Wormholes & Time Machines (again)

If you want to know the answer to a tough question, ask the experts... Doing exactly that over at Physics Stackexchange. You can follow progress there.

Excel... "the clipboard cannot be emptied" - a solution

I say "a solution" advisedly: Excel warns that another application may be using the clipboard - thereby preventing it being cleared (because e.g. the other application has "locked" the clipbaord.) But even if it were true, how does one identify the offending app? The hard way... quitting them one by one and seeing when the fault goes away. As a result of which I found an offender: the Skype add-on for Firefox - and whilst other applications have also been noted as being at fault, the only one I had previously noted was rther more obscure than Skype.

I had tried all sorts of cleverness (such as adding DWORD AcbPreventPreemptiveCollect = 1 to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\General; checking that rdpclip wasn't running; worrying about the VM integration features of Windows 7's XP Mode, etc.), none of which worked, and then for some reason just thought I'd be methodical with the only other major app that was running - FireFox.

I restarted it in safe mode and the Excel error (which actually only affected Drag and Drop, rather than cut and paste per se) disappeared. I then went through the Add-ons disabling all and re-enabling one by one until the culprit was found. To be honest, I had expected the Adobe Reader plug in to be at fault, but it wasn't.

Hope that helps lots of people with various clipboard problems in various versions of Excel and various Microsoft operating systems.

Creativity Strikes (at last) in Ladakh

A chorten (the Tibetan form of stupa) is

a mound-like structure containing Buddhist relics, typically the remains of a Buddha or saint, used by Buddhists as a place of worship

There are rather a lot of them in Ladakh...

This photo is of just a few on the slope below Shanti Stupa in Leh, Ladakh









The Chortens of Ladakh
   
Chortens crowd the valley floors,
    Chortens mount the steeps.
Chortens climb the ridges;
    There are chortens at the peaks.

Chortens loft the sun and moon,
    Chortens shelter bone.
Chortens case the scriptures;
    Every chorten is a tome.

Chortens shine a bright, lime-white;
    Chortens light the air.
Chortens chant in silence;
    Every chorten is a prayer.

Chortens meditate by day;
    Chortens dream of sleep.
Chortens know their purpose
    Is the promise that they keep.

Chortens are the testaments
    Of chorten-builders’ faith;
Every chorten is a last bequest –
    And all of them decay.

Chortens are impermanence –
    Chortens show the way;
Chorten brick, like human flesh,
    Is merely will-full clay.

When the wind has flayed the flesh,
    When sun has bleached the bones,
When ice has pierced the marrow,
    There is no strength of stones.

Chortens rise and chortens fall,
    Lime-white pales to grey;
Chortens are impermanent –
    And scripture too decays.

Chortens moulder on the hillsides,
    Chortens crumble on the plains,
Chortens tumble from the ridges;
    The lotus flower fades.

Chortens teach what chortens know –
    Each teacher makes it plain –
Chortens must be raised anew...
    Lest wisdom too decay.

June 6th 2010; Oriental Guest House, Leh, Ladakh

It's done DONE

Well, at long last (and it's a very long last - nearly four years since I pitched up in Budapest just to "finish IT off") - and despite the many, many impediments presented by a cold December Monday yesterday, the book, "IT" was finally uploaded to the printers and the order emailed.

It is done: the text, the design, the illustrations - all of it.

Except for the bits that aren't, whatever they might be: there's bound to be something.... for example, recent tribulations included (but were not limited to)

• Complete lack of internet chez nous (until Monday evening... "That's not a valid IP address..." [Thinks: but you gave it to me by DHCP!!!] "... I'll update/reset the database..."
• Death of the headset microphone when I finally got to Castro and could get online
• A typographic miscalculation by the printers in a page count
• Complete failure of printer's FTP site to be accessible to any browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE8)
  
• Unexpectedly appalling costs of hand binding (eschewing which then negated considerable expense and effort in attempting to productionise a "burnt in" title..."
• Und so weiter, und so weiter, und so fort...

But, it IS done.. all 720pp large pages (Royal Octavo... sort of - 234 x 156mm) of it (a few blanks to round things up nicely) - though I have admit that whilst certain bits still make my spine tingle the bulk of IT is just Stuff That I Did. (hmmm... if Stuff were more interesting that could make an interesting title for an autobiography).

