Big site on my server

Now my über-powerful </sarcasm> Compaq machine is running Debian, a proper server distro of Linux. It’s very efficient and much easier to use as a server than Ubuntu, especially when combined with my new-found favourite server software, XAMPP, which sorts out all the apache / SQL / PHP headache for me, without even the need to install: the simple ‘tar xvfz’ command and the 5 minutes of reading a magazine as it ran was all it took, and was far less hassle than the hours of waiting for apache to compile and install and the head-bashing as mod_ssl refused *yet again* to work alongside apache.

Now that my Compaq has all the functionality of a proper server, I’m venturing into scripting and application territory and have taken the plunge to install WordPress. The site I’ll be hosting (temporarily at least) is my friends’ one: The Beautiful Game. The URL of my wordpress installation is: http://gedanken.we.bs/wordpress/.

The blog (originally here) gets several hundred hits per day and has over 30 writers. It is jointly managed by four of my peers, and in essence, is pretty big. The reason for my hosting it is to provide better functionality from an admin point of view, and also the possibility of displaying Google ads as a source of revenue.

The site isn’t yet finished as yet – there’s lots of work to be done on design, and the import was a bit dodgy. But once everything is fixed, this little lump of whirring metal sitting next to me will be spitting HTML into the Interweb like a real server. Watch this space…

Vegetarianism

Following a recent talk organised by Sceptic Soc, a society I co-founded, here’s my take on it. I obviously can’t cover all the many aspects of the issue so here’s a response to what was mentioned in the talk and ensuing discussion.

The main argument put forward was the economic one – the whole argument about each kilogram of meat requiring countless gallons of water and stacks of food to grow, while millions are starving in Africa. It’s true that meat production is hugely inefficient, however I do wonder why vegetarians believe that by depriving themselves of all meat, the suffering they incur on themselves, their friends and family is worth less than the infinitesimal benefit to people in Africa. What’s wrong with depriving themselves of just a bit of meat? Let’s take a look at a diagram:

Assuming the law of diminishing returns is true: if vegetarians eat enough meat to make them OY happy (maximum possible) – let’s say eating that much meat is of maximum utility to the person. Africa consequently gets minimum food. But almost the same utility (OC) can be achieved by eating much less meat, giving Africa OD food – much more. So I can understand the logic behind limiting intake of meat. what I can’t understand is what happens when vegetarians eat O meat. Africa gets OX food, but all one needs to do is deprive Africa of a tiny amount of food to provide just a bit more meat to vegetarians. This might be just half a steak every weekend, but is nevertheless still some meat. The utility this gives to vegetarians is huge, since it is a very rare luxury for them. So by depriving Africa of BX food, the vegetarians get OA utility. One would have to be very concerned indeed for Africa to create such misery for oneself by not eating any meat when by just eating a tiny amount of meat and having a tiny effect on Africa, personal happiness is increased so greatly.

The argument that one should be prepared to kill one’s own meat is also flawed. As pointed out by Dr Zetie, killing meat is incredibly messy (disembowelling hares etc.) and doing something like killing a cow requires tools that most of us simply haven’t got, although a taser in combination with a large knife might work.

The religious argument was also put forward. I guess I’ll always have to differ with religious vegetarians as I just personally find religion as a list of rules to be obeyed blindly nonsensical. The apparently famous quotation ‘only fools argue whether to eat meat or not’ was used – I personally believe that it’s more intelligent and less foolish to debate about it before making a decision than just accept it and say ‘God said so’. The same religion on the other hand believes each animal has a soul and that each soul is part of God’s big soul and by killing any soul you’re damaging God and therefore yourself since your soul is also part of God. Maybe this makes perfect sense to some people, but I personally can’t see myself buying this idea.

Overall, I think it’s true that by reducing meat consumption the world can dramatically change the distribution of food and help countries which really need it. But vegetarianism, with its inconsistent treatment of fish (if anything fish is more in danger than other animals) and dubious religious links is just not for me. Besides, even on a serious note, meat is very, very tasty and nobody should be forced to live without ever having eaten meat.

Relativity Lectures at Cambridge

I’ve just returned from one of the most interesting and insightful lecture series I have ever attended. They were mostly on special relativity, and, of course, in Cambridge. Lectures took place at the McCrum Lecture Theatre (Corpus Christi College), where Stephen Hawking recently unveiled the famous ‘Grasshopper Clock’:

Unfortunately reflections in the daytime, lack of a tripod at night and lack of patience on my part made it a difficult subject to photograph. It was built by the genius Dr John Taylor, and is entirely mechanical. Instead of hands it has lights which move round, but instead of using an array of LEDs, it’s actually a disc with 61 slits behind another disc with 60 slits. The entire thing is backlit, and by rotating the back disc slightly, slits on the front face appear to light up in quick succession, going round the face (clockwise) – a mechanism which, while probably actually rather common, I personally think is a work of engineering genius. The grasshopper at the top opens and closes its mouth while doubling up as an escapement mechanism – hence its name, the chronophage. Apparently it strikes hours by dropping a chain into a coffin, maybe in a metaphorical and literal attempt to ‘wake the dead’.

Dr Taylor’s genius extends also to the making of kettles: instead of using a spring-loaded switch or bimetallic strip, which owing to the high currents involved would not be ample to protect the switch from damage from electrical arcing, he came up with the wonderful idea of using a bimetallic dome, which, owing to the huge amounts of stress that would have to build up before it flips inside out (breaking the circuit), does so very quickly, reducing arcing to a minimum. Apparently he has now made a billion kettles, hence is presumably stinking rich, and deservedly so!

The lectures themselves were (fortunately) highly mathematical in nature. We explored the Lorentz factor in many of its different uses (t = yt’; x=(1/y)x0 etc… [super- and subscripts are hard in WordPress]), covering even areas such as the relativistic Doppler shift, simultaneity and Lorentz transformations, testing my Summer-holiday-decayed and sleep-deprived mathematical skills to the limit. What I was really pleased about was that we were encouraged to examine the proofs and algebra with rigour, making sure we understood the fundamentals before just sticking numbers into equations. And I finally got my question about the twins-paradox-in-reverse ‘paradox’ resolved!

We also started with some estimation problems – plugging estimated numbers into formulae to guess things like fuel efficiency of jumbo jets, resulting in very good examples of ‘garbage in garbage out’ situations. Later there was also a lecture on spin (cross products of vectors which my school disgracefully leaves until after GCSE to teach; angular momentum, torque, etc; and spin on particles such as electrons).

And not only were the lectures interesting, but the people who attended were some of the most inspiring, interesting and genuinely intelligent people I have ever met. They were (of course) all strong in Physics, Maths and general Sciences, and the academic atmosphere made for some really interesting discussions over lunch – mainly the rants of a fellow antitheist who somehow managed to reference the Casimir effect, Quantum Physics, Quantum tunnelling, M Theory and the multiverse theory in a 15-minute time interval without apparently stopping for breath while still making sense.

All in all, I found it a very worthwhile experience, and certainly a welcome break from performing titrations at school.

Young Enterprise

This is all very exciting. I’ve been too busy over the past week even to tweet, and results are very sweet indeed: the Young Enterprise team of which I am a central member has passed the first hurdle: after giving a presentation to economics teachers and external assessors, being selected as one of two teams submitted by the school to participate in the competition. Competition was tough – there were seven teams which were all strong, keen and impressive, and we were chosen in preference to them; the rest of the team and I will do our best to make sure we live up to expectations.

We are called Team Elements and our blog is located here.

Organising school paper documents

Following on from my ideas about going paperless, here is how I organise all the many sheets of paper I receive daily at school in preparation for scanning or somehow making it electronic, a solution which I personally find it highly effective.

In brief

The system uses a single lever-arch file and a set (or two) of dividers. The folder is effectively split into two parts: the main section at the front which deals with preps, blank paper and paper miscellany; and the subject section, split into the different subjects that I’m doing.

1. The Main Section

‘Paper’ is fairly obviously where blank sheets of paper are stored – lined, graph and blank paper. The next bit is prep. The first tab, ‘Set’, is where I dump all the homework sheets that need doing. Once the preps are completed the question sheet and my answers get stapled together and moved into the ‘Done’ section. When a prep gets marked it goes into the ‘Returned’ section which is scanned upon arrival home. The paper then gets shredded, leaving me with a bunch of scanned files on my HDD rather than a huge folder full of paper. The ‘Unis’ section is anything I pick up about university choices / preparation / general future education.

2. The Subjects Section

This bit is devoted entirely to subjects. Each subject has its own divider, and this section is used as a temporary cache for everything that isn’t prep (classwork, handwritten notes etc.) pending scanning and shredding upon arrival home.

Extra bits

There are always some special documents which don’t fit into any category in the system. The front of the folder contains my timetable (as can be seen in the first photo) and the back a load of transparent A4 paper wallets for anything that can’t for any reason be hole-punched.

The entire one-folder solution is incredibly simple but I’ve found it immensely effective as a system for getting everything from paper to HDD, and I hope this helps someone out there.

A juicy Maths problem

This was set by Dr Leversha (who else?):

When the polynomial f(x) is divided by x – 3 the remainder is 17 and when the same polynomial is divided by x + 2 the remainder is -8. Find the remainder when f(x) is divided by x² – x – 6.

