http://www.idefex.net Almost an obsession Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:11:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So I now have fancy letters after my name as something to show for the last four year's hard work and a lot of money. Even better, I have a Ph.D. lined up doing something that I'm sure I'm really going to enjoy. But as a consequence, I'm also losing ... http://www.idefex.net/2009/07/curtain-call/ Take one arbitrary limitation (Twitter only lets you send 140 characters). Note that Twitter allows you to use UTF-8 characters. Add a course in information theory. Roast under the heat of procrastination for several hours until juicy. In english: I wondered just how much information you could send in ... http://www.idefex.net/2009/05/twitter-compression/ Jon Stewart had a pretty great interview last week with Cliff May where they discussed the merits of torture, which was excellent on many levels. What got a lot of traction was Stewart's assertion that Truman was a war criminal for using the A-Bomb against Japan; he acknowledged that he ... http://www.idefex.net/2009/05/procrastination/ The Wii can now boot backups off of a hard drive. "Excellent", I thought to myself. "I have an iPod sitting around, and if I backed up Brawl onto it, I'd be able to play Brawl without listening to my Wii's DVD drive grinding itself away to dust". So I ... http://www.idefex.net/2009/04/technology-and-tex/ Yet another entry during term?!! Killing some time before going out, a quick post on some topics that have been circulating in my mind for the last few days. My week five blues seem to have arrived exactly a week late. This is unsurprising, as lectures didn't start for me until ... http://www.idefex.net/2009/02/lightning-strikes-twice/ An entry during term time!?! What madness is this!? I've had the magnificent fortune to not have suffered from any serious illness during my time in Cambridge - until this week. I was practically bedridden for two days, technically functional but practically ineffective for a third (curiously, between the two ... http://www.idefex.net/2009/01/license-to-ill/ The last episode of Countdown with Carol Vorderman aired yesterday (the final conundrum was, appropriately, 'Era Closes'). It was the final of the current series, and was competed between two PhD students from Cambridge and Oxford. Unfortunately, the Cambridge guy lost narrowly (four points), but I was struck by how ... http://www.idefex.net/2008/12/countdown/ Three months since an entry - clearly [minus one point - Ed] another busy term in Cambridge has gone by. It's been somewhat different to previous ones; living in an actual house has proved remarkably easy to transition to. I suspect a lot of that is based on the fact ... http://www.idefex.net/2008/12/michaelmas-post-mortem/ Unless you've been living under a rock the last few weeks, you know that yesterday the Large Hadron Collider went online, much to the joy of physicists everywhere. It will clear up a bunch of questions about the Standard Model and, more happily for me, it might confirm the theoretical ... http://www.idefex.net/2008/09/lh/ It seems like it's a bad time to be a fan of anything I like. In quick succession we've had Nizlopi announce they're not touring next year, one of the Barenaked Ladies get busted for drugs, another narrowly escape death and now Jasper Fforde, quite possibly my all time favourite ... http://www.idefex.net/2008/08/my-heroes/