Distractions

It's been pointed out I spent all of May without posting!  I suspect there will be much more of this neglect to come as the thesis reaches crunch point.  There is a light at the end of the tunnel, but even now in what I hope are the dying months of the thesis it still seems such a long way away, especially when I'm surrounded by such talented people who clearly know what they're talking about.  Even now, after four years, I feel like I don't know what I'm talking about, and somehow I'm supposed to write hundreds of pages worth of material by the end of this year!

I've suspected throughout the course of the thesis that I'm not really cut out for long-term projects - I think I have some kind of academic ADHD in which I find a problem really exciting but get bored and want to move onto something else before too long.  This kind of short-term obsession is a reason I write posts about random things like analysing cribbage hands or Pass The Pigs - because I find them really, really exciting and interesting... for a while.  Then I find something else and forget about what I was doing before!

It's been really hard to stay excited about the same project when there is so much else going on.  I've heard some people say that doing your PhD is the most rewarding part of your whole academic career - I can honestly say that I really hope not.  While I have learnt a hell of a lot which I am sure will place me in good stead for future jobs etc, it has been one of the most self-esteem crushing, depressing and difficult periods of my life.  I suspect once I find my niche I'll be a lot happier with my lot in life, but suffice it to say I never want to do a PhD ever, ever again!  Having said all that, it is nice to see the work I've been doing over the last few years finally start to come to fruition.

Anyway, now I've had my three paragraphs of emo, these are some of the things I would probably be playing with if I weren't trying to concentrate on my thesis:

There is a thriving community of people out there who spend their time on something called tool-assisted speedruns.  Basically, they use whatever means necessary in order to complete a game as fast as is physically possible - way faster than a human could ever do by themselves.  This involves things like exploiting the hell out of whatever glitches happen to exist in a game, using emulators to slow down the game to get that perfect jump, saving the gamestate before a difficult point and doing a section time and time again until you get it absolutely perfect, and pausing the game for a few hundredths of a second before coming across a difficult enemy just so they behave in a way (based on the random number generators in the game) which means you can get past them faster.  I'd love to spend some time writing computer code to try and optimise some of this stuff and make it even faster - people have already written relatively simple AIs for Super Mario Brothers that work really well:

Another thing I'd like to do is work out where the hell all these pink Nissan Micras are coming from.  If you don't know what I mean, perhaps this will refresh your memory:

I'm starting to see them everywhere!  I'm starting to think I should take a leaf out of the book of the ecologists I work with and do some experiments to work out how quickly their population is increasing - so I know how long it will take before we're all overrun with them.

One non-thesis related problem that I did manage to solve was one posed by a friend who found it in a list of job interview questions for a job he was applying for.  The question was this:

You roll a die.  You can either take an amount of money equal to the number on the die (so a 5 would get you $5, for example), or you can choose to roll it again.  You can roll it a total of three times - if you choose to roll again the first two times, you have to take whatever you get on the third roll.

So for example, you might roll a 1, choose to roll again; roll a 3, choose to roll again; then roll a 2.  You have to take the $2 because you've used all your rolls.

For another example, you might roll a 2, roll again then roll a 5 and decide to keep it.  So you get $5.

So - over to you.  What should your strategy be to make sure you get the maximum amount of money?

Music - but not mine

Before I start, I'd like to say thanks to the people who actually read my blog and agitated for me to write in it again.  The fountain of wisdom that is xkcd suggests that only really boring people apologise for not posting more in their blogs... so I won't!  However, I will make what will be a pretty common excuse in the coming months - along with working, I've been very very busy with trying to get my PhD finished.  My current plan is to get it done by August - it's ambitious but it may actually be feasible.

I thought this time that I'd write about music other than my own.  For someone who professes to be a musician I really don't listen to a lot of other people's music, Powderfinger notwithstanding*.  When I do listen to music, I am strange in that I like to listen to a single album at a time - sometimes for days or weeks, constantly, while I work.  I've never really gotten into the listening to mp3s thing - I really enjoy listening to an album played in order (or sometimes on shuffle if I'm feeling adventurous) as the artists intended.  Lately I've had the chance to do this with a few different artists, so here goes...

My very musical friend Dave gave me an album for being a groomsman at his wedding.  That album was Arcade Fire's Neon Bible.

To be brutally honest, I was a little cynical after the first listen or two.  The last offering that Dave had bought for me as a present was some of Sufjan Steven's more experimental work, and other than a couple of standout tracks I found it a little too experimental for my tastes - so I was preparing myself for the worst with this new unknown offering.

But, to their credit, Arcade Fire's album really grew on me.  A lot of good music does this for me, but because of my preconceptions I wasn't really expecting this to - I would never have fallen in love with this album if I hadn't had a couple more listens to give it one last chance to impress me.  I recognised a couple of  songs from the radio - Black Mirror and No Cars Go, which I really enjoyed from the start - but over time, I grew to love many of their album tracks** even more.  Particular standouts are Black Wave/Bad Vibrations and Ocean of Noise - these were stuck in my head for weeks!  There aren't really any tracks I could count as "misses" - they're all tight and well thought out, and even at their worst provide enjoyable background music.  I might accuse the title track Neon Bible of being unmemorable; but then, it's part of a long tradition of unmemorable title tracks.

I love good emotive vocals and the lead singer Win Butler really delivers, particularly in the lesser-known tracks.  I'm not-so-much taken with the backing vocals of Régine Chassagne - on their own - but the harmonies between her and Win are for the most part amazing!  I tend to concentrate most on the vocals (in terms of both lyrics and melody) in terms of music I like, and to this end Neon Bible is a winner for me also: the instrumentation and various sound effects scattered throughout the album are always interesting, always tight and very nicely complement the vocal work.  I know (from listening to the album as I type) that there are a multitude of really nice hooks played by the keyboards and guitar in particular, but I wouldn't be able to remember most of them - they fit so seamlessly into the story the voices tell.

Anyway, I think I've ranted enough about this album.  Tell me your thoughts on this album if you've listened to it, and I'd be particularly interested to hear peoples' opinions of the other Arcade Fire albums.  Is this as good as they get?  Or am I really missing out if I don't give the other albums a try also?

* I've been avoiding writing a full-blown critique of all seven of their albums lest my fanboyish gushing send you all to sleep!
** I usually call them "B-sides" but my girlfriend scolds me for it...

I'm still alive!

Wow.  Just when I thought life couldn't get any busier.  Apparently moving takes a lot of time and effort.  As well as helping with a wedding.  And having three jobs.  And (still) doing a PhD.  And playing two gigs in four days - the second of which went four times longer than originally planned o.O

On the upside, we have a shiny new place (now just to unpack, grumble), money is starting to come in, and finally - finally - things are starting to settle into a routine once again.

Of course, now that things are getting less hectic I'm finding more things to fill the time with - Dave, now a married man, is finally getting the chance to get back onto my EP, so hopefully more work will be done on that soon!  And The Solution is back, and will hopefully soon be rehearsing regularly for the next gig, whenever that may be!

Seeing as I don't really have much exciting to show you, I'll show you something tangentially related to what I'm doing at work at the moment.  Reaction-diffusion modelling, which I'm working on now, uses a series of mathematical equations to determine the distributions of things in space - and depending on what you plug into it, some interesting things can happen!  Alan Turing (after whom these Turing Patterns were named) found that the patterns on leopards and jaguars are the result of chemical reactions that are modelled by such reaction-diffusion equations.  It's another example of how maths can - as well as helping us understand how things work - actually be aesthetically pleasing, which I love :)

Is this the real life?

Hullo everyone!

Thanks for all your support and suggestions on Longest Night and EP covers.  There were literally dozens of pageviews that weren't mine!

Sorry about not posting for a while - life has gotten hectic.  A few of the things that have been going on:

• I have searched for, and found, a new place to live with a lot more space for me and my lovely partner.  We move in next week.  I'm excited!
• I have searched for, and found, a new job!  I will be a typist working from home.  Hopefully I can type fast enough to make it worth my while, I'm looking forward to having a bit more money as things have been getting pretty dire lately.
• I have been helping prepare for Dave's wedding, including attending his buck's night last night!  The wedding is in two days, so it's going to be a huge weekend.  After the wedding, we can expect to see more news on both my EP and his shiny new album!

Speaking of music, I have two gigs coming up!

The first is on the 26th of February at the Lark Distillery, as the support act for the amazing George Begbie launching his new EP "These Familiar Streets".  I've listened to these songs at length, and I can assure you that you are in for an incredible treat!  I can't wait to get my hands on this and future EPs from him, so come along and get in on the ground floor ;)

The second is on the 1st of March at Irish Murphy's with my band The Solution.  We haven't had the chance to rehearse or play for months and we're relishing the chance to start playing again, especially after our last gig unfortunately fell through.  We are so excited to play for you, and hope you'll come along and have fun with us!

Oh and as a final note, check out the blog list on this page, there are two thought-provoking and pretty new blogs to while away those lazy hours!

In which things are revealed

Right, it's about time I stopped putting it off.  This is what I have so far for one of the tracks on my upcoming EP.  I alternatingly love it and hate it each time I listen to it, so I'm going to put it online now before I change my mind.  Again.

I'm new to all this online music posting trickery, so let me know if it worked - and of course, what you think!

Hopefully in a few weeks there will be a bit more stuff to put up here, but in the meantime, here's Longest Night:



Also, just because I feel like being generous to my poor long-suffering readers, here are a couple of sketches for cover art provided by the talented Ariel Pascoe - these may change before I actually print the EP, but I'd appreciate some thoughts in the meantime on these too.  And I'd like you to tell me which one you like the best!

Who needs drugs?

Right, I'm almost entirely confident that was the strangest night sleep I've ever had.

Dream 1: Dreamt I was in a really bad screaming argument.  Realistic enough that I woke up in a cold sweat at 5am, took me over an hour to get back to sleep.

Dream 2: I'd moved house into a residential college, except my college "room" was an entire apartment, with a room in it that was completely full of randomly arranged beds of different sizes. I remember thinking "awesome, the friend who I offered to stay over at my place (which happened in real life) will have heaps of room now".

Dream 3: Had a dream within a dream (this is not the first or most complicated of these dreams I've had) in which I was very ill and throwing up in bed, then "waking up" from that dream to do pretty much the same thing.  Realistic enough that I dragged myself into consciousness, actually waking up (about 7:30am) to make sure I hadn't actually thrown up while dreaming of myself throwing up.  And to make sure I wasn't just dreaming of myself waking up to check.

Dream 4: I watched Powderfinger play cricket - the band members who weren't playing chatted with me about music. Except the pitch was maybe 2 metres long, and it basically just involved the bowler hurling the ball at the batsman.

Dream 5:  I was in a movie.  For some reason I wasn't actually aware of being in the movie - I thought it was real.  The fact that there were ad breaks in the dream involving discussions of said movie should probably have tipped me off.  The plot of the movie involved me thinking that I was in someone else's elaborate dream in the movie (and it was elaborate, I just can't remember all the details), but it turned out they were in mine.  And once I worked this out, and that I was in a movie, I woke up.

...

If I could go back to sleep, I suspect I'd dream up an awesome plot for Inception 2.

Cribbage (part 1)

Well, as requested on my previous maths post (I won't go so far as to say "by popular demand"), I'm going to do a brief analysis of the game of cribbage.

Cribbage, for the uninitiated, like some variants of poker, involves choosing which card or cards to throw out to maximise the number of points you're likely to get.  You can score points for your hand by having runs, combinations of cards that add up to 15 in value, pairs, three of a kind, four of a kind, flushes, and a strange one-point bonus named "one for his nob" <cough>

The variant of cribbage we'll work with here involves starting with 5 cards, and throwing one out. A single card, the "starter", is then chosen which acts as an extra card for your hand, replacing the one you discarded. Often you'll need to decide whether to take the risk and remove a card which might be useful in the hope that something better will come up as the starter.

Let's say you pick up this hand:

4♠ 4♣ 6♣ K♣ K♦

So, what do you do?  All you know about are the cards that you picked up, and nothing about what the other player(s) might have.  The starter could be any of the other 47 cards in the deck with equal probability.

If you discard a 4, you'll destroy one of the pairs, losing you 2 of the 4 points already in your hand.  But if the starter comes up 5, it'll score you 11 points.

If you discard a K, you'll again destroy a pair.  But again, if you pick up a 5, you'd score a tasty 14 points!

Finally, if you discard 6♣, you will have two pairs tucked away safely in your hand for 4 points.  However, the best you can do from that point is get an A, which will get you 12 points.

By running through all 47 possible starter cards, we can work out (using the magic of computers!) every possible outcome of each choice.

Discard	Minimum	Average	Maximum
4♠ or 4♣	2	3.66	11
6♣	4	5.53	12
K♣ or K♦	2	4.26	14

So if you're trying to get as many points as possible, your best option is to discard 6♣ even though the best case scenario is only possible if you discard a K.  Even the option of discarding a 4 is almost as good as discarding a K, even though you can only score a measly 11 points.

A couple of histograms give a better idea of what is possible.  For 6♣:

Most likely we'll only get 4 points for our hand - but that's the worst we can do, and there is still a small chance of doing better. The red line shows us what'll happen on average, so a little over 5 points.

And for discarding a K:

In this case, we are most likely to get only 2 points, though getting 4 points is also a definite possibility.  Getting any more than that, though, is even more unlikely than if we discarded 6♣.  On average (red line) we won't even score 5 points!

So we see that in this case, the potential benefits are outweighed by the risk.

However, just like in Pass the Pigs, our aim isn't just to rack up as many points as possible - our aim is to win! If our opponent is very nearly at the finish line and we need 14 points to win, then our best option would then be to discard a K, because it's the only way to win the game.  In a situation like that, the utility of the amount of points changes, and near enough is no longer good enough!

Happenings in music

Hi all!

I have a gig on Sunday week at Irish Murphy's, my fourth solo gig, and I'm excited about it!  There will be:

• New songs!
• Unprecedented levels of audience participation! (hopefully - don't let me down, you bastards)
• Tortured nautical metaphors!
• Hats!

and much much more!

I hope people can make it - tell your friends, but especially tell your enemies.  If you bring your enemies to the gig, the awkward silences will mean people pay more attention to me, and after all, isn't attention-seeking what music is all about?

My band The Solution also has a gig coming up, also at Irish.  It's our long awaited comeback tour, otherwise known as our second gig.  We've had a long time without gigs or practice, and we're all gagging to get back into it.  Please come along to that too, and justify our existence :)

In other music news, the EP is coming along well - we've had more recording time, and I think we might be approaching the halfway mark.  Hopefully over the next couple of months we'll get enough time to knock most of it off.  I'll get to putting the first completed song on here sometime soon!

And while we're talking about music, I woke up with a song in my head this morning.  This is about the third time this has happened.  I'm hopeful, generally when this happens I end up with a song I really like!

Finally, if you want to avoid the actual human interaction in this blog and just see what's happening musically, you can use (or give your friends) this link: http://firstsignofmadness.blogspot.com/search/label/music