Irregular Shed

Links for 2010-03-16 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Arduino Tutorial - connecting a parallel LCD
Nice to have it shown in black and white.

Marmite XO [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:14:31 PDT

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

Truly a thing of beauty.

Lego tower of magnificence [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:36:19 PST

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

Inspired by the twisted architecture of Bollops and The Egg (links to follow when I'm not using my phone to post), today a poorly four year old and his thirty-something dad built this beauty in their living room.

Reader, I was that dad.

Links for 2010-03-02 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 PST

Jon Combe | Code| HTML clocks using JavaScript and CSS rotation
Via @pip - well nifty clocks made entirely from Javascript and CSS.

Links for 2010-02-26 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

DIY USB to Serial Cable For $3! « jthomson's blog
I knew this was possible but have been too lazy to try =)

The Steorn Orbo motor replication by JL Naudin

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:15:30 -0500

The Steorn Orbo motor replication by JL Naudin:

Once you get over the design of the site - one big page with more Comic Sans than has been legal for 12 years in the EU - this is fascinating and puzzling. Jean-Louis Naudin has been examining all the tech data put out by perpetual motion dreamers Steorn have released and built his own Steorn Orbo motor, and - puzzlingly - seems to have favourable results for them.

Obviously the laws of thermodynamics say this can’t be the case and I’d love to see someone with a much deeper understanding than me - with a bunch of oscilloscopes - take a really good look and point out where the calculations are going wrong, but Monsieur Naudin seems to be approaching that criteria.

Troubling and puzzling. I like to know what’s going on!

Quick and dirty Tardis [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:05:06 PST

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

Jack wanted a Tardis for his little Doctor Who figures. I obliged with this quick craft foam effort. He doesn't mind the obvious flaws and, frankly, neither do I. =)

I actually have a couple of big gauges like the ones you can see...

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:38:06 -0500

I actually have a couple of big gauges like the ones you can see here. I shun the idea of Steampunk; I prefer Dieselpunk myself. Anything that looks like lab equipment from the 60s is full of win for me.

Hydroelectric Power Plant, Mirejovice - Control Room Gigapixel in Czech Republic

Bending time [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:50:20 PST

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

Penny's animal keyboard is getting made more silly than it already was. Crazy pitch control by knobs or by light, deliberately glitchy reset, line-out with proper volume control and power socket are all added so far. Cosmetic work to follow.

We're number 1! And 2! And 3! etc. [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:33:37 PST

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

In January we had the entire top 10 of Welsh-language kids books to ourselves. Not best-sellers but bloody impressive - nobody could touch Awen in January.

(Gwales.com is the distribution arm of the Welsh Books Council, and they' have a virtual monopoly in getting Welsh language books out there.)

Impossibly impressive short film styled entirely with various...

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:24:02 -0500

Impossibly impressive short film styled entirely with various company/entity logos. Somewhat sweary in places

Logorama on Vimeo (via @bobbyllew)

I have no idea where this picture came from - I found it on an...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:19:21 -0500

I have no idea where this picture came from - I found it on an SD card that was in my Eee back last year as an extra drive - but before I use the SD card for something else I wanted to share it with the wirble-wirble-world.

It’s awesome.

Another day, another fantastic vintage nuclear attack...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:13:21 -0500

Another day, another fantastic vintage nuclear attack poster… via BoingBoing et al.

Awesome. from mappeal, via Make and Geekologie and OhGizmo and...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:03:50 -0500

Awesome.

from mappeal, via Make and Geekologie and OhGizmo and BookOfJoe (phew!)

Javascript Brilliance

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:45:02 -0500

Two things involving Javascript that I didn’t know about this time last week:

Node

Node is a standalone Javascript engine for running on servers. Lets you deal with things on a socket level, interact with the file system and so on. This means you can write all your code for both a client and a server in the same language; something you can do with haXe as well, but without the compiling down to Neko bytecode step, and in a somewhat more commonly used language.

Gordon

Gordon is a (currently very simple) SWF player written in pure Javascript, which gets the file running using SVG and HTML5. The only way to get Flash to run on an iPhone, at the moment - an impressive feat! Being clean Javascript, the sourcecode is all there for the taking, but that’s okay - it’s licensed under an MIT open source license!

