Yes Please

Regular readers may know that I’m something of a fan of one Danny Wallace. Not just a fan, actually, but a subject—Danny is the king of his own micronation, The Kingdom of Lovely, of which I am a citizen. He’s also The Leader of my not-cult, Join Me (it’s not a cult; it’s a collective).

Danny has a new book out, called Friends Like These. It’s about a quest (oh yes! another one!) to track down a bunch of old friends Danny went to school with twenty years ago. To promote the book, the Danny Wallace Appreciation Society group on Facebook ran a competition in which people were asked to submit their stories of how one of Danny’s previous books—Yes Man—had affected them.

It seems I won. Nice one. I look forward to the copy of Friends Like These I won to join the other two I accidentally pre-ordered.

A Quote by Ryan Norbauer

Ryan Norbauer, on the desire to achieve:

My lifelong preoccupation with accomplishment has always been not so much motivated by a desire for praise or reward as an anxiety about having some concrete achievements to which I can point and say, “look there, you cold and unfeeling universe: something I’ve done, something I’ve made, something I shall leave behind.” In this way, accomplishment has always been my answer to mortality.

2007 in Cities

I have a pile of stuff to post about, both things I want to link to and a few observations and more journal-like things that Id like t post about. Right now I don’t have the mental bandwidth to accommodate that volume of joined-up thought, so I’m falling back on the blogging stalwarts of ripping off other bloggers and compiling lists. Real content to follow. This post is more for my own interest in years to come.

With that gripping lede out of the way, here’s a list—inspired by (i.e., copied from) Jason Kottke—of the cities I’ve visited in 2007.

• Dublin (I actually moved here)
• London (four times, not counting passing through Heathrow)
• Nottingham
• San Francisco
• Mountain View
• Las Vegas
• San José
• Liverpool
• Paris
• Manchester
• Chester

My plans for 2008 already include all of these cities except Paris (though I wouldn’t be opposed), as well as Birmingham, New York, Zurich, Naples, Los Angeles, and Ankara. Doing my bit for climate change.

The Wisdom of Michael J Fox

Esquire has a collection of semi-connected soundbite-sized chunks of wisdom from Michael J Fox. Some of it is pleasingly astute, and it’s totally free of the pretentiousness you often see when celebrities share their pet philosophies. Possibly because:

If you don’t have someone calling you on your shit, you’re lost.

Hooptedoodle

Sometimes I feel like I have no reason to post about a subject because a story broke a few days ago and it’s been analysed by a crowd of eager bloggers since then. Other times I stumble on an article written over six years ago that grabs me enough to make me want to share it. Elmore Leonard writes on writing, covering his most important ten suggestions (or in today’s parlance “top ten tips”) for improving your writing by keeping it out of the way of what you’re trying to say.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…

…he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

Maths Fun

If you watched the video of Randall Munroe at Google you might have heard him mention a site called Project Euler. It’s a cool collection of short but interesting mathematical problems that are intended to be solved with a computer. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from using good old practical mathematics.

The most solved puzzle on the site is this one:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Now, this didn’t look to me like a computer was required to solve it, so I nibbled the end of my pencil for a second and came up with the following solution:

There will be 333 numbers in that range which are divisible by three (every third number, so a third of the total). There will be 199 numbers in that range that are divisible by five (every fifth number, and a fifth of the total—it’s 199 rather than 200 because the top number, 1000, is excluded).

Now I don’t know offhand a way to calculate the sum of the first 333 numbers divisible by three. But I do know offhand a way to calculate the sum of the first 333 numbers. It’s 333 × 334 ÷ 2. Is that any help? It turns out it is. Consider the first five multiples of three: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15. The sum is 3 + 6 + 9 + 12 + 15 = (3 × 1) + (3 × 2) + (3 × 3) + (3 × 4) + (3 × 5) = 3 × (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5). That is, it’s three times the sum of the first five numbers. By the same reasoning, the sum of the first 333 multiples of three is equal to three times the sum of the numbers from one to 333, or 3 × 333 × 334 ÷ 2.

Applying the same reasoning again, the sum of the first 199 multiples of five is five times the sum of the first 199 numbers, or 5 × 199 × 200 ÷ 2.

