Things to be thankful for

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Yesterday I saw that Braxwolf had written a post called “Thankful for Creation“. I immediately assumed that by “Creation” he meant the cosmos in which we live. Actually he was focusing more on the creative side of life, although he did see a religious aspect to that as well. Nevertheless that headline brought to mind that I am certainly thankful for the cosmos, and I think it’s good for all of us to contemplate such things once in a while.

However you look at, scientifically or religiously or something else, it is pretty mind boggling that the universe exists at all, and in such a way as to make us and our lives possible. You may have heard the Carl Sagan line that “We are stardust”. Yes, to the best of our knowledge a good proportion of the chemical elements that make up your body and mine and most of the other stuff on the Earth had to be forged in a supernova explosion, the end result of the lifecycle of a large star, which lasted some billions of years. Then some of the “stardust” had to be all gathered together by another star (aka the Sun) to allow the planet to form, and the same star helpfully provided an enormous power source for several more billions of years, enabling life to develop and take hold. Pretty amazing.

On top of that, the lives we all get to live today are the product of thousands of years of human culture and creativity. I happened to read earlier that as of today you can now buy a pretty powerful computer for $5:

That’s striking, but actually most everything around us that we take for granted normally is equally remarkable. The amount of insight and knowhow that is required for the making of a spoon, a notepad or a pair of glasses is staggering, and only possible because generations of people have been building on the work of those that went before for several millenia.

We might have done a lot to improve our own lives, or the lives of others, but by and large what we’ve done ourselves is small potatoes compared to what was just there for us to work with because of where and when we are.

I’m thankful for many things, and among them I include the Universe and spoons.

Android apps on iPad via Windows!

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ipad-win-android

I don’t have an Android tablet, but there’s an Android-only app that I wanted to use on my iPad, and I came up with a way to do just that. My method is enjoyably perverse.

What you’re seeing in the picture is an iPad screenshot. What it shows is this…

  • An Android app (Droidfish) is running on a Windows desktop PC inside an Android emulator (Genymotion)
  • The iPad is accessing that Windows machine via Chrome Remote Desktop

I could have zoomed in to fill up the iPad screen with the app but I wanted to show that it’s Android on Windows on iPad, so I included a fair bit of the Windows 7 desktop.

Probably not something a lot of people will want to do very often, but it’s kinda fun to see an Android app appearing your iPad, and in this case actually it’s pretty useful to me!

The whole thing works fairly smoothly, and the raw processing power of the desktop PC means the intensive computations that chess programs have to do when analyzing actually probably go faster than they would on a real tablet.

Mind you if I end up doing this frequently, I might get myself an actual Nexus 7.

First World Problems

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I can’t believe I’ve succumbed to such things, but I have. I find myself feeling frustrated because I’d like to watch my show lounging on the bed, but I can’t because the iPad needs charging. So I have to watch it on the HDTV instead while sitting on a comfy sofa.

The horror of our modern lives, huh?

Blogs vs Wikis vs Forums

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Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about blogs, wikis and forums and what each of them are good for. Partly this is a result of some discussions about how the NBI 2015 went, where I tossed out the thought in passing that a group blog might work better than the current forum. Then I started wondering if that would really be true, and if so why?

Googling turned up a few interesting articles comparing the different tools. The best such pieces seem to be written with a learning environment in mind, they’re basically guides for teachers looking at what would be appropriate to use with their students. However a lot of the thoughts are relevant more widely. These two resources are well worth a look:

  1. Blog, Wiki or Forum – which should you use?

  2. Differences between Discussion Boards, Blogs and Wikis

The latter of those states that:

  • Forums are “Used to DISCUSS and DEBATE”
  • Blogs are “Used to REFLECT and REVIEW”
  • Wikis are “Used to COLLABORATE and SYNTHESISE”

Not a bad way of summarizing the differences in a nutshell.

Some standout points from my reading and musings:

  • Wikis have a big advantage when you have some set of information that will change over time, even if only because it’s a work-in-progess, and which will be updated by many people. For example maintaining a list of blogs taking part in the NBI event might be easier this way. Anyone could add a blog to the list, and the list always stays in the same place, and always up to date. Achieving something similar on a blog or forum would be more work because they’re not designed for that.

