Monday, December 20, 2010

Christmas posting

Hello, my few faithful followers! (and the more common faithless ones)

I've been spending the last week waiting impatiently on the results of a job interview, checking email and my phone compulsively every few minutes just in case they've contacted me.  I've been sorely tempted to call them up and see if any progress has been made on the decision, but have managed to hold off so far.  I think I'll probably crack and check for news before I leave to spend Christmas with my girlfriend's family on Thursday - I'd rather not spend time stressing over whether I've got the job or not when I should be relaxing.  People seem to be divided on whether checking post-interview is a good idea or not... I suspect it's probably for the best to leave it where possible, as you'd expect to hear about it if you've got the job at least, and checking isn't going to change the result!

Musically, I've been working on new songs lately.  I can't really do anything towards the upcoming EP at the moment as my producer is away on holidays.  However, I have been working on getting some cover art with a very talented artist who just so happens to be the bassist in The Solution, the band I play in!  Expect to see previews of the cover art and music from the EP in the new year.

One thing I will reveal though, is my working title for the EP - I'm thinking of calling it "Windows to the Soul". I hope it doesn't sound like I'm taking myself too seriously, or sounds too emo, or anything like that... simply put, it's the only name that's stuck so far.  So that's most likely what it will be called, unless I get an outpouring of hatred towards the name - of course, the customer is always right ;)

I did a quick Google search just now and found that someone else has also used that title.  However, I don't think anyone's going to confuse my music with contemporary Christian music, so I should be pretty safe!  Oh someone else used it too... a DJ.  Yep, still safe.

Anyway, that's me for 2010 - hope everyone has a fantastic Christmas!

Enjoy this picture of a fluorescent hyperferret.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Metablog

I've only been blogging for a month now but am already getting into the blogger's obsessive mindspace of making it all pretty and readable for people, and making it easy for people to get involved.  On that note, you now don't have to have an account to comment, don't know why I had it set that way in the first place... sorry!

I've even linked it in a couple of places, most notably my facebook page.  I know a few friends have dropped in here from facebook... and wow, I just looked at the stats counter for this site.  76 pageviews yesterday, I'm pretty sure I didn't check in myself that many times...

So don't hesitate to comment, even if it's to tell me that I was completely wrong (I've already had a few interesting disagreements with friends on Ten Things I Wish Were Invented Already), or suggest something actually interesting to write about.  It's easier to comment now, so if you didn't bother before, you can now, with your very own Cloak of Anonymity*!  And it lets me know that people are actually reading this thing.  I admit, I can be an attention-seeker sometimes ;)

Also, kudos to whoever provided the six eight pageviews from Mac users.  Oh and one from an iPhone, well aren't you fancy!

* It gives +2 to potential douchery... just be careful in case I set the Banhammer on your ass!

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Music!

As a change of pace from the maths post, and in an attempt to win back people I may have scared off... ;)

I had a gig last night!  It was my third solo gig at Irish, and as usual all the other performers were intimidatingly good.  But I think I'm developing as a performer - the nerves and fear about getting up on stage aren't quite so paralysing as they were a couple of years ago, that's for sure!

I'm doing some recording of the best stuff I've written so far, with good friend Dave acting as producer (and featuring heavily with instruments and backing vocals!).  It's going well enough that I'm thinking of releasing the recordings as an EP, hopefully to be released early next year.

I'm considering at some point putting a track or two on here for people to listen to, as they are churned out. I'm keen on the idea of musicians giving their music away for free, but asking for donations or people buying their solid-format music in return.  I figure if something's popular enough, it'll be pirated in any case (I'm not expecting that to happen with my stuff anyway!).  And having your music spread around is a great way to drum up publicity, and thus people who are likely to actually look out for you, attend your gigs, and buy your stuff!

So what do people think?  Would you like me to put something up?

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Pass the Pigs (Part 1)

So it was only a matter of time before maths started appearing in my blog.  But never fear! This shouldn't be too complicated.  If you do get too freaked out, don't worry, you'll be safer in this part of the blog!

A few weeks ago, my better half and I were having dinner with some dear friends, who proceeded to bring out a game called Pass the Pigs (made by Milton Bradley).  Neither of us had ever seen the game before, but we were quickly introduced and proceeded to have a great time playing it.