So... in about a month's time it should turn up in hard-copy, at last...

Notice has been given on the apartment and so the last day of occupation should be 24th March 2010... home beckons (see thoughts on Home in "IT" for an explanation of that that feels like).. and then some new adventure... Soon it will be farewell to Budapest - a lovely city, hot in summer, cold in winter but always invigorating - and Hello England! again.

I'm not sure it's actually sunk in yet... perhaps when I have a volume in my hands. Now all I have to do is find an agent, get the car sorted for returning to Blighty, sort out immigration stuff, fix up my LinkedIn profile, get revenue generating (= "a job") and so on... but first I think I've earned a bit of a break - all I have to do is work out what do with it.

But that's just Stuff. Old Stuff. Coming soon - New Improved Stuff... with extra Stuffness.

It is done...

The proof-read. Only took 16 weeks (from 29th June to 20th October 2009). Just a bit more reading aloud (a bit behind with that - have been doing that in parallel) to catch up on and then it's all spell and grammar check, typesetting, printing...

When will it be finished finished? Pretty damn soon. Then home. I'm exhausted; I'm tired & broke, and I need a holiday. Nearly there....

But, if I say so myself, it's beautiful.

Shared the last of the cognac (left over from the great drunken celebration of completing the narrative) with Orsi, Reka and Janette to celebrate and now....?

Stuff. Just stuff.

Phew! Wot a Scorcher!

The basic problem with electron microscopy is that it's no good for looking at living things - it just fries them with electron radiation.

So, of course, someone is looking for a way around that problem - they might be onto something.

However, what really caught my eye was the analogy used to explain just how nasty it would be to find oneself in an electron microscope.

The radiation dose received by a specimen during electron microscope imaging is comparable to the irradiation from a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb exploded about 30 meters away.

Yeah... last time that happened to me I couldn't get my hair to comb flat for a week, but at least I got a nice tan.

Hot Stuff!

The Big Bang Conspiracy & Baryogenesis

Did you know that those amazing maps of the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background were produced by a webcam placed inside a painted sphere in a studio in Pasadena? Just another put-up job like the moon landings!

No? You mean you actually think the Big Bang - or something rather like it - actually occurred about 13.7 billion years ago?

Good - we can proceed.

The conspiracy I was actually alluding to was that of the scientific writers and science popularisers who state blandly that in order for everything we see in the universe to be ordinary matter - as opposed to a mixture of matter and anti-matter) the universe had to have been created with a slight excess of protons over anti-protons from the very beginning; "slight" being here about one in a billion, i.e. for every 1,000,000,000 anti-protons there were, there were 1,000,000,001 protons. [My preferred "popularisation" of this issue is given at the end]

The "reason" for this "necessary" excess is that particles and their antiparticles annihilate: if the numbers had been exactly equal there would be no matter at all, just radiation, since every particle would have had a corresponding anti-particle to annihilate with.

The problem is that it is obvious after a moment's thought that there is another possibility - and one which is actually more coherent than positing the slight imbalance referred to above ex nihilo: we know that (yes we do, don't quibble) there are symmetries in physics and that symmetries are often broken, so why not assume that the numbers of particles and anti-particles were in fact equal at t~=0 and that the ratio then drifted away from 1:1 owing to some broken symmetry?

Ever since that thought occurred to me (as a solution to the problem of Baryogenesis - i.e. where all the baryons - things like protons and neutrons - came from, how and in what proportions, etc.) I had wondered "Well, why not?"

Well, you can go this way. In fact Andre Sakharov worked it all out in 1967 - but being then in the Soviet Union his work wasn't seen for quite some time, and it was left to Susskind and Dimopoulos to independently suggest exactly the same thing to the West in about a decade later.

Having subsequently read up on Sakharov's work, I rather thought, OK... it can work that way, but I didn't really see how neatly and simply it could be put together until I saw Susskind's Lecture 6 on Cosmology - thank you Stanford and Prof. Susskind for putting your excellent lectures on YouTube, and thank you to whichever student asked precisely the question I wanted to ask.

I'll try to restate his answer here, and add one tiny observation of my own on why the alternative (the magic of an ab initio imbalance in numbers) is in fact doubly improbable...