  • Blog posts are basically personal, and basically not meant to be revised much after publication. There might be some editorial process before a post goes live, there might be edits by the author afterwards, and of course other people can chip in with comments on posts. Not forgetting that you can have “pages” rather than “posts”, which can be a bit more permanent and organized. But blogging is not really a medium for working collaboratively, and nor is it well suited to maintaining an ongoing resource that could be tweaked many times.

  • Forums are good for interaction and discussion, but not particularly for organizing information. Things get rambly, it can be hard to find what you’re looking for, and there is no easy way to pull all the little contributions people make to a discussion into a coherent total picture.

  • When it comes to organizing and structuring information, wikis are probably best, followed by blogs (because of easy use of tags and categories), while forums are a long way behind.

  • An intriguing feature of wikis is that some of them allow you to separate the thing you’re working on (e.g. a page about topic X) from discussions about that work (e.g. debating whether subtopic Y should be included).

  • Because wikis are more of a free-for-all, with people able to change each other’s work, they might take more organizing. This could be a problem especially on topics that divide opinion. Lots of wikis tend to be rather dry because of this, sticking to purely factual info, and not offering much in the way of recommendations or evaluation. (e.g. The classic Wikipedia post that lists a hundred pieces of software to do some job, but giving no clue that only three of them are really used in practice, or what the pros and cons of the three main choices really are.)

Overall it seems to be that blogs, wikis and forums all offer many things that a group of people collaborating together could benefit from using, and it’s a shame there’s no single platform that’s convenient for handling all of them in one nicely integrated place!

The Devil’s Political Dictionary

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Some useful definitions of important political concepts:

  • Apathy – From the Greek for “without feeling”. In politics, a state of numbness induced in otherwise healthy voters by excessive exposure to political campaigning.

  • Cynicism – In ancient Greek philosophy, a school of thought with a focus on living virtuously. Therefore followers of cynicism tend to recoil from most forms of politics.

  • Democracy – Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Generally speaking, one out of three ain’t bad.

  • Election – An inspiring process in which the people freely and peacefully choose which incompetent charlatan will get the blame for everything that goes wrong in the nation over the next several years.

  • Party – An informal gathering of miscellaneous people, often involving drinking, drugs and sex. Social norms of sober and responsible behavior don’t apply to parties. The most popular parties are usually those that are completely lacking in adult supervision.

  • Power – All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore to avoid corrupting the innocent, it is normally best if power is given to those who were already corrupt.

  • Voter – In a democracy, politicians ultimately answer to voters. A typical example of the kind of question that they answer is: “Who the frak are you, and why are you trying to kiss my baby?”

Stack Overflow Dev Survey: Some Fun Facts & Snarky Remarks

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I ran across the Stack Overflow 2015 Developer Survey, which is a surprisingly interesting and fun read for the geekishly inclined. Here are some random and fun tidbits:

  • “The average developer is 28.9 years old. He or she was born in April 1986, just as the Chernobyl meltdown was taking place.”

    (Did Chernobyl cause mutant ninja coders?)

  • “The programming field is growing extremely rapidly…. only about 25% of developers worldwide have more than 10 years coding experience. Most of those veteran developers have probably been coding professionally much shorter than that.”

    (Alternative interpretation: Ten years is about as long as most people can stand to do it!)

  • “48% of respondents never received a degree in computer science. 33% of respondents never took a computer science university course.”

    (Now you know why hardly anything ever built actually works properly! I kid, I kid… Univ courses don’t help with that anyway!)

  • Swift and C++11 are the most beloved languages.

    (Cultish fanpersons much?)

  • “Windows maintains the lion’s share of the developer operating system market, while Mac appears to have overtaken the Linuxes among active Stack Overflow devs.”

    (Hey, I thought I was a weird outlier in using Windows 7 rather than a Mac, but Win 7 is still the tops. Admittedly it is a stretch to even consider myself a dev, that is not my raison d’etre by any means. Whether I actually have a raison d’etre… hmm… I’ll get back to you on that…)

  • Tabs v Spaces… “Upon closer examination of the data, a trend emerges: Developers increasingly prefer spaces as they gain experience”

    (Yeah, we learned the hard way.)

