Sziget 2007 - Day 1 - No Haka, No Power

This week I shall be mostly eating junk food and drinking beer - because Sziget is here!

I meant to write this immediately, but it's now Day 3 and already things are becoming hazy!

We arrived in time for the Maori dance workshop at 13:30 by the Afro-Latin stage, but they didn't. No surprise there - it is after all a long way to New Zealand and it only takes one airline hiccough to derail a carefully organised itinerary (lovely mixed metaphor!)

...and now, seven days later I can't remember a damn thing about today, except it was hot, I drank a lot of beer, and in the middle of a concert at the World Music Stage the power went out during Salif Keita's concert so it looked like this.

It came back in bits and pieces a few minutes later, but it was a bit flaky. It came, it went. One of the backing singers put on one woman show of dance while the band played acoustically, and eventually the lights came on again and Salif Keita returned.

He started singing but his mic wasn't working. So after a minute of frustration and (I suppose frantic back-stage activity) when no sound emerged he flounced off stage never to be seen again.

Turns out it wasn't just this stage - seems a lot of places on the island lost power. Rumour has it that there was a slight underestimation of the power requirements and a consequently a rather big blown fuse.

Sometime after midnight the late bus home; 300Ft to get dropped (if the driver is amenable) about 200m from home, or if not quite so amenable, about 400m... not bad.

That was it for day one. Must have done lots of other things but I have no idea what they were.

Sziget 2007 - Day 2 - Haka, Kaizers Orchestra and The Chemical Brothers

On the second day I fulfilled an ambition: I finally got the chance to do the Haka today thanks to Te Matarae I Orehu Maori Dance Group and Wetini Mitai-Ngatai, their leader - choreographer who has been helping to preserve Maori tradition and garnered considerable respect for his efforts - and deservedly so.

I've been to New Zealand numerous times (though not since 2000, now I think about it)- beautiful place, fantastic people. The first few trips were business trips (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch) but the rest were pure pleasure - though it was on the very first trip that I took a week off to drive back across North Island - stopping off at Rotorua, Mt Ruapehu, and so on along the way for thermal parks, spas and a spot of skiing.

Since then my interest in Maori tradition developed in the course of researching IT; I have a wonderful book called The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori by Elsdon Best in which the traditional knowledge of the "Whanau Marama" - "the children of light" (i.e. the heavenly bodies) was recorded at the beginning of the 20th century; sadly, even then much of the oral traditional knowledge was already lost.

As a tiny illustration of how central astronomical lore was to the Maori (due in no small part to its importance in navigation) consider this lullaby (Best, p5)

I haere mai koe i te ao o Puanga
I te Huihui o Matariki
I a Parearua, i a Poutu-te-rangi
Ka mutu, e tama, nga whetu homai kai ki Aotea

Translation: You come hither from the realm of Rigel, from the Assembly of the Pleiades, from Jupiter and from Poutu-te-rangi [Altair: Best p33]. These alone, O child, are the stars which provide food at Aotea [Great Barrier Island - see wikipedia]

Outside New Zealand, Haka, meaning "words of fire" or "fiery words" (Ha - breath, hence speech, words; ka - fiery), is probably best known by the intimidatory performance of a war haka by the All Blacks rugby team before the start of a game.

According to Wetini Mitai-Ngatai, the whole purpose of the eye rolling, tongue poking and face pulling is to make oneself appear as mad/hungry/fierce as possible - and thus "the uglier the better", so he was naturally very complimentary about my efforts.

What we leant was the Ka Mate haka - Wetini Mitai-Ngatai taught us the movements, the words and the story a piece at a time and so in the course of about half an hour we put it all together and finally performed the whole thing with members of Te Matarae I Orehu Maori Dance Group mingled among the great unwashed who make Sziget what it is. It was a fantastic 45 minutes.

So, after working up a bit of a sweat and getting the adrenalin flowing (we did some Maori martial arts practice games too) it was time to get on with the rest of the day...

Today's unexpected find was the Norwegian rock band Kaizers Orchestra on the main stage (direct links to MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube). They opened the show on the nagyszinpad but should have headlined on some other day instead in my opinion - they easily outclassed some of the other supposed top-draw artists.

Of course, by the time The Chemical Brothers were due on stage at 21:30 the space in front of the main stage was completely full - by which I mean completely full, and considering that it's a space of at least 40,000 square meters the crowd seemed easily 50,000 strong (it looked huge, but the whole capacity of the island is only 70,000 and they definitely weren't all there - just most of them).

Unfortunately, there had been a few of what the BBC had anticipated as "light showers" but which turned out to be short but torrential downpours during the day - necessitating periodic retreat to whatever tented beer pavilion was closest... bummer!) - so whilst not quite up to Glastonbury standards, the ground underfoot was a bit damp and squelchy in places by now. This meant rivers of people skirting large puddles on the way in and trying to keep to the metal sheet areas once they got there (or at least avoiding the major pools).

Excellent show of course. What else can I say?

We caught some Lead Zeppelin on the Blues Stage later - the lead singer looked a bit like a gay Dom Deluise but he had a pretty good Jimmy Page substitute voice.

We probably went to the Roma tent for some gypsy music, but I'm damned if I can tell you who we might have heard.

And it was good.

Inexplicable "Inflatable Planets" - Hot Saturns

Back in September 2006 New Scientist ran an article on "The riddle of the inflatable planets" in which Dimitar Sasselov said that the newly discovered planet HAT-P-1 was so light that it would float on water "like a beach ball."

Now New Scientist has reported today that another group The Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES) has found another particularly anomalous planet designated TrES-4, this one being "about the density of balsawood" [Balsawood! Does it have any uses other than model aircraft construction?]

Apparently, according to New Scientist, Travis Barman, a theoretician at Lowell Observatory, said, "This planet cannot exist.", i.e. there's no good explanation for how it could have become so large.

However, here's a hypothesis: the planet is not as large as it appears - the apparent size of the planet suggested by the observed dimming during transit could be due to a set of sufficiently dense rings. Saturn's rings are considerably wider than the planet, and they scatter quite a lot of light (though I'm not sure how much... I may be a geek but I'm not actually doing this research!)

I see two basic possibilities for the existence of rings around such "Hot Jupiters" (planets of Jupiter mass very close to their parent stars)

1. There could be a stable ring system. Intuitively this seems unlikely given, amongst other things, the considerable radiation pressure likely to be experienced so close to a star - dust would be driven off

2. There is a temporary ring system - it would wouldn't need to be stable, it could be recently formed. Perhaps if the planet had one or more moons, additional tidal heating from stellar proximity etc. might have expedited its disintegration and the formation of rings, in which case extended observation might record progressive dissipation of the rings and decrease in the dimming observed.

In either case, what would have been observed would be a "Hot Saturn" rather than a "Hot Jupiter", and the abnormally low density would be explained by the mis-estimation of the planet's size, i.e. mistaking the attenuation due to the ring system for attenuation due to the planet itself.

I wonder how this hypothesis could be observationally tested - actually I wonder whether it is viable at all... but that's what a bare hypothesis is: an idea for exploration...

Blog, Blog, Blog, Blog Blog... Steganos

Victoria Satterly has been nice, so probably for that reason more than any other I decided to bite the bullet between the horns* and buy Steganos Security Suite 2007 which is "Vista Compatible" (hmmm... we shall see... well, we might have seen)

OK, enter existing product code for Upgrade price, enter card details, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and off we go to the Visa Secure site for verification. Visa Secure gives me the Secret Message I entered when I set it up, so I'm pretty sure it's them, and the site certificate is OK, so we enter the mystery characters from the impossible password and...

Back at the Asknet powered Steganos Shop - "The Payment Failed." But I'm in credit with Visa! Tried a few times more. No dice.

So I call Barclaycard (this is all taking place on a Saturday, by the way), and they can see no transactions and suggest I call the oneline people, but - wait for it! - this multi-billion $ operation's online department only keeps 9-5 Monday-Friday hours. Obviously parts of Barclaycard are run like a village post-office.

Anyway, I call on Monday and they can see only one transaction - which they approved but which the online shop declined! Eh?

Email to tech support at Asknet - they are prompt and helpful - at least up to the point of telling me that I "failed multiple risk-management rules". Bugger. Word about the bullion heist must have leaked out. OK I confess, I was hoping to scam myself a billion, $20 at a time...

What on earth are they on about??? Visa said, "Sure, here's the money," and they said, "Nein, danke, der risk ist zu fiel!"

The only other way of purchasing would be to use another payment method (I tried calling, but that just gets someone else to type things into the web form for you) - and what is the only other choice available? PayPal. Howls of derisive laughter.

So there you are. I strongly suggest that you try and remember whether Santa decided you were Naughty or Nice before trying to make a Visa purchase through Asknet.

Strangely though I found the whole experience calming. It inspired humility: it seems that there are things in this world that simply cannot be done no matter how hard you try - so get used to it.

* PS If you know of any more wonderful mixed metaphorical sayings like this (I heard this one with my own ears), drop me a line...

Why You Don't Want to be a Geek II

Because Geeks do things like this

(I'm not going to spoil it for you just yet...)

I am now fiddling with Chris Barker's PERL program Syllabify.pl, attempting to turn it into Visual Basic for Applications so that I can run it under Word and then do my own Flesch-Kincaid scores etc.. Unfortunately, I don't know PERL, but what the hell, I DO STUFF - shouldn't be too hard... ooh, er... grep... that's Unix stuff, a kind of Stuff I Do Not Do...

Hmmm... I feel a Dr Seuss moment coming on...

*************

There is Stuff I love to do.
Do you like the Stuff I do?
Do you like my Kinds of Stuff?
Is my Stuff your Kind of Stuff?

I do Stuff that's odd and queer.
I do Words like There and Here,
And Hither, Whither, Whence and Hence,
And Protoplasmic, Turbulence.

Words are Stuff I like to do!
Do you do Words the way I do?

Do you make them twist and shout?
Do you turn them inside out?
Do you like to tweak their noses?
Do they feed your odd neuroses?

I do Stuff! It's Stuff I do!
Does doing Stuff appeal to you?
What Kinds of Stuff do you find nice?
Would you like finding rhymes for "nice"?

I would! I do! It's Stuff you see!
And Stuff is very good for me.
Stuff is endless; Stuff is great!
Except the Kinds of Stuff I hate.

Unix Stuff I Do Not Do.
Unix Stuff should be Taboo!
Access too is Stuff I don't!
Sociology I won't!

Apart from that, I'm cool with Stuff:
There never seems to be enough!
And Stuff is everywhere you look –
In every picture, every book!

Stuff is Why, and How, and When
And If perhaps, then maybe Then.
Doing Stuff is What I Do
I'm Mr Stuff - and who are you?

*************

So what Kind of Stuff did I stumble upon in that very first link?

Haiku "discovered" in Linux documentation. My personal favourite was:

I suppose you have
to fiddle around a bit
to get this working
-- Werner Hauser, Linux Laptop HOWTO

It's a wonderful world!

PS According to Microsoft Word, The Flesch Reading Ease score for the above pseudo-Seuss is 100, and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade level is 0.7

Stuff is Easy!

Why You Don't Want to be a Geek (The Flesch-Kincaid Formula is Wrong)

Well, I'm not sure if "Geek" is the right word - perhaps I mean "Nerd"? - but you can see the problem instantly: obsessing about the trivial. Does it really matter which word I use when, whichever I do choose, you know full well (or will do by the time you've read this, or other parts of the blog) that this guy...

a) Is Eccentric (I'm English; "eccentric" is not only acceptable, it is possibly even mildly flattering...)
b) Is Quirky (thanks for that one Gary)
c) Isn't Two Bricks Short of a Load - in fact probably has two loads of bricks, but doesn't know what to build with them
d) Is Weird

i.e. is, not to beat about the bush, more than slightly geeky, possessed of a high coefficient of nerdulence (let's make that my CoN for future reference)

The nicest reflection I've had on my idiosyncratic disposition is that "Julian doesn't just answer questions that no one else can, he answers questions that no one else even thought of asking."

Sadly the corollary to that is probably "Actually, he answers questions no one else thought worth asking," (some examples later) but...

Here I am, brain the size of a (dwarf) planet and it's full of Stuff! And useless Stuff at that.

Life, don't talk to be about life... (Actually, do talk to me about life - isn't it fascinating?)

However, about those sheep...

What prompts this (hitherto promised but thus far undelivered) piece of naval gazing?

The Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics, Reading Ease and Grade Level as implemented in Microsoft Word (hopefully as per DOD Standard MIL-M-38784B. Detail! The Geek or Nerd must attend to detail... which means, having finally tracked it down, that MIL-M-38784 of July 1995, superseding MIL-M-3978C of October 1990... still with me? ... doesn't in fact contain the Flesch-Kincaid formulas... at least any more. Maybe it did. Who knows?)

And what is the precise problem?

I had Word do the readability statistics for IT - Reading Ease 83.2, Grade Level 5.9. So far so good (in fact rather too good - I don't believe an 11 year old could read IT). But then I noticed that the formulae:

• Grade Level = (0.39 * Average Sentence Length) + (11.8 * Average Syllables per Word) - 15.59

and

• Reading Ease = 206.835 - ((1.015 * Average Sentence Length) + (84.6 * Average Syllables per Word)

would allow me, given the stats I had, to work backwards and calculate the average number of syllables per word (ASW), which is of course Trivial and therefore, almost by definition, of riveting interest to the Geek or Nerd.

So, I invert the formulae, plug in the values and uh oh! I get two different answers.

Check I've got the formulae right in Excel and then that I get the right answers for something (I used the Dr Seuss Green Eggs and Ham stats in the Wikipedia article on Flesh-Kincaid - advanced warning/plot spoiler: I think they are using the wrong formula at the moment) - which I do.

So, is Word miscalculating or is the problem that the ASL of 18.6, Reading Ease and Grade Level scores are all inappropriately rounded...?

Hmmm...

Some time later...

Word says there are 18.6 words per sentence, but using its own figures for word count and sentence count the average appears to be 19.16 (2 S.F.). Aha! Word's Average Sentence Length is Wrong! But no, that doesn't fix it. Nor does undoing any rounding that may have occurred.

So what's going on? Beats me. I blame Microsoft.

Hastily, and erroneously it seems. I found somewhere else on the web a slightly different version of the Grade Level formula.. it should in fact be:

• Grade Level = (0.39 * Average Sentence Length) + (11.8 * Average Syllables per Word) - 15.9

And then, once you've made allowances for rounding errors in Word's stats, everything seems OK at last (well, almost, to get precise agreement that constant has to become 15.96536ish - I think I'll settle for 15.9, it's close enough)

Except that the Word help files says they use the value 15.59.

But at least I can semi-reliably calculate the average number of syllables per word in IT. We'll talk about the ARI, Gunning-Fog and Coleman-Liau indices some other time...

Now wasn't that worthwhile? No. This is why you don't want to be a geek.

Now, as to the Meaning of Life as to be revealed in "IT", what is it - exactly?

Well, the answer is:

The Lotus Position has unexpectedly encountered an error. Connection Refused by Host Either you do not have permission to access the site, your password is incorrect or you have failed to understand the question...

Triple Ball Lightning

Immortality beckons!

Actually, I just thought it was worth putting onto the memorious internet the phenomenon I witnessed many, many years ago... thereby ensuring that if anyone really digs for ball lightning eye-witness reports it might prove useful for its oddity value.

It was a summer's day in the south of France, in or around Juans-les-Pins near Antibes on a family holiday when I was 8-10 years old; I recollect my brother being with me, and since he is 3 years younger than I am, I couldn't imagine having taken a 4 year old with me, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't 11. To be explicit the year must have been around 1969-71. [Juan-les-Pins looks rather more developed according to Google Earth than I remember it, but this memory is now at least 36 years old, so no surprise perhaps!]

Anyway, there was a thunderstorm and suddenly out of the base of the cloud in front of us three equally spaced dots of light appeared and proceeded to travel in a straight, silent line towards the ground where they disappeared equally silently. Which is not to say they were absolutely silent because it was hard to tell how far away they were, and of course the rain itself was making some noise.

To see one ball of lightning is a once-in-a-lifetime event - to see three at once was (in mature retrospect) absolutely stunning; (my maternal grandmother said she had seen ball lightning - and she also said she saw "The Great Comet" "of 1908" - having specifically said she didn't remember Halley's Comet in 1910; I wonder if she saw Comet Morehouse, which had unusual tail structure - see also here.)

I have always wondered about their spacing and trajectory, particularly whether they were following the Earth's magnetic field; I (hazily) recollect the angle to the ground as being about 60 degrees but have never bothered to check the dip in the south of France. Nothing more to say really except that that they appeared as small dots (though not quite pinpoints of light) and not balls - I guess they were too far away.

Pity I didn't have a camera with me, but I would probably have missed the moment - they didn't take more than a second or so to travel from cloudbase () to ground.

The only specific conclusion I can draw from this is that the theory that says ball lightning results from a normal lightning strike on highly silicaceous soil is at best incomplete.

Alas I have never seen a UFO - let alone been abducted (though my plans are ready); I suspect Einstein, Newton and Pythagoras were right (in this respective ways) and that the Moon is not made of green cheese (for proof see Google Moon and zoom in to the max); and I know thanks to "Edmund" (?) that certain mental defence techniques are effective against most types of Alien mind-control (Greys, Nords, and, er, the other one) "but of course, not Reptilians" (How could I have been such a fool as to think I could go mano-a-mano with a Reptilian!)...

So I trust this report will be found credible