The idea of the game is that you roll a pair of pigs, and the position the pigs land in determines how many points you get.  You can stop at any time and "pass the pigs" to the next person.  You can also keep rolling and racking up points, but the downside is that if the pigs land in a certain position, you lose all the points you gained that turn.  If the pigs are touching, you lose all the points you have altogether!

The way to win this game is all about knowing when to quit.  As I was playing, I started wondering if people had worked out optimal strategies for winning this game (because I'm a geek).  The answer as I found out later, is of course yesyes, yes, and yes.

If you can't be bothered reading all of that, the general idea is that stopping when you've scored 23 points (or, obviously, when you've won the game) is a good strategy.  The actual very best strategy, if you're only playing against one other person, depends on what your score and their score is.  This makes sense if you think about it - if you've only got 10 points and your opponent has 99 points (the score needed to win is 100), there's no point stopping after 22 points because you know your opponent is very likely to win next turn unless you go all-out.

I decided to try and replicate the results.  First I compared the experimental results in all the literature I could find - what chance each "roll" has of happening.  Fortunately, they all seemed to agree pretty well - the consistency is pretty surprising considering we're talking about mass-produced plastic pigs.

PositionPercentage
Side (no dot)
34.9%
Side (dot)
30.2%
Razorback
22.4%
Trotter
8.8%
Snouter
3.0%
Leaning Jowler
0.61%
from Kern, JC (2006). "Pig Data and Bayesian Inference on Multinomial Probabilities". Journal of Statistics Education 14 (3).


So then, using these probabilities, I simulated what would happen if people with different strategies played against each other.  I ran a round-robin competition in which every strategy from "stop at 15" up to "stop at 30" played against each other in a one-on-one game 40,000 times, taking turns to be first to play.


I found that for the first person to play, being more bold is an advantage - the "stop at 25" strategy wins most often, winning over 52% of their games when playing first (see below).  Not bad, considering that all of the strategies are pretty reasonable competitors.  The reason that boldness works here is because the first player gets an advantage in that they will always have played either as many or one more turn than their opponent.  This means that they can get away with taking more risks.





For the second person to play, alternatively being more shy is better - the "stop at 17" and "stop at 18" strategies do best here, again winning over 52% of their games.  The "stop at 17" strategy actually does slightly better, but to such a small extent (52.225% vs 52.219%) that it makes no difference.



If we combine both sets of results, we see that playing to 23 is the best of the strategies, which agrees with what others have said.



Of course, the next question is what to do when playing against more than one opponent?  This is something that strangely hasn't been brought up by anyone, and is a problem for next time.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The face of evil?

What with the whole controversy with WikiLeaks and the leaked diplomatic cables, I've seen Julian Assange's face a lot in the media lately.  And apart from whether WikiLeaks is doing the right or wrong thing (or, more likely, both) by releasing all of this sensitive information... I think he looks like a TV villain.

I mean, really.  Look.



He looks like the kind of genuine supervillain who has really scary plans that involve mercilessly killing lots of people for some reason that only he and his many mother issues can discern.  I think it's the hair.

When I pointed this out to my better half, she agreed, but said that she thought Colin Farrell looks more like one.  I'm not sure I see it myself.



What do you think?  To be fair, this is probably one of the nicer Colin Farrell pics, I recommend you use Google Images to find the more evil stuff... I only posted this one because it's on Creative Commons and I'm paranoid about copyright!

I should probably make a post other than random stuff soon.  Stay tuned ;)

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Google is fun and also scary

I hope no-one tries to find this site via Google.  

For one, you won't actually find my site on Google, at least not yet.  That would involve people actually looking at it.

Also, this, which my girlfriend kindly pointed out:


Thought the first sign of labour would have been pretty obvious, but obviously some people failed their pre-natal classes!

I think this list gives you a scary insight into the mindset of your average Google user :D

... though I am kind of disappointed that "first sign of the lolcat apocalypse" isn't on the list.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Ten Things I Wish Were Invented Already

To start this off (because the Welcome doesn't really count as a proper post) I'm going to write - in no particular order - a list of 10 pieces of technology that I wish were already here in real life, real and imagined.  It's something I think about quite a lot.  Really cool stuff seems to be like the end of a rainbow, even as years and decades pass, the really cool stuff seems to be just as far as ever... even though, looking back, you know things have changed since you were a little kid waiting for the bright and shiny future.

