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Leonardo Pisano is better known by his nickname Fibonacci. He was the son of Guilielmo and a member of the Bonacci family. Fibonacci himself sometimes used the name Bigollo, which may mean good-for-nothing or a traveller. More…
Tags: mathematics
Amongst the various DVDs and books I got this Christmas I received one quite unexpected and unusual present. From my Dad and his wife I received a radio controlled thermometer.
Not exactly what I was expecting and I’m not entirely sure how useful I’ll find it. It is two digital devices one that you place outside that measures the temperature and relays it via radio to another unit inside.
It is currently minus 0.4 degrees Celsius outside and 21.9 inside.
I’ve had a very merry day this 25th December although we didn’t get the white Christmas that was a possibility. This was my first Christmas by myself and it wasn’t half bad actually, spent half the day watching Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. In fact I’ve watched it twice, once through as normal and then again with the cast commentary.
I am well stuffed with excellent food and am relaxing in front of the computer screen instead of the TV like many people will be this evening. Nothing much worth watching anyway today other than The Simpsons’ alternative to the Queen’s Christmas message.
BBC News: Scrooge or Santa? asks MPs Lembit Opik and Stephen Pound of their views on Christmas.
Funny to read that Stephen Pound MP for Ealing North thinks it has become ‘a pagan festival of greed and falsity’ when it was originally a pagan festival that was hijacked by the church to encourage acceptance of this new religion that was replacing the old ways.
Well the clock has chimed twelve and it is now officially Christmas Day. Huzzah!!!
The video for Fairytale of New York is on Channel 4 and I just noticed that it stars Matt Dillon. Fucking love it.
The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing “Galway Bay”
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day
Merry Christmas everyone and I’ll see you later today after I’ve slept a while.
Hooray I’ve just finished work until Monday.
We had a free screening of It’s a Wonderful Life today and we only had about 50 people in for it, where the hell is everyone.
What with free shows and closing early the cinema only took about £150 today. But there was some good news I had a pay increase that was backdated for about 10 weeks so I got a sizable amount of pay that I hadn’t been expecting.
I’ve been thinking recently that the cinema business is dying, in fact I reckon the entire movie industry will soon be facing major upheavals. I shall get around to writing in length about this but for now it’s time I got a little merry in preparation for Christmas.
Tags: cinema
Professor B’s pseudonymous kid reminds me a lot of how I was as a kid particularly in relation to meeting Santa Claus.
I was reluctant to go along with the common herd and sit on Santa’s knee and tell him what I wanted for Christmas, It’s not like he’s the real one anyway. “Why are you making me do this mum?” I would whine. I much preferred to conduct my Christmas wish list business with Father Christmas at a long distance via letter.
I remember that this event didn’t happen at a mall (didn’t have them back in the day in my neck of the woods) but in a small village hall and we had a Christmas breakfast of sausages and baked beans beforehand. Such are the weird traditions in small English rural communities.
Tags: me
This week I shall be mostly playing Snow or Blow.
This is a very cute game where you have to move the little kids to catch snowflakes in their mouths, but watch out for the birds as they may deposit something in your mouth that doesn’t taste quite so nice.
Tags: games
It’s amazing what you can find out at the Wikipedia.
Carbon nanofoam is an allotrope of carbon discovered in 1997 by Andrei V. Rode and co-workers at the Australian National University in Canberra. It consists of clusters of carbon atoms strung together in a loose three-dimensional web.
Each cluster is about 6 nanometers wide and consists of about 4000 carbon atoms linked in graphite-like sheets that are given negative curvature by the inclusion of heptagons among the regular hexagonal pattern. This is the opposite of what happens in the case of buckminsterfullerenes, in which carbon sheets are given positive curvature by the inclusion of pentagons.
The large-scale structure of carbon nanofoam is similar to that of an aerogel, but with 1% of the density of previously produced carbon aerogels – only a few times the density of air at sea level. Unlike carbon aerogels, carbon nanofoam is a poor electrical conductor. The nanofoam contains numerous unpaired electrons, which Rode and colleagues propose is due to carbon atoms with only three bonds that are found at topological and bonding defects. This gives rise to what is perhaps carbon nanofoam’s most unusual feature; it is attracted to magnets, and below -183°C can itself be made magnetic. This property of ferromagnetism has also been seen in other allotropes of carbon including fullerene subjected to high pressures and temperatures and graphite irradiated with high energy protons.
