I’ve finally remembered what no. 34 is. It’s Anoraknophobia by Marillion. I’m not sure if I should admit to having remembered that or not, really.

How much is $87billion? This much. That’s a lot. An *awful* lot. Especially when you’re spending it on killing innocent people eliminating evil terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not two entries ago, I was bemoaning students. Today, I was directed at this comic, which set me off on a proper nostalgia trip and made me think about being a student again. We humans have such a great capacity for hypocrisy… 🙂

Y’see, even though I’m not a great fan of students (or more specifically, student culture, but that’s a rant for another day; perhaps after I’ve been queuing at a bar for half an hour whilst hundreds of the buggers stand around moaning about having no money and how hard their work is before ordering seventeen pints each and missing their lectures the next day), part of me still quite fancies the idea of doing full-time research. Actually, I even gave it a try for a year.

I did a computer science degree. By dint of the fact that I’d been sat in front of a computer almost continually since I my 8th birthday (and despite a messy relationship’s attempt to ruin things in my final year) I did quite well. Having, at that point in time, absolutely no idea what to do with my life, I jumped at the first research post I was offered. In retrospect, this was something of a mistake. I should have jumped at the first research post I was offered that was in a subject area I was actually interested in. I didn’t, and I ended up studying applications of parallelised cell processing using optical interconnects. Which is a fancy way of saying “algorithms”, which, in computing speak, means “unutterably dull”.

The whole thing wasn’t helped by the fact that the simulation software I had been given to use didn’t actually work for anything other than very, very basic systems. I ended up spending 90% of my time writing programs to get round the limitations of the simulator. By the end of my research period, I’d managed to obtain, well, absolutely no results whatsoever. This posed a problem. A thesis which basically said “I have no results, and so therefore, in conclusion, I am unable to say anything useful at all” is not a good thesis. So, I did what every sensible person would do in this situation. I ditched it all in and got a job instead.

I did feel a bit guilty about this for a while, especially as a neglected to mention to my supervisor that she shouldn’t be expecting a completed thesis any time soon. But I felt a bit better when I later discovered that all but one of the other people in my research group had done pretty much the same thing in the following year.

Sometime afterwards I found out that the research group I’d done my third year project with (and who I’d thoroughly enjoyed working with) had several research posts, and would have been happy for me to have taken any of them.

Chalk one up to experience. At the least, I’m being paid now 🙂

I did have loads of really exciting and profound stuff to write about today. Unfortunately, at some point overnight, my ADSL modem decided to hang up and not reconnect, so home.parm.net has been down until just now when I got home and poked it into life again.

By way of an apology, have a six legged cow.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate all students. I used to be one. My girlfriend is a student. They’re not all bad.

But this story doesn’t do much to help matters. This is Oxford University, for goodness sake – they’re supposed to have the cream of the intellectual crop. If they don’t trust their intake to be able to find another building 500 yards away, what hope is there left for the country?

Just uploaded another batch of photos just here. Again, the scans are a bit disappointing compared to the original.

Labyrinthitis playing up bigtime again. Feel miserable. Probably won’t write much more today.

I was driving along the M56 to work this morning, and there was the most gorgeous, spectacular rainbow I’ve seen in ages. “Oooh,” I thought, “I’ve got the camera in the car with me, and there’s a lay-by coming up. Maybe I’ll get a nice picture of it.”

Except, of course, I put a black and white film in the blimmin’ camera yesterday, and didn’t finish it. Bah. And I can’t really justify a second body, either. “f/8 and be there” – helps if you have the right film, too. Buggerations.

The latest Ig Nobel prize winners are out. This year’s highlights include:

• An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.
• Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.
• The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos

A friend of mine also forwarded me this report on happiness, although I’m not too sure what the nonpecuniary domain is. The same friend also provided me with this amusing paper on the Detection of large woody debris accumulations in old-growth forests using sonic wave collection.

Another friend of mine had such fun with a Biocad machine she decided to write about it. This made me laugh.

All this of course means that a link to the classic “Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass” is all but inevitable.

Hooray for science!

I played with Lego a lot when I was a kid. An awful lot. My brother and I had several very large buckets of bricks, along with a couple of toolboxes worth of Technic pieces, motors, etc. It certainly made it easy for my parents when it came to buying me presents. Buying me a new Lego set or three was a guaranteed way to keep me quiet well into the new year and beyond.

Actually, it probably still would be, although most modern Lego sets tend to have so many custom pieces and pre-made bits of gubbins as to be almost pointless. I wonder if my parents still have my Lego Technic Control Centre…

Anyway. This guy is clearly mad. And a genius. Check out his Lego renderings of Escher. Incredible.

I’ve just spent a happy hour or so looking through me-ish‘s photographs. They’re very, very good.

Also, I reckon I’ve got 26 out of the 60 covers on her album covers quiz thingy, and I’m going to go mental if I can’t remember which one number 34 is. I know I know it, but I just can’t place it.