Two blogs in one day when I'm writing up?
Well, having just mailed two further chapters in for review, I thought it might be a good opportunity to have a look at the matching method I used to tie together the ACM and Citeseer paper sets and see if I could improve it a little. I won't explain it since it'll be very boring for you (it's quite boring for me, and I actually enjoy this kind of tedious pattern-matching stuff) but it does continue to give me ample opportunities to look at the titles of obscure academic papers that nobody has ever cited and quite possibly nobody will ever read again.
My point is this: some of the titles are strangely, glorious bizarre. As a random choice, currently rolling up the screen in front of me are papers titled "A bump in the stack encryptor for MS-DOS systems" (I'm sure it'd be a bump in the stack for anyone) and "A 2-(22,8,4) Design Cannot Have a 2-(10,4,4) Subdesign" (I never said it could).
But my favourite, and the real reason for blogging twice in a day, is the wonderfully-titled paper "A 3/2-approximation algorithm for the Windy Postman Problem." How could it not grab my attention with a name like that? The first thing I love is the way the title naturally assumes that I know what the Windy Postman Problem is, and why I should therefore be excited at an approximation algorithm costing only three shillings and two pence. Sadly, of course, I had no idea what the Windy Postman Problem was, but as the matches continued to roll up the screen, my imagination began to run riot. What were they talking about? The thought process ran roughly as follows:
- It's got to be about farting. Kind of like Windy Miller from Camberwick Green, too many beans, heh-heh-heh-Beavis. (Incidentally, why aren't you surprised that my mind went to the farting scenario first?)
- Is it postmen having problems with wind? Or postmen who suffer from wind having problems in society? Maybe it's a problem with airmail?
- Maybe the wind is so strong it blows the letters out of the postman's hand and he has to go and collect them all again?
- Maybe he needs a van, like the UPS guys. Except without the brown socks.
- Hm, yes. It's got to be about strong wind causing problems for the postman in his delivery duties. It's got to be about the losing-the-letters-and-having-to-find-them-again thing. While farting.
Not even close. Apparently it's one of those simple-sounding problems that we used to occasionally come across at school, like the travelling salesman problem: essentially, what's the quickest route to make sure the postman visits every street in a city at least once? That's the general 'Chinese Postman Problem'. (We have a problem with Chinese postmen now?) Variations include the use of one-way streets as part of the problem. The Windy Postmen have the additional problem that while all the streets are two-way, some are more easily traversable in one direction than the other (because there's a strong tropical wind out there of course), so there's a trade-off to be made between short, costly routes and longer, wind-backed paths. And the people who wrote the paper weren't talking old money, the 3/2 is to do with how long it takes to calculate an approximation for the best path.
Still, it was fun while it lasted. Meantime the matching algorithm spots another one: "A Case Study on the Mergeability of Cases with a Partial-Order Planner" goes into the database. What an afternoon I'm having.
Elsewhere, future-movie-critic-and-eldest-nephew Matt continues to dazzle with unexpected observations. When asked by our reporter to name his favourite vegetable, his second answer (his first was 'fish fingers') was 'broccoli' (which is strange enough in itself) and when asked why he replied 'because it looks like trees'.
He started school yesterday. I doubt they'll know what's hit them.
Postscript: Googling on 'windy postman problem' brings even weirder stuff to light. I just found a paper that states: "Eulerian graphs and trees are windy postman perfect." Intriguing, baffling and poetic all at the same time.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
6 September 2006: Burp
One of the sad things about writing up is that I don't always get to see 'Deal or No Deal'.
For the uninitiated, it's Noel Edmonds ('im off of multicolour swap shop fingy, never as good as Tiswas eh?) without Mr Blobby or John Craven or bleddy Keith Chegwin or anyone, doing a game show where people pick boxes randomly hoping to avoid boxes that have large sums of money in them. The premise actually sounds too simple: surely you wouldn't get away with it six days a week for nine or ten months a year? Well - somehow it works and it's good fun and I don't care what you think, I like it.
What I like better is Harry Hill pretending to be the banker. And thanks to the copyright-busting wonder that is YouTube, I just found some highlights...
Click here to have a look. I'm loving this game...
