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?

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..

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.”

Rejected by a natural language processor! That’ll teach me for being sceptical.

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.

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.

As for Ronaldo, this was one of those wearisome afternoons when he played with the soul of a pickpocket, trying to get opponents sent off, eyeballing the officials, exaggerating injuries – in short, the whole everyone-is-against-me routine. At one point he spent so long portraying himself as the victim, repeatedly pulling up his shorts to show Dowd a scrape on his thigh, the referee demonstrated how little he cared by doing exactly the same with his own leg. Dowd might as well have made a W for Whatever with his fingers.

And I’m slightly cheered that though I only got 50% for my first machine learning assignment the class average was only 52%. Fifty is something of a psychological barrier .. anything less would feel a lot worse.

ithankYouGodformostthisamazingdayfortheleapinggreenlyspiritsof
treesandabluetruedreamofskyandforeverythingwhichisnatural
whichisinfinitewhichisyesithankYouGodformostthisamazingday
fortheleapinggreenlyspiritsoftreesandabluetruedreamofskyand
foreverythingwhichisnaturalwhichisinfinitewhichisyeseecummings

It’d be even cooler if the chart was at all attractive..

It became this anomaly in my collection, Radiohead but not, and I forgot about it until today, when I thought I’d scan it with Last.fm’s command line fingerprinter which told me:

 <track confidence="0.245223">
     <artist>Ennio Morricone</artist>
     <title>Man With A Harmonica</title>
     <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Ennio+Morricone/_/Man+With+A+Harmonica</url>
 </track>

Which wasn’t what I expected at all.

But now a six-year odd mystery has been solved and I’d love to know how the fingerprinter works. Probably some hairy maths .. it’s impressive it can figure these things, especially now they’re automatically redirected.

It’s still an excellent song.