1. Glasses that take photos, moving footage and sound of what you're seeing/hearing on demand (à la Spider Jerusalem from Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan)

It may just be me, but I think it would be amazing to be able to capture candid images without anyone even being able to suspect that you're doing it.  Walking through cities, or markets, or anywhere there are people doing anything interesting, there are so many moments I wish I could capture on film, but would feel too intrusive taking a photo of - and in any case, by the time I got the camera out assuming I even remembered to bring it, the moment would be over.  Not with these babies - click, a moment in time frozen, captured and stored away!

2. Hovercars/bikes

Yes, this is clichéd, I know, I know... but for some reason, hovercars have managed to keep my imagination captured even past childhood.  I'm not talking about those big, clumsy hovercraft things - I mean like the things on the old Playstation game Wipeout and sequels (if anyone other than me played that...).  I just love the thought of driving along the road, coming up to a slow driver in busy traffic, and just going straight over the top.  I didn't get my driver's licence until this year... up till that point, I was secretly hoping they'd somehow develop some kind of awesome electric-powered hovercraft, making getting a car licence pointless.

3. Mounted missile launchers on cars

On the topic of vehicles, since getting my driver's licence I have become painfully aware of the sheer number of bad drivers there are on the roads.  Of course, I'm probably not the most fantastic driver in the world myself from lack of experience, but there are some people out there who should really know better!  More than once I've wished for a very specific kind of device: a missile launcher mounted on top of my car, firing a missile on the press of a button on my steering wheel, aimed directly at the car in front of me.  I'm sure the technology exists for something like this, but for the sake of practicality, I have very specific requirements which may not be possible, and if they are possible, I'm very sure they wouldn't be cheap.  It needs to reduce the car in front of me to ashes, yet somehow avoid affecting my car and the cars around me, or the road itself, and it needs to do this within a fraction of a second so I can safely just drive through the smouldering remains of the last car to defy my rule the road rules.



Yes, I understand there may be some legal issues involved in this.

4. The technological singularity

The technological singularity is often described as the point at which humanity creates a machine more intelligent than any human could be - the implication is that the machine can then design and create a machine even more intelligent than itself, and so on, meaning that humanity basically becomes obsolete, and technology  will develop faster, and in different ways, than any of us could imagine.

Realistically I don't see this happening in my lifetime, if at all - it does seem like one of those things that sounds good on paper but will never actually happen.  But the implications would be incredible, as well as what it would mean for humanity...

5. Mind uploading

One of the more far-fetched technological advances, but great for the purposes of thought experiments, is the simulation of an entire mind (yes, I love linking Wikipedia).  If in the future, your entire brain could be simulated perfectly accurately by a hypothetical extremely powerful computer, then that simulation could think, and in fact would be a copy of your mind, with all your memories and experiences.  Then, assuming that it were possible to manipulate that simulation by stimulating the virtual brain's visual cortex and other sensory inputs, you could create an entirely realistic virtual world (and by extension, virtual body) for that brain to interact with.

The implications of this are even more staggering.  You could upload a copy of yourself, and that copy would last as long as the computer hardware and software needed to run it - effective immortality assuming there is always be a computer to run the simulation.  The philosophical implications are even scarier - that copy of you is not actually you, and you become different people the moment either of you has any experiences whatsoever after the "uploading".  And is running such a simulation even possible? (it's already assumed that it would already be incredibly difficult!)

6. Invisibility Suits

I probably wouldn't be as interested about this, except researchers are actually doing interesting things with metamaterials in more recent times... which means that one day these may actually be possible!  But of course, "soon" probably means "in 50 years" and won't be anything like as cool as you'd imagine from the description, and even if it was, there's no way anyone with less than a few million spare would be able to afford one.  Sigh.  I almost wish they'd stop teasing me with the possibility that it might happen...

7. Holograms

I remember as a kid going to Questacon in Canberra and seeing an entire room as a hologram, in great detail. It's an image that's always stayed with me, even though sadly the exhibit's long gone.  And it's another of those things that you occasionally hear about them making some progress with, and unlike most of the things in this list, that I've actually seen and been impressed by.  You wouldn't think it'd be too hard to have an interactive hologram in the middle of every room that you could use to have 3D images of stuff?  Imagine 3D television, or computer games, or, well anything really.  And you wouldn't have to put on some daggy glasses and look at your TV, it'd just be right there.  I'm not really talking like a scientist now - but dammit, sci-fi has spoiled me!

What I'm trying to say is holograms can make just about anything awesome.  I'd watch Question Time  if it was in hologram form.  We need to have it.

