though I've got an appraisal coming up soon, so I'm sure I'll find out how I'm really getting on when that happens! I'm looking forward to the next trip to London, as I've not been in ages, and I do quite like it. It'll be good to see everyone again, and hopefully we can go out and have fun and all the rest of it. It's kinda weird having to cram the bulk of my social activities and going out into one week a month with people I don't see the rest of the time, but that's the way it goes.
Alison and I are in the midst of arranging a summer holiday. We're going to Finland, as I've not been in years and Ali has never been, and my relatives over there haven't seen Beth yet. We've got flights and my parents (who we're going with) have sorted a big cottage for us to stay in. Apparently my brother and sister and their respective significant others might be coming too, so it'd be a big crazy multi-generational family holiday. Now that I think about it, it could almost be the premise for some trashy comedy film, the blurb of which would no doubt tout the "hilarious consequences" that ensue, but hopefully all will go according to plan and we'll have a good time. Roll on... uh... August.
What else is happening...
- My Fantasy Football team is languishing near the bottom of the league. Rubbish.
- I'm trying to build a media center PC. So far this involves selling anything I can find to buy computer components.
- Beth can sit up for hours. She can't crawl, because she seems to be stuck in reverse. She is learning to eat, but it's slow, and often it boils down to her painting her face with Weetabix or inadvertently sticking bits of carrot up her nose or whatever.
- My Nintendo DS Lite is probably the best thing I have ever bought and I love it. I'd buy a Nintendo Wii as well if I had the money.
- We put curtains and wall hangings up in our bedroom the other day, which makes it look a whole lot better.
- We watched Big on DVD last night. It's a great film.
- We've just finished season 5 of 24 on DVD. It was great. Far superior to season 4, and easily up to the standard of seasons 1 and 2. I wish we had Sky so we could watch season 6, but I guess that will have to wait.
- I've read Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham. It was brilliant. Quite scary and haunting, which is kinda weird as most books and films don't really bother me. This genuinely unnerved me, to the point that I was scared walking around the house in the dark at night. Really well written, and clearly inspirational to swathes of horror film makers. I had a nightmare about it last night too. Weird.
Right. My lunch hour is nearly over, so I figure I'll just submit this and be done with it. No links today. Shocking, I know.
See you soon.
Tangent: All I Want For Christmas by Mariah Carey is the best Christmas pop song, and pretty high on the list of bestest general pop songs ever.
Now, back to my life and what's happening in it...
I've been busy lately... I've also been ill. I've had a cold and sore throat and such like since I got back from London, which is pretty rubbish, but I'm managing. More rubbish is the fact that baby Beth is now ill, and is waking up in the night and hacking and coughing and generally not being very happy. Pretty naff really.
So... what's been happening? Well, we went to Leicester over the weekend. It was pretty tiring, given the non-sleeping nature of Beth, but it was good to see all our old friends and go to church there and such like. So while the trip felt kinda hard to justify when we were getting lost en route or being woken up at 4 in the morning (in someone else's house - even worse) it was worthwhile in the end. Pretty good on balance.
It's nearly Christmas. This is good for various reasons, not least because I really, really need a holiday. I'm tired in the extreme and need a break from work. I do like my job, but I am about ready for some time off. It's the training that's hardest to be honest - it's not easy doing a full day at work and then coming home and having to do homework on top of it. It's worse than school, I swear. It's certainly worse than university, hands down.
I've bought some CDs just lately. Here's my thoughts:
Sam's Town by The Killers
This is a pretty disappointing album really. The single, When You Were Young is about the only genuinely good thing on there. The new single, Bones, is a horrendous invitation to treat (if I may abuse the terminology of contract law for what might better be described as a blag for a shag) with an absurd horns section that makes the whole thing sound like it was produced by Andrew WK. There's a couple of good tracks, like Reasons Unknown and Read My Mind, but the rest of it is just bland and forgettable. It would appear that The Killers have a limited amount of quality per album, so while their debut had extreme highs in the singles that make up the first half of the album and extreme lows in the latter half, this follow up is just consistently middling. As an esteemed colleague of mine said, there is nothing remotely anthemic here - there's certainly no All These Things That I've Done, and the aforementioned When You Were Young is just barely as good as Somebody Told Me, which isn't the highest praise. I really cannot recommend this album in any way.