Nobody seems to have done it in my set, so here is what I think the answer is. I bet it’s wrong but hey…

Anonymous against Scientology

Everyone knows about Scientology, hailed by many as the most ridiculous ‘religion’ around, although I’d personally refer to it as a cult, and a very expensive one to join at that. The religion has been accused of murdering its members (Lisa McPherson being a notable example), stalking, following and harassing John Sweeney and ripping off those enticed into their elaborate hierarchical scam.

In response, Anonymous was founded, originally a unit of hactivists working off IRC channels, hence the name of their project: Project Chanology; a group of politically motivated hackers who take a lead role in disabling Scientology websites through DoS attacks with some historical success.

Originally I was pro-Anonymous all the way. I saw Scientology as the most nonsensical scam ever concocted and felt an irresistible moral urge to support Anonymous in any way I could. I printed posters, posted on forums and even participated in some IRC chats. However there came a point when I realised that actually Scientology is, in a rather subtle way, the foundation of a very important benefit to society and something which should be developed to fulfil its full potential. Here is my reasoning:

After many years of watching governments fail at scientific issues and reading articles about cases of extreme financial illiteracy and stupid decisions made by bankers, I have grown to appreciate a real need for a tax on stupidity. People who simply cannot work out that, on a £10K salary, whatever banks may tell them, buying a £500K house is just not a good idea are being given an unreasonable amount of sympathy by the imbeciles in our beloved government, and bankers who invent things like ARMs for subprime borrowers get bailed out by the very same government when the idea unsurprisingly fails spectacularly. At risk of sounding like the Daily Mail, I’d say that the cost of such stupidity is being covered by the government, and thus ultimately paid for by tax payers, many of whom are very intelligent people who, owing to this intelligence, are having a generally positive effect on the entire country.

To make an audacious sweeping generalisation, I’d also say joining the cult of Scientology is equivalent to a statement to the world about one’s IQ – or lack of it. To believe blindly in the most fantastical science fiction ever written surely reflects badly on one’s intelligence? I would argue that only the most stupid, misguided or spectacularly ignorant people in the world would believe in something like Scientology, and since they pay a premium for membership of this society, this sounds like exactly what I was suggesting the creation of in the previous paragraph.

Of course, as it stands at present, some changes need to be made. Anonymous suggested Scientology be stripped of its status as a tax-free religion, and quite rightly too. My view is that it should be turned into a company with shares – I’d definitely buy a large stake in it – or even be bought over by the government, a worthy investment which would constitute some government income: a stupidity tax. If this system is integrated it would be the end of high taxes and the beginning of a new era in which not being stupid actually reduces tax and in which, as a result of natural selection, the average intelligence of an entire country (or even world) will increase to a level of mental competence at which people can think for themselves and refuse to believe things blindly and moronically.

— DISCLAIMER —
The views expressed in this post are highly exaggerated for the sake of irony and sarcasm; in other words, don’t take this too seriously – I certainly didn’t, hence the ridiculous and probably fallacious nature of many of my arguments.

Large Hadron Collider at CERN flicks on

Today (10 Sept 2008) the Large Hadron Collider at CERN starts shooting a high-speed high-energy beam of protons around its 27 kilometres of high-tech, computer-controlled, 3.8m-wide, £5bn magnetic tubing after months of preparation, years of building and decades of planning. It is undoubtedly ‘an historic moment’ for science: it is the epitome of the progress of science, engineering and organisation that man has made over the centuries, and represents a huge step forwards for mankind.

If all goes well, it is hoped the collider will uncover the elusive Higgs Boson, dubbed informally ‘the God Particle’, the particle which gives mass to other particles. It is thought to give gauge bosons like the W and Z particles (responsible for the weak nuclear force) mass but not photons (EM radiation); the finding of this particle would unfortunately lose Stephen Hawking a bet of $100. The Elegant Universe also mentioned the possibility of the discovery of the graviton (a closed string free to move between branes), the thus far theoretical gauge particle of gravity, and indeed other particles, including ones providing evidence for supersymmetry, predicted by String Theory (another huge theory which may be proven or broken by the findings of the LHC).

If all goes wrong, according to the interesting but incorrect media-hyped grunts of pseudo-scientists, the Earth will be sucked into a black hole and/or be turned into a smouldering mass of ’strange’ (or is it ‘charmed’?) particles. I have lamented this issue before, and now the media have yet again taken the word of a qualification-less laymen and amplified it to the point that the fallacious argument resounds more strongly than the truth. Presumably an ignorant yet arrogant individual read somewhere that singularities might be produced in high-energy particle collisions at CERN. Presumably (s)he failed to read the next paragraph, which probably explained that such singularities would be so devoid of mass that they would evaporate almost instantly releasing comparatively innocuous particles in the process, and ended up writing a letter to the real scientists, who were almost certainly working hard to progress human understanding ever further beyond apparent boundaries and obstacles. The letter warned the scientists that ‘if the world ends [the pseudo-scientists] will kill them’. I think this sample of their intellect leaves not much more to be said.