Caveat - if we were to do properly we would, like surgeons of old, very quickly be up to our knees in the full gore of particle physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, so following Susskind's lead I'll just talk about electrons and protons and neglect the fermion/boson, hadron/baryon/lepton/etc. distinctions, and all the other gristly bits.

All you really need to know to get the hang of this is:

1. E=mc², and
2. the mass of the proton (m_p) is about 2000 times the mass of the electron (m_e)

E=mc² is from Einstein's Special Relativity and says in essence that from certain quantity of energy you can create a certain quantity of mass - e.g. a high energy photon can turn spontaneously into particles - and vice versa.

Once upon a time the universe was very small, and thus rather a lot hotter than it is now. In fact the temperature increases without limit as you approach t = 0 (this is the problem for modern physics: how to get rid of such unpleasant infinities by some clever theory that subsumes both general relativity and quantum mechanics) .

Temperature being just a measure of energy, it's not too hard to see that when things are hot enough, light (which is just energy in the form of photons) can create pairs of electrons and anti-electrons (they come in pairs because electrical charge has to be conserved). And when things are even hotter - remember, m_p is 2000x m_e, so it takes 2000x as much energy to create a proton as an electron - even more energetic photons can create protons and anti-protons.

OK, the stage is set... Fiat lux! It's started - space and time are now up and running and the microscopic fireball is seething. For a while after Fiat Lux there is just FLUX as mass and energy inter-convert, but as the universe expands, the fire cools. Now it just so happens that the expansion at the relevant time is relatively slow - sufficiently slow in fact for the fireball to be in thermodynamic equilibrium, which means that reactions have time to "go to completion"... in other words, if there are 1,000,000,001 protons and 1,000,000,000 anti-protons, there is sufficient time form them each to find their anti-particle and annihilate.

If there were an initial imbalance in the number of protons and anti-protons, the period in which energy and mass inter-converted would not have affected the imbalance because every photon that became particles would become a pair of particles (charge conservation)... adding equal numbers of protons and anti-protons, or if the reaction went the other way, removing a matching pair.

But, the universe is expanding, and as it expands it cools and there suddenly comes a time at which the photons cool to the point at which they don't have enough energy to make protons & anti-protons any more; they can still create lighter particle pairs for a while, but that will stop too eventually. The same thing will occur for the electrons and positrons as happened for the protons & anti-protons - they will annihilate until either there are none left or the remainder of an initial imbalance is revealed.

And there's the odd thing: the universe is electrically neutral - the numbers of electrons and protons match perfectly. Now, if by fiat there was an imbalance in the number of protons & anti-protons, it takes another fiat to create a perfectly matching imbalance of electrons and positrons.

The most logical inference is that some process is creating equal numbers of electrons and protons, indeed we may suppose that at some extremely high energy photons can create not particles and their anti-particles but any pair of particles as long as charge is conserved. The only problem with this is that there is no such process in the enormously successful Standard Model - which is why most physicists agree that there is physics beyond the Standard Model to be discovered.

The Standard Model does not "allow"an electron and a proton to be created from photons because that would violate the so-called law of baryon number conservation. Protons have a baryon number of +1, and anti-protons have a baryon number of -1, so it a pair is created the baryon number doesn't change, but if an electron and a proton were created the baryon number would increase by 1. But this "law" is just an empirical observation thus far: we have just never seen baryon number change in any of our particle accelerators - or other experiments (such as filling giant tanks with water and watching to see if any protons decay - anything that can be created can be destroyed; we haven't seen that either and the half-life of the proton is now estimated to be at least 6.6x10³³ years... which is about a trillion trillion times the age of the universe)

Supersymmetry is I believe the extension considered to be the solution to the problem as it contains processes that allow the individual baryon (and lepton) number to change... as long as the baryon-lepton number total doesn't.

There's a nice review paper on baryogenesis on arXiv here (it's for experts... I just look at the pictures...)

And the preferred "popularisation" of the Big Bang baryogenesis issue is: Given the observed facts that the universe if made of matter and not a matter/anti-matter mix and that there are about a billion photons for every proton we can see, at some point very, very early in the history of the universe not only were there about a billion and one protons for every billion anti-protons, there were also a billion and one electrons for every billion positrons, and rather than call this a monstrous coincidence of not only ratios but absolute numbers, it is preferable to consider this as evidence for new physics that would allow the so-called "law" of baryon number conservation to be broken at sufficiently high energies and for electrons and protons to have been created together and equally in slight preference to positron and anti-proton creation.

