All in the name of scientific enquiry

I stumbled across a group of colleagues in the kitchen at work, who were pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. They had raided the biscuit cupboard and taken out several different packets of biscuit, and then were saying things like “I think I could do 15 seconds with this custard cream”. This was often greeted with noises of disbelief, so the first person had to demonstrate by dunking the biscuit in question in their tea for that long. The thing was timed properly on watches, but the results sometimes contested due to how much of the biscuit was in/out of the drink, how hot it was, if white/black tea mattered etc.

In case the brand of tea or hardness of water etc. influence things, I won’t give the detailed results, but my theory is that the relative positions should be constant across the country. The order is:

  1. Fig roll (the best)
  2. Chocolate hob nob
  3. Ginger nut
  4. Custard cream / bourbon equally hopeless

Not tested: rich tea, digestive (too boring).

There was some call for fig rolls to be disqualified due to excessive fruit content. There was also discussion about quite why the custard cream and bourbon were so poor. My theory is that the sandwich nature means that the tea has twice the surface area on which to attack the biscuit and make it soggy (assuming it has dissolved the cream filling away). There was also discussion about why cake goes hard when you leave it but biscuits go soggy – is it the egg in the cake?

I don’t think this is something we should leave to the experts.

Nowhere to hide from legalese…

I got an email from a good friend who now has an email account with the University of Bangor. The email disclaimer is a work of art – which art, I’m not sure. I dread to think what an email disclaimer on an EU email would look like!

Gall y neges e-bost hon, ac unrhyw atodiadau a anfonwyd gyda hi, gynnwys deunydd cyfrinachol ac wedi eu bwriadu i’w defnyddio’n unig gan y sawl y cawsant eu cyfeirio ato (atynt). Os ydych wedi derbyn y neges e-bost hon trwy gamgymeriad, rhowch wybod i’r anfonwr ar unwaith a dilëwch y neges. Os na fwriadwyd anfon y neges atoch chi, rhaid i chi beidio â defnyddio, cadw neu ddatgelu unrhyw wybodaeth a gynhwysir ynddi. Mae unrhyw farn neu safbwynt yn eiddo i’r sawl a’i hanfonodd yn unig ac nid yw o anghenraid yn cynrychioli barn Prifysgol Cymru, Bangor. Nid yw Prifysgol Cymru, Bangor yn gwarantu bod y neges e-bost hon neu unrhyw atodiadau yn rhydd rhag firysau neu 100% yn ddiogel. Oni bai fod hyn wedi ei ddatgan yn uniongyrchol yn nhestun yr e-bost, nid bwriad y neges e-bost hon yw ffurfio contract rhwymol – mae rhestr o lofnodwyr awdurdodedig ar gael o Swyddfa Cyllid Prifysgol Cymru, Bangor. www.bangor.ac.uk

This email and any attachments may contain confidential material and is solely for the use of the intended recipient(s). If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this email. If you are not the intended recipient(s), you must not use, retain or disclose any information contained in this email. Any views or opinions are solely those of the sender and do not necessarily represent those of the University of Wales, Bangor. The University of Wales, Bangor does not guarantee that this email or any attachments are free from viruses or 100% secure. Unless expressly stated in the body of the text of the email, this email is not intended to form a binding contract – a list of authorised signatories is available from the University of Wales, Bangor Finance Office. www.bangor.ac.uk

8 things

Nic threw down the gauntlet of writing eight things about myself, so I will try.

  1. I have the Freedom of the City of London.
  2. I didn’t have any pets as a boy, but after we were married Katy took me to a local cats’ home and two of them chose me.
  3. My Spanish is limited to not much more than Nadie espera la Inquisición Española*.
  4. As a boy, I once went on a Brownie pack holiday.
  5. One of my lecturers at college invented the subroutine / procedure call / function call. For a while it was known as the Wheeler Jump after him.
  6. I broke my leg as a boy by falling from a tree I was climbing.
  7. I learned today that there is a Scottish word in the OED that rhymes with purple. It’s hurple, and means to run or walk in a limping kind of way.
  8. I don’t own an auto-gyro.

I can’t think of eight other people I want to inflict this on, who haven’t already been inflicted, so I’ll stop here.

*Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Stretching and squashing time

Katy and I had a shock yesterday – the children watched a history programme on children’s TV, about the 1990s! (Death of Princess Diana, invention of the world wide web etc.) This isn’t even as far back as my childhood and yet it’s considered history. I can still remember my colleague Serge showing me this program called a web browser that he’d naughtily installed on his PC at work – “What could you do with it?” I asked. Bah.

In other news, J discovered and then read my old copy of Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt (70 years old!), and L has been mostly wearing a Native American squaw type dressing up dress.

Site problems

Sorry if you’ve been having trouble or strange error messages looking at the site in the last week or so. I’m not sure what the problem was, but my blog was hogging the database shared with other people on the same server and so the administrator clobbered the blog until I could sort it out.

The only thing I could think of doing was upgrading to the most recent versions of WordPress and Spam Karma I could – please let me know if it goes wobbly for you, and sorry again if it’s been a pain.

Bricks and experimental technique

J and I had a nice conversation over tea the night before last, which was the first like it since we moved. He thought that when he dropped a brick into a plastic paddling pool full of water, the water would slow the brick down so it would just touch the bottom gently. Unfortunately it didn’t slow it down enough and it made a large hole in the bottom. This was more irritating than normal because the paddling pool was collecting water from a downpipe with nowhere else to go (other than the ground). There are four downpipes that empty straight onto the ground – I find it hard to believe that a house that was generally well maintained had such a bad drainage problem.

We’re trying to get a builder to put in some soakaways to sort it out, but the downpipes at the front go near the gas supply, so this could be tricky i.e. expensive. Also possibly expensive is the damp patch on the wall near the hot water tank – again I’m surprised this wasn’t sorted or even picked up on the survey as it’s fairly obvious.

Anyway, I told J that the water could have slowed down the brick, but not enough. To be sure he’d need a control, where he dropped a brick into an empty paddling pool. This went on to testing medicines, double blind tests, and placebos. Yes, a brick meets paddling pool incident can be used as an opportunity for learning about experimental technique.

We’ve found the local swings and K took lots of photos including some of some nesting swans, and L’s silk rainbow wings from my parents finally arrived and made her happy. The children were bouncing off the walls a bit so Katy’s been going through some maths, English and science work books with them that weren’t part of the normal pattern of things but help to keep sanity. Also colouring-in books have proved surprisingly popular – K’s done some excellent stuff and L’s are colourful!

Katy found a complete bargain – a set of children’s books about the body for 20p each, and as there are 31(!) of them they go into quite a lot of detail (I must confess I was very vague about what the lymphatic system was) but they’re almost like comic books so aren’t too heavy. The children seem to like them and J has probably finished them all by now.

Before they were scattered all round the house they were in a pile in the children’s bedroom. They are all numbered on the spine and I asked J how he would put them in order. He described selection sort, which is what most people would do – search through to find the smallest, pull it out of the pile and put it at the bottom, then go through to find the next smallest and so on. I described bubble sort to him (go through the pile and swap adjacent pairs that are the wrong way round; keep repeating till you’ve not swapped anything) and then we had a go at quick sort together and I said that’s the way that computers usually put things into order.

We picked a book at random from the middle (which was book 12), and put it to the end temporarily. J then started from the left end looking for books greater than 12 and I started from the right looking for books less than 12. When we’d each found something we swapped them. When we met in the middle we slipped book 12 back into the place where we’d met. Then all the books to the left of 12 were less than it, all the books to the right of 12 were greater than it, and hence 12 was in the correct place. He guessed that we’d repeat the whole process on the less-than-12 bit and on the greater-than-12 bit, but we didn’t bother actually doing it.

(So next time you put your iPod on shuffle, or sort a list of things in Excel or Word, this is probably what’s happening behind the scenes. In case you’re wondering, I expect that the iPod labels each track with a random number, and then sorts the tracks by that number, so even shuffling is actually putting into an order.)

In digging around Wikipedia to get my facts straight about sorting, which is meant to be bread-and-butter to geeks like me and something I thought that clever maths types had analysed to bits to work out efficiencies and worst cases etc, I learned that some people had invented a new kind of sorting in the last five years! It’s called the library sort, and it’s a variant on insertion sort.

We continue to try to tame the sea of boxes and disorder around the house. I was chuffed when I found (in an unmarked box in a random room) the clock radio so we don’t have to rely on my mobile phone’s alarm to wake us up. So far I’ve managed to keep to at least one box unpacked per night (on top of things like unloading stuff from the car that I’ve taken back from the lock-up) and Katy’s doing loads.

The car doesn’t seem to like us almost running out of petrol. I broke down on the way to work – an intermittent fuel pump problem which the roadside rescue bloke managed to sort out. Unfortunately it played up again for Katy en route to opening up Parents and Tots, and defeated the roadside bloke was taken to a garage. The children thought a ride in the breakdown truck was a bit of an adventure (J took a bit of getting used to the idea).

The helpful BT engineer has been to get the phone working again – only 10 days till broadband now (sigh). Unfortunately the phone socket is in the most remote part of the house (the extension) as the previous people were on NTL (boo hiss) so the handy sockets are useless. So I’ll have to turn into a phone engineer and then network engineer to sort this all out – a bit of drilling, cable pulling and stapling, and then socket bashing. At least I get to buy and use a new tool (a krone tool, for attaching the phone wires to the phone socket).