Some wonder whether the LHC is just a waste of money. My response couldn’t be put better than Stephen Hawking’s: ‘Both the LHC and the space programme are vital if the human race is not to stultify, and eventually die out. Together they cost less than one tenth of a percent of world GDP. If the human race cannot afford that, it doesn’t deserve the epithet ‘human”.

So I hope that, whatever obstacles fly in the face of this audacious, ambitious and hugely important project, results will be published over the Winter, and great progress is made towards humans’ ultimate understanding of the universe – even if it means proving String Theory! As Stephen Hawking put it, ‘Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the Universe’.

Stephen Hawking references taken from a BBC News Article

Alternatives to Paper

It looks like, with improving technology, it’s approaching the end of the road for paper. And so what a relief this article was to me – after my rant about snail mail it’s plain my stance on old-hat methods of getting things done is not favourable.

While I haven’t quite decided to go entirely paperless as yet, I regard paper as a hindrance to getting things done effectively and efficiently. Among other inefficiencies: it’s not searchable, it takes up huge amounts of space (I have one year’s work filling about 10 lever arch files which span half the width of my wall), it gets lost, it’s not easy to back up, it requires one to write which is slower than typing, it’s not interactive, it wastes resources, and it’s a pain to edit.

So it seems to me that as close as possible to paperless, using technology as a helping hand, is the way to go for the sake of sanity. Therefore, for anyone who happens to be striving for sanity, I have summarised here some ideas which are easily (and relatively painlessly) incorporated into everyday life:

Notes

Whenever possible, take notes on a laptop or some electronic device (preferably one which is easy to type on). If that fails and written notes are an absolute necessity, type it up as soon as possible afterwards, or scan it in and use something like Evernote to make it text-searchable – that way you don’t get a huge backlog of stuff that needs scanned.

Also, instead of using random scraps of paper to write reminders, use a file called todo.txt on the desktop to replace post-its stuck to the monitor with a text file. Again, Evernote can be utilised to a similar effect.

Bank statements

I had piles of these and felt obliged to keep them, just in case some hugely unlikely catastrophe occurs at the bank and they lose details of my account balance, and for some bizarre reason accept a statement as proof that I had £xyz in my account (however un-photoshopped it might look). So don’t be like me – switch to online banking and be sure to opt for electronic statements!

Letters and receipts

I’m talking here about receipts for online shopping rather than till receipts (which I normally throw away unless it’s a warranty). Like notes, scan them as soon as they arrive, file them electronically using some sensible organisation (of course using OCR for text-searchability), then shred them immediately afterwards (Unless of course they’re important legal stuff or something), thus forcing the exclusive use of the electronic copy, thus relieving any stress as to where to file the paper copy. After all you could always print them again if necessary.

Of course, paper can be useful for certain occasions – writing letters for instance – which is why I explicitly haven’t given up on it; after all, things like drawing diagrams are much easier. However with the rise of handheld devices equipped with styluses, I hope to see the use of paper decline and more useful technological alternatives being used.

The Economics of Gifts

In The Armchair Economist, Steven E Landsburg ponders the suggestion that one should never buy presents since it is economically inefficient. The idea relies on the argument that it is always better to give cash since the recipient can then decide how to use it, maximising the utility of your contribution; buying a present means opportunity cost. On the whole I would agree.

I’d however like to propose a few counter-arguments I’ve come up with since reading that book: reasons why buying gifts is sometimes better than giving cash. If the recipient has always wanted something dearly but can never justify spending money on it, buying that person the gift may well be the way to go. You may think that is a slightly bizarre situation – surely if the recipient wanted something he would buy it? In fact, I’d argue this situation quite commonly arises. Take for example the studious schoolchild who desperately wants a new computer but knows if he received money that it would be ‘best’ spent on the £50 textbooks and besides, that his ageing laptop ‘will have to do’. While the overall utility of giving him the money may be numerically greater in the long term, and if the student knows that, it may be better to force-feed him the joy of the new computer. Another idea that ties in with this is the utility of surprise; von Neumann laments in the initial chapters of his book Theory of Games and Economic Matter that his model doesn’t yet take into account utility of taking risks which ultimately ties in with the element of surprise, and I think some people (though not all!) treat surprise in gifts positively.

In fact perhaps the strongest reason for opting to buy gifts instead of offering money is the very fact that the recipient has to make a choice. One of the party slogans in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, ‘freedom is slavery’, demonstrates my point quite clearly: nobody really has the time to compare prices extensively on a new laptop and read every review on each of the potential buys within the specified price range, and having that choice made for you – getting the legwork done for you – in my opinion, is itself worth the opportunity cost providing the gift is reasonably well-chosen.