For the uninitiated, it's Noel Edmonds ('im off of multicolour swap shop fingy, never as good as Tiswas eh?) without Mr Blobby or John Craven or bleddy Keith Chegwin or anyone, doing a game show where people pick boxes randomly hoping to avoid boxes that have large sums of money in them. The premise actually sounds too simple: surely you wouldn't get away with it six days a week for nine or ten months a year? Well - somehow it works and it's good fun and I don't care what you think, I like it.
What I like better is Harry Hill pretending to be the banker. And thanks to the copyright-busting wonder that is YouTube, I just found some highlights...
Click here to have a look. I'm loving this game...
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
5 September 2006: Brink
Forget Lebanon. A humanitarian "man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale" is about to break out in Africa.
Yup, that's right. Darfur again. Over three years since it all kicked off, the first two of which saw the world do absolutely-flippin-nothing about it apart from some serious-looking shaking of heads, and now the African Union peacekeepers are being kicked out, the UN aren't being allowed in and the Sudanese government are going right back to their military backing for the Janjaweed Arab militias in their ethnic cleansing efforts against the local black population.
But hey, it's a sovereign nation, there's nothing the world outside can do to stop genocide, is there?
Note: interesting to read some of the American press on this stuff: apparently the UN's inability to act is all because they're too busy actively supporting Hezbollah and Iran. The whole world's a conspiracy, isn't it?
Yup, that's right. Darfur again. Over three years since it all kicked off, the first two of which saw the world do absolutely-flippin-nothing about it apart from some serious-looking shaking of heads, and now the African Union peacekeepers are being kicked out, the UN aren't being allowed in and the Sudanese government are going right back to their military backing for the Janjaweed Arab militias in their ethnic cleansing efforts against the local black population.
But hey, it's a sovereign nation, there's nothing the world outside can do to stop genocide, is there?
Note: interesting to read some of the American press on this stuff: apparently the UN's inability to act is all because they're too busy actively supporting Hezbollah and Iran. The whole world's a conspiracy, isn't it?
Thursday, August 24, 2006
24 August 2006: Dwarf
When we woke up this morning, there were a variety of things you think might not change:
- The number of furlongs in a mile (eight).
- The number of players on a football team (eleven).
- The number of pounds you get for passing 'Go' in monopoly (two hundred).
- The number of planets in the solar system (nine).
You'd be wrong. The International Astronomical Union just voted a resolution through that demoted Pluto from a planet to being a 'dwarf planet'. So now there are eight 'classical planets' and at least three 'dwarf planets' which, incidentally, include Ceres, the largest asteroid from belt between Mars and Jupiter, along with Pluto and 2003 UB313 (now that one needs a catchier name).
Problem caused, of course, by the discovery that 2003 UB313, despite its disappointing name, is actually larger than Pluto. So what are you going to do? Create a tenth planet - knowing full well that there are probably more out there - or demote Pluto to a not-a-real-planet group? (Or just ignore it altogether and say Pluto is a planet because it got there first?) So it's probably the best they could do.
Still, it's tough on poor Pluto. I mean, it must be hard enough out there at the dark edge of the observable solar system, all alone except for its hanger-on moon Charon, shunned by the Voyagers and now usurped by a newcomer and demoted from being a planet. I'm told it comes in towards the sun every so often, crossing Neptune's orbit, but Neptune has so arranged its diary that the two will never meet.
Sheesh. Makes my write-up life seem perfectly bearable.
Monday, August 21, 2006
21 August 2006: Bagpuss
As I write this, I'm finishing some very nice home-made peach cobbler for lunch and listening to last week's movie reviews from Mark Kermode (which, by the way, is quite comfortably the best thing on the radio, and that includes Le Show and Test Match Special). Chapters six and seven will continue this afternoon, but I thought it was important to catch up with what the good doctor thought of 'Snakes on a Plane' (answer: "not as unutterably terrible as you might think it might be").
Kermode's reviews are normally a great source of education, information and entertainment (thus clearly belonging on the BBC), more entertaining than anything when a truly-awful-but-clearly-going-to-make-lots-of-money blockbuster comes out and Kermode sets off on one of his rants. Dig out the archives for Star Wars III: Return of the Sith ("better than the first one, but then so is slamming your head in a car door") or the more recent Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest for prime, glorious examples.
And now I'm starting to wonder if my eldest nephew Matt might be headed the same way. He just turned four, and for his birthday it was decreed by all concerned that it would be a darn fine time to introduce him to Bagpuss. Emily's cat Bagpuss. I had to 'check' the DVD before wrapping it up, of course, and enjoyed a wonderful episode which featured a highly-extended version of 'row row row your boat' which led to the mice going on strike. So we packaged it up, along with a Lewis Carrol nonsense verse book to keep the his parents happy, and off we went to Salisbury.