Links for 2010-01-11 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

Threadless T-shirt: When Geek-ness Goes Retro...
Next time Threadless have a sale, I'm all over this shirt...

Links for 2010-01-07 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

Invent with Python
Might be handy one day - simple games, made with Python

I love me a bit of chilled out noise, and this video is full of...

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 08:53:52 -0500

I love me a bit of chilled out noise, and this video is full of the most wonderfully bizarre sources for such things. Found on the Make blog a while ago, and finally experienced properly today…

Links for 2009-12-14 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 PST

Ryan Abegglen: All the flim that's fit to flam.
Freaky retro-styled graphic nonsense that words cannot describe (so I'm giving up right now)

What did you do with your lunchtime today? I made a Christmas...

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:30:00 -0500

What did you do with your lunchtime today? I made a Christmas shitty ditty out of samples from Freesound.org and a loop appropriated from Radiohead’s National Anthem.

Samples:

Sleigh bells
The Winstons’ Amen Brother break beat (history)
Jingle Bells musical box
Sabian crash cymbal
The National Anthem

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

via @Nermal: catsforgold.com

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:38:36 -0500

via @Nermal: catsforgold.com

Continuing the de-uglification

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:51:36 -0500

Titles in Gill Sans? Yes, we’ve got them now, thanks to the utterly awesome typeface.js

In other news, Ruth Jones out of that Gavin and Stacey programme is recording her Christmas special for BBC Wales in the studio here. Michael Ball in da house, Max Boyce in da house, etc. How very festive.

De-uglification sequence initiated

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:53:06 -0500

The use of a scan of flock wallpaper and big thick black lines was too much. I decided to use my standard background (used pretty much everywhere - generated within Aviary.com’s Peacock), a white background for the main bit and some tinkering with the CSS in features that I’ve not used yet.

Still got my Sinclair-inspired logo though =)

Seriously, if you’re on Tumblr and want to create a theme of your own, you can’t go far wrong hacking a theme as well crafted and documented as FieldNotes.

Links for 2009-11-16 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Threadless T-shirt: We've Got Some Work To Do Now
Got to get this t-shirt, it's the business!

Ugly

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:24:11 -0500

I’ve successfully mangled some CSS to make this blog:

unique
as ugly as hell

Yay me!

This is, quite frankly, amazing. 3D renders of the classic...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:58:13 -0500

This is, quite frankly, amazing. 3D renders of the classic fractally Mandlebrot goodness.

From www.skytopia.com, via Foomandoonian

Via BoingBoing - I love this photo so much I could squeal....

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:26:25 -0500

Via BoingBoing - I love this photo so much I could squeal. Bonkers photo of a mad tool for insane women to use in their certifiable hobby. Yes!

Fun with APIs

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:25:18 -0500

Part of the reason I’ve chosen Tumblr as the platform for my blog empire is because it’s achingly customisable. And - hurrah! - it has a good, well documented API for techie tinkerers. Having had a good look through it I’ve realised I can replicate the bits of Storytlr that I’m really going to miss with some not-so-hard scripts. The only fly in the ointment is that I’m going to have to use PHP or Python to do the scripting, which means I’ll have to host the scripts elsewhere.

I’m tempted to give Python a whirl and host the scripts on the Google App engine. It’s free, and has cron-like capabilities - both good as far as I’m concerned - and if it actually works out well, I could very well open it up for other Tumblr users to play with.

Obviously, whether or not I get beyond the planning stage is another thing altogether =)

VKendology: boozes plus bad maths

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:31:00 -0500

Preamble du jour

Anybody who knows me even the tiniest fraction knows I like maths and physics. I make no attempt to hide it (and why would I?); I’m very much an ‘out’ geek. This is the t-shirt I wore today. And anybody who has dipped into my posts online over the past, ooh, nearly five years knows how much I hate it when maths is used badly in PR campaigns disguised as research, so as to get free advertising for a client when lazy journalists churn the PR pieces to fill column inches.

The most egregious of them all, and the one that started me off on my quest against faux formulae for advertising, is what has ended up being known as Blue Monday. My feelings about “the officially most depressing day of the year” are very well known. The only good thing about this supposed formula is that, thanks to mutual feather ruffling, I’ve made a couple of allies in science: very occasionally the darling of the tank-top Dr Ben Goldacre, but much more frequently the very lovely Dr Petra Boynton.