There’s one more piece: in adding up all the multiples of three, and all the multiples of five, I’ve included some numbers twice. There are some numbers that are divisible by both three and five, i.e., those numbers divisible by fifteen. There are 66 of these, from 15 to 990 (again, by taking 1000 ÷ 15 and rounding down you get 66). So the total has to be reduced by 15 × 66 × 67 ÷ 2.

The final answer is: (3 × 333 × 334 ÷ 2) + (5 × 199 × 200 ÷ 2) – (15 × 66 × 67 ÷ 2) = 233168.

The easy way, of course, is:

$> python
>>> sum([i for i in range(1,1000) if i % 5 == 0 or i % 3 == 0])
233168

Break Down the Walls

This post is copied and pasted. It started life as a response to an email from Ronan asking for my take on a New Scientist article on the creation of passports to transfer avatars from one online world (like Second Life) to another.

Seems to be representative of the upcoming (or current?) shift from centralised social hubs to open standards for social interaction. Thisis why I keep saying Facebook should sell. It’s going to be dead in a year or two if it keeps the current walled garden design. The walled garden didn’t work for Adam and Steve and it’s not going to work here either.

We’re not going to have a single repository of friends lists and personal details which we laboriously migrate from one old and busted service to the new hotness every six months. The next round will be open protocols that let you describe your relationships once and use that in any service that supports it, whether that’s photo sharing, music recommendations, event invitations or whatever.

It all starts with OpenID for decentralised identity verification, which is already gaining traction. Every AOL subscriber already has an OpenID, whether they know it or not. So does every Live Journal user. How long before Yahoo!, Google, and MSN follow suit? Conservatively, I predict that by the end of next year there’ll be at least one university, probably in America, that assigns students an OpenID alongwith their email address.

It only makes sense that the virtual worlds would follow the same path, and for the same reasons.

I do not know what’s up with the Dutch.

Stephen Hawking: Idiot?

I’m using the new headline writing technique of writing something ridiculous and controversial and then putting a question mark in so I can get away with it. No Stephen Hawking isn’t an idiot. But he’s doing something that I disagree with, so I’m going to call him one. That’s how the Internet works.

Hawking intends to jump back in the popular science book arena in early 2008 with a new book on his favourite subject: the origin of the universe. Hawking is certainly qualified to write such a book, and his previous successes lead me to expect that it will do quite well. So why is he an idiot?

He’s only gone and called his new book "The Grand Design"! Let me be clear here. Stephen Hawking is clearly and evidently not a theist in any meaningful sense. Yes, he uses God as a convenient metaphor throughout his writing for a popular audience (at least; I haven’t read any of his academic writings so I can’t comment on them). But it should be clear to anyone familiar with his work that he is, at worst (or best, if that’s your perspective) a deist and most probably an atheist.

So why muddy people’s thoughts by using as a metaphor an idea that many people take to be literal truth? Even moderate religious people will no doubt interpret this title to mean that Hawking literally believes that the universe was consciously designed by some self-aware entity. Which will of course fuel the popular perception that there are a great many educated and influential scientists who hold such parochial views. They don’t.

Albert Einstein is often trotted out as a key figure in such an appeal to authority. While the argument from authority, familiar as it is to many believers, is fallacious, in this case it’s based on a faulty premise to boot. Like Hawking, Einstein used the metaphor of God extensively. But in his case it’s even clearer what his true views were. Citations and quotes abound that demonstrate beyond all doubt that Einstein did not believe in a personal god. But, like Hawking after him, he failed to realise the damaging effect of facilitating this misconception.

Metaphor is a powerful literary tool. And it is often based on myth. But surely it is prudent to wait for a myth to die before resurrecting it to spruce up book titles?

Finally, on a slight aside inspired by comments I have read about this story, when is someone going to write a book addressing the really difficult question: why do people have such trouble with Hawking’s name? It is Hawking, with a G. Not Hawkins. This has been a public service digression.

Whiteboard Erased

I have a half-hearted plan to write a work-a-like of Bebo‘s whiteboard drawing feature. I think it would be an interesting addition to Soylent Red’s comments if people were able to use drawing as well as text.

Bebo’s whiteboard is a simple Flash drawing program. I decided that my work-a-like would be a good excuse to learn about the HTML5 canvas element. I realise that this would exclude Internet Explorer users from the fun, but when have I ever cared about that? Current versions of Safari and anything based on a recent Gecko (Firefox, Camino, Seamonkey) would be able to handle it. Oddly enough (because Ian Hickson, the author of the HTML5 draft, worked for Opera Software until recently) the most recent Opera release (8.5) doesn’t support canvas, although the previews of the Opera 9 apparently have support.

