2001: A Space Odyssey

I just read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke. I also watched the film by Kubrick.
The film feels very arty, and I remember after seeing it the first time thinking "what just happened?". The book is much better from an understanding point of view, and actually after you've read it, you can see where Kubrick is going with it.
The book is very readable and I really enjoyed it. Much of it is still in prediction territory, regardless of the name. You really have to remember that this was written in 1968 before the whole moon landing thing.
I love the coriolis tech used in the space stations and ships, although I'm pretty sure you need a radius of at least 300m to feel comfortable. The 10m radius of David Bowman's exploration ship's rotating section would drive a person insane.
The themes are all very cool, although I was disturbed by the implication that at alien race may have been needed to push apes into humanity.
The book should have ended two chapters earlier than it did as well, with the Starchild. The subsequent chapters are about a pre-Babylonian hunter/gatherer tribe meeting aliens, and an exploration group on the moon finding a different alien artifact. Irrelevant and irritating. Clarke was ahead of his time with the whole consciousness run on computers, then as pure energy. 1968. Damn.

Commercial TV

<rant coarselanguage="yes">

Commercial TV seriously pisses me off. I don't watch it if I can help it. In fact, the only time I watch it is when I want to just chill out on a Friday or Saturday night with Sinéad in front of the telly, and even then I'll push to watch a download.
It isn't especially the commercials that piss me off on commercial TV. Some commercials are entertaining, and you can deal with commercials quite effectively by hitting the mute button. Try it. Seriously. No sound will probably just annoy you at first, but you'll soon come to appreciate the absence of complete shit being shouted at you.
What really pisses me off is movie truncation. OK, so you've sat down to watch a movie that perhaps you haven't seen for a long while, or maybe even its a relatively new one that somehow you just missed in the [DVD rentals/Cinemas/downloads]. You've dealt with the ads nicely with muting (v.s.) and really quite enjoyed the film right up to the point where the credits start rolling. At this point, the movie has not fucking finished and the commercial TV assholes squish the credits into a third of a screen, mute the movie and start spouting bullshit at you about moronic TV programs you aren't going to watch because they make your brain bleed out of your ears. "Hey, assholes! I was watching that!". I often want to read some of the credits to find out who some of the actors were, but more importantly, the end music is an important factor in leaving you in a particular state of mind. It can actually be a large part of the film. Directors take care with this, and artists are paid lots to have films finish with their work.
What I also hate about commercial TV is the way they move schedules about, very often without telling you anywhere in advance. Say there's a particular science fiction series you've been enjoying. One week, they might just not fricken show it all, the next week they could put it back by an hour. "Sure, we'll just show this at 12am instead of 11pm, no one will care". Assholes. Or worse, bring a show forward by an hour, so you can sit down in time to watch the credits. No wait, you never get to see credits, they're spouting bullshit at you. It's enough to drive you to downloads.
Oh, yeah, most of the programming on commercial TV is just moronic bullshit you aren't going to watch because it makes your brain bleed out of your ears. I may have mentioned it. But that's OK. I don't watch it. My favourite moronic bullshit I don't watch is "Current Affairs" shows. These sensationalist, purile, indignant "fact finding" stories make me want to puke.
OK. deep breath. I think I'm done now.

</rant>

More Cores.

You have probably heard about Moore's law driving the relentless improvement in computational power we've seen the last 40 years. Unfortunately, this "law" isn't about power or speed, but purely about the number of transistors able to be packed onto a chip. Speed has historically been a direct result of this as the clock speed was able to be driven up with the smaller device sizes.
While Moore's law is still happily churning along, and probably will for at least another decade or two, recently processor speeds haven't really been increasing very much. Instead we are now seeing multiple cores (copies of a whole processor) embedded in chips. Currently, that's mostly 2 and 4 core chips, but since this is now the easiest way to use all the extra transistors that can be packed into a chip, over the next 10 years we'll see many many cores on your desktop. Numbers like 32-128 I suggest.
Cool right? But there's a problem. Most of today's software only knows how to do one thing at a time, so if you had a 128 core machine today, it wouldn't feel any faster. We need to write more software that uses multiple cores. Its called parallel programming, and it's much harder than normal programming as it is prone to sudden and massive program failure as threads wamp each other's data. It's been suggested that 1% of programmers actually know anything about this.
At least I may be hold onto a job for the next ten years.