Reports came back the following day that Matt had, at first, been greatly confused by Bagpuss: specifically, he was deeply uncertain about the relatively enormous cat and he asked if it was going to eat the mice from the mouse-organ. My first reaction: ha ha, how silly, it's Bagpuss! My second reaction: hang on a minute, he's got a point.
And the point is this: not that Bagpuss is some shadowy film-noir short with hidden depths and dark overtones (although frankly the relationship between the doll and the toad has to be looked into), nor that Bagpuss perhaps was just toying with them all, giving and taking their consciousness at his own whims, but that if you looked at it from a completely neutral perspective, never knowing anything about Bagpuss, the question Matt asked is exactly the question you should ask. And I never have asked that question, not once in my thirty-one years.
Neither has anyone else, it seems. Do a Google search on: Bagpuss "eat the mice" and it comes up blank. Nobody else has ever thought of this. So now I'm wondering if Matt is actually gifted at seeing plots and characterisations that go beyond anything the normal punter would see. And if that is the case, all we need to do is train him to talk at two hundred words per minute without notes, and Dr Kermode's position should be under threat.
Meantime I'm off to finish chapter six and consider what truly was going on with Dougal and the Blue Cat. Maybe Matt can advise me.
Kermode's reviews are normally a great source of education, information and entertainment (thus clearly belonging on the BBC), more entertaining than anything when a truly-awful-but-clearly-going-to-make-lots-of-money blockbuster comes out and Kermode sets off on one of his rants. Dig out the archives for Star Wars III: Return of the Sith ("better than the first one, but then so is slamming your head in a car door") or the more recent Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest for prime, glorious examples.
And now I'm starting to wonder if my eldest nephew Matt might be headed the same way. He just turned four, and for his birthday it was decreed by all concerned that it would be a darn fine time to introduce him to Bagpuss. Emily's cat Bagpuss. I had to 'check' the DVD before wrapping it up, of course, and enjoyed a wonderful episode which featured a highly-extended version of 'row row row your boat' which led to the mice going on strike. So we packaged it up, along with a Lewis Carrol nonsense verse book to keep the his parents happy, and off we went to Salisbury.
Reports came back the following day that Matt had, at first, been greatly confused by Bagpuss: specifically, he was deeply uncertain about the relatively enormous cat and he asked if it was going to eat the mice from the mouse-organ. My first reaction: ha ha, how silly, it's Bagpuss! My second reaction: hang on a minute, he's got a point.
And the point is this: not that Bagpuss is some shadowy film-noir short with hidden depths and dark overtones (although frankly the relationship between the doll and the toad has to be looked into), nor that Bagpuss perhaps was just toying with them all, giving and taking their consciousness at his own whims, but that if you looked at it from a completely neutral perspective, never knowing anything about Bagpuss, the question Matt asked is exactly the question you should ask. And I never have asked that question, not once in my thirty-one years.
Neither has anyone else, it seems. Do a Google search on: Bagpuss "eat the mice" and it comes up blank. Nobody else has ever thought of this. So now I'm wondering if Matt is actually gifted at seeing plots and characterisations that go beyond anything the normal punter would see. And if that is the case, all we need to do is train him to talk at two hundred words per minute without notes, and Dr Kermode's position should be under threat.
Meantime I'm off to finish chapter six and consider what truly was going on with Dougal and the Blue Cat. Maybe Matt can advise me.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
16 August 2006: Deep
It's ok, I'm still alive, the anthrax hasn't got me yet.
It's just that I'm writing up for most of my waking hours right now, trying to get some kind of closure and complete a full draft by the end of the month. Of particular interest in recent chapters might be chapter two, heading 1.1 which currently reads:
(now that's what I call a balanced literature review)
and the discovery of CrossRef, which seems a nice idea until you realise it's basically just the publishers, scared of the advance of OAI and the ensuing loss of revenue, banding together to produce their own wide-ranging search facility restricted, of course, to their own published materials. Yup, they include smaller publishers, but it seems be you're either in the group or out of it... and if you're out, you're out. This would be a problem if CrossRef becomes the de facto standard for academic paper searching, but it won't: partly because, like Google Scholar, a lot of the papers are subscription-only, and partly because crawler-based search/cache facilities such as Google and Citeseer will just gobble up the data and offer a search facility that includes CrossRef documents as a sub-set of their larger dataset.
