Month: July 2013
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A circle inscribing a pentagon
This is also from The Irrationals – though I had to ask for assistance over at Stack Exchange to get the right answer (as is so often the case the solution is reasonably obvious when you are presented with it). Anyway, the question is: given a regular pentagon (of sides with length of 10 units) which […]
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Not such a dunce after all
Reading The Irrationals and I discover that the term “dunce” – as in stupid person – comes from Dunse, via Dunsman, and ultimately Duns Scotus, a 13th century scholastic from Duns in the Scottish borders. His views annoyed the humanists (the humanists being of the view that humans needed to re-read the classics, the scholastics […]
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More astrophotography
The advantage of waiting a little longer to take some more shots is that the sky gets darker and you can drop the exposure time to 20 seconds. The disadvantage is that clouds appear… But here are some more shots: (a) Deneb, Cygnus and the Milky Way (b) Altair and Aquila – milky way visible […]
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Vega, Lyra and the Milky Way
It’s a clear night here in Norfolk, so here’s a shot – 30 seconds at 1600 ISO – of Vega, the rest of the Lyra constellation and the Milky Way (bottom of frame). No apologies for the size of the picture!
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The irrationals
This book – The Irrationals: A Story of the Numbers You Can’t Count On – is my holiday reading. It’s quite eccentric – publishing passages in Ancient Greek alongside maths – but quite fun. Expect some entries based on the things it makes me think about.
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Court blocks the publication of a scientific paper
The English High Court (the highest civil court) has blocked the publication of a scientific paper that would have revealed the full details of a zero day vulnerability in Volkswagen’s immobiliser mechanisms – the temporary injunction against publication has been granted to stop the publication of “Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobilizer” – […]
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A moment reached
I have just submitted my “qualifying dissertation” to the University of York. Latterly I have been thinking of my PhD studies in terms of the film Dougal and the Blue Cat – I grew up at a bad time (the virtual collapse of cinema going in the 60s and 70s) and a bad place (in […]
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Turing versus Rosenberg
Perhaps this would be better on my book review site, but it’s really a question of science, prompted by reading the challenging The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. My issue with the book is not atheism but the essential claim of the author – Alex Rosenberg – that human beings cannot reason […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 