They laughed when we called it the BadgerCam; well, they're not laughing now! The badger walks up to the left of the car and has a wander around ...
... and here's a still of the badger just before it leaves.
We have one further video of the badger shuffling away - not so interesting, so not shown here. Of the other 48 videos, about one third show cats, about the same number show nothing at all and then there are a couple of videos of birds .. plus two of me bringing stuff out to the bin.
More pictures from before this blog got started, back in 2005.
2005: Even then the author tried his family's patience
How am I getting on with my Christmas present, "Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur"? Thanks for asking. You see, QFT is like a big jigsaw puzzle where each of the pieces is itself pretty incomprehensible. You spend a long time delving into Lagrangians (that's a piece of the puzzle), quantum simple harmonic oscillators (another piece), calculus of variations and the Euler-Lagrange equation (another), and so on, without much sense of overall direction.
Gradually, the individual pieces themselves begin to make sense (you grasp enough of the trees to see the local wood) .. and with enough pieces under your belt, you can begin to assemble them to get a picture of QFT as an entirety. (Also see this interesting piece from Sean Carroll).
You see why the big picture of quantum field theory is so inaccessible. I'm about a third of the way through the book, currently looking at quantum (operator-valued) fields. It would be a pretty special amateur to get through the whole of this book, that's for sure.
Meanwhile, Clare is preparing a new hat for me, to update the one in the picture above. Seems to feature the letter 'D' ...
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2004: working on a contract with Samsung
I was assigned to help Samsung with their bid into BT's 21st Century Network (their transition to a multi-media IP network). My task was to help them both with understanding BT's idiosyncratic ways and with the phrasing of the English response-text. As usual, on the last day we pulled an all-nighter. Young Samsung engineers were out for the count, lying on desks and flopped over chairs. I was busy till dawn when the Samsung VP approached me in surprise. "We were told that all you westerners were decadent; that you all went home at 5.30 at night. We were the ones who worked till we dropped!"
It was clear that that Samsung executive had never worked in consulting - nor experienced a Western corporate bid team in action!
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One is en vacances, the other is an author with a penchant for murder (2004)
"The aliens are here. And they want to help. [...] The Jackaroo have given humanity 15 worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroo's previous clients.
Miracles that could reverse the damage caused by war, climate change, and rising sea levels. Nightmares that could for ever alter humanity - or even destroy it.
Chloe Millar works in London, mapping changes caused by imported scraps of alien technology. When she stumbles across a pair of orphaned kids possessed by an ancient ghost, she must decide whether to help them or to hand them over to the authorities. Authorities who believe that their visions point towards a new kind of danger.
And on one of the Jackaroo's gift-worlds, the murder of a man who has just arrived from Earth leads policeman Vic Gayle to a war between rival gangs over possession of a remote excavation site.
Something is coming through. Something linked to the visions of Chloe's orphans, and Vic Gayle's murder investigation. Something that will challenge the limits of the Jackaroo's benevolence ..."
Remember Oasis? A Mancunian scruff band: semi-criminal, unemployed and so-angry. They produce two desperately-great albums (Definitely Maybe, (What's the Story) Morning Glory) and get rich and famous. Then it all falls apart - they're going through the motions.
The same thing happens to writers, Greg Bear being a case in point. I loved McAuley's Fairyland for its sharp evocation of the counterculture in a dying civilization. The author was clearly loving it, even if the ending did rather squib out. Many books later, McAuley is an established SF writer, churning them out. He ticks all the competence boxes: he can create characters, settings and plot. But (yawn) his heart isn't really in it. And if he doesn't really care, this rubs off on the reader.
Let it be said I really wanted to like "Something Coming Through". I put up with the endless police-procedural chasing around and jumping through hoops (to little apparent purpose) in the hope there would be a big reveal. But no, all that will be reserved for future volumes of what promises to be an interminable saga. Sorry mate, life is way too short.
More pix from before this blog started. Here it's summer in Washington DC, three months before the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Clare and Adrian fronting the White House - how American they look!
The author and his wife - it's August 2001
Clare is doing that 'dubya' thing .. I think ..
When the planes hit, I was in a meeting in Vienna, Virginia. We had another C&W office a few hundred yards away, and in its basement car park was MAE East* (1919 Gallows Road). Would it be a terrorist target - to close down the global Internet? We didn't know but Craig Stenberg and myself zoomed down there, fast-talked our way past an officious guard, and got the C&W people out.
Then most of us went home and watched it all unfold on TV**.
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* MAE East: the American east coast Internet hub (Metropolitan Area Exchange, East).
** Cable & Wireless, like other major telecommunications companies, played an important role in restoring communications in New York and Washington in the aftermath of the incident.
It's been observed that the Germans would make a much better job at running Greece than the Greeks do. Some reactionaries have even been heard to observe that the British Empire made a better fist at governing its colonies (particularly in Africa) than the post-independence Governments.
At a technical level, these thoughts are certainly correct. They leave one factor out, however. The efficient Northern Europeans ran these countries in their own interests, not those of the indigenous populations. That's why the Greeks prefer their domestic leaders, incompetent and/or corrupt though they may be.
Genetics-aware commentators have been speculating for a while that we're on the verge of reprogramming our children with optimised alleles for health, athleticism, beauty, personality and intelligence. There's no technical reason why this shouldn't be reliable, safe, effective and possible in the next few decades. Sounds like the salvation of the human race - we can bootstrap ourselves to the next screen. Here's an update on work-in-progress.