Dollhouse

Check this out, a new series from Joss Whedon, Dollhouse. Looks really cool. Promo videos here, here, here. Starring Eliza Dushku. Niiccce. Essentially about personality/skills/experiences programming of the "actives/dolls", hired out to clients to be whatever they need them to be. Airs in February. Can't wait. Oh, and for BSG and Terminator to start again....

First view of exoplanets!

This is a fantastic milestone in astronomy. While we have inferred the existence of planets around other stars using the gravimetric wobble effect, this is the first time we have actually "seen the light" bounced off them. Sure, that light has passed through a whole bunch of filters and other optical effects to increase the contrast against the brilliance of the host star, but it is still real.
See also here and here.

The Selfish Gene

I just finished reading the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

This book makes for really interesting reading, if you are interested in evolution. Certainly, I now have a much better understanding of how natural selection works, but by far the most impactful element of the book is how it changes the way you view life in general. Dawkins proposes a view of life that is fascinating and irresistible. This view is that to better understand why we are here and even how we are here, we should focus on the viewpoint of the genes. Genes were here first, and in general we can refer to them as replicators, the things that actually copy themselves, and thus live on through geological time. Our bodies, us as entities, as creatures, are simply robots, or survival machines that the replicators use to give them the best chance for survival in their timescale. Our bodies are honed, via the process of natural selection acting on the various variations and mutations of behaviour that the genes produce.
In the process of human evolution, we have developed fantasticly complex brains capable of great self awareness and intelligence. Obviously the mutations and variations that led us down this path has been a great success story for our genes, for they now dominate the planet through us. However, this intelligence and self awareness gives us the ability to ignore many of the behaviours produced by our genes, thus taking control slowly away from them. Dakwins discusses his meme theory of evolution of cultural behaviour as part of this, separate but analagous to genetic evolution.
Everyone should read this book.

Support Movember!

Support Movember!

Battlestar Galactica restarts "soon"

Can't wait.
And check out some hints for the up and coming final episodes.

Incandescence

I just finished reading Incandescence by Greg Egan.
As always, Egan writes with his hard-core knowledge of physics. You simply can't expect to understand everything unless you're really enjoying that third year degree subject right now. The core part of this book is about a pre-industrial race working out some of the details of the theory of relativity from observation and low-tech experiment.
It really is very cool. The other half of the book fills in some culture and technology for the rest of the galaxy, and could probably be an interesting backdrop for many SF novels, but that isn't how Egan works. The contrast between the halves is stark, and you are left wondering how that will be resolved right up until the end. Which I won't tell you about except to say I didn't find it very fulfilling.

variable argument lists

I found an interesting problem with using var args today. When you implement a function that takes a variable number of arguments, you have to use a nasty little function called va_start() which gets a pointer to the first of the variable arguments that was passed on the stack to the function. See code below. In order to do this, you pass to va_start() the argument that was just before the variable arguments passed, in this case a const MyObj&.
I found that this just caused the user of the va_list to crash.
It turns out that you can't use an object reference like this, because the sizeof mechanism that determines how far to advance the pointer past the parameter thinks the parameter is as big as the object, where it is really just a reference to that object.
Solution: Pass a const MyObj* or a MyObj by value. In some functions, you could arrange the order of params so that a pointer or value is next to the var args.
Nasty.

void doStuff(const MyObj& details, ... )
{
  va_list args;
  va_start(args, details);
  //use args
  va_end(args);
}

Awesome weekend

Wow- what an awesome weekend.
Friday was my birthday, thanks to all the well-wishers! I bought some geeky t-shirts from here, to celebrate.
Saturday, we dropped the kids off at my Dad's place and then went to Andrew's wedding. That was really cool. Andrew showed a brilliant video of himself (and others) instead of doing a speech.
Sinead and I stayed in a hotel afterwards. No kids. Whooo-hooo!
Sunday we relaxed, eventually went and picked up the kids and had a Thai takeaway for dinner. It just doesn't get much better :_)

Free Nappies!

