All the people who said this was two and a half hours of pure escapism were exactly right. The film is too long but passes the 'how many times did I check my watch' test.
The film succeeds through high production values. The plot is formulaic and dull while the action sequences are way over-familiar. But there are deeper problems.
Bond is too old and the women are infeasibly compliant. A modern audience just can't suspend disbelief when a woman Bond never met before pretty much immediately goes into a passionate clinch with him .. just because. Things move to embarrassment-central when his love interest - Dr Madeleine ProustSwann - is young enough to be his daughter.
So I really struggle with the positioning of future-Bond.
Daniel Craig wants out and should be let out.
A charismatic Idris Elba would be a great government assassin - if that was where our foreign intelligence services were going (is it?). Otherwise Bond is going to end up as a drone-wielding Q. In that case, better we stop while we're still (marginally) ahead.
Some see Bond as a classic projection of British cultural 'soft power' - a wildly-successful global phenomenon where British Intelligence (troubled, naturally) still sits at the centre of events. In SPECTRE we Brits are setting up a global surveillance consortium called 'nine eyes', for God's sake.
You know, even in a fictional universe, there's a difference between punching above your weight and trying to peddle Lalaland.
Lunch today at the very pleasant Le Bistrot Pierre, Bath. Food was good and bon marché while the waitresses spoke perfect English gently seasoned with "Monsieur" and "Fromage" - in accents not a million miles from authentically French.
Here are some impressionistic pictures which might convey the ambience for this family get-together. Our thanks to Jane for organising it.
We had hopes of a post-prandial Jane Austen pilgrimage around the houses she occupied in Bath but we ran out of time.
We'll try and combine it with a trip to the Bath Christmas Market (November 26th - Dec 13th).
With the help of this video, plus downloading the Google Cardboard app, it's not so hard.
Is it possible to classify an experience as simultaneously awesomeandclunky? Google's app comes with a set of demos so you can (using a lot of WiFi bandwidth) ..
wingsuit your way across American mountains, valleys and caverns
take a flying tour of Chicago, Google Earth-style
immerse yourself in the Palace of Versaille with a charming, french-accented guide.
At these moments you know that when Virtual Reality comes of age, the world will be transformed.
Meanwhile, my hands got tired holding the viewer, and as I can't easily get my Nexus 6 out of its cover, I had to physically hold it against the back of the cardboard box.
But at £12.99 why not buy at VR 'release 0.1'? I'm now looking for other VR packages for Cardboard - more guided tours, more exotic scenery.
I already downloaded a VR planetarium and toured the solar system ...
Update: since the above was written I've been intermittently looking for content. There's not much, and what there is falls into three categories:
Still pictures taken with 3D cameras. You can move your PoV through 360 degrees
3D Movies where you are passive - danger of nausea!
Genuine 3D environments where you can look around, move and interact.
Only the last option delivers the true promise of VR and it's the hardest to provide. I haven't tried any games - I was hoping instead to wander virtually around some exotic faraway locations and/or see strange wildlife - but there's very little content out there, either on YouTube or Google Play. Don't know if Cardboard will be enough to kickstart things.
"It is usual in the computer industry to specify password strength in terms of information entropy, measured in bits, a concept from information theory. Instead of the number of guesses needed to find the password with certainty, the base-2 logarithm of that number is given, which is the number of "entropy bits" in a password.
"A password with, say, 42 bits of strength calculated in this way would be as strong as a string of 42 bits chosen randomly, say by a fair coin toss. Put another way, a password with 42 bits of strength would require 242 attempts to exhaust all possibilities during a brute force search. Thus, adding one bit of entropy to a password doubles the number of guesses required, which makes an attacker's task twice as difficult."
...
"For passwords generated by a process that randomly selects a string of symbols of length, L, from a set of N possible symbols, the number of possible passwords can be found by raising the number of symbols to the power L, i.e. NL. Increasing either L or N will strengthen the generated password.