Petra recently pointed me at a mathsy PR mess that she was concerned by. In football terms, it was very much a Division 1 relegation zone affair, for Global Brands’ unpleasant booze, Vodka Kick. It had passed me by completely, which is good as far as I’m concerned because it meant it had also passed by the Premiership and Championship quality news outlets, and had only been picked up by Division 1 news websites - local papers and lazy radio DJs, that sort of thing. Of course, I’m not the sort of person who finds getting arseholed on artificially flavoured, watered-down ethanol appealing, so it may have been all over whatever news source the proletariat follow…

Anyway, Petra had serious concerns about the research that was being presented by the PR company, and told me she was working through that side of things for her blog. Would I be interested in taking a look at maths to see how figures worked out? Why yes, of course I would! Her comrade Tristan O’Dwyer was also looking at the same PR piece for his blog, so the three of us started comparing notes to pick through the whole debacle, using our own unique super-powers to analyse what was going on. Me, I’ve been on maths detail, and that’s what I’ll concentrate on here, but first some background…

The promised background

To flog flavoured vodka drinks to twenty-somethings, Global Brands set up a competitiony thing on Facebook-type things to find a young, “fun-loving” maths or science student to research nights out, to produce a “scientific” “thesis” on what makes a night out “perfect”.

Obviously, with this all being in the name of PR, munters need not apply. They didn’t actually say that (althoughh kudos would be due if they were that honest), but the way the cards were played made this obvious. The winner would be a moderately attractive woman; not “out of your league” material as far as men would be concerned, and the sort of woman who looks like she could be in your group of friends if you’re a woman. It wouldn’t be a man because if they were good looking they’d end up making potential male customers feel inadequate. An ordinary looking man would work if they were a bit funny, but VK is a sophisticated drink as well as a fun-loving one, so being entertainingly funny wouldn’t work.

What a surprise it was, then, that this young lady won; seen here posing with a formula that is all her own work, honest. (More on that later…)

As with Petra, I’m not going to name her (it’s not hard to find, though) in case she realises the travesty of it all.

Now, as is traditional with these PR formulae, the formula that is presented is poorly rendered. I’ve taken it upon myself to try and improve the appearance by using OpenOffice.org Formula to get something a bit more likely to gain a grade C GCSE. Here’s what has been shown off by the PR gang:

Here, your Perfect Night Out (PNO) is equal to your attractiveness+spontaneity factors, multiplied by the sum of your number of friends factor, venue factor, timing factor and fun time factor, all multiplied by an “end of the night factor”.

The PR company say this is all the student’s own work, but I find that suspicious. As she’s a biology undergraduate I’d expect her to be able to write a formula accurately, and that means no multiplication symbols and single character variable names. PNO is PxNxO, and N is used on the right hand side.

Looking at the promotion’s webpage, we can see that the whole formula is based on subjective feelings from leading questions, and any attempt to use actual units (like those of time, or the number of people or places) are thrown out the window in favour of a numerical scale from 1 to 10. At least, that’s how it appears - in their calculator they have eight variables, compared to the seven in the formula. Also, their calculator just adds your numbers together giving a total out of 80, instead of multiplying three parts of it which should, using the scales suggested, be out of 16000. (Of course, we can’t know that this is the case because there’s no example figures shown in the description of the formula.)

However, Tristan obtained the ‘thesis’ written by the student from the PR company, and in the interest of peer review (and seeing as it had to, and I quote, stack up to academic scrutiny by Britain’s best brains), we’ve got it hosted here for all to see. I recommend you have a look at it before I start picking holes and showing how easy it is to have infinite fun!

Reading through the paper was interesting for me, from a forensic point of view. It looks an awful lot like there are two distinct writing styles in certain places that would suggest, to me (and this is only an opinion) that the bulk was written by one person and then someone else chimed in to expand. I won’t dwell on this though, there’s no physical (or electronic) proof, but certain sections show a woeful lack of understanding of fairly simple maths.

Outlined in the paper are formulae used as the foundation of the formula above. A couple of them have really basic, obvious flaws that I would expect anybody tasked to draw them up to spot before even committing them to paper; they’re listed below. For them to be the foundations of any research on any topic would be pointless, and we can only be glad that it’s for a pointless exercise like a perfect night out, and not for something important like, I dunno, the amount of gas required to inflate a car’s air bag. Once again, I’ve used OpenOffice.org Formula to render them accurately.

