Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass

Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.

This is very reminiscent of a project I did for my Physics A level about resistivity changes of certain metals at different temperatures. I got very crappy results also, I think I blew my chance for an A grade because of it.

A British Jihadist

A very long interesting interview in Prospect magazine which reveals how young British men of Pakistani heritage might turn to radical Islam and become suicide bombers.

They are essentially rootless and unsure of their place in the world and thus become easy prey to those who offer 'answers' and a 'role' for them to fill.

One thing that has not been mentioned is that in many ways they very typical of young British working class men irrespective of race. Many young men have no role to play in society at all anymore. With the move towards a Service Economy the typical working class male jobs are disappearing. Young women no longer require men to support them financially and so for many men there is no real role for them as husbands or fathers.

Also I think there is a lot of anger and frustration amongst men of my generation which is resulting in drunken mindless violence. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that there has been a rise in violence in Britain in the last couple of decades.

These feelings which I believe are pretty general across the country for many men are being channeled in the particular case of British Pakistanis by Islamist extremists into acts of terrorism.

This story made me sad.

This story made me smile.

And this I couldn't agree more with.

I hate Spam as much as the next person but I think that tackling the problem this way is a little over the top.

Russian-language media, both online and offline, has made little effort to conceal one central thought when dealing with the spammer’s demise: that somehow the late Mr. Kushnir got what he deserved. “The Spammer Had it Coming”, one headline reads. “Spam is Deadly”, “Ignoble Death Becomes Russia’s Top Spammer”, “An Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem” - 84 Russian-language news captions on Kushnir’s murder, retrieved by the Yandex News search engine within a day of the event, seem to share the general feeling.

The Russian media seem to have a different opinion though.

The waiter is no longer ranting so much instead he's writing hilarious and wonderful true life tales.

Though he's working his ass off at the restaurant he's picking up some very nice tips from these customers.

What kinda crazy company puts a couple of children on their condom wrappers? [via]

Mr.Skin Chapeau, that's who.

There is an indepedent investigation being carried out by the Independent Police Complaints Commission into the circumstances of this incident and I'm pretty confident that the truth will come out. However even at this stage with the scant evidence we have it's clear that a number of errors were made by the police and that Jean Charles' actions (probably innocently carried out through error or misjudgement) may have in some way contributed to this tragedy.

He was misidentified as a potential suicide bomber.

He was not apprenhended immediately but was instead followed.

He was then misjudged at some point to not only be a suicide bomber but also one that was at that very moment about to activate a device. Because only in this circumstance does the shoot to kill policy apply.

A number of questions still need to be answered though.

If he was judged to be a suicide bomber why was he not apprehended earlier?

Why did he run from the police?

Did the police identify themselves sufficiently ?

I believe that the reason why he was not apprehended earlier before he reached the Underground station is that initially the police judged him not to be a threat and were following him as part of an intelligence gathering operation.

A number of reports particularly foreign media seem to suggest that as the British police in general do not carry guns that they were not able to deal with this situation appropriately. This is not the case though. The armed response unit are supposed to be well trained and deal with armed criminals often and in most cases will actually deal with the situation without the need to shoot.

Regardless of this tragedy I think that the Shoot-to-Kill policy is seriously flawed as it in no way guarantees the prevention of the suspected bomber from carrying out his intended purpose.

The terrorists now simply need to add a Dead Man's switch to future devices so that the detonation is activated when a button is released, rather than when it is pushed. Ensuring that their goal is achieved even if they are shot in the head.

Not to mention the chance that innocents may lose their lives in the carrying out of this policy.

EDIT: Just read on Bruce Schneier's blog something that reminded me that far greater numbers of people have died on the London Underground due to poor maintenance of the track or through driver error and that a greater number still have died on the strettes of London due to drunk drivers. Should we now institute a shoot-to-kill policy for suspected bad maintenace staff or suspected drunk drivers?

England suffer huge Lord's defeat
First Npower Test, Lord's, day four:
England 155 & 180 lost to
Australia 190 & 384 by 239 runs

Well it wasn't too unexpected after the fine second innings of the Australian cricket team and the numerous dropped catches on England's part. But it had started out so positively on Thursday when the England bowlers had made an excellent effort in dismissing Australia for a small total and I was fooled in to thinking we had a genuine chance at winning.

One Test down and four more to go so still plenty of time for England to still cause an upset and win the Ashes.

A quite disturbing video of a Camel Spider eating a lizard.