"The strength of a random password as measured by the information entropy is just the base-2 logarithm or log2 of the number of possible passwords, assuming each symbol in the password is produced independently. Thus a random password's information entropy, H, is given by the formula
H = log2NL = L * log2N = L * log N/log 2
where N is the number of possible symbols and L is the number of symbols in the password. H is measured in bits.In the last expression, log can be to any base."
If we take logs to base 10 and consider the word 'cat' (where the three symbols are each taken from the set of 26 lower case characters {a-z}) then the entropy is:
In the xkcd cartoon, the phrase used is: "correcthorsebatterystaple" which I make to be 25 characters. These are drawn from the 26 lc symbols {a-z} which deliver 4.7 bits of entropy per character. (Handy table for DIY calculations here).
This would give a pretty impressive total of 26 * 4.7 = 117.5 bits of entropy.
But xkcd claims only 44; how come?
The cartoon's author, Randall Munroe, could be using the NIST heuristic analysis of 2004. After all, the phrase is not composed from random letters but words in English, which cuts out a lot of randomness*. If we use the NIST figures, I calculate we get 41 bits of entropy. But the whole area is actually rather vague.
Personally, I do the best I can. I use relatively insecure passwords for low-grade access to websites which seem to demand them, and much more cryptic (and unmemorable) passwords for stuff which is really important. By now I must have somewhere close to a hundred different username-password combinations,
Some people recommend investing in a password manager; I use Word with the 128-bit AES encryption turned on and a pretty high-entropy password which I have memorised. NIST recommends 80 bits of entropy for (non-military) high-security.
If I ever forget it, I'm toast!
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* Bruce Schneier has some good advice (and a bit of a critique of the xkcd cartoon).
Randall Munroe, xkcd author, explains what he was really doing (clue - count the little boxes representing bits under the symbols/words ...). Think of the words in the passphrase as quasi-symbols drawn from a huge 'alphabet' - a set with thousands or hundreds of thousands of members. This is the value we give to N (so even log2N is reasonably large). Then with two to six words in the passphrase, L = 2 to 6 ... and the entropy L * log2N does what you need. In the cartoon, Randall assumes a publically-known dictionary of 2,048 words, from which each word in the passphrase is randomly chosen. This gives 11 bits of entropy for each word.
This has been a long saga - amazing how many hits this post has received (91 as of today).
The central heating engineer, Ian Hosegood, came this morning. It turns out the problem was indeed with the Siemens wireless base station (wall-mounted next to the boiler). It was showing the radio link to the living room thermostat as active, but the relay to the boiler/pump had not tripped. This is the bug in the device highlighted in the post I mentioned. Ian switched it out for the Honeywell CM927 wireless programmable room thermostat and upstairs relay box.
Finally, the central heating is working again.
In passing, Ian observed that I seemed to have a flat rear tyre (my car parked on the drive outside the front door). At the garage they found the screw causing a slow puncture - fixable; the other rear tyre was low-tread so had to be replaced. With the water pump failure last Friday, this has been an expensive few days.
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Clare and myself visited my mother this afternoon - here's one I took with her while Clare was at the cafe getting us all hot drinks.
Dundee University, in collaboration with the OU, is launching a free online course (6 weeks; 4 hours per week) on 'forensic anthropology': Identifying the Dead.
"In the shadow of Dundee’s Law Hill, a grim discovery demands the attention of forensic experts. Unidentified human remains have been found and the police need to identify the victim to move forward with their investigation.
After a meticulous recovery of the remains, it will be your job to:
document and attempt to explain any evidence of trauma;
identify the victim through biological profiling;
and undertake a facial reconstruction.
"Experts from the University of Dundee’s award-winning Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHId) will guide you through the process of human identification. They will introduce you to the fields of human identification; forensic anthropology and archaeology; craniofacial identification; and the study of the human body.
