Why didn’t I know about this before? MIT have all their course material available, online. Wow. Now I can finally patch up my maths knowledge and take that primer on Number Theory I’ve been meaning to do for so long.

The speaker at church on Sunday wasn’t up to much, frankly. He was a guest speaker from Scotland, and a friend of the pastor (so I have to be a bit careful what I say). He came to talk about worship. I think. I’m not totally clear, to be honest. The thing is, his sermon consisted of 50% pop-psychology (“You’re going to die; live with it”, “You’re not that important”, etc), 40% meaningless Evangelical jargon (“As I was preparing this morning I really felt God wanted me to [x]”), 5% awkward (sorry, “spiritual”) silence and 5% of actual content. Some of that 5%, I’ll admit, wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t much and it was mostly drowned out by the handwavey waffle of the rest of the talk. He threw in a couple of verses at the beginning before veering wildly off course and then skipped over other Bible references because he “wanted to get to his point”. By the end of the sermon, I had no clear idea what his point actually was, or how it fitted in with his prescribed topic of worship.

So. It was quite surprising to me when, talking to another person from my church later on, that they thought it was a really good sermon. I didn’t say anything – because I’m a coward, I just ducked out of the conversation – but it niggled me. And the reason it niggled me is this: the guy could present. He could speak well; he was funny, he engaged with the congregation, he was animated and he held your attention. He was a very good, very natural public speaker. And – here’s the rub – people seem to have a tendency to confuse a good speaker with someone who has something worthwhile to say. So, even though he talked waffly nonsense for forty minutes, the fact that he presented it well made people feel they’d heard a good sermon.

Now, there’s nothing intrinsically bad or wrong with good presentation. Indeed, it makes ideas easier to communicate; it makes people more receptive to ideas and more likey to retain them afterwards if they are well presented. But to confuse the quality of the medium and the quality of the message is a bad thing, and something we very much need to be aware of.

Crazy busy at work. Eclectic linkdump:

Catholic Church in “Being Sensible. Again.” shocker. If this carries on, I may have to buy a rosary.

Beer cures cancer. Probably also causes it, too, though.

Coffee Beer. Sort of.

This article may as well have been written about me.

From Wired’s preview of PGR3 on the Xbox 360:

PGR2 focused its processing power on cars, not their environs. In PGR3, cities are 10 times more detailed. And – even though they’re usually just a blur as you whiz by – thousands of individually modeled spectators react to the action, cheering winners and jeering losers.

Yep, that’s right. Your hundreds of dollars of computing power are going into rendering even more accurate crowds that you’ll never actually see and won’t make the blindest bit of difference to how the game actually plays. Well, please excuse me if I’m not frothing at the mouth with excitement here.

Hat-tip to Homicide – CFDG is a very cool hybrid of Logo and, uh, a context-free grammar parser. Slightly reminiscent of Processing, but more vectory.

Nearly a year after I left, Starship Troopers is finally available for you to buy in the shops. Lacking the requisite ninja kickass PC hardware necessary to play it, I’m unable to comment on whether it’s actually any good or not (and even if I did have the requisite hardware, I’m pretty sure I’d say it’s awesome either way, because even without the last year I was still involved in at least 50% of the development so I’ve got a certain amount of pride resting on it 🙂 The screenshots over at IGN look very sexy indeed, anyway.

But anyway, go and buy it and pay the wages of my friends over at Strangelite.

The thing is, I thought it was impossible to take the piss out of J. Allard, given just how effective he is at taking the piss out of himself. But apparently it is. Weebl is a hero.

We all know that nayf is awesome. But what we perhaps didn’t know is just how awesome he is. I’ve managed to prove that, actually, he’s the most important person who has ever lived.

Nayf claims that every time (well, it’s happened three times out of three so far) he steps out of a bus shelter, the rain slows or stops completely. He also claims this is a significant occurrence. Fortunately for us, there are methods we can use to determine if this is significant. We’re going to use a test called the chi-squared test: it allows us to test observed results against a null-hypothesis and see if they differ significantly. In this case, our null-hypothesis would be that a person stepping in or out of a bus shelter should have no discernable affect on the weather whatsoever. So, with that in mind, we can construct the following table:

To perform a chi-squared test, we compare the value of the sum of all ((O-E)²)/E with values in the chi-squared table with appropriate degrees of freedom – in this case, we have one degree of freedom. For it to have a probability of 5% we would expect a value of 3.84. For it to have a probability of 1%, we would expect a value of 6.64. We have a value of ∞+3, which isn’t actually on the table, but extrapolating I think it’s reasonable to assume that the probability of this result occurring randomly is pretty low. Infinitely low, in fact. More than infinitely low – because our value is ∞+3.

So, this make the result more than infinitely significant – which, of course, means that Nayf himself must also be more than infinitely significant – and thus, the most important person who has ever lived, ever. All hail Nayf!

Some Russian photography worked out that if he put coloured filters in front of his camera and took three photographs of the same scene, he could reconstruct a coloured image using only B&W film. The results are here and are very, very cool indeed.