Monday, 18. August 2008, 19:45:53
infinity, Hilbert, mathematics
For some reason I started thinking about the viability of
Hotel Hilbert today.
Hilbert was a mathematician, and his idea was for an infinite hotel which even when full could always find room for one more person. Now in a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, there is the problem that you can’t simply send each guest to the next available room at the end of the corridor, since it would take them longer and longer—and eventually infinitely long—to check in. So Hilbert’s clever wheeze was instead to get everyone to move down a room when a new guest arrived, leaving room 1 free for the new arrival. Thus the rooms at infinity would only be approached very gradually, one room at a time, and no-one would have to take an inifinite walk.
So far so good, but what happens when someone wants to leave? Depending on how long they’ve been there, it could be a
very long walk back to reception! Hilbert never addresses this problem, which is surely critical to a viable hotel. After a while it occurred to me that instead of getting people to move down a room every time a new guest arrives, the rooms themselves could move. I think the solution is to have an endless loop of rooms, like the compartments of a paternoster lift. Not only does this remove the hassle of having to change rooms all the time, it also means that on the return side of the loop there is a stready stream of empty rooms heading back towards reception. When half way through your stay, you simply switch to one of the returning ones, and hey presto you arrive back at reception just in time to leave!
This doesn’t solve everything however. For instance in most hotels people want to come and go during their stay, and not just stay in their room for the whole visit. I’m still working on that one, but I am confident I will have a solution by the time the first infinite hotel has finished being built!
Saturday, 16. August 2008, 14:27:55
phobia, vampire, mirrors
I recently met a girl who has a fear of mirrors. She was at first diagnosed with Body Dysmorphic Disorder which is about self image, but she said in fact her fear is the reverse: when she looks in a mirror she’s scared that she won’t have a reflection! It sounds kind of weird but at the same time it seemed to make sense in a weird sort of way. (Luckily she’s not the type who wears much makeup!) She’s now been diagnosed with Eisoptrophobia, however this simply seems to mean “fear of mirrors”, so it doesn’t actually explain her condition.
I asked her if she’d ever found bite marks on her neck or experienced missing time, but she didn’t think so. She does have a certain sense of humour about it, but the dread she experiences on approaching a mirror seems very real, we were walking through a shopping arcade where there was a shopfront with a line of mirrored pillars, and she insisted on walking so that I was between her and the mirrors, and she clutched me the whole time and looked the other way until we were well past them.
I noticed though that she didn’t have this issue with reflections in windows, I think it’s that mirrors are like openings into other worlds whereas you can see through the reflections in normal glass. Looking the phobia up online I see that a fear of mirrors is surprisingly common, with the notion that the reflection is really of another parallel world being quite a dominant theme. But most people’s fear seems to be that some weird creature will look out at them rather than that they themselves won’t have a reflection.
I recall seeing a Dracula film once where this guy is shaving and Dracula comes up behind him. When the guy notices Dracula isn’t reflected in his shaving mirror, Dracula simply taps the mirror and says “unreliable things” and then tosses the mirror out of the window. From his casual air, he evidently he didn’t suffer from Eisoptrophobia!
Sunday, 10. August 2008, 19:35:27
flowers, bees, photography, photograph
I’ve been away for a while recently, and visited a place which is heaven for bees but hell if you suffer bee-phobia. Every plant in Harlow Carr Gardens in Yorkshire was covered in bees, making the most of the gaps between rain showers. I took my chances and got a few close ups, only centimetres from the flowers.
This next one is my favourite shot though, these flowers are so strange, reminiscent of dandelion clocks. The scene also reminded me of what is said to have been the first Impressionist photograph,
“The Onion Field” by George Davison.
These flowers look like open mouths complete with teeth! They’re from the foxglove family I think, but would make good triffids.
I also went on a mysterious woodland walk high above
The Strid, a place where the River Wharfe (which is normally about 20 metres wide at that point) is funnelled into a rocky gorge narrow enough (about 1.5m) to stride across (hence the name). (However many people have drowned jumping The Strid, since the rocks tend to be slippy, and slope back towards the water, which is deep and fast as it courses through the narrows.)
Well that’s all for now, I’ll do a few more later and try and catch up on the bloggysphere too.
Wednesday, 23. July 2008, 00:46:08
olympics
It seems that come the year 2012 we’re all f*cked as we won’t be able to use the year in our blogs or indeed at all! (At least in the UK). According to
this site about the 2*12 Olymp*cs the number “2012” (also “London 2012”) has become a "Games' Mark" and no-one may use it, punishable by summary execution or somesuch.
So not only are they filching my money via the Council Tax but they’re going to stop me writing the date any more! Hmm, I guess that means that during the Olymp*c year I won’t be able to write out any Council Tax cheques, so maybe the scoundrels won’t get their addict’s fix of cash from me that year....
Tuesday, 15. July 2008, 18:08:55
html
Here's a literally random thing to do!