Watch the lecture - it's better than a blog posting.

Fiat Stuff - et Stuff Erat.

English....

Writing, as I do - more than I usually care to admit (which I am nonetheless obliged to on this occasion) - somewhat parenthetically, I have perceived, in the course of writing IT, some apparent deficiencies in English punctuation ( in addition to a lack of words for certain things and other minor irritations* with the language as a whole).

I am therefore pleased to note that I am not the only one to suffer in this way...

Here's a lovely sentence from the article A cooler way to operate atomic clocks (American Physical Society)

"Since only the phase difference of the two sidebands is detected, length fluctuations of a cavity that has a free spectral range, such that it is resonant to both sidebands, do not deteriorate the measurement."

Written here in shorter lines, the problem is not quite as apparent as it was when I first read it, but on first (and second) reading the clause "length fluctuations of a cavity that has a free spectral range" completely threw me. Reading ahead to the "such that it is resonant to both sidebands" didn't help because the un-nesting only occurs in the next clause.

I wondered whether a dash would have helped in place of the first comma... no that doesn't help. Eliminate the second comma? Possibly, but the "such..." clause should be set off somehow.

And so, at last, we come to the need for something like a double comma which serves to structure the sentence without creating a parenthetical aside as a dash would do. Here it is, re-punctuated

Since only the phase difference of the two sidebands is detected,, length fluctuations of a cavity that has a free spectral range, such that it is resonant to both sidebands,, do not deteriorate the measurement.

Much clearer! It's a pity though that ",," is so ugly. We need (at least!) one other punctuation mark.

Any ideas what it should look like - or be called?

I doubt it would catch on though - much as the "rhetorical question mark" has rather failed to gain much acceptance (who even knew there was one?)

* Why don't we have a word meaning back of the hand? Or one for the inside of the elbow? (Yes Mum, I know it's the Cubital Fossa but that's not "a" word.) I could go on, but I would have to look things up (notes etc.) and I don't have the time right now...

?~=",," Stuff?

Hats off to Hungary

(Click the photo to go to the photo's page on Flickr)

August 20th is the anniversary of the foundation of the Hungarian state and traditionally the fireworks begin at 21:00 and the rain begins at ~21:10. But this year - no storm this year!

These were the best fireworks I have seen in ages... the line of green, red and white (the colours of the Hungarian flag) are nicely presented along the Buda side of the Duna (Danube)... in that place, earlier in the display a line of pure white jets had played earlier, leaving a drifting swarm of sparks dangling in front of a smoky background that made the far side of the river look for all the world like a close-up of the Milky Way.

It was an excellent display - more elegant, creative and spectacular than in previous years: the colours and patterns seemed somehow more thoughtful. Of course, the bangs are always loud. Fortunately the Pest bank of the Duna is only about a 5 minute walk from the flat so not only was it easy to get to the Pest side of Lanchid (Chain Bridge - Lanc-hid) it was no great detour to get to Godor for a beer on the way back.

A cheap and spectacular night out!

Update on IT

Narrative finished 12th May; unresolved issues finally cleared up by 17th June; miscellaneous comments, potential improvements etc. in the Scratch column finally cleared up on the 29th June.

Now "all" I have to do is re-read it from the beginning and polish it up.

The recession will probably be over by then... so I ought to be able to find gainful employment after that!

Progressive Stuff

4:33

That is, four hours, thirty three minutes of non-stop Michael Jackson.

And now... Johnny Cash singing "A Solitary Man" - is that just coincidental commentary?

Ah... normal programming has been resumed - at last.

It's going to be a long day...

Yes, I will finish & post the entry (with pics! see what real darkness looks like!) on caving, but for now I simply wanted to share my pain with you...

Michael Jackson is dead...

and since I arrived at 11:00 (it's nearly 2pm now) that's all that's been played in Castro Bisztro.

I fear my appreciation for the late Mr Jackson may have taken a turn for the worse by 6pm if this keeps up.

You do feel my pain, don't you? You are sharing my suffering too, aren't you?

PS No more need for zombie make-up for Mr J... (Tasteless Stuff)

Down, Down. Deeper and Down.