Every pre homo sapiens sub-species experienced this reality. The new guys are in the area and they're smarter and more competent than we are. We're gonna be toast. In the greater scheme of things, should we be happy about that or should we wipe out these upstarts while we can (if we can)?*
FWIW, my vote is in favour of letting the new guys have our space. But then, I always wanted humanity to get to the stars.
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* They say all Internet discussions eventually bring in the Nazis - this was precisely the argument National Socialists used against the Jews.
A 23andMe mailing mentions that the police are now using suspect facial profiles generated from scene-of-crime DNA. Remarkable. Only a small number of alleles bearing on likeness have been identified to date, but genetics is obviously central. Just think of identical twins, the clue is in the name.
Some of the DNA facial reconstructions put together by researchers seem quite accurate; others not so much (see article).
One of the better ones? Ms. Spangler’s ancestry is half Korean and half northern European. Top right image is from the DNA; bottom right, was adjusted for age, weight and height.
The police use of this technology seems at present to be grasping at straws. The picture of a suspect below was characterised by one critic as showing simply a 'generic young black man'. Since the perpetrator has not yet been caught, however, we have no idea as to its accuracy.
Sketch of a possible suspect based on DNA left at the crime scene
However, like most technologies that we know in principle will work, this is going to be big.
Just to recap, here's the current state of the art (above). They seem not too bad to me, although they probably chose their best ones for this publicity shot.
Just bland things today, I'm afraid. My thinking processes, heightened by two days of fasting led me to two wonderful inventions I'd like to share with you.
1. The Skype Mannequin
In his celebrated novel, "The Milkman in the Night", Andrey Kurkov has a middle-class, middle-aged widow in the Ukraine embalming her deceased husband - I think 'plastification' might have been the technique - so that he would continue to keep her company and perhaps scare off the bad guys (that old silhouette at the window trick). I assumed this was a satire on the well-know garrulousness of Ukrainian menfolk.
Still, it got me thinking. Perhaps a mannequin could be made of me. Equipped with a speaker in the mouth, microphones in the ears, cams in the eyes and a decent WiFi link I believe it could give an excellent impression of me doing small-talk. A small motor for the odd arm gesture would complete the illusion. I was thinking of installing it on the couch at my mother's house for those days I don't visit in person.
Please let me know if you want to fund this. (I am also contemplating an AI control system).
2. The Lethal Net Curtain
The Executioner has long been a favourite in our house. Powered by two AA batteries, solid-state circuitry in the handle boosts the voltage to some low number of kilovolts. This is fed to a grid of cross-hatched wires in the form of a tennis bat. Zap! Watch those mozzies explode!
The Executioner
We could reverse-engineer these components and feed the volts to a net curtain, where the net was fine wire. We all like to open our bedroom windows as the summer approaches but we hate the insects. In America the houses come with insect screens but in the UK, not so much. My bug-zapping net curtain is exactly the answer we've all been looking for.
Let me know, etc.
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Would you like to see a cute Two Part Invention? Here's J. S. Bach's Two-Part Invention Number 4 in D minor (Bass Guitar Accompaniment). Sorry about the five-second intro Ad, skip it and you get to the earnest fat guy: and he rocks!
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The new Badger Cam was reset to stills + video and when I checked this morning, 249 Megabytes of the camera's 8 GB SD memory had been used for 8 + 8 pix/videos. The new location was the barbecue stand, overlooking the back garden. I'm now understanding better the concept of wildlife photography: you get to watch a lot of uninteresting videos.
To cut to the chase (you see what I did there?) here's the best of the crop. Our little black cat arrives from next door and finds an interloper already in our garden ...
Riveting, wasn't it? The movies were cats all the way down: as Clare observed, not wildlife at all.
The trail camera arrived and after the usual configuration issues I got it to work. We strapped it to a tree in our front garden and placed a bowl of old dry cat food about five feet in front of it (which you can just see at the bottom of the image below). The camera was set on a timer from 9 pm to 8 am. This is what we saw,
Showing the field of view of the BadgerCam
The cat approaches ...
At 4.06 am, the cat turns his nose up at the ancient dry stuff
The camera is a bit too high, and I really meant it to be taking both still pictures and videos, but only still pix were in the folder. Must revisit that menu item. Now we know it works I think we'll maybe relocate the camera - after all, still no badger!
We "know" we have a visiting badger: strange holes dug in the garden; a large polythene bag of bird seed on our porch torn open a few days ago; even pictures from a few years back.
The badger emerges from behind our shed
The badger steps daintily along the patio
I have today invested in a cheap trail camera. Choosing was, btw, a nightmare. Simpler cameras record to SD cards (which you have to keep removing to see if you've got anything); more expensive ones use SIM cards and upload, but configuration seems to be a nightmare. The best ones are way, way too expensive. In the end I decided to go for the cheapest one which had enough favourable reviews - the Little Acorn 5210A 940nm Wildlife Trail Camera with 8GB SD-Card.
Just hope all those three star reviews mentioning the flimsy hinges on the battery compartment don't make me look an idiot. Don't want you to think sibling rivalry has anything to do with it, but .. here's what my sister sent to me recently.
A living, breathing badger tempted by dry cat food will top that, don't you think?