Paste this code into a text file and save it as "random.html"
<HTML><HEAD><NAME="Frameset">
<title>random</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="59">
</head>
<FRAMESET ROWS="*" units=pixels border=0>
<FRAME NAME=r SRC="http://www.randomwebsite.net/random/"
SCROLLING=yes Frameborder="no" border=0>
</FRAMESET>
</HTML>
— Alternatively you can download this zip file containing one I made earlier.
random.zip
Now drag the file into your browser and bookmark it for future reference. Whenever you load it, it will load a randomly chosen webpage that changes every 59 seconds! (You can set the META Refresh to a different number of seconds or remove that line altogether if you like, but please don't make it too short so as not to hammer the random website server).
There are actually several websites around which will serve up random webpages, another URL you could use in the above file is http://www.randomwebsite.com/cgi-bin/random.pl
(Note: the reason for wrapping the URL in a frameset is because otherwise a timed refresh (or pressing the "reload" button on your browser) will just reload whatever random website you first got instead of fetching a new one.)
If you google "random website" you will find several more. I find it's a fun thing to have loaded in a tab, every now and then I check to see what's turned up, there are often interesting sites and blogs I would never have known about.... and just once it even loaded up a site I was already familiar with!
Tuesday, 8. July 2008, 00:31:45
summer, sky, photograph
Before this week’s rain it was sunny....
... so I went cycling along the canals...
Saturday, 5. July 2008, 19:24:12
language
Somehow I have to write about words again. But isn’t that what words are for?
So this person said, “..... and when I said that, he literally exploded!”
“You mean he was a suicide bomber?” I asked in surprise.
“No, I don’t mean he
really exploded....”
Why do people say ‘literally’ when they mean ‘metaphorically’? It seems that the word
literal has two different meanings. It can be summed up like this:
- The literal meaning of literal is literal.
- The metaphorical meaning of literal is metaphorical.
Hmmm.....
Saturday, 28. June 2008, 18:05:45
anime, radio, language
It always bugs me when people on TV or radio say “forward slash” when reading out a website URL. The “forward” bit is so redundant! This is all Microsoft’s fault for using the backslash for a path separator in Windows and confusing people as to what kind kind of slash they need to type.
Recently I thought things were getting better, but then today a radio interviewer (that is, an interviewer on a radio programme, not a person who interviews radios!), in a TOTALLY non-internet context, said to some guy “...and as for your clients
forward slash friends...”
AArrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhh!
I do hope she was being ironic because otherwise I think I’m going to have to do a Miyazaki* and send the BBC a sword with the words “No Forward Slashes!” written on it...
*
for non-anime fans, the director Miyazaki sent a genuine samurai sword to Disney with a post-it note attached saying "No cuts!" when he heard they were contemplating cutting some scenes from one of his anime masterpeices for the US market.
Friday, 13. June 2008, 01:45:52
This is an image I’ve just been working on to use for a condolences card for someone, Maybe I should call it “Path to Eternity”.
It took me hours to select a suitable image. I realised quite quickly that I wanted one which was quite minimalist, one with mood but not too much detail—a conventional landscape would be too kitschy for such an occasion. Nevertheless I had misgivings about using an image with such bold foreground figures, and made sure I suppressed any visible detail in them so that they became, as far as possible, generic figures of humanity.
I knew I wanted an into-the-light shot with the sun breaking through clouds or mist to give a feeling of either hope (light at the end of the tunnel), or perhaps a mythic afterlife feeling, or hopefully both. Luckily I have several zillion
contre jour images, as for some reason the old adage that you should take photographs with your back to the sun has never held sway with me! The actual location is Pendle Hill in Lancashire which is quite a strange place, especially when the clouds come down. I’ve actually uploaded a few images from that day before but this is the first time I’ve uploaded what I consider to be one of the “good” ones.
Monday, 2. June 2008, 19:20:13
manga, Mysterious Girlfriend X, salt, science
Every once in a while something wonderful happens. Another chapter of
Mysterious Girlfriend X (謎の彼女Ｘ) gets translated! This story cleverly turns what could have been a very ordinary high school romance into something truly exotic thanks to the strangeness of the girl, Mikoto Urabe, who never does anything by the book, as you can see here when she invites her boyfriend to taste her sweat after he comments that she smells nice. (The result is that he has a vision of her in a bikini at the seaside.)
What I like about this kind of story is how it shows that with the right attitude, everyday life can be an amazing and exotic experience, something mysterious, or a great adventure.
Incidentally I learned something interesting recently. I’ve heard it said in the past that only humans have salty sweat. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I gather from what a nutrionist on Radio 4’s Food Programme said that we only have salty sweat because we eat too much salt. It seems to be the body’s way of excreting excess salt: apparently if you cut your salt consumption enough your sweat ceases to be salty, which means that contrary to popular belief you don’t need to consume more salt in hot weather to replace what you lose due to sweating. In fact in tests done on troops in the desert it was found that taking salt tablets had a negative effect as they needed to consume more water than troops that had nothing to compensate for the salt lost due to sweating.
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