Random Ramblings

Wishful advertