"Good night?" "Are you in?" "I’m downstairs." I walked down. "How was it? Was Tom okay?" "You are never gonna believe what happened!" "What? Tom not turn up again?" "Ha, no. There was a massive fight!" "In Cantina’s? Who would have thought?" Sarcasm was not his strong point. "Yeah, I know, but this was bigger than normal. Well, in fact it was all kinda quick, but some guy lost an arm!" "Ha, ha." He looked at me as if waiting for a punchline. "No, wait, you’re serious? How do you lose ...

So when you ask "when will finite field arithmetic be useful?", that’s when. In the 70s, there were gangs of raiders. Paintball, mainly, but that still stings. So they’d wander from door to door, pretty much dropping in at random. Drive-by paintball, I guess you could call it, but they didn’t always drive. The thing is, they would let you off if you could do the maths. Not always finite field arithmetic, but that was definitely the biggest area. "Let ω be a cube root of 5 adjoined to a prime f...

A bird - or something flying anyway - flew through the open door and struck Goldberry, then landed in the open fire, spilling hot coals on to her dress, and setting it aflame more quickly than any could have imagined. Olly grabbed the burning coals and tossed them quickly back into the fire - one, two, three of them! - and swatted the flames into ash, before even Goldberry herself could move away from them. A second later he realised what he had done, and looked down and saw his scarred hands. ...

 "So what do we know, Moiraine?", said Siuan, sitting behind her desk. "Very little, I'm afraid, Mother, beyond what we knew already. I think we have confirmed what we suspected, however - Dagdara has been affected by some external force." "I do not think that we really doubted that", replied Siuan, "but yes, that is - unfortunately - a fair summary. Was it worth it?" "I think so, Mother - she will not suffer any long-term harm, and she went into this willingly, and we were..." she hesitated,...

How to Score Order of Payout Winner calculates score first, and then everyone pays the Winner. Going anti-clockwise from the Winner, everyone else calculates their score. Non-winning players then pay each other the difference between their hands. Calculating Payout East always pays or is paid double. Calculate score of the hand using Basic Hand Scores and then apply all appropriate doubles using Doubles. Rounding Scores When using chips in multiples of 10, rather than 2, work out the d...

The benefits of political messaging are fairly clear: to persuade your audience to support your proposal, you need to talk to them; the more effectively you do this, the more support you get. Perhaps all persuasion is politics: every time I want to persuade someone to agree with me, maybe I will do better if I accept that I'm a political actor. I certainly think this will be true in understanding and addressing Digital Poverty: for one thing, we need a better name for it. The West Wing and t...

So... Jeremy Corbyn has announced that he will table a vote of No Confidence in the House of Commons as soon as the summer recess is over, and we're heading for a Second Brexit referendum. Or has he? Well, no. Not quite. Not even nearly, really. "I therefore intend to table a Vote of No Confidence at the earliest opportunity when we can be confident of success." [My emphasis] https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1161751909788782594/photo/1 Well, the emphasised words look perfectly reas...

From 1974 until 1979, I was at St Francis infants and junior schools in Kensington. I have very strong memories of some of the teachers there, and as you can imagine, some stand out more than others. In around 1978 or so, there was some kind of inter-school quiz event, and I remember Margaret Hall - who was then either deputy head or head, but I can't remember that - popping into our classroom with a final "ooh, if this comes up, then this is the answer!" moment. The question in question was "...

In its beta phase, I bought a reMarkable tablet, which claims to (and indeed does) "feel like paper"; it's basically a (fairly deliberately) functionally-limited E Ink tablet with a paper-like semi-haptic interface designed for note taking. Physically, it is a lovely piece of kit: it's light, entirely monochrome (well, grayscale) in both the electronic and non-electronic parts, and well-constructed. Its intended user seems to be one who loves the physicality of pen or pencil and paper, and for...

DST and Death Research Matt Parker (who is, for me, famed for supplying the game Set (that the kids love), and non-transitive dice), recently posted a short YouTube video on some research into daylight savings time (DST) changes and changes in mortality rates. It's an interesting topic, and anecdotes (and potentially evidence) abound for how traumatic this might be; the big question here, though, is whether or not DST changes actually cause death; presumably, the implicit question is whether o...

Further to my recent post on Stack Unwinding, I think I now understand how I perceive stacks visually ... The root of the stack is in front of, somewhere between chest and neck height, slightly to my left. Adding an item to a stack brings it closer to me, but always moving leftwards. Items on the stack are rectangular, with the horizontal sides around twice the length of the vertical. Items being added are sort of twisted so that the stack itself is a little skew. I don't think that this so...

This morning I heard that David Davis, the UK Brexit Secretary, in an interview with Newsnight broadcast on 14 March, had passed off the potential problems associated with a reduced transition period for the UK assuming that it ends up leaving the European Union. "So one of the big crunch issues on the transition - or the implementation period - is that the EU says it should end at the end of December 2020; the UK is saying it should be around 2 years - so that would be March 2021. Are you gonn...

So an audit has recommended that Northamptonshire County Council should be disbanded and replaced with two councils instead. The reasoning seems to be that, in addition to the council being effectively bankrupt, it would additionally be impossible to rescue as one council, whereas rescue in the form of a reconstruction as two councils would be feasible. The logical conclusion, to my mind, is that the council was originally in an untenable position: if it is simply not possible to have a single...

On its release in around June 2012, I signed up to a crowd-funded exercise to provide all MPs with a copy of The Geek Manifesto: Why Science Matters. It's a well-written, inspiring read that I can thoroughly recommend to geeks who want to take a bigger part in democracy. At the time, my MP was Don Foster, now Lord Foster of Bath, so I guess I'll check to make sure that Wera Hobhouse, his replacement, has a copy as well. I'm currently re-reading the book (again), and this time round I'm going th...

In Nature, How to make replication the norm, the authors discuss several ways in which scientific research can - or more particularly in this case, cannot - be reproduced by later researchers. One phrase from the paper struck me particularly hard: "In addition, for a random sample of papers, journals should attempt to reconstruct the code from scratch or search the executable code for errors." A lot of my day-to-day job is spent searching code for errors. We have many tools for this: visual...

So, I was having a conversation this morning about software stacks, and whether stack unwinding goes up or down. In particular, we often end up talking about whether one item is above or below another. That's natural enough language, on the face of it: after all, the physical metaphor of a stack is something along the lines of a stack of books, where one book naturally and physically sits on top of the previous one. Adding to a stack is literally putting something on top of it, a removal from a...

So a few Christmases now, I've had post addressed to 4 The Glebe in Bath.  Actually it's in Hinton Charterhouse, but that's near enough to Bath that the postal address looks like this: 4 The Glebe Hinton Charterhouse BATH BA2 7SB I've stuck with capitalisation and formatting as given by the Royal Mail's web site.  For comparison, my own address looks like this: 4 Glebe Road BATH BA2 1JB Obviously the "Hinton Charterhouse" part might help to - and is at least in part intended to - r...