The number of friends to go out with

Here, N is the magic number that represents how you feel being with your friends. W_K is a weighting factor, provided as a black box that allows wiggle room (“Formula doesn’t work for you? Clearly you’ve misinterpreted your weighting factors!”). L_L is the lower limit of the number of friends you like to go out with, U_L is the upper limit, and F is the number of friends you’re with actually out with on this occasion.

Looks impressive doesn’t it? The problem is, if you only like going out with, say, three other people - no more and no less - then you end up dividing by zero, resulting in infinity. Hey presto, infinitely good night out! This happens whenever you have two identical limits, so my favourite result is infinite perfection by being a complete loner.

The timing formula

Here, T is a numeric representation of timing - as a factor, not as a time, so no units. W_T is a magical weighting factor, D is a day idealness factor (D=1 on your favourite day to go out, 0.5 for any other day). S_Diff is the difference between your ideal start time for a night out and the actual time you start, and F_Diff is the difference between finish time.

This formula doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for several reasons. Firstly, there’s no discussion in the report regarding the units of time; in science normally this is done in seconds, but given that there’s 0.25 added (“to allow for inaccuracies”) I suspect this should be in hours - 15 minutes sounds like a more realistic amount of wiggle room than 15 seconds or 250 milliseconds. However, elsewhere in the formulae minutes are used - so there’s no consistency.

Secondly, units need to be included in scientific formulae. 7 seconds +7 is meaningless, either both factors have the same unit or no units at all. Those 0.25 wiggles require a unit identical to those of the differences. If you add them in, and let’s (to keep a pretence of science) assume that we’re doing it all in seconds, then the bottom of the formula is in seconds squared (aka s²) - an acceleration! Given that both the weighting and day factor are purely numerical, it results in the Timing factor being in s^-2, which is nonsense.

Conclusion

An acre of bullshit, but with the occasional nice flourish (more so than from - gah! - Arnall). All the same, there’s a disturbing lack of science coming from a biology student. I do sincerely hope she recovers from this and has a good career.

An aside - why do PR companies inflict this sort of rubbish on us? Well, as another commentator has pointed out, by getting things like this into news and blogs, instead of as advertising, you probably pay less (although you have the gamble as to whether it gets picked up by anyone), and you don’t have to play by the ASA’s rules, so you can claim absolutely anything…

Change of theme

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:39:51 -0500

After realising how clean and customisable the Field Notes theme is on Tumblr, I’ve switched to that and started tinkering with it (increasing the content width, logo at the top, Disqus comments so far; background design to follow).

Fascinating? Not really. Just want to post something. I’ve got a bigger super-post to finish off, but want instant gratification…

It's typical isn't it?

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:08:07 -0400

The theme that I found on Tumblr and decided to build my own theme off is a complete mess of poorly chosen and/or default id and class names and a spaghetti-like bundle of CSS. It’s going to take a while… at least I’ve got comments working though.

Here we go again

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:46:38 -0400

I found myself being a digital nomad once again. After Swurl shut down in the early part of 2009 I found a great replacement in the form of Storytlr. Things seemed to be good - nice European guys, invited over to the Google I/O conference in June where cool new features on the way - and then a bombshell was dropped in October.

Storytlr will be gone by the end of the year. Time to find yet another blog solution. I wasn’t really that happy using Blogger in conjunction with a full-featured aggregator because comments weren’t crossing over between the two, and I wanted to avoid running my own server as much as possible so that I don’t have to constantly worry about updating the code as security issues arise. I just don’t have enough hours in the day to spend time doing that.

Now, a few years ago I first came across Tumblr, and I quite liked it but didn’t think of it as much more than a novelty. More recently, a few people I follow on Twitter have been playing with it and appeared to be very happy with its capabilities - and ease of use figured highly - so I decided to look again.

I’ve liked what I’ve seen enough to use it as the basis for this latest iteration of my online presence. Where there’s features missing that I’d like, I’ve started building my own versions in things like Yahoo Pipes, and I’ve delved into the page template to start getting it to look how I’d like. There’s still some way to go (no comments yet, for example), but I understand much more about how it works than I have done with previous platforms I’ve built on.

So here we are - expect to see improvements over the next couple of weeks!