8. Virtual Reality

This one actually surprises me a bit, and maybe I've just not been paying attention.  I did play with a VR headset once - again, only as a kid - and remember thinking that it wasn't actually very good.  Why don't we have decent versions of these now?  I'm not even talking the sci-fi full-immersion stuff like in Star Trek, though of course that would be awesome... I don't even hear about people using just a VR headset to play computer games.  And you'd think that'd be very possible, and maybe even cheap, by now!  Maybe it just wasn't as cool as people thought it was going to be?  Maybe we're just happy with stuff like Wii and Kinect...?

9. HUDs

This is something I think of randomly when I'm doing things where I have to look around at different things a lot.  Like driving a car (again).  It'd be nice to have a HUD (heads-up display) built into my glasses or something so I could see everything at once instead of having to go through the incredibly draining process of actually moving my eyes between objects.  Or on contact lenses I could wear.

Oh and that's right, there's another term for this stuff, called "Augmented Reality".  But for those of us who play computer games, the thought of wandering around in a Half-Life HEV suit with all your vital statistics there and visible in your field of vision is a tempting one...

... or is that just me?

10. Time Travel

Sure, it's probably not even physically possible, and even if a loophole in the laws of physics does exist, probably not for anything bigger than a millionth of a gram for a few seconds backwards or forwards in time.  But countless sci-fi shows have demonstrated just how cool the damn concept is.

What I find coolest about time travel is the possibility for really complicated and sometimes paradoxical situations that are somehow logically self-consistent (again, sci-fi).  One implication of time travel which I've debated endlessly with a friend about is the predestination paradox.  The way I like to think of it is imagining a robot (let's call it Alice) building another identical robot (called Bob), then Bob going back in time, changing his name to Alice, then creating Bob.  So there's really only one robot that's somehow created itself, but for a length of time, there are two robots.  It doesn't feel like it should make sense, but somehow it does!


Damn, I thought it was going to be difficult to write 10, but now I've written a wall of text... and I haven't even gotten onto things like teleportation and rayguns and stuff...

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Welcome!

Hi, and welcome!

So for the few of you who've read my previous attempts at blogging, I've finally decided to try again (but with less horrible handwritten HTML).  I'm not entirely sure why, but it should be an interesting experiment.  I'll see how long I can neurotically pretend to my non-existent readership that I'm interesting on the odd chance that someone I don't actually know stumbles across it. If you happen to be one of those someones, an extra welcome to you!  Hopefully I'll manage to put something interesting on here occasionally, even if it is the kind of "interesting" that makes people wonder why I haven't been put away yet.

I called this blog "First Sign of Madness" after musing that, like most blogs, this one probably won't take off and have a million readers. I have to face the facts - I can't draw, can't compete with the wit of people like xkcd, and am unlikely to garner fans with my random mathematical or philosophical scrawlings.  So basically writing this will be like talking to myself... and maybe a few good friends.  Also, I'm quite mad, but you'll work that out as I write more posts.

Unlike my previous efforts, I'm not going to restrict myself to talking about my life - because I have other outlets for telling people how my soccer team went this week or how awesome it was to catch up with persons X, Y and Z the other day.  And I probably won't be comfortable sharing the really juicy gossip about my life with strangers on the internet!  Instead, I'm going to use this as a place to write about... well anything I'm thinking of, and see if I can start some conversations in the process.

I've decided that I'm going to separate this thing into categories (these will definitely overlap) which you should be able to search for if you feel like it.

Life: Basically stuff that's happening to me that might be interesting.  I'll try and keep this short.

Random: Ramblings of any given nature, on any given topic.  You have been warned.

Numbers: This will mainly be me playing with numbers and applying them to real life situations.  I might resurrect some posts from my old "Fun With Numbers" forum blog if I don't get any ideas.

Music: Thoughts about music - sometimes that of others, but probably mainly mine.  I'm not in the business of giving opinions away like kittens (there are plenty of music blogs already) unless of course it's fanboyish gushing, in which case you probably don't want to hear it anyway!

I'm not sure how this is going to go, or even if I'll be able to keep interested in it, but it's at least worth a shot.  So if you're reading, stay around, make some comments - the more I get back from you, the more inspired I'll be to write more.  There's no need to fear haters or trolls, these will be... summarily dealt with.  Together we can make this a fun place to hang around in.

... eck, did I just write that cliche?  I feel ill...

- N