<insert crazy ramblings here>

I must not Twitter.
Twitter is the time-killer.
Twitter is the little-sink that brings total procrastination.
I will glance at your tweet.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when the tweet is gone I will scroll and face other posts, and only time will remain.

And when it has gone past I will scroll the browser to see other posts.
Where the tweet has gone there will be nothing.
Only time will remain.
{edit: O always preferred the movie version of the litany.}

A while ago I went to flickgc's to play some games. On the way out hawkida asked me to help out with some Eastercon stuff. I hummed and harred about it, and jamesb enthused me on the idea, in that indomitable way he has.

A such I've attended[1] a couple of programming meetings and snuck into a committee meeting today.

I'm in total awe of conrunners. The amount of stuff they get done, to make sure that a bunch of us fans have a amazing 4 days is truly mind blowing. All done out the kindness of their mad hearts.

The clipped notes I took on the second half of today's committee meeting ran to nearly 4000 words.

[1] "attended" should be read as "sat in back and occasionally made silly comments".

It's that meme that every one's doing.

( I'm a left moderate social libertarian. )
... as is the average person who has done this quiz.
But I'm slightly more left moderate social libertarian than average.

Thinking about it, the way I cook, and the way I read have a lot in common.

In SF I tend to read more Science Fiction than Fantasy. On the basis that while I love good fantasy or sci-fi, I really loath bad fantasy, but can (and often do) enjoy "bad" sci-fi. If the writing, or characterisation is atrocious, there's usually a decent idea, or at the very least some fun action. A fair chunk of my to be read pile (and a very large percentage when I really started buying stuff at uni), is stuff I'd never read a review of, and just bought based on a 20 second look at the cover.

Similarly with cooking, I'd rather by a bunch of interesting ingredients and wait for inspiration to strike when in the kitchen, than try an follow a recipe. While I do appreciate a really well cooked meal (and am capable of knocking together a respectable dish), I also enjoy a hastily thrown together mishmash. And frankly that's easier. Probably round 90% of them turn out to be okay, 5% great, and 5% not so much.

I'd like to think that makes me optimistic, as I'm seeking to maximise enjoyment, with minimal effort, but maybe it's pessimistic as I'm not putting in the effort to seek out the exceptional.

They've been relaying the tarmac outside my flat all week. I live at the northernmost edge of the Finsbury Park Parking Zone. So on Monday morning I drove my car the 5 minutes to the tube station and left it there all week.

I went down to pick it up today, and there was a peice of paper under the windsreen wiper. I thought it would be some passive aggressive note from a home ownerer telling me the car had been in their space for a week now, and asking me to move it.

But it was in fact a quite threatening note.

From a character in wrestling game me and iBon had made while testing what manor of monstrous distortions were possible. Had me in stitches.

A post on the scientific preprint paper blog on how the credit crisis spread, reminded me of my masters dissertation.

It was on attempting to model solar flare statistics using a self-organised cirtical forest fire model. In laymans terms we had a program that updated a grid with spaces, trees, and fires following some simple rules. This paper sums up the sort of thing we were supposed to be thinking about.

The most interesting results we got out of model in the end came when we started playing with underlying rules. If you let a few of the trees wander about into empty spaces beside them, you still get self organising behaviour.

This sort of model had been using in the past to look at measles epidemics (Spread of fire ~ spread of disease).

One thing we didn't get a chance to try, was adding an occasional long range correlation. In other words giving a tree a friend on the other side of the grid. Turning into the kind of small world network, where there's only 6 degrees of separation between any tree and Kevin Bacon.

I couldn't find this in the literature anywhere. So thought that if I'd stayed on at Warwick I might have been able to write it up, and get published.

I just had a quick look now and it seems that while I was thinking this, someone else had already done this, written it up, and it was awaiting publication. I'm quite glad I didn't end up wasting a lot of time on this now.


In an entirely unrelated matter, if anyone buys me this t-shirt, they will be thoroughly irradiated.

I've spent lunch time sorting out plans for the coming month or so. Let me know if you're interested in any of the below.

Avenue Q, the adult musical version of sesame street finishes it's long west end run in March, so I'd like to go see it before it goes. Cheap tickets seem to run out by February. The cheapest January ones I've seen so far are £20 for the Friday 23rd matinee but I can't make that. So £30 {edit: Looks like £25 should be possible} on another evening. Anyone interested?

On Friday the 23rd I'm planning to go to Shunt. An nightclub cum art venue under the vaults at London Bridge. Since a mate will be doing circus stuff there that week.

I read jabberworks's LJ for three reasons. Firstly she's a brilliant illustrator, whose daily doodles are simply fantastic. Secondly she draws one of my favourite DFC strips. Thirdly she really has her fingers on the pulse of the UK small press scene.

Alternative Press Fair, Euston, Sunday 1st February 2009, 12pm to 6pm.
I think I'll aim for around 2ish.

St. Jude's Gallery
Details: Mon, 2 Feb, 6-8pm opening; exhibition runs until Thurs, 12 Feb.
Bankside Gallery, 48 Hopton Street, London SE1 9JH. Open every day from 11am-6pm.
Anyone work near the South Bank and feel like having a look one lunch time?

I can't make late night Science Museum or the BSFA's Michael Swanwick Interview on Thursday 28 January, as they clash with a Karaoke thing I'm going to with a few mates from a previous Job. Grr. In fact they both seem to be on the last Wednesday of the month.

I want to go see Yes Man, but suspect it'll be out of the cinema's soon, so have probably missed the boat on trying to organise that one.

Colour is (badly) defined as the relative amount of one three frequencies of light waves reflected off a visible point.

Could you make a false colour ultrasound image by using three different frequencies of ultrasound? If so would they be of any use?

Minilink dump since I know won't have time to look at this, this week:

Update plans for death. Bequeath my brain.

As ranted against by Fluff Cthulhu.

I suppose I should set up a minimal will, and thingy with relvant passwords on.

Oh, and I see that I didn't write down my response to people who've said they'd feel weird leaving bits of their bodies for surgeons to train on / experiment with.

I won't be there. So anything that can be done with the bits that are left is just good recycling. If it can directly help save/improve someone's life, great. If it can help a research project cure something, or even just rule out a false hope of a cure, fantastic. If it just gets cremated, and buried, that's fine too, I won't be there. But it does seem like a bit of a waste.

I'm not trying to be morbid here. Doesn't hurt to be prepared.