Rock Band

I'm not entirely clear on the story, but apparently EA liked something they saw in L.A. Noire, and made us a pre-release gift of Rock Band (pre-release only in Australia; it's been out for ages in the U.S.). Drumkit and guitars now take pride-of-place in front of the big screen in the lunch room, and people gather to play during lunch and after work every day. The batteries in the guitars were flat by the end of the second day, and one guitar has already been glued back together!

Rock Band is just awesome fun. Its real value comes, of course, from playing in a band. The independent difficulty levels means anyone can join in and have a go and contribute something, even singing (if you're brave enough :) ), and it rivals or surpasses the Wii for sociability - imagine a crowd of people gathered around after work with beers, watching and talking and taking turns playing. I wonder how long the novelty will last, but it's great so far.

I'm hooked on guitar. I'm not even any good - only played Guitar Hero once 'round at Brett's place before - but I love it. I know it seems silly, but the game is fantastic at making you feel like a god when you get a good solo, even though you know it's a plastic toy guitar with five fret-buttons (well, ten if you count the high frets at the base of the neck, used for crazy solos at the end of a song!). It's especially satisfying if you know and love the song and shiver in anticipation as your favourite chord progression comes up :)
I know I don't have the motivation to learn a musical instrument properly; Rock Band provides instant, gratuitous gratification :D

Reading Material

So anyway, I got a little sidetracked in my previous post. I meant to thank Melanie again for organising my New Scientist subscription :)
I've also been reading some other books lately - something that I haven't done much of in recent years (besides conference proceedings!). In a way I enjoy being almost completely disconnected from the net during my (admittedly rather scant) personal time, because I have missed sitting back or snuggling up with a good book.

The most interesting book I've been reading is Kinsey, A Biography, by Jonathan Garthorne-Hardy. I haven't finished it yet - it's rather thorough - but it's the book that the recent film was based on, so I sort of know how the story ends anyway. But it's the detail that is fascinating, which you just don't get no matter how much you read online. I admire Kinsey greatly, because he was arguably a genius in two fields that most interest me - evolution and sex.

I also picked up The Constant Gardener, the film of which I loved (and first read about in New Scientist, incidentally - an example of that magazine's aforementioned socio-political coverage);
and The Harsh Cry of the Heron - a sort of guilty pleasure, it's the concluding sequel to a fantasy series (Tales of the Otori) whose appeal is the same lightweight fantasy that makes Harry Potter appealing to such a wide audience.

Finally, I've just finished reading Priceless, an autobiography by Charlie Daniels that I picked up randomly because it looked interesting. Charlie Daniels was a successful madam in the UK's sex industry, and her life story is indeed captivating - in a train-wreck kind of way - but unfortunately I thought the writing was somewhat forgettable.

One cool thing about Sydney is the number of independent bookstores that I like browsing, even if I don't buy anything. There's a bookstore on Oxford St (the epicentre of the gay and lesbian community) - no, not that kind of bookstore :p, though unsurprisingly with a decidedly mature and alternative bent - a few independent and second-hand bookstores along the main street of the very trendy and hip Newtown area (along with a T2 store :) ), and one small-but-packed-to-the-ceiling bookstore in the CBD, that I've visited so far. It all makes Dymocks and Angus & Robertson and the like look rather ordinary!

McNaught's Comet

Brett thoughtfully let us know about McNaught's Comet, the brightest comet in 40 years! On Monday evening Sarah and I went up Mt. Archer to watch it. Unfortunately the cloud cover and haze was terrible, making it impossible to see the sun set let alone a comet! I returned on Wednesday evening but it was just as bad. This was pretty depressing, since the comet's peak brightness was on Monday and it's supposed to fade over the week, so I was afraid we'd miss it altogether.
Nevertheless we gave it another chance last night, Thursday, and we were finally rewarded! I wish we'd brought binoculars or a telescope, but thanks to the tripod Sarah gave me for Christmas, I was able to take some pretty decent shots with my wannabe camera ;)
(click for higher res!)