  • C++ still pays rather well.

    (Someone has to sort out those pretentious buffer overruns and protect humanity from Skynet.)

  • “Niche or emerging technologies pay big bucks… It’s also likely that developers with niche competencies are just better developers all around.”

    (What about with niche incompetencies?)

  • The average salary of a US developer would buy them 18,712 Big Macs. In South Africa it works out to 19,215, in the UK a paltry 15,757.

    (Note: Only in the US do most developers actually spend their entire salary on Big Macs.)

  • Only 1.9% of developers hate their job.

    (Nowadays people really appreciate actually having a job. Especially one which can buy so many Big Macs.)

Humor aside, there’s a lot of interesting info in the survey, so I recommend taking a look.

As always, take survey results with a large pinch of salt though.

A few fun quizzes – science, US citizenship & Arsene Wenger

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I like quizzes, and I sometimes do ones I stumble across on the net.

Here are three pretty interesting ones that I did recently.

Are you scientifically literate?

Fun if you like science or want to see how much you can still remember. Quite a broad selection of topics, though a few of them are not much about whether you really understand basic science as whether you remember somewhat incidental facts or follow news coverage of science.

I scored 92%.

Could you pass a US citizenship test?

Interesting to see what kinds of things you are expected to know to qualify for American citizenship. Mostly it is history and politics. Some of the questions have a bearing on how the the US works and what is entailed in being a citizen, but some are a bit arcane and more like history trivia questions. Some of the questions are also answerable without knowing anything about the US specifically, for example by knowing which century WWII was in.

Btw, be aware that the quiz is from 2011. There are a few questions in it about who holds what office, and the answer might have been different when the quiz was set than when you take it. (At the time of writing this post, there hadn’t been many changes if any though.)

I scored 91% (IIRC). They didn’t say if that would be a pass, but I imagine so.

Arsène or Aristotle?

The answers are quite easy to guess without knowing anything about things that Arsene Wenger or Aristotle have actually said. Still nice bit of fun.

I scored 10/11.

If you do any of them, I’d be interested to hear what you thought of them!

Lying with Data, Pilot Suicide Edition

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Sometimes I’m tempted to start a whole blog about bad and misleading uses of data. There’s a classic book (as in very old and very good) called How to Lie With Statistics on this. It shows how the facts stated can be perfectly true, yet also completely misleading. Now that we’re allegedly living in the age of big data and it’s very easy for all and sundry to put out impressive looking charts, the problems it describes seem to be worse than ever and there are plenty of new ones to add to the list.

The strangest thing to my mind is that many of the examples even come from reputable people who certainly know how to do better, and who often bemoan stupid uses of data themselves.

One example I saw today…

Pilot Suicide

FiveThirtyEight – of Nate Silver fame – proclaims We Don’t Know How Often Pilots Commit Suicide.

Remember I’m not talking about saying things that are false, I’m talking about misleading people with statements that are true. So what’s wrong with this article?

To most people the factual statement “We don’t know how often pilots commit suicide” translates into the implication: “Be afraid, pilot suicide could be a real danger”. If you just read the headline, if you just read the opening paragraph of the story, or even if you read the whole story but didn’t stop to ponder the numbers, that would be your take-away from the article: Be afraid.

There are a couple of reasons why “Be afraid” is totally the wrong conclusion to draw from the data. Basically there is a critical difference between “We don’t know X” and “We don’t know anything about the possible values of X”.

  • Although we don’t know how often pilots commit suicide, we have a strict upper limit on how often it could be because plane crashes are incredibly rare. So at most pilot suicides while flying are incredibly rare.

  • We can reduce that upper limit even further by removing crashes whose causes are known to be something else. In the end the thing we don’t know (pilot suicides while flying) remains “unknown”, yet constrained into a range of possible values such that the rational response to it should be “it’s so rare it’s not worth losing sleep over”.

Does it matter?