Free sample at ecodirect.com.au, and check out the sunscreen while you are there.
OK, a little gratuitous, but links is links :_)

Sinead's business is going well. I've just been over to check on the backup system I've just put in place. I have a RAID 1 NAS set up, sending it daily backups at night.
I used a Lacie 2big Network. I've one issue so far with the windows share on it disappearing, but it came back with a reboot, so I'll have to keep an eye on it. But it looks pretty!

Half-Orc to Centaur in three Easy Steps

I am mourning Moag as a Half-Orc. Moag as we knew him is dead. The party faced a room full of some real nasties on Wed night, player-time. One such nasty was a Grell, a brain with tentacles. With a brain that size, you just know it is going to cast spells and be, well, you know, clever and stuff. Moag battled bravely, and even thought he had it cornered, seemingly trapped in a small room, silenced by Vim, co-adventurer. But the Grell was too clever, and found a way out of the room, where it could cast spells, and viciously pointed a tentacle back at Moag and cast Disintegration. Moag was instantly turned to a small heap of ash. Moag was suddenly gone.
Later, as the party was back in town, carrying a small bag of ash, counting their coin, and looking at options, they remembered that they had a very special magic item. This magic item can turn back time itself, and if used within a few seconds of Moag's death, would have brought him back, and tactics could have been revisited. Only, back in town, many hours had passed and the party as one, thought "ooops".
Then the party realised that in order to perform the less expensive version of Resurrection, Raise Dead, you actually need the body whole. And the better spell Resurrection, which does not require a body, was waaay too expensive.
A final option remained. They Reincarnated him.
Moag returned as, yes, a Centaur. Weird, but actually not bad strategically as a fighter as Centaurs are really strong. Moag lives, but lives hating orcs, as Centaurs do, which is really disconcerting for Moag as Moag's mother is an orc.

[Update]
Looking for a picture of a Centaur? I've pulled it. Too many hits.

Evolution is Over

Evolution is over apparently.
Actually, I used to agree with this but for a different reason than is discussed in this article. The article suggests that evolution is slowing because, among other things, older guys aren't having children as much - especially in the West, and it's older guys that produce the mutations required for beneficial changes to be selected. Sounds plausible. I would have thought that modern medicine would have been the largest contributor, simply by allowing those who would have otherwise died to live and reproduce. It isn't survival of the fittest anymore. Its survival of damn near everyone.
I say I used to agree with this, but I guess I should say that I have broadened my definition of evolution to include technological as well as biological evolution. Evolution hasn't stopped, it has found a way to work even FASTER. Biological evolution got us to the point where we could used tools, and record information, and that was enough to boot-strap the technological phase of evolution. We don't need biological evolution anymore, technology is changing us far more, and far more quickly than biology has/will. Have you noticed the computer that 20 years ago was in the study, is now in your pocket? Where will it be 20 years from now?
Behind your eyes.

Capacity

Just finished reading Capacity by Tony Ballantyne.
This is good science fiction but not for the usual reasons. OK, it has plenty of cool ideas in it, but there's something disturbing going on. It's close enough to a lot of other science fiction environments, that you don't notice at first, but the differences start to get more creepy as you read. Also, I found it quite hard to decide who to side with at times. I wasn't quite sure which side was going to triumph. You should note that this is book 2 of a trilogy, so perhaps things would have been a bit different if I had read the first book, Recursion already. Ah well. The novel stands by itself and I'll now be reading the other two...