Author: Rory

According to RTÉ News, Dublin City Council has abandoned its plans to supply Dublin City with blanket free wireless networking. This is disappointing news, made more bearable by the fact that I was (surprisingly) unaware of the plan until it had been scrapped.

Dublin City Council has decided the plan would be contrary to EU law on state aid, as well as not financially possible. The project is estimated to cost €27m.

The good news is that we’ll still be getting free wi-fi from libraries and other public buildings.

Yes, it’s meme time. The rules:

• The title of your album is the last four words of the last quote listed on this random quote page (I got “In a mad world only the mad are sane.”, from Akira Kurosawa).
• Your band name is the first article you get by visiting the Wikipedia random article page (Anisogamy for me).
• The album background is a (dubiously legal) derivative of the third image on Flickr’s last seven days of interestingness (mine is this one).

David Attenborough’s new series, Life in Cold Blood, starts soon on BBC. It’s the last of the Life on Earth series and is about reptiles and amphibians, the only major animal groups not yet covered. Nature has a feature on the new series and its host:

Attenborough is very much as you would expect from his on-screen appearances—knowledgeable, eloquent, a consummate storyteller and extremely excited about wildlife. He is as happy enthusing about a turtle mating frenzy as he is about the grisly habits of the caecilian, a burrowing worm-like amphibian whose young feed by tearing strips of fatty skin from their mothers. And what about the most interesting thing he’s eaten himself? “Big moth caterpillars in New Guinea. You put them on a fire and they come out like Twiglets.”

His latest subjects, including snakes, lizards and frogs, might be less of a draw for some people than ‘meerkats and monkeys’, but he seems to relish the challenge. “In a way, it’s a great advantage because it means that a lot of their stories haven’t been told. It’s a measure of what, in my view, public service broadcasting should do. It shouldn’t just be about making programmes about popular animals.”

I read the last sentence of the article with particular joy.

From xkcd.

Those two results for “died in a blogging accident” both point to this MySpace post, which will no doubt make the poster in question very confused indeed about his new-found popularity.

I’m calling it on the strength of a single trailer, and a slightly too-strong fondness for the lead: Juno will be the film of the year 2008.

(from Twitter, by web)

I learned this puzzle from a friend in work. He posed it one morning before everyone had had their coffee and ended up costing a small handful of engineers a whole morning of productivity as we each solved it. I’ve been meaning to post about it here for a while. Here’s the formulation as best I can describe it:

You have in front of you one of those tables you get in Asian restaurants with the rotating centre—what one of our product managers described as a lazy susan, though I’ve never heard that phrase from anyone else. Picture the restaurant from the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom if you really want to set the scene.

On the table are four glasses, each of which is either standing upright or turned upside down. They’re evenly spaced around the table, in a square. You sit at the table blindfolded. Your aim is to turn the glasses such that they are either all upright or all upside down, subject to the following rules.

You are allowed to inspect two of the glasses, by touch, at a time. You can choose to inspect either the two immediately in front of you (i.e., a side of the square) or one in front of you and the one opposite it (i.e., a diagonal). After inspecting the glasses you are allowed to turn either glass, both glasses or neither glass.

Once you’ve inspected and possibly turned two glasses the table is rotated a random amount so that you don’t know which glass is which. You then have the same choices about inspecting and turning glasses as before. Then the tables is rotated again. It goes on like this for as long as you need to solve the puzzle.

If at any point you get all the glasses upright or all upside down you’ll be told that you’ve won. You don’t need to be able to know that you’ve solved it. You aren’t told at the start what configuration the glasses are in, though you can assume they don’t start in a solved state.

Find a way to reliably solve this puzzle that will be guaranteed to work in a finite number of moves regardless of the initial conditions or how lucky you are with rotations of the table. In particular this means that you can’t just keep spinning the table and turning upright every glass you touch in the hope that you’ll get them all eventually.

You know when you’re looking for a specific fact, a simple answer to a straightforward question, and the only option open to you is to throw together a few keywords and hope that the resulting snippets of pages contain the correct answer? It turns out some other people (a research organisation called True Knowledge) are irritated by this too, so they’re working on a system that can index knowledge rather than just pages on the Web. Not only that but the system can synthesize new knowledge from the facts it already knows. Near future, or space-age pipe dream? Either way, it’s fascinating.

The video is well worth watching to get an idea of what many people hope will be a reality in the medium term.

Out in Kerry, where an Inch is a mile.

(from Twitter, by txt)