Well, that was quite a weekend! Dean arrived Friday (12th June - need to put that it now it's been so long) and we did the usual - a few beers at Godor and then... not quite sure now - but eventually we ended up a restaurant nearby that - purely on the name, to whit The Marquis de Salade - Noémi and I had been meaning to visit for ages. It's not a glorified salad bar it is in fact an Azerbaijan restaurant about which good things have been written.

What a disappointment. They didn't have what Dean ordered so without a by-your-leave they substituted something else. The Azerbaijan bread plonked on the table turned out not to be complimentary at all, and my lamb dish was 80% bone and fat. Noémi enjoyed her steak though, but we shan't go there again.

However, Saturday was the day! The day for leading Dean up the garden path. He'd been told to bring old clothes and sturdy boots, but didn't know why. I offered clues. I squeaked; he guessed a visit to the Budapest sewers (I think there are Parisian sewer tours but I don't think I'd want to see Budapest's) Later, I bought a packet of M&M's, put on my best Morpheus shades, and combining The Matrix with a reference to his recent Across India by Auto-Rickshaw expedition under the team name "The Mad Hatter's Tea Party" gave him the old Blue Pill, Red Pill spiel...

You take the blue pill... the story ends. You wake up in bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Anyway, by the time we got "there" he had just about worked out we were going caving. (The clueful squeak had, of course, been the sound of a bat - transposed down a few octaves for the hard of hearing post-teenager... which reminds me... I was sort-of attacked by a bat when I was a teenager, but that's a bit off topic for now...)

So here is the caving news - and some pictures. Group photo first, all (except for one couple for whom there wasn't quite room in one pic) nicely arranged on a little stone bridge. This one was taken near the end of the expedition, and as you can see we are all mellow and, more to the point, not flat, which was nice.

I don't know how far we went because the cave system runs for miles and we only spent a couple of hours underground, but it was most excellent. I had thought (having seen someone else's video of a recent visit) that it was all rather scary - not that I'm claustrophobic, but just as I feel a little bit uncomfortable when a tall building sways - even if it's been standing for years - so I thought I would be preoccupied with the thought of thousands of tons of rock waiting to come down on my head.

As it happened, I wasn't - even when crawling through some very tiny spaces. Our guide for the afternoon - Helga - had by far the best helmet light: a good old fashioned acetylene lamp (a.k.a a Carbide Lamp) fuelled from the grey cylinder in her hands in which water sloshed against the Calcium Carbide to create the acetylene that fuelled the devilish flames with a very satisfying whoosh! when she shook it. They also give a nice light that the little LED lamps we had completely failed to live up to.

Naturally anywhere one could actually stand up was called a "room" and most are named (e.g. "The Library") but, when you don't know how big the cave system is (and this is a big system) you're probably not prepared for the sheer quantity of nouns your need to pack. Consequently, the names quickly become rather prosaic... think "the big room", "the little room", etc. etc. However, we were speleologists for the day (rather than speleolinguists - eh? - well, it exists now) and rather more interested in just being underground and what underground actually looks like. Are there interesting formations, fossils, dwarves, goblins, orcs...?

Interesting formations? Well, nothing truly spectacular but there were two named features - The Ghost (rather more gargoyley than ghosty if you ask me, but no one did), and Winnie the Pooh (see below). There was however also some odd, unnamed flooring (if that's not an odd way of describing a cave floor in itself) that looked rather as though someone had set a load of large round pebbles into a bed of concrete - and a few in situ fossils (fossiliak in Hungarian - had to learn that specially) - all sea-shells. And that about wraps it up for objets of interest, as such.

Here you can see yours truly completely failing to pass through the hole called Winnie the Pooh (because it would be all to easy to get stuck, with or without additional hunny load). I did manage to get my head and both shoulders through with a bit of effort but thought that there was a good chance of getting stuck if I tried to pass my chest through it to... so I retreated gracefully (well, as gracefully as one can with Helmet Hair)



Noémi however fared much better - indeed she passed right through.

Just before we came out we stopped and turned out all the lights. Total darkness is a very rare sight - so I took a picture of it for you. There it is - complete darkness. And it wasn't at all scary - even when we all stopped speaking/sniffing/shuffling and sat in silence too. Though Helga did say that if you sit in the complete darkness for about 45 minutes you start to hallucinate, we didn't stay that long.