12 Stops And Home by The Feeling
This, I can wholeheartedly recommend. It's unabashedly poppy and bright, but is that a bad thing? Wikipedia cites the mighty ELO as one of their influences, which explains the full and exciting sound, and also goes some way to explaining why I like them. The album is quite varied, but it flows well from one thing to the next. Love It When You Call is probably the high point for me - joyous 80s hair rock that The Darkness never quite managed to deliver. Probably the best CD I've bought this year.
Black Holes And Revelations by Muse
Ah, Muse... I'm going to do a bad thing and compare them to Radiohead, simply because their musical path is somewhat reminiscent of Radiohead's route from The Bends and OK Computer (cf. Muse' Origin of Symmetry and Absolution) into the realms of weird experimentation on Kid A and Amnesiac. Black Holes seems transitional in the same way that Kid A and Amnesiac were. In and of themselves, these albums aren't all that much to listen to, but they led to the mighty Hail To The Thief (which, tangentially, some lady on the train was listening to this morning - pretty heavy for 8 in the morning. She also had it on random play, which I consider a crime) which is one of Radiohead's finest works. Will Muse follow up Black Holes with a similar masterpiece? I don't know, but I do know that I hope that this record is not the end of the journey. It's not that it's not musically accomplished or uninteresting... it's just... unsatisfying. There's too much stuff on there that feels out of place or out of character, as though it's a test of different styles. In the words of Roy Walker, it's good, but it's not right.
So, that's music for you. I also picked up High Fidelity on DVD, which we watched last night. It's a great film, and it's a rarity for a film to be different from the book that spawned it, while still being as good. I love both the book and the film - they paint such a good picture of a certain type of man, a man that is pretty much me. The lead character is a person I could have been, given various twists in history, and it all feels very close to home. I love it.
Talking of books I could have been in, or written, I've just finished reading a book called A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. It's a sort of memoir about a guy's life after his parents died and how he looked after his little brother and so on. It's only loosely based on real life, and it certainly plays with the semi-fiction idea, being very self referential in an Adaptation sort of way. It's good, and funny, and quite clever, but... It just doesn't seem to deliver. I'll try to explain why. The premise of the book appears to be that the writer is writing with a view to experiencing some sort of catharsis from the death of his parents, as though by thrashing all his experiences out on paper he will somehow be liberated from them. Alas, by the end of the book it seems to become apparent that this is not occurring, and that for all his attempts to get over things this way, he just can't, and he will always carry them with him. The trouble with this is that to me, the reader, it then appears that the book is a failure - as though I have read something pointless. The writer sought closure by means of my reading about his tortuous experiences, but he doesn't get it - have I then wasted my time? The thing that bothers me further is that this failure is acknowledged by the writer, as though he knows the book can never help him to get over the deaths in this way. So does that make it OK that he failed? If he knows he failed, and he writes that into the book, does that make it OK? It's a bit confusing to be honest. There's a paragraph in the book which might serve to illustrate this a bit better. The writer is in the process of throwing his mother's ashes into a lake, but things aren't going quite right. I'll transcribe the section below...
I am doing something both beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful, know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it's no longer beautiful. I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose - that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome.
And that, in some sort of way, is where the book suffers. It's good, but it's pointless, but if he knows it's pointless, is it good regardless? It's hard to say really, especially when you're finishing off this post after coming home from the work Christmas party. Anyway. I guess you get the idea.
My one other criticism of the book is that it appears to be somewhat over edited, to give it the impression of being very cavalier and off the cuff, in a comparable way to certain bands who apparently go out of their way to make their music sound as though it was recorded in someone's bathroom on a Fisher-Price tape recorder from a jumble sale... but I digress. I'm not sure quite where the middle ground on this is, as the style suits the book, but I'm slightly suspicious of it, as it's clearly been carefully edited to make it look like it was never edited, if you follow me. Ho hum.
So... that's about that. I have indeed recently returned from the office Christmas party, which was good fun. The meal was good, the drink was free, and it was good to talk to everyone about something other than accounting! So, a good night all in all.
More sometime soon... Happy Christmas, if I don't blog before then...