No comet here, just a nice view of the city under a gentle sunset before the comet became visible.


Pretty good shot of the comet over the city. Bonus aeroplane to the left ;) There's a bit of camera movement blurring the lights; I mustn't have tightened the tripod enough.


Just the comet.


Just the comet again.

I might go up again tonight to check it out again... I reckon it's pretty exciting :)

Please Look Twice

It would be remiss of me not to do my own private bit to educate people during Motorcycle Awareness Week. Perhaps you don't realise just how exposed we are on public roads.
So please, please, for the unabashed naked truth of the matter laid bare, go to
http://www.pleaselooktwice.com/
and watch the ads.
I'm sure you will find them quite revealing.
:D

AOL Search Queries

Sorry for being such a hermit lately; I'm just concentrating on getting my thesis written.

I did take time out to play with AOL's search query database for a bit. It's probably old news to some of you, but this is the story:

A while back the US Government demanded databases of search results from the major search engines (they wanted to trawl through the data to determine the prevalence of searches for pornography and such, in an attempt to pass some online child protection legislation). Google in particular refused to turn over results citing trade secrets and privacy concerns. A lengthy legal battle ensued, in which in many people's eyes Google fought the good fight.
Anyway, that's just context.

Early this month, AOL's research division released to the public AOLs entire search records for a 3-month period. Not a leak; a deliberate release. Just hours afterwards, AOL admitted they screwed up and retracted the database, but not before people had made copies.

As a concession to privacy concerns, all usernames in the database are replaced by random numbers, but the interesting thing is that the random number is assigned on a per-user basis, so you can see an (anonymous) person's entire search history. You can search the database by keywords, user id, or the website that the search returned.

It's fascinating in a voyeuristic sort of way. Some of it is funny, some of it is sad, and some of it is just plain disturbing.
This example clearly shows the underestimated danger of steak and cheese to society.
Here are some funny examples courtesy of Something Awful.
And here's a pretty interesting writeup of the whole situation.

I think what makes the database fascinating is trying to reconstruct what's going through someone's mind as they enter these search queries. Bizarre stuff.

Synergy

I knocked together this motivational poster to help explain the correct meaning of synergy, since apparently our new Dean doesn't get it :D

I seem to have a habit of copying Thom's blog posts lately...

Inverloch

Like Thomas, I thought I'd celebrate the release of Sarah's Inverloch. Of course, I think everyone who reads this blog already knows about it, but I reckon it's worth posting anyway. It's for sale in major bookstores like Barnes & Nobel and Borders, online from Amazon (where it was ranked 5000-something-th'd at one point!), and even in some Australian comic-book stores (not here in Rockhampton, sadly).

Anyway, I decided to post to my blog a couple of poems I'd written in the Seraph-Inn forum. I think they're decent, though it's hard to get objective opinions from that forum :P

Logic Puzzle

Here's a puzzle that Zbigniew Michalewicz gave at the Complex Systems 2004 conference in Cairns, though I don't know where he got it from. It was phrased with a lot of redundant information; here's the essential, stripped down version. I think it's quite clever and has an elegant solution (even though I didn't solve it myself :p )

You and a number of other people are seated facing each other in a circle in a plain room, with no prior knowledge of what is about to happen. One person, the host, enters the room, blindfolds everyone seated in the circle, paints a dot of some colour on everyone's forehead, and then removes the blindfolds.
Looking around, you see that multiple colours have been used and that some people, seemingly spaced at random, share the same colour dot as one another.
The host tells you three things:
"You may not communicate in any way the colour of a person's dot."
"I will ring this bell at regular intervals; when I ring the bell, stand up and leave if you know the colour of your dot."
"At some point, you will know the colour of your dot."

The question is, how can you know what colour dot you have?