So, there you have it.. them... Caves: big holes in the ground that contain varying kinds and quantities of interesting Stuff and a whole lotta dark.

Supernova Theory

Science Daily reports a potential Type Ia explosion remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud (see here for the original Chandra report) with unusual characteristics: this remnant is lobed rather than circular.

Now, it's probably a naive thought but a simple axplanation occurs to me: since Type Ia supernovae are the result of accumulated hydrogen from a companion star detonating, the variation in morphology could be explained by the nature of the companion and consequent disparities in angular momentum.

Consider a white dwarf rotating and accumulating mass from a large, nearby companion; I would expect it to be tidally locked in its rotation and thus to have relatively low angular momentum. Consequently, upon detonation the equatorial matter would spread easily. Now consider another white dwarf whose companion star is farther away/lower mass... it might not have been spun down and so might possess considerably more angular momentum (even though it would probably take longer to accumulate the necessary critical mass) so when it does eventually go bang equatorial matter experiences a smaller deflection, perhaps leading to confinement and more effective channelling of the explosion towards the poles.

What does the companion to this star look like? Don't know... unfortunately. However this is at least a testable hypothesis.

If you object to this line of reasoning please say so!

Banging Stuff

Update 21st Feb 2010... More recent work suggests the majority of Type 1A's are caused by the collision of white dwarfs... see here for details.

Red Tape

'Er indoors is trying to get a new passport... I am annoyed as only an Englishman can be that they want my life history before she can get a passport. However, more to the point, the consular staff concerned specifically required my identity document - that piece of paper that says where I live - and no, my passport would not suffice.

I said the British have no such paper; when that was passed on there were (implicit) howls of derisive laughter. The British Embassy offered to speak to them, but they wouldn't call and get it from the horse's mouth. I rang the other country's consular department at the embassy in London and they, of course, agreed. However, Mr I-Am-The-Expert here insisted that there was nowhere in the world where one didn't have such a piece of paper. He did however agree to call his counterpart in London - if he could use my mobile phone! - and was eventually persuaded by someone he knew.

"Interesting" was the full extent of his acknowledgement. All I have to do now is produce letters with my address on e.g. bank statements (it's just like renting a video really it seems...)

As to why I don't want my life history stored left, right and centre you only have to read the latest story from the UK in which the RAF has admitted about 500 DV (Developed Vetting) reports (required for high security clearance) have been stolen. Bloody hell... if they can't keep that stuff secure!

Oh - and YOU - see the reply to your last comment on Piggies!

This little piggy...

By implicit request ("popular" would be an overstatement)

Questo porcellino andata al mercato
Questo porcellino restata sui casa
Questo porcellino mangiata rosbif
Questo porcellino non e mangiata niente
Questo porcellino urlato... ui ui ui ui (ad libitum...) tutte le strada di casa

Corrections welcome...

And as a bonus...

"Si six scies scient six saucisses, six cent six scies scient six cent six saucisses"... which even the French have trouble saying/hearing

The arch-duchess's shoes are probably dry by now...

Tongue Tripping Stuff

PS "a Czech cricket critic"

The Cliff Wherefrom I Hung

So, what did happen just as I was about to complete "IT".

Well, there I was, approaching the dénouement at last - I had perhaps an hour's more work to do - when it suddenly occurred to me that the screen on my laptop seemed a bit dim... this usually happens when it has switched to battery power and I thought that the power lead must have become unplugged.

But it hadn't! (can you feel the tension building)

I looked down at the power supply and saw - to my horror - that the little green light was no longer shining bright. This was my worst fear - death of the power supply!

Oh dear. Still under Rock's excellent 3 year warranty (thank you Rock for sending for the replacement hinge a while back) but it would take several days at least to get a replacement.

And then it dawned on me that the lights had gone out in Castro. Ah! A fuse has blown.

But, as it turned out, it must have been a very big fuse, because it wasn't just Castro that was affected... the rest of Madach ter seemed strangely dark... there was no sign of artificial lighting anywhere... it was quiet... too quiet.