"Week-by-week, the case will unfold, providing you with more information about the victim. You will be presented with theoretical material and hands-on learning opportunities, to evaluate the case information and use what you have learned, to piece together clues to the victim’s identity."
Clare and myself have signed up. The start date hasn't been announced yet but there will be more here later.
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Identifying the Dead is just one course from FutureLearn. There are so many! I was naturally interested as to how they make their money, what's the business model?
Those kind, committee-minded ladies at the Church are apparently organising events for those poor unfortunates in the Calais Jungle. Never mind that it has been reported that:
"A crisis relief charity chief is set to pull the plug on aid to the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp after discovering most people there are economic migrants ‘without any reason’ to leave their home country. The Bradford-based Human Relief Foundation has been running a project to help the ‘refugees’ at the makeshift camp and previously claimed they were all ‘fleeing war and significant atrocities.’ But a visit by a team led by Kassim Tokan, the HRF deputy chief executive, discovered a totally different picture on the ground, with unwanted clothing and food being ‘dumped and burnt’ by the migrants. Instead of vulnerable families fighting for survival he found the camp – dubbed the Jungle – was ’95 to 97 per cent’ adult men.
"The discovery has prompted the charity – which sends relief aid to people in desperate need around the world – to change its aid policy in respect of the Calais camp where around 4,000 people are living. They found chaotic conditions with no organisation where aid was being distributed randomly and unwanted items later discarded in piles on the ground. Interviewed by ITV’s Calendar News, Mr Tokan admitted he was surprised by what he found. Asked if his charity would withdraw support for the camp’s inhabitants, he said: ‘Most likely, yes.’
"He said it would be better to help people in genuine need in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey rather than ‘healthy people here.’
If everyone is a dove, then they all cooperate in harmony and everyone gets a steady one unit of reward. If a hawk should chance along - with an angry sense of entitlement, shall we say? - the hawk takes but does not reciprocate. The hawk gets a reward of 2 units while the dove gets ripped off. The hawks steer clear of each other - when they meet, things get violent and abusive and they each reap damage of -2 units. Eventually, there are no more doves and the whole setup collapses. A metaphor for consistent Christianity, you might think.
The Old Testament is the way to go. As you will no doubt recall, in tournaments trialling different interpersonal strategies tit-for-tat tends to win out. Tit-for-tat is really an 'eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', as explained in the diagram below, albeit one which is quick to forgive on repentance.
It's important to recall that the specific Hawk-Dove payoff matrix (or Prisoner's Dilemma, or Chicken - they're all variants) logically comes first. It's that which determines cooperation to be good, mutual defection terrible, but defection when dealing with a cooperator best of all.
If the world presents a situation with that kind of payoff matrix, then we can discuss what strategy to adopt. Unconditional cooperation - let's be brutal - means you're a sucker. Unconditional defection is just brutal, and worse, leads to terrible outcomes when not dealing with unlimited suckers. Tit-for-tat generally and robustly comes out top: start nice, punish cheaters but be prepared to forgive.
You may have noticed that in interpersonal matters, women have an instinctive psychological knowledge of these game-theoretic truths*. And those Church women, what's that all about? Trust me, those very pleasant women will never meet a single person from the Jungle face-to-face,
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* Men sometimes organise themselves into a hierarchical pecking order (the threat of physical aggression can play a part in this - think Mafia) where you can defect down but have to cooperate up. Short of running away, which is usually not possible, you're stuck with it: you play dove-up and hawk-down. The society of women is, arguably, often more egalitarian.
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Here's the video tutorial for Hawk vs. Dove (just under 10 minutes). Best viewed in conjunction with reading this Wikipedia article.
"China has announced that it will begin construction of the world's largest particle collider in 2020. According to officials, the subterranean facility will be at least twice the size of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, and will endeavour to find out more about the mysterious Higgs boson.
"The final concept design won't be completed until the end of next year, so we don't have many details to go on, but the collider is expected to smash protons and electrons together at seven times the energy levels of the LHC, generating millions of Higgs bosons in the process. Best of all, the facility will reportedly be available to the entire global scientific community. "
The Great Collider
There's a book on this (below) due for release shortly (author Steve Nadis writes about the project here); Luboš Motl reviews the book here.
"I think this is a bad development for physics because I am pessimistic about particle accelerators telling us something truly deep and novel about the universe, at least in the next century. Particle physics is a perfect-storm specialty in the sense that it can absorb unlimited amounts of money and physics talent while yielding arbitrarily slow progress on the important questions. If there are tens of billions of dollars flowing into these machines, innumerable physicists will continue to pour their youth into them for extremely incremental results."
but even in terms of spin-offs (computing and communications, high-tech manufacture, magnet and superconducting technologies, general physics education and culture) this has to be a winner for China. Assuming it finally gets the OK from the Politburo.
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I'm inclined to be impressed by China's big science. Less so on the record of the European Union.
"In 2013 the European Commission awarded neuroscientist Henry Markram $1.3 billion to pursue an audacious goal: building a simulation of the human brain. Markram's initiative, the Human Brain Project (HBP), is now in disarray. Critics blame HBP management and the project's unreasonably ambitious goals. Yet plenty of blame for the HBP's woes rests with the project's funders in Brussels, who put politics ahead of science and exercised poor oversight."
So we now have this amusing, impassioned and sweary rant about the project which carries a deep ring of truth. In this area, at least, it appears that no-one knows anything.
4.45 pm, Halloween has arrived and we are all set:
I'm told that the tendency these days is to hold Halloween parties where the kids come dressed up. It's all a bit passé going door-to-door, threatening the innocent townsfolk.
In any event, we are prepared; and if no-one comes, trust me, none of this is going to waste!
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Update 10 pm: For the second year running, no-one came. Oh well, time for plan B ..
With my 65th birthday in view, I am kinda worried that I'm getting stupider by the year.
Stupidity (can we still say that?) is really a decline or lack of fluid intelligence, the horsepower that lets you think abstractly and creatively solve new problems. Most older people have learned stuff over the decades and score rather better at crystallised intelligence (see the Wikipedia article for more on fluid and crystallized intelligence).
What does the world of science have to say? It's not completely easy to find out, but after some digging I found the diagram below (from here) - where the T-scores on the vertical axis are rescaled IQ scores, as shown further down this post. It shows the sad story of someone who had an IQ of 120 at their mid-twenties peak (T-score 63) but was merely average at 60.
It seems we lose about 0.6 IQ points per year from a high point when we're 26, a figure consistent with this Aberdeen/NHS study. How depressing!
Whatever my IQ was at age 26, it's now 23 points lower. And yes, I had to resort to pen and paper to work that out ...
Age decline in fluid intelligence - around 0.6 IQ points per year
Translating between the different statistics (IQ, Z, T)
You might want to take a look at this LessWrong article which has a different graph, but one which is depressingly and scarily consistent.
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* Understanding the Stats(Descriptive Statistics and Psychological Testing - Stephen E. Brock, Ph.D., NCSP)
How is IQ scored?
IQ scores are a standard score with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.
Z-scores have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.
Z-scores can be transformed into IQ scores by multiplying a given Z-score by 15 (the standard deviation of IQ scores), and then adding 100 (the mean IQ score). For example, a Z-score of –1 equals an IQ of 85 [100 + 15(-1) = 85].
Transforming a Z-score into an IQ score: IQ = 100 + 15Z.
What are T-scores?
T-scores are standard scores with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10.
Z-scores can be transformed into T-scores by multiplying the Z-score by 10 (the standard deviation of T-scores), and adding 50 (the mean of T-scores).
For example, a Z-score of –1 equals a T-score of 40 [50 + 10(-1) = 40] ,,, and an IQ of 85.
Transforming a Z-score into a T-score: T = 50 + 10Z, and IQ = 1.5T + 25.