Tags: science
I rarely read The Times anymore since it turned into a tabloid, in more ways than merely the size of the newspaper, however I did this morning as I was waiting for a dental appointment.
A couple of stories piqued my interest.
Clarke condemns the ‘Luddites’ over identity cards opposition
Is this the bloggers’ favourite blog?
The new Home Secretary Charles Clarke last night branded opponents of the plan “Luddites” and argued that he had a duty to use technology to protect citizens as he overcame opposition from both the Labour and Tory back benches.
I know he wasn’t referring to me as he was using the term to describe the recalcitrant MPs opposed to the bill but it is oddly amusing for a technologist such as myself to be lumped in with Luddites.
It is particularly ironic given that I think it is the government’s blind faith in technology to solve problems that has gotten us so far down this road. The proposed National Identity Card will not solve the most significant of the problems it is designed to address and yet will drastically undermine privacy and civil liberties. This is a security trade-off that I’m not willing to accept and neither I suspect would the majority of the public if they truly understood what the proposals meant.
I have written a longer thesis called Identity and ID cards, in which I outline the impact of the proposed National ID card.
The second of the stories in The Times is a profile of the blog BoingBoing which is indeed as the article suggests my favourite blog.
Tags: computer security, ID cards, security
Gosh darn it, those chaps at GCHQ have gone and produced yet another of their codebreaking challenges.
As ever I’m not one to back down from a challenge of this variety and so shall be endeavoring to conquer this little conundrum.
We had a few comments last time suggesting that the challenge which we gave you was a little too easy. Well, here’s something which will take a bit more work, but has a few things in common with the last challenge.
There are three parts to the solution. What is the connection between the men in the first list and the women in the second list? Which man pairs with which woman? And what is the hidden quotation?
MEN
KCRVKXHL EUJDXZ
WKNJVWL GSWOXU
HYUE WREEYCS
QFDX ORNQTP
VTWMAC UEIIML
OFIIPTYX LYIJ
ZGRT BPDIIRNN
XCT GSXXJYUQ
RNBTCNP TCOSHNM
XIVL VFBD
NRIKUSL UIQORMDB
UFIV WKXXZY
DYFJN WCLEQPJ
LVZD CONKLNFK
PZSS TEBBMJ
BZGZD A’GAANZ
JRFJWRI XFCS
QJAMDU ZWWVDU
GMTHYL IKUBGMFPTPSSPM
KEZHQ WSNIECWOMEN
TVFAMI WVYVTT
KHP FNWHQBEV
MTJXMG EHXJRDT
ORERC VIUWFNUE
AIKUSBS EHSMKHNR
UQPIDJX HEXID
TZMMDR WDNCRM
ECWHX YCMBXA
LRNU FHZOHVN
YVTLG UGZVYNHT
YAERFI KFXBARV
OUGEUDLRZ EZBVJDR
CQMBSVDD LNYMICCNI
DGOFBL AGUCZD
AQSEWKC XFIWFSYK
RKUUC VHMPUUPT
CZNTBXD CFDNFE
OSXFSXCZ XBZGCXDUXA
BQKDVGBOJ OVIQXW
CWUIFBLSK HSOGSB
I’ve studied it a short while and it is indeed not as simple as their previous challenge which involved simple shift ciphers. There are many possibilities but it would seem to me that either a single cipher is used for all the names or a different but related cipher is used for each name.
Frequency analysis is pointless for a sample as small as a single name so I didn’t bother with that but analysed the entire list. The results here show that all letters of the alphabet are present and that there is a narrow range of frequencies, the most frequent being only twice as frequent as the least.
Which means either a polyalphabetic cipher has been used to encrypt the entire list or a different one has been used for each name or group of names. Either way it appears that my work is cut out on this one.
Tags: cryptography