Not written for a while. Been very busy with house hunting and work and generally being stressed. Am on pills from doctor for minor stomach problems. Yay. Anyway. Here's a list of things I'm loving at the moment:
- Being married. Alison is away at the moment and it always makes me think of how much I like having her around and having the company. I go nuts on my own, and stop doing much anything useful.
- My friend, Laura. Things are mental at the moment, so it's nice to have a friend I've known for ages. Provides a much needed bit of stability.
- My parents. I'm figuring if I ever turn out to be any good at being a parent it'll be because I had good examples. I'm also very grateful to have my dad to help with stuff, especially with looking for a house at the moment. He seems to know an awful lot about an awful lot, which is handy.
- 24. I borrowed the DVD set of series 2 and have watched it all this week. I'd never seen it before. I remember Colin watching it fanatically at uni, but I never got into it. It's amazing! Really well made and well shot. They pack in so much for something that happens over the course of one day. It's like reading a novel, but in film form, except it actually takes as long to watch as it would to read because of the sheer amount of detail. It's great stuff.
- Radio 1. I have a lot of time for the BBC, and I have absolutely no complaints about the licence fee. Radio 1 is probably worth it on it's own, never mind all the other radio stations, the TV stations, the news, the web presence... Anyway. They've got as good a mix of music as you can hope for when trying to cater to everyone, no adverts, and some very good DJs (with the exception of Sara Cox, and some of Moyles' more egocentric moments). Jo Whiley is a legend. Tangent - is the new Muse single any good? I don't know. I heard it once and thought it was awful, then heard it again and quite liked it. Maybe it's a grower. Oh, and the Pink single is great.
- Cheap computer parts. In between buying and selling on ebay and picking stuff up second hand from people, it's nice to get the high spec parts of yesteryear at minimal cost. I'm looking forward to setting up my TV recording box with some of the kit.
- Talking of which... free software. Never mind your warezed copy of XP Pro, I'm talking properly free stuff. No cost, and I can do anything I like with it. I'm looking forward to getting gentoo and Mythtv set up so I can record TV and do all that Tivo business. Quite a fun project for someone like me who's into all that stuff.
- X Men 3. Amazing film - highly recommended. The plot rolls along nicely and it looks stunning. Dark Phoenix makes a great enemy - genuinely terrifyingly dangerous, much like Doc Ock in Spiderman 2 - which really helps in adding to the urgency of the conflict. The special effects are awesome and the face offs between the mutants and their various powers are very cool. They did well with the trailer to barely reveal any of the final conflict, so it was all fresh and new when you saw it.
- Talking of trailers, we saw new ones for James Bond, Superman and Pirates Of The Caribbean 2, all of which look good. It'll be fun and games getting babysitters so we can go see them, but we'll manage!
- In other film news, I must admit I've been slightly pleased to hear that the Da Vinci Code is getting awful reviews. I thought the book was pretty bland, and the ending diabolical, so I was glad to hear that the deus ex machina was laughed at in Cannes. There we go.
Right. Bit of life news... House hunting is going OK. It's very hard work trying to balance price against what the house is like against where it is against what the schools are like etc etc. It's tough stuff. The web makes it a lot easier to dig up info about what the areas and schools and so on are like, so that's good, but it's still tough stuff. We've got 6 viewings arranged for this saturday, so it'll be a busy day. Let's hope Ali copes OK with all that, as she'll only be two weeks of her expected due date by then! That's also quite scary. I'm going to be a father in, at most, a month. It doesn't feel real yet. I'll bet it'll feel all too real when it happens!
Anyway. That's about it for now. I'll try to write again soon, though it may wind up being about computer games, so I apologise to the uninterested among you! Alternatively I might write about books. Who knows. See you soon.
So, I'm visiting my parents. I'm back on the Wirral for the weekend, mostly to fix computers at my dad's church and possibly to help my parents unpack, as they have just moved house.
So, last night I drove up from Leicester to Pensby. While driving, I listened to the original radio shows of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy on tape. A thought occurred to me... A thought that is tremendously geeky. Disturbingly, a quick search at Google suggests that while I may not be the first person to ever conceive of such a thing, I am very possibly the first person to write about them on the web. I think this probably makes it doubly geeky.
So, here goes...