Having decided that browser support was sufficient for what was essentially to be a fun addition and not a necessary part of the site I set about coding the whiteboard. I have to say that the canvas drawing API is a joy to work with. It’s very simple, and very easy to pick up. It has a great deal of flexibility without having to resort to providing a host of specific methods. It took me less than an hour from starting to read the spec to having a working prototype, with a choice of five colours and three brush sizes. By this stage there were some browser inconsistencies to work around. For example, my method of finding the correct coordinates of a mouse event is still buggy, particularly in Safari.

Thankfully I didn’t invest any more time in fixing and working around bugs before I discovered the real show-stopper (and I’m not talking about the Heart-Break Kid Shawn Michaels). It turns out that no current browser supports the toDataURI() method of canvas. That means it’s impossible to submit the image data back to a server. So I have a nice little drawing applet that has no way to save your drawings. Crud.

Top 5: Video Game Characters

It’s been a while since the last installment of Top 5. I was working on another list but it didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped so I’ve filed it away carefully in /dev/null. I have to say that finding the right subjects to cover in these lists is harder than I first thought. The subject has to be one that people are interested in so that there’ll be some amount of arguing afterwards; it has to be broad enough that I’m not just listing the five things that qualify for the list; and it has to be narrow enough that I can have some hope of knowing what the hell I’m talking about.

So, throwing that last point (as well as all caution) aside, I’m going to try to list the Top 5 Video Game Characters. Try not to get too angry at me for getting this list so badly wrong.

5. Tails

Maybe Tails was less obvious than his more extroverted Hedgehog buddy Sonic, but that really added to his charm. Tails was content to hang back and let Sonic do all of the real work. He’d just saunter along behind the action, chipping in whenever he felt like it but never making a commitment. He was a symbol for our generation of free-loaders and coasters. And he could fly.

4. Heihachi Mishima

Given that many video games are aimed at the angry and hate-filled adolecent boy demographic, and that many of my game-playing years were spent as a memebr of that group, there’s inevitably going to be a skew in favour of ass-kicking, name-taking, hurt-locker-putting badasses. Heihachi is the Tekken series’ contribution. I joined the Tekken bandwagon at its third incarnation, where Heihachi stood out as the toughest SOB in the beat-em-up genre. I remember playing a versus battle with Heihachi and King that lasted about five seconds of the most bone-crunching moves in the game and ended very close to a double knock out, Heihachi barely the victor. Unfortunately I was using King. Even now in Tekken 5 when Heihachi is suppposed to be dead he can’t be beaten easily.

3. Sarge

Quake scared the shit out of me. The haunting noises of evil foes just around the corner, the dark shades of brown and grey in the deepest dungeons. I couldn’t bring myself to play it at night. None of it seemed really to bother the game’s protagonist, the hard-as-a-nailgun GI known as Sarge. Everything great about this character is summed up in the opening video of Quake 3, when you really think he can win against his crowd of foes even if he is only armed with a cigar. This is even before we consider that he’ll be played by The Rock in the Doom movie.

2. Sephiroth

Long black coat, cool-ass Japanese sword, chanting music in the background. The villain of Final Fantasy VII is himself most of the reason that it’s the best in the series. Nothing I can say will really evoke the awesome cool that radiates from this character during 70+ hours of playing FF7. Look for him in Advent Children.

1. Pac-Man

This is the second Namco entry on the list. Interestingly it has been rumoured that Pac-Man is actualy Heihachi Mishima’s biological father. Make of that what you will. He’s just a yellow disc with a wedge cut out of it but, as one magazine put it, he oozes more cool than a Zanussi in the arctic. He’s got an indellible retro chic, like a lava lamp that never went out of fashion. He’s also big business, being the most played arcade game in the world.

That’s my Top 5. What? No Mario, no Donkey Kong, no Street Fighter characters? No Ecco the Dolphin? Have I gone completely insane? You tell me. Who deserves to be on this list and who doesn’t?

Incidentally, I’m going to break with tradition and give a single honourable mention. This is the special category of ‘hottest video game character’, and my number one is Tanya from the Red Alert series. To hell with Lara Croft. Tanya, played by Kari Wuhrer in Red Alert 2, is the reason cut scenes were invented.