One in particular has caught my attention a couple times now. It features rather simple looking puzzles on the screen and large cash prizes of several hundred dollars. It is hosted by a blond British woman (or at least someone with a non-North American English accent) encouraging viewers to call in and try solving the puzzle of the moment. It is rather amusing watching her trying to come up with new things to say after 20 solid minutes without a single caller. How many new ways can she describe the puzzle? How many new ways can she ask me to call in? How many times can she say that time is running out?

The absolutely maddening thing is that these puzzles are always so easy. At least, they seem easy enough that it is absolutely mind bogglging that someone hasn’t called in yet. Last night’s game: name a car brand with 5 letters starting with M-A-Z and win $2500. And nobody is calling in to answer! All the while the background music gets more and more pressing, alarms start going off, and countdowns start appearing on screen, all designed to make me think that I only have a few seconds to call in and be handed this bounty just for not being a complete idiot.

But last night I finally found the complete rules online and found out how this ruse works. Though they work hard to give the impression that nobody is calling, that the puzzle really is that easy, and that there really are no tricks associated with the cash prize, it’s all BS. When you enter by calling in (all calls cost $2) or sending in a text message (again, at the cost of $2) you’re only registering your name as a contestant. It is then at the producer’s discretion when to actually call people, how many people to call, and how long to run the game. So they could run the entire thing with people furiously texting and calling thinking that it is a sure thing and why the hell aren’t I getting through because nobody else is calling and it’s almost over so I have to try again and again and again and….. and then only at the end let someone on the air with a guess they know is wrong and not have anybody win the prize. The rules basically say that they can put up this ruse of easy money as much as they want, collecting their $2 fees with each registration sent in, while having no obligation to actually let anybody even try to win.

In any case, the answer to last night’s puzzle was MAZEL, the Spanish concept car design studio. I doubt anybody would have won even if they had given them a chance.

In a terminal, run ‘alsamixer’.

Towards the bottom right, there are two items labeled ‘Digital’.

For the system to recognize the built in microphone, the first needs to be set to ‘Digital’ and the second to ‘Analog I’. For the system to recognize the audio input jack on the front, they must both be ‘Analog I’.

Then, open System > Preferences > Sound, or double-click on the volume in the task-bar and open preferences. Under the ‘Input’ tab, switch to whichever device shows some input levels. For the external, this is ‘Microphone 2′ but not ‘Microphone 1′. Adjust gain as necessary.

Then you can run qarecord to record wav files.

Now all I need is something that can play LP records and I’ll be in business.

So I broke out my spreadsheet program and worked it out. I assumed you always get the minimum number of coins (e.g., one quarter and one nickel instead of three dimes), and that each value from $0.00 to $4.99 has equal probability of turning up. This second assumption is the one I’m least sure of, as pricing practices and the effect of taxes may favor an uneven distribution. But that’s a project for another day.

The results are that for any transaction, you should expect to get:

• 0.8 toonies *
• 0.4 loonies *
• 1.5 quarters
• 0.8 dimes
• 0.4 nickels
• 2.0 pennies

I basically used brute force because copy-and-paste is easy, but the same patterns that make copy-and-paste easy mean you don’t really need brute force, and I could probably have done it all in my head. For pennies, you’ll get 1, 2, 3, 4, or 0, and then the pattern repeats. So from just 5 transactions, you can already tell that the average for pennies will be (1+2+3+4+0)/5=2. Loonies are used only for values in the 1 and 3 dollar ranges, and none for 0, 2, and 4, so the average will be (0+1+0+1+0)/5=0.4. The rest are left as an exercise for the reader.

I would have thought I’d run out of penny rollers first. I guess the coin roller people compensated for that but not the rest. When I go buy a new bag I’m going to check what the ratio of denominations is. ‘Cause I’m a dork like that.

—

* For American folk, replace “loonie” and “toonie” with “one dollar bill” and “the two dollar bill you should have”. With only a one dollar bill, they’re just like pennies—you should expect two every single goddamn time. With a two dollar bill, you’d average just over one bill per transaction. Sure you could use that logic to argue for 3 and 4 dollar bills too, but let’s not get crazy.

And from the other side:

It was all the more delicious for the effort. It’s great being home at Christmas, when food just keeps reappearing in the kitchen no matter how much you play with it.

However, this precession of the signs does not necessarily mean that astrology is complete nonsense. One can imagine a world in which astrology really did work, despite the fact that the signs don’t match up anymore. It’s not hard. In fact I’ll do it right now.

It’s not hard to imagine that the time of year of one’s birth actually did affect one’s behaviour. Maybe our gestation period was more heavily influenced by ambient temperature, such that a developing embryo’s body chemistry was altered in specific and predictable ways. Isn’t there some species of reptile in which whether you become a boy or a girl depends on the temperature at which your egg develops? That’s what I’m talking about here. Even less crazy would be that a child’s first few months of development influence their behaviour. You might imagine a person born in December would be tougher than someone born in May because of various environmental things. I think there have even been proper studies on this kind of thing. Early childhood psychology and the like.

People would notice this kind of predictor. Except instead of noticing that the changes in behaviour are correlated with seasons, they notice that they’re correlated with the position of the sun at birth. These are really pretty much the same thing, and it seems like seasons would be an easier connection, but hey, everybody loves astronomy, right? So, instead of saying “babies raised in the first month of winter tend to be tough and have a high threshold for cold” (or whatever) they say “people who were born under Capricorn (Dec 23 to Jan 19) tend to…” etc.

And this system works. The people who have worked it out have just made a mistake in assuming that correlation equals causation (which it does not). But that doesn’t really matter since their mistake takes many lifetimes to become obvious, and by that point astrologers have stopped bothering to check if the Sun is in the same place it’s been in for the last hundred years. Another simple mistake.