Anyway, enough from me. Time to get back to chapter six.
It's just that I'm writing up for most of my waking hours right now, trying to get some kind of closure and complete a full draft by the end of the month. Of particular interest in recent chapters might be chapter two, heading 1.1 which currently reads:
1.1 It's A Load Of Old Rubbish
(now that's what I call a balanced literature review)
and the discovery of CrossRef, which seems a nice idea until you realise it's basically just the publishers, scared of the advance of OAI and the ensuing loss of revenue, banding together to produce their own wide-ranging search facility restricted, of course, to their own published materials. Yup, they include smaller publishers, but it seems be you're either in the group or out of it... and if you're out, you're out. This would be a problem if CrossRef becomes the de facto standard for academic paper searching, but it won't: partly because, like Google Scholar, a lot of the papers are subscription-only, and partly because crawler-based search/cache facilities such as Google and Citeseer will just gobble up the data and offer a search facility that includes CrossRef documents as a sub-set of their larger dataset.
Anyway, enough from me. Time to get back to chapter six.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
2 August 2006: Re-repeat
Quick blog before getting back to The Write-Up.
It occurs to me that I should have blogged at some point last week in one of my 'annual' repeats. Last year at this time I was writing, as usual for this time of year, about the winner of the Tour De France, the new Hillsong album and a little rant about work, and how while some things change, others never do. War in the middle east, environmental disaster, Zimbabwe in turmoil, deaths in Iraq. Could have been today, couldn't it?
Of course, some things do change: Niger, unlike last year, seems to be at least slightly more comfortable - indeed the top story involving Niger as reported by Google news (gotta love it) seems to be their pride at hosting the Africa Volleyball Championships. And as for the Tour De France, an American won it - at least at the moment. But Floyd Landis failed a doping test and, if his B-sample fails on Saturday, he'll be stripped of his title and banned for two years. Something that Lance Armstrong, for all his controversy, never faced. Hillsong's new one, 'Mighty To Save' has received reviews ranging from 'best in years' to 'way too youth/United oriented' although 'At The Cross' does seem to be generally well-received (seems a little plodding to me).
Meantime Tropical Storm Chris, which was upgraded from 'heavy showers' right up through Tropical Depression and into Tropical Storm while I was travelling to work yesterday, seems to be heading to become the first Atlantic hurricane of the year. Which isn't bad, considering it's August already, but that's scant comfort to the people of Cuba, Florida and wherever else it decides to go after the weekend.
And as for the middle-east, good to see Britain sitting firmly on the fence by sending aid to Lebanon and helping the US get the all-important bombs to Israel. Something to do with keeping the economy ticking over, isn't it?
It occurs to me that I should have blogged at some point last week in one of my 'annual' repeats. Last year at this time I was writing, as usual for this time of year, about the winner of the Tour De France, the new Hillsong album and a little rant about work, and how while some things change, others never do. War in the middle east, environmental disaster, Zimbabwe in turmoil, deaths in Iraq. Could have been today, couldn't it?
Of course, some things do change: Niger, unlike last year, seems to be at least slightly more comfortable - indeed the top story involving Niger as reported by Google news (gotta love it) seems to be their pride at hosting the Africa Volleyball Championships. And as for the Tour De France, an American won it - at least at the moment. But Floyd Landis failed a doping test and, if his B-sample fails on Saturday, he'll be stripped of his title and banned for two years. Something that Lance Armstrong, for all his controversy, never faced. Hillsong's new one, 'Mighty To Save' has received reviews ranging from 'best in years' to 'way too youth/United oriented' although 'At The Cross' does seem to be generally well-received (seems a little plodding to me).
Meantime Tropical Storm Chris, which was upgraded from 'heavy showers' right up through Tropical Depression and into Tropical Storm while I was travelling to work yesterday, seems to be heading to become the first Atlantic hurricane of the year. Which isn't bad, considering it's August already, but that's scant comfort to the people of Cuba, Florida and wherever else it decides to go after the weekend.
And as for the middle-east, good to see Britain sitting firmly on the fence by sending aid to Lebanon and helping the US get the all-important bombs to Israel. Something to do with keeping the economy ticking over, isn't it?
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