Human beings aren’t so very rational though. They’re more responsive to stories, how the stories are framed, how many stories they saw than they are to the actual data mentioned. After being exposed to all the coverage that’s there’s been about pilot suicide lately, I’d find the possibility preying on mind if I were about to fly. I’d be able to dismiss the worry based on what I know of the stats, but I wouldn’t be able to avoid having the thought that it might happen. That’s how human minds work.

After the average human being reads that FiveThirtyEight article, they’re going to be left pretty uneasy about the whole question of pilot suicide. All the talk in the article about how it’s unknown, instances when it may have happened, listing risk factors for depression, the quotes from a pilot saying “If I had depression I wouldn’t admit it” will leave the reader anxious. Maybe they were already nervous about flying, and some of them will avoid it a bit more now.

That doesn’t sound too bad maybe?

Well on 9/11, about 3,000 people died. In the year after that many people got scared of flying, and switched to driving long distances instead of taking the plane. The problem: driving is much much more dangerous than flying. It’s estimated that about 1,500 extra people died on the roads that year because people were afraid to fly and drove instead.

How to improve the situation?

Of course it is entirely legitimate and responsible to study and write about topics like pilot suicide, or airline safety in general. Part of why flying has got to be so safe is that people have been poring over every incident for decades and learning the lessons from them.

However it’s easy and tempting to write in a way that’s irresponsible. Tempting because scary-sounding stories are going to get more attention, shares, pageviews etc. Easy because there is less work to do – just pick out some interesting facts, don’t worry too much about the context or putting them into perspective for the readers.

Given that, it’s maybe asking a lot that journalists and bloggers should strive for a higher standard. But one thing we can do to nudge them in that direction is call them out on it once in a while.

Saving energy, saving money, saving the planet

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Some of my twitter friends had a conversation about saving money on lighting the other day. Energy use is a topic that I’ve delved into a bit previously and I’d like to share some resources and thoughts that might be useful to my friends and to other people.

“Every big helps”

People often have the mentality that “every little helps”. They think switching off a phone charger here or a lightbulb there is important and fret about that. David MacKay, a Cambridge professor and advisor to the UK government has coined the phrase “every big helps” to help restore a sense of perspective. The point is focusing on the big things – the stuff that actually accounts for most power usage – has a much bigger impact on energy use, and therefore on energy bills and on the environment.

Watch this fantastic five minute video to hear him explain:

So what is big?

When it comes to electricity use, you can get a rough idea of how much electricity is used by different items in your home from this table from the US Dept of Energy:

Electric Appliances in the Residential Sector

These are obviously ballpark figures. Every model of appliance is a bit different, and every person and family has a different pattern of usage. All the same, it gives an important rough idea of what is likely to be a big contributor to your electricity bill, and what is probably pretty small.

For example one low-energy light-bulb on for three or so hours a day might only account for $2 of your annual bill, while your fridge-freezer could easily account for $60.

As one of my friends pointed out, the table shows a desktop PC using only 75W. A gaming PC running state-of-the-art games on max resolution could easily be using four times that much or more. So a heavy gaming habit could easily pwn all the lightbulbs in your house put together in terms of energy use.

The table at least shows you how to think about energy use, and back-of-the-envelope math is enough to get a ballpark idea of what is likely to be most important for you. Just estimate and add up…

  • power used when on * hours on
  • power used on standy * hours on standby

This info is for electricity use only, but that’s what sparked this post.

Some probably good things to do

What’s most impactful to do is going to vary from person to person, but some things are likely to apply in a lot of cases.

  • If you’re not already using low-energy lightbulbs, it’s pretty much a no-brainer these days. It might not make the biggest impact but it’s easy and cheap to do.
  • Heating and cooling are big on energy use. That means turning the heating or aircon down slightly could save more than all that running around worrying about lightbulbs.
  • “Heating and cooling” includes stuff like dishwashers, washing machines, fridges etc. When it’s time to change one of those items, getting a more efficient one is probably going to be a great idea. Also using the less power hungry programs, like washing at a lower temperature.
  • Insulation to stop your heat vanishing off into the night air is very good, but putting all that in can be expensive. Sometimes there are grants to help with that though.

