Spent an excellent week in Les Arcs, save for one hit to the head. Obligatory photos:
Plus a couple more here.
Thought I’d see if eMusic was still value for money this afternoon .. astonished to find a year’s subscription is still £140 but they’ve reduced the number of songs allowed by from 90 to 35. So I’ll be giving that a miss. How do they expect to compete with Spotify?
A super line from Jack Dee to close this week’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue:
And so, ladies and gentlemen, as the gentle donkey of time is lead into the tranquil Bethlehem of hope, before having his ears blown off by the Israeli army of eternity, I notice it’s the end of the show..
There’s a great line in the Guardian piece ‘100 minutes in the life of Muammar Gaddafi‘:
Gaddafi certainly knows how to woo a crowd, particularly at important junctures such as this. This was after all his big chance to cement Libya’s re-entry into the bosom of the international community after 20 years in the wilderness.
The technique he chose to do so – cunningly – was to blatantly insult his audience. The representatives of the 192 nations assembled in the assembly hall were no better, he told them, than orators at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner. “You make your speech and then you disappear. That’s all you are right now.”
Noticed National Rail has a ‘virtual assistant‘, sceptically wondered how bad it could be:
Rejected by a natural language processor! That’ll teach me for being sceptical.
Exams are over, the sun came and went, I got a first (hurrah!), a job for a couple of months and now it’s just .. working out what now? Completing Chrono Trigger is my first priority :D
Spent some time moving the last.fm charts thing to Python, because Python is tasty, PHP is clumsy, and matplotlib is a superb piece of kit.
Here’s a histogram of the number of tracks I’ve listened to each week for the last few years:
(x is the number of tracks in a week.) I looked at a few friends’ and there seemed quite a split between those roughly following a Gaussian distribution and those following something rather more exponential. I should experiment with different features of matplotlib, maybe narrow those bins a little. I’ve lots of little plans for other graphs and combinations.
Finally, there’s a great little piece about a quirk of the number 1/89 here. Sum the numbers of the Fibonacci Sequence in the following manner:
.01
.001
.0002
.00003
.000005
.0000008
.00000013
.000000021
.0000000034
.00000000055
.000000000089
.0000000000144
.
+ .
.
----------------
.01123595505... = 1/89
The link has an outline proof about why it’s true.
Revising for an exam on machine learning and pattern recognition bitsandpieces on Friday and I came across a paper titled ‘An Introduction to the Conjugate Gradient Method Without the Agonizing Pain‘. Which is awesome.
The Conjugate Gradient Method is the most prominent iterative method for solving sparse systems of linear equations. Unfortunately, many textbook treatments of the topic are written with neither illustrations nor intuition, and their victims can be found to this day babbling senselessly in the corners of dusty libraries. For this reason, a deep, geometric understanding of the method has been reserved for the elite brilliant few who have painstakingly decoded the mumblings of their forebears. Nevertheless, the Conjugate Gradient Method is a composite of simple, elegant ideas that almost anyone can understand. Of course, a reader as intelligent as yourself will learn them almost effortlessly.
Its keywords are conjugate gradient method, preconditioning, convergence analysis and agonizing pain, and it has a chapter called ‘Eigen do it if I try‘ which (brilliant and awful title aside) is the first intuitive explanation of eigenvectors I’ve read, hurrah.
Just a note to say I updated Historical Charts to take advantage of Last.fm automatically correcting misspelled info.