Some, all or none of you will know that part of the plot of Hitch-Hikers... centres around a quest to find the ultimate question to the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. It is necessary to discover the question after a fancy computer spends 7 1/2 million years figuring out the answer, only to come up with 42, which is unsatisfactory to say the least.
Hold up, let's go back a bit. The fancy computer spent 7 1/2 million years coming up with this answer? The thought that occurred to me was this:
What has happened to Moore's Law?
Broadly speaking, Moore's Law states that every 18 months the number of transistors in a computer chip doubles. This is a gross simplification, but it will serve for the purpose of this discussion. If we assume (inaccurately) that doubling the number of transistors in a computer doubles it's power and thereby halves the time needed to solve any given problem, then it should be obvious that to wait 7.5 million years for Deep Thought to arrive at the answer is foolish. It would be simpler to wait 18 months, from which point one would only have to wait 3.75 million years for the answer. Better still, wait for 3 years, and then you only have to wait for just under 2 million years for the answer. Better still, wait for... ah, you get the idea.
So, what is the optimum time to wait until building the computer, such that the time till the answer arrives is minimal? Well, if we let t be the time till the answer is produced and x be the number of iterations of Moore's Law, then we get this equation:
t = 1.5x + (7.5*10^6)/(2^x)
Yes, it would look better if I did it as an image or something, but I can't be bothered.
Differentiating with respect to x will allow us to find the lowest amount of time needed. This a bit hard to differentiate. I did it after midnight last night while very tired and slightly drunk after having a can of cider. As luck would have it my uni maths notes were in my room. Brilliant.
You get something like:
0 = 1.5 + (7.5*10^6)*ln(2^x)*ln2*e^(xln2)
^
EDIT: This is wrong. See Izz' comment below for correct answer.
Now, if anyone can figure out how to solve that without resorting to numerical methods then they're a better mathematician than I.
Anyway. A bit of scribbling on the back of an envelope suggests that the optimal number of iterations is somewhere around 22. In that case, you wait 33 years before building the computer, in which timeframe computing power has increased by a factor of 2^22 (=4194304) so the time taken to solve the problem is only 1.78 years. The total time to get the answer is then 34.78 years, rather than 7.5 million years.
So, they'd have been better off if they'd known about Moore's Law.
How's that for geeky 
I commend anyone who has read this far. You are probably as much of a geek as me!
Alison got the job! She is going to start a GTP teacher training course at Beauchamp School in Septempter. It's like a years on the job training which ends up with her qualifying as a teacher. She's going to be teaching secondary school and A-Level biology. Excellent!
In other news, I finished a book the other day. It was a big anthology of Isaac Asimov stories, called "The Complete Robot". I'd link to it at Amazon, only I can't find it there. It must be some weird edition of it or something. Anyway. It was 682 pages of small print that made up about 30 short stories about robots, surprisingly enough. I'd been inspired to read it, after seeing I, Robot for the second time and reading quotes like this about it, and wondering what the original stories were like.
The book was a long read... It took me two renewals from the library to finish it. It was good though. It was an interesting read, and it was - admittedly - much more in depth than the aforementioned film. The stories in the book played much more with the 3 rules, whereas the film kinda copped out and just abused them. The film was similar to a couple of the stories, but the originals were a bit more subtle. The film also took some artistic license, like Susan Calvin (the smartarse lady in the film) being young enough to provide some kind of vague sexual chemistry for Will Smith, as opposed to being about 60 in the books. Hmm.
It was worth reading, though I guess I might not persuade too many of you, as I am something of a sci fi geek.
Speaking of which... I played some more Half Life 2 last night. (For those few of you who have played it, I'm up to the city levels, towards the end, after Alyx and I teleported back to the lab.) I'm leading a little squad of guys round the city, who help me in the firefights we get into, which is kind of cool. I'm mostly fighting regular soldiers at the moment, but I keep seeing these bigass monsters called striders which look like they'll be a problem when I get round to fighting them. I'm also really getting the hang of the gravity gun now. The city levels have these little crazy mines called hoppers which jump in the air when you get near them and then explode when they hit the ground. The trick is to catch them in the air when they spring up, then throw them. It's kinda neat to walk up to a mine, have it spring up in the air, catch it with the gravity gun, then launch it at some explosive barrels next to the little encampment of Civil Protection officers and watch them all go flying.
Physics rocks. Oh yes.
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