The Bigger Picture

Want to know more about energy use, sustainable energy, what it’s going to take to avoid dangerous climate change etc? Here are some great resources…

Sustainable Energy – without the hot air – a website and ebook from David MacKay

The site has a section of videos, which might be a quicker and more enjoyable way to get the main ideas:

Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air with David MacKay (one hour talk at Harvard)

David MacKay – How the Laws of Physics Constrain Our Sustainable Energy Options (18 minute TEDx talk)

Liebster Q&A

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By now I imagine everyone that reads blogs has come across the “Liebster Award”. How exactly it originated I’m not sure, but it is a meme in which you nominate blogs that you particularly like, and suggest some questions for those bloggers to answer. They in turn nominate blogs they like, and so it goes on.

It turns out I was nominated for this some time ago by wallcat. It took me a while to notice, and even longer to write a post. But at least I don’t have to feel left out… and it is a pretty fun and interesting meme!

Wallcat’s Questions

Where is your favourite place to hang out?

I don’t have a single place, but coffee shops are good. I prefer by the window or outdoor seating, so I can get the daylight and watch life going past.

What do you like to do to unwind?

Games, books, TV or radio could feature, together with drinks and snacks.

Also walking and tennis, but those aren’t always ready-to-hand options when I’m in need of unwinding.

Would you consider yourself to be an outdoors or an indoors person?

I think I prefer outdoors, but a lot of the stuff I like to do or need to do requires being indoors!

If you could have one super-power what would it be?

Time travel, if that’s allowed as a super-power.

If you were a sorcerer what element would you specialize in – fire, earth, air or water?

Air.

All the elements would be cool, but I like flying, the sky, and airy stuff generally.

What is your proudest achievement?

I helped someone turn their life around from a very bad place.

Who are your role models?

I don’t know if “role model” is really the right term, but I’ll say Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Richard Feynman. I know a fair bit about their lives and they’ve been an influence on me one way and another.

What is your favourite book, game or film?

Book – The Lord of the Rings.

What is your favourite colour?

Blue or Purple. I find you can easily have too much purple though, so maybe blue.

If a genie granted you three wishes, what would they be?

I assume it’s a genie that is clever enough to rule out meta-wishes (wishing for more wishes etc) and not one of the devious and untrustworthy ones that will twist your request into something that technically fits but is actually horrible… in that case…

  • Excellent health until age 90
  • A fully functioning TARDIS (and the knowhow to operate it!)
  • The ability to master the material in any book by skimming it for five minutes

I’m sort of asking to be the Doctor aren’t I? Except sticking to being basically human!

I did contemplate asking for a large amount of money, but I figure with a TARDIS you’ve got a home and transport taken care of, plus you can always go win the lottery if you really needed to get actual cash.

If you could sum yourself up in just a few words, what would they be?

Intermittently awesome, frequently dysfunctional, mostly quite nice.

Nominees and Questions

Now the tricky part… since I’m very late with this meme, I think pretty much everyone that I might have nominated has already been nominated by someone else, and already posted their response as well. If wallcat hadn’t nominated me, I’d surely have nominated her!

Well rather than try to find out who has already done this meme, I will sidestep the issue in two ways…

  • I will list some of my favorite blogs
  • I will ask some questions that anyone who feels so inclined can answer, either in a blog post of their own, via a comments here, or via Twitter.

11 Blogs I Like

In no particular order, a non-exhaustive list of blogs that I like, and bloggers who I’d enjoy seeing answering my questions, if they feel the urge…

11 Questions

Feel free to answer as many or as few as you like, and via whatever medium you prefer… your own blog, comments here, Twitter or other internety means. Though if there’s some way I can find out that you have answered them, that would definitely be good.

Remember anyone who wants can answer!

  1. Do you watch or play any sports? Which?
  2. Are you a morning person, night owl or neither?
  3. Strangest phobia you have personally come across?
  4. What little known book, show or film do you love?
  5. What historical era would you live in, if not the present? Why?
  6. What advice would you give your younger self?
  7. What’s something you’ve always wanted to do, but not done yet?
  8. How would you do in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse?
  9. What’s your ideal place to work?
  10. What fictional character has influenced you the most?
  11. What’s the best thing about your life right now?