<insert crazy ramblings here>

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.

Just spotted a really useful clipboard feature in the text editor I use.

I supports: Cut, Copy, Paste, and Swap.

Swap the highlighted text with the clipboard text. Genius!

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What would Richard Feynman do?

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing…”

“The gravitational force is weak,” he said at one conference, introducing his work on quantizing gravity. “In fact, it’s *damned* weak.” At that instant a loudspeaker demonically broke loose from the ceiling and crashed to the floor. Feynman barely hesitated: “Weak — but not negligible.”

Seen at Bad Science.

The two biographies about him are great. Essentially a series of anecdotes about him, told by one his mates.

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The XO is the "lowest power laptop ever made, its the greenest laptop ever-made, it's the only sunlight readable laptop on the market, it's more rugged than a Toughbook, it's in the Museum of Modern Art for it's look ... 15 times lower [in power consumption] than any other laptop on the market. The Mesh networking extends the reach of a single access point as the wifi signals can hop from laptop to laptop to reach the children living the farthest from the school. ... we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. ... The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made.

From Groklaw's interview with the founding Chief Technology Officer of One Laptop Per Child project.

This thing sounds seriously nifty. I hope they do the Give One, Get One scheme in Europe at some point.