Month: August 2013
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Dietary myths debunked by the New Scientist
I always think it’s good to get rid of myths about human diet – so here are six care of last week’s New Scientist. 1. Drink eight glasses of water per day Turns out we get plenty of water from food and drinks such as tea and coffee (the idea these dehydrate is also debunked). […]
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Searching for a NoC simulator
I am looking around for a Network on Chip simulator – one that models the cores and not just the routing. Anybody know of one? The only ones I have found thus far are simulators of the routing.
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How to install SystemC on amd64 Linux
These instructions work – unlike those you might read elsewhere, which have been edited poorly. 1. Register to get the sources at accellera.org’s website 2. Once registered login and download the source: go to http://www.accellera.org/downloads/standards/systemc and download systemc-2.3.0.tgz 3. Move the .tgz archive to the parent directory of where you want to install and unpack […]
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Wet and stormy autumn ahead?
This weekend sees the summer bank holiday in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scotland, like the Republic of Ireland, keeps to what was once the UK-wide date of early August). Although August will still have another few days left, in many ways Monday marks “the end” for summer for many. So, what of the autumn? […]
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Annoyed with @amazon and their b0rked business model
Last week I was sent a $50 Amazon.com gift voucher: a very pleasant surprise. I immediately loaded the voucher into my Amazon.com account (I had one of these long before I got an amazon.co.uk account) and then thought about what books I’d like to order – picked a couple and thought “that’s nice”. Despite the […]
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Weight loss: all gone wrong?
So, I go on holiday, hire a bike and cycle a lot for the fortnight I am away: regularly burning (according to online assessments) over one thousand calories a day. And then I come back and find (see the graph) that my weight has risen by five pounds. Too much drinking, fatty foods and so on? I […]
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How secure is your encryption?
The answer is, “probably quite secure, but not as secure as you might think.” This is not a story about the NSA but about the fundamental maths of encryption – and about the ability to “guess” what an encrypted message might mean through a sophisticated version of “frequency analysis” – in other words guessing what […]
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“Crowd sourcing” to play a key role in fundamental physics experiment
Ordinary people are to be asked to make a contribution to an experiment which aims to determine key facts about the nature of the physical universe – reports the New Scientist. Particle physicists at CERN – the join European experiment famous for the Large Hadron Collider – are conducting an experiment – AEgIS – into […]
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A neat contradiction
the smallest natural number that cannot be described by an English sentence of up to one thousand letters Such a number cannot exist – if we take the sentence above as a legitimate description of the number – as the sentence above both describes the number that cannot be described in less than one thousand […]
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My one problem with Feynman’s QED
Well, as predicted, I finished off Richard Feynman‘s QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter in short order this morning – and it is a truly marvellous book. I just wish I had read it as an undergraduate. My one problem with it was its explanation of “stimulated emission“. Now, as an undergraduate, I […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 