But before you know it, the Sun has moved quite a lot, and the constellations don’t match up very well anymore, just as we see today. The seasons that caused this whole mess, on the other hand, are still right where they were before. People born in the first month of winter are still tough and cold (or whatever), and that still matches the description of Capricorn even though the Sun isn’t in Capricorn anymore. The system still works, we just have an outdated naming scheme.

So the claim that astrology is complete rubbish because the names of the signs don’t match up with the sun anymore is fallacious. You might as well claim that modern electronics can’t possibly work because current actually flows the other way. Unfortunate naming conventions don’t invalidate the thing they describe.

However, all of this is not to say that we live in a world where astrology is true. There are, I’m sure, dozens of other reasons why your newspaper horoscope can’t possibly be true, but I’m not going to address them here. The point is, astrology may be nonsense, but it’s not necessarily a priori nonsense.

I saw this picture on Google Maps and wondered how much information you could get from it. We know the CN Tower is 553.33 metres tall (with the SkyPod at 447 m), and located at coordinates 43.476667 N, 79.3875 W.

Questions:

• How high is the sun in the sky?
• What time was the photo taken?
• What are the coordinates of the satellite that took the photo?
• Others…?

Yes more information is required, but nothing you can’t look up or make a reasonable guess at. At least I don’t think so. I wonder if anybody will notice if I work out this geometry for my summer project instead of exoplanet orbit geometry like I’m supposed to. Are there other big landmarks we could do this for?

I’m current far away from home in Toronto, working a research project
which requires juggling about a dozen different lines of thought at
once. Everything is time critical and every job conflicts with others
fighting for scarce resources. I didn’t realize over 50 terabytes of
disk space still counted as scarce, but 90 hours of observing a pulsar
with a half-second period builds up.

Of course since everything work related requires so much attention and
juggling and delegating, I’ve been toying with this blog in the
background. There are at least three improvements I’ve made, all for
the hell of it and none of it appreciated by anybody but me I’m sure.
But really, why else would I be doing this if not to entertain myself.
I’m posting this by email right now! Wheeee!

So, when we try to improve one of these programs, you can count on a lot of debugging before anything gets fixed. Often the things just won’t compile, or there’s a typo so it looks for the wrong input file. Recently one of these programs was rewritten, and was tested a little to see that it actually worked. On a small scale it worked fine, but when we started submitting jobs with it on our big computing cluster, 100 gigabytes of data would go in and exactly 0 bytes would come out. Segmentation fault.

It was not the size of the data we were putting through that caused the segmentation fault, but the number of processes we were running. It turned out the segmentation fault was not repeatable when running one copy fo the program at once, but when you run dozens of copies simultaneously, when one fails they all die.

The only way I could really deal with this was run the program in a debugger and just hope to catch the fault. For about a week I had a terminal window open with gdb running my program. Every few hours I would check to see that it succeeded in its job and then would run it again, hoping for that elusive seg fault. Days went by. Program exited successfully. Program exited successfully. Program exited successfully. My supervisor would ask if I had solved the program yet. I would look at him and say, “Program exited successfully.”

Until finally I decided to give up. I told my supervisor, “If this run doesn’t die, then I’m giving up and going back to the old code.” Within two minutes of that conversation…. segmentation fault! Like the rarest of pokemon in an Ultra Ball, my debugger had finally succeeded in capturing the bug in my program.

And that, children, is why playing video games will help you do well in school. All the time my boyfriend made me play pokemon with him back in senior year of undergrad was well spent after all.

All of which I’ve done.

Here I was, sure that since it was only ten episodes into the final season, BSG would last me through the summer, building up to its grand series finale. Then, they had to go start airing a promo on Space saying “THE LAST EPISODE UNTIL 2009!”

Spoilers below!

Interestingly, almost everything that I expected would get drawn out over the whole season happened this episode. Especially interesting was the sprint to Earth in the last ten minutes. It all came across as very rushed and not well thought out. I think the whole Cylon-Human relationship at that point is not well explained, with one group threatening the other at every turn. I see no reason for the humans to trust the Cylons enough to bring them to Earth, no matter how good Apollo seems to thing is oratorical skills are.

I’m a little sad to see that BSG arrives on Earth in a post-apocalyptic state. As I said before, I hoped to see Earth in the near-future, with Cylon-like technology, having been trying to reach out to their Twelve Colony brothers. But, that’s not the kind of material that fills half a season. BSG is about refugees finding a new home and re-establishing the human race, not hanging out on Earth. (That’s why I didn’t like the New Caprica section of the show.) The state we were left with at the end of this episode brings up a lot of questions. I suspect the Earth-Cylon connection is still going to be very important. The Final Five haven’t lost their significance now that we know where Earth is.

(Also note that in this episode, they have acknowledged that the final five Cylons are different from the first ones, since Adama has known Tigh for thirty years and has watched him age, which the other Cylons do not do.)

But, aside from all that, I think the most interesting thing was Diana’s statement that only four of the final five are in the fleet. This explains why four and not five cylons came together when they started hearing the music. If true, it also means that Kara Thrace is not a Cylon, against the majority of fan guesswork to date. It could, of course, have been a lie. It might also have meant that the Final Cylon was already on the basestar when the Three said that. It’s the latter I favour, if only because it would be a huge let down to come this far only to find out that the final Cylon isn’t any of the characters we already know.

So, where is the final Cylon? If they are someone in the fleet, why haven’t they been hearing the music too? And what happened to Earth? Where does the season go from here? I guess we’ll have to tune in next year…. frak.