Hints (in order of revelation - highlight text to read)

1. It is crucial that everyone knows that the problem is solvable.
2. There are an infinite number of colours (but assume for the sake of the problem that you can still tell when two people have the same colour :) ).
3. Can you know what colour you have if you are the only person with that colour?
4. Goto 1.

Yeah, I think everyone who reads this blog has heard this problem anyway, but I still think it's good :p

What I Learnt Today

Actually, some cool things I learnt from the first issue of New Scientist that I received the other day:

• Don't use any security measure you can't place on the ground and walk away from.
• I want a brass water bottle if I go travelling to exotic countries.
• Robotic exoskeletons are cool.

Thanks for the subscription mum!

My latest paper

Here's the latest paper I've written, co-authored with Carey!
It's even about MMORPGs in some way (that I don't understand :p ). Check out the links at the very top to write your own.

Puzzle

This sentence is just so tricky it deserves a post of its own. Can you solve it? There are apparently two valid solutions.

In this sentence, the number of occurrences of '0' is __; of '1' is __; of '2' is __; of '3' is __; of '4' is __; of '5' is __; of '6' is __; of '7' is __; of '8' is __; and of '9' is __.

Self Referential Sentences

Here are some sentences that make you chuckle, do a double-take, or just plain scratch your head in bemusement. These are a select few culled from Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.

Structure

• This sentence no verb.
• because I didn't think of a good beginning for it.
• This sentence was in the past tense.
• A preposition this sentence ends in. (Yoda might have said this...)
• This sentence is a !!!! premature punctuator
• It goes without saying that
• When one this sentence into the German to translate wanted, would one the fact exploit, that the word order and the punctuation already with the German conventions agree.

Identity

• It feels sooo good to have your eyes run over my curves and serifs.
• Do you read me?
• If I said something else, would it still be me saying it?
• If I were you, who would be reading this sentence?

Prophecy

• The reader of this sentence exists only while reading me.
• In the time it takes you to read this sentence, eighty-six letters could have been processed by your brain.
• This sentence will end before you can say "Jack Rob
• Does this sentence remind you of Agatha Christie?
• You have, of course, just begun reading the sentence that you have just finished reading.

Truth

• (Here's an interactive sentence! Can you solve it? Fill in the blanks with any digits.)
  In this sentence, the number of occurrences of '0' is __; of '1' is __; of '2' is __; of '3' is __; of '4' is __; of '5' is __; of '6' is __; of '7' is __; of '8' is __; and of '9' is __.
• This sentence contains exactly threee erors. (Get it?)
• This sentence is false. (But it says it's false, so it's true! But if it's true...)

To Blog or Not to Blog?

I came across an interesting bit of research presented at a recent conference of the British Psychological Society in Edinburgh. (New Scientist link)
Dr Elaine Duncan of Glasgow Caledonian University and Dr David Sheffield of Staffordshire University questioned 94 diary writers and compared them with 41 people who did not keep diaries. Some health workers and researchers encourage their patients to keep diaries, but Duncan and Sheffield found that the diary writers in their sample had statistically significantly greater levels of anxiety and symptoms such as headaches, sleeplessness, and digestive problems.
Unfortunately the study couldn't show causality - whether diary writing was the cause of the symptoms or merely another symptom of an underlying malaise.
Fortunately for fellow bloggers, this seems to apply primarily to people writing about traumatic events or ordeals, so keep your blog happy and all is well :)

In other news, I was somewhat taken aback by the reactions of two friends to whom I proudly showed my new blog. They both made unqualified statements to the effect that bloggers suffer from the delusion that the world finds them interesting and takes them seriously.
To be fair this may well be true for many bloggers (do a search for blogs by misunderstood artists ;) ), but it's also true for many more people who (perhaps thankfully) haven't discovered blogging yet. Point: People = amusing; blog = tool.
And anyway, if my blog provides someone with some small amusement - either at my content or at my expense - then I'll count it a success :)