If you have arachnophobia, I'd advise you not to click on the video, it is fairly yucky. This speciman was about the size of my hand spread out, maybe 5 inches across. Camel spiders aren't really spiders, they have 10 legs and 2 eyes and belong to an order of non-spider arachnids called Solifugae. They are aggressive and believe me, it hurts bad when they bite (taking a chunk out, story for another day) but non-venomous.

A somewhat inappropriate advert for the Christmas release of The Passion of the Christ in Japan.

Christmas in Tokyo: Passion of the Christ [via]

Last month I wrote about how I pledged to refuse to register for an ID card at Pledgebank.

Well it took a little over a month for the pledge to receive the 10000 signatures required so now it is definite "I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund."

You may still make the same pledge yourself if so wish.

Found via Infosthetics.com, The Secret Lives of Numbers.

Ever wondered what the most popular integers are? Now you can find in this numerical equivalent of Wordcount.

13 is the 22nd most popular number just ahead of 97 which is the 23rd most popular for some reason.

Flash Game: Planarity

A brillant little puzzle game created by John Tantalo, a CS undergrad at Case Western Reserve University.

Instructions: Arrange the vertices such that no edges overlap.

Labels: Games

A couple of child-related links I found at Metafilter.

This man is raising his kids to become violent so that they may be warriors against evil in the future.

A good move when there are Ukrainian vampires drugging children and drinking their blood.

and Cars will explode instantly when struck by a single bullet.

The BBC has been attacked by classical music record companies for it's release of Beethoven's nine symphonies on it's website for people to download freely.

There is the obvious issue that it is devaluing the perceived value of music. You are also leading the public to think that it is fine to download and own these files for nothing.

Correct me if I'm wrong and I'm not but it is fine for the BBC to offer it's recordings of Beethoven as performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for free.

It was a limited offer, the recordings are no longer available, and I believe that it will have introduced the excellence of Beethoven's work to many individuals who wouldn't otherwise have experienced it. There are likely to be people who wouldn't normally buy classical music who would have been tempted by this offer just to see what it was like and will now seek out other recordings that are available for purchase.

The very companies that are attacking the BBC are likely to be the very companies that will benefit from the increased interest in classical music. I believe that the BBC in doing this is fulfilling it's charter of creating greater access for the general public to a wide range of culture.

According to A Big Stick and a Small Carrot Charles Kennedy had the audacity to mention Iraq yesterday and was attacked for his naivety for what seems like a fairly measured statement in comparison to say George Galloway.

"I am not here implying some causal link between Britain's involvement in Iraq and the terrible terrorist attacks in London last week. Not at all. The mass murderers who attacked London last week did not need Iraq as an excuse. The blame for the deaths in London falls firmly on their shoulders and on their shoulders alone."

But it would be hard not to link the war in Iraq to the bomb attacks in London as our political leaders themselves link the war into the wider War on Terror.

If we truly are at war with the terrorists then this latest attack may be seen by many especially those who support the actions of the terrorists as a retaliatory strike. I believe that Britain would still have been targeted even if our government had decided not to participate in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power and that in time the majority of population of Iraq will be a lot better off than they would have if Saddam Hussein had remained. But there is no escaping the fact that war has resulted in many innocent Iraqis losing their lives thus aiding those people who wish preach hatred of our country.

In the end we may never know why four seemingly normal lads from Yorkshire decided to blow themselves and many innocent Londoners up. But to think there may possibly a link between the events in Iraq and the attacks on London should not be considered a thoughtcrime. Most of us are thinking it anyway but I don't think that the bomb attacks have at all changed our opinions on Iraq whichever side of the debate of whether we should have invaded or not we place ourselves.

Wasps' Nest
Originally uploaded by electricinca.

Found this wasps' nest a couple of days ago and had to get the man from the council to come and exterminate them all.

The police and security services have managed to track down those responsible for the attacks in London and it appears that they were four young men from the Leeds area all of whom died in the resultant explosions.

It is not the result that people were expecting. It was theorized that the attackers may have been outsiders or perhaps Britons that had trained in Afghanistan and it was thought that they had planted the bombs and then left as the Madrid bombers did so that they could attack again in future.

But now we know that it was four seemingly normal young men who had somehow become radicalized in this country to the point of becoming suicide bombers. Questions are sure to be asked about how this came to be. It's quite likely that there was some outside influence on them, who organised them and supplied them with the explosive material, but perhaps we are deluding ourselves about this just because we cannot understand how these four men could do what they did.

Labels: Security

Computational complexity theory is part of the theory of computation dealing with the resources required during computation to solve a given problem. The most common resources are time (how many steps does it take to solve a problem) and space (how much memory does it take to solve a problem).

In this theory, the class P consists of all those decision problems that can be solved on a deterministic sequential machine in an amount of time that is polynomial in the size of the input; the class NP consists of all those decision problems whose positive solutions can be verified in polynomial time given the right information, or equivalently, whose solution can be found in polynomial time on a non-deterministic machine. Arguably, the biggest open question in theoretical computer science concerns the relationship between those two classes:

Is P equal to NP?

In a 2002 poll of 100 researchers, 61 believed the answer is no, 9 believed the answer is yes, 22 were unsure, and 8 believed the question may be independent of the currently accepted axioms, and so impossible to prove or disprove. A $1,000,000 USD prize has been offered for a correct solution.

More...

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Complexity classes P and NP".

I'm a big fan of the novels of China Miéville particularly Perdido Street Station, a book so crammed with wonderful ideas you worry it might be burdened by the number but somehow it works perfectly.

There is an in depth recent interview with him here.

The one thing that the Wikipedia does better than any other side is to tackle current events. They are the authority to go to for those seeking information about the bomb attacks on the London transport system on Thursday 7th July.

I may not be a Londoner but I share the sentiment expressed in this letter to the terrorists.

I was going to write on Thursday that I believe that due to London having the greatest concentration of CCTV cameras of any city in the world that the bombers will have little hope of escaping capture. The Wall Street Journal has a good article about that very thing.

All links here found via Kottke.org

I had quite a bizarre dream last night.

For some reason I had decided to meet my dad for lunch on the Isle of Wight (odd because it is over a hundred miles from where I live and even further for him). Anyway we meet up and go to have lunch together in an apartment building that I've never seen before which had huge glass windows.

I forget what happens next but we end up deciding to leave the island and have to wait at the dockside for the ferry to come back to pick us up. In real life I think the ferry is a huge thing which carries cars but in the dream it was tiny and could hold only about ten people in it. So we are waiting there and decide to spend some time at the fairground until the ferryboat returns.

Looking around the fair I spot a game where you have to throw balls to knock small wooden blocks off a shelf. Now the blocks were really small about the size of a matchbox and were quite a distance away so everyone that tried their arm was missing and not winning a prize.

So I decide to give it a go and manage to knock two blocks off the shelf the guy running the game then brings the blocks to me so I can read what prize I've won and enscribed on each block is a number which indicates the amount of money I've won.

Amazingly it appears I've won in total about £30 000 but the bloke doesn't have that sort of money on him so he needs to leave and will come back later with my money. Sometime later he returns and he doesn't have it, all he has is about £1500. He offers to make up the difference with a lot of other crap like some cuddly toys and some free turns on the different games at the fair. Now I'm really pissed off and the ferry has just arrived so seeing I'm never going to get the money I'm owed I just leave with my dad and the £1500.

Breaking news on multiple TV channels indicate there have been explosions in a number of different locations in the capital following news that the London underground system has ground to halt after an apparent electrical surge.

As you would expect there has been a lot of jumping the gun and suggestions of bombs and mentions of 9/11. It's too early to say if the explosions are due to bombs or if they are in any connected to each other or to the London underground situation.

BBC News: Several injured in London blasts

Eyewitness accounts

With the G8 summit being held in Gleneagles it must come as no surprise that there may be terrorist activity being planned in the UK to coincide.

Boing Boing: Euro Software Patents are DEAD! w00t!

You have won the fight to keep software patents -- America's disastrous, failed system for awarding exclusive rights to mathematical instructions -- out of Europe. Despite the other side's nonstop dirty tricks, subversion of democracy, and outright lies, the will of the people has been upheld in the Euro Parliament. The day was carried because of the tireless efforts of orgs like the FFII, FSF Europe, and EDRI -- and because of your tireless support in writing and phoning to your elected reps. You should be very, very proud. Congrats to all the copyfighters who've busted their humps on this!

The European Parliament voted 648 to 14 to reject the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive.

The bill was reportedly rejected because, politicians said, it pleased no-one in its current form.

BBC News: Software patent bill thrown out

Jason Kottke really does find the best links on the interweb.

Fictional Iron Chef match-up between Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck 
Arguing over food science has never been so interesting.

All of Franz Ferdinand's albums will not have names and will only be differentiated by color
Their second album -- the black, red, and green one -- will be out in September.

But his obsession with the death of celebrities in the future is a trifle worrying.