It seemed that someone was trying to delay the completion... if necessary by darkening a substantial part of Budapest - though why I can't fathom. I struggled on on battery power (well, the laptop struggled on battery power, I struggled on on nervous excitement and tension... would the battery last?) hoping that the aged Lithium battery could hang on long enough that

a) I could finish
b) I could actually save the finished document before the laptop died.

I couldn't... I managed to shut the system down securely only seconds before it would have died, but IT was not yet finished. How long would it take for power to return? There was no way of knowing. I could only wait...

So I waited, the power came back on less than an hour later and I finished about five minutes after that (~14:22)... and then got very, very drunk and eventually (~21:00 and almost a whole bottle of cognac later) had to be helped home by Csaba. Don't really remember that.

As to why it was necessary to delay the completion for ~1 hr I guess I shall never know... maybe someone was just building the tension... by removing the tension (ha ha!).

Electrifying Stuff

Mimsiness

Thanks (tak?) to anonymous for posing the perfectly cromulent question (in a comment to "IT'S DONE") "Can you recite Jabberwocky in German whilst standing on those stilts?" (what stilts? Perhaps these?)

The answer is, no. Because I don't recall Jabberwocky in German. (or French...)

MY question is: who is anonymous? There are very few people with whom I have discussed translations of Jabberwocky... one is Swedish, if I recall correctly (and if my senescent brain is taking up the mantle of perfect recall, was the conversation in Cambridge? Did I refer to Douglas Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach?)

Come out, come out, wherever you are!

IT'S DONE

Castro Bisztro and the author are pleased to announce the completion of IT - the book - the book you never thought would be finished. Yes I still have to correct and proof it but the story is complete. All 306,000 words of it.

I am now going to enjoy several very large cognacs.

And then a few more.

And later I'll tell you what happened just as I was about to finish (we call that a cliffhanger in the trade).

Satisfying Stuff!

*Nearly" Done

Yes, "IT" is nearly done (watch this space, seriously) - but I mean the story, not the whole project (still have corrections and proofreading to do but it will be the first time there has been an end-end story). However this post is not so much about literary achievement as nerdulent smugness...

As part of the aforementioned forthcoming proofing process the book will be checked for various, grammatical, syntactic, rhythmic, stylistic and other infelicities - such as over use of certain phrases and words and the use of words just too obscure to be easily digested.

To this end I wrote some concordance code - i.e. a program that works through the whole text and accumulates lists of all single words, all double word pairs and all triple words combinations and links them to the source text, which lists are then sorted alphabetically and placed in a spreadsheet (which links back to the text so that I can inspect individual occurrences).

Now, when I wrote the code, the sort algorithm was very simple - and slow. So I improved it with some cool tricks that sorted all three groups at once and did a few other neat things, but since I didn't really investigate sort algorithms even the improved code was slow - just not quite as slow as it had been (it's running in VBA as well): there's a note in the code to the effect that "by the time the book reaches 100,000 words this will be soooooo slow."

Now the book is >300,000 words. I started a concrodance running Saturday morning on the old, old 1.4GHz Athlon powered desktop PC knowing it was going to take an age, but even I was shocked. Eventually I discovered the sort alone took over 29 hours to finish (and tabulating the results into Excel took a further 8 hours or so), but even while it was running it seemed desirable to rewrite the code.

I'd found and implemented a QuickSort a long time ago, and decided to rejig it for the present purpose. It took a couple of hours, but after some preliminary testing (and still the other PC was chugging away, indirectly consuming gigatonnes of CO2 even as it performed a glacial sort) I was ready to try it out on "IT".

Everything sorted in about three and half minutes! Direct comparison showed that the new sort was 500x faster, but after allowing for the fact that the new code was running on my Core 2 Duo laptop and that the laptop was about 5x faster than the desktop, that's still a 100x improvement!

Result: QuickSort really is quick, even with very large arrays.

However, interesting results from perusing the 80MB of concordances generated were that the vocabulary of the book seems quite limited and there weren't as many outrageous words as I had thought.

There are about 15,000 words unique words, which number comes down to about 9,000 once the roots of the words had been identified so that "decay", "decays", "decayed", "decaying" etc. are considered as one item of vocabulary (I used Porter Stemming code I found somewhere and ported to VBA). So, maybe it won't be quite as linguistically challenging as I had feared... at least vocabularistically.

That's all for now - have to Do if it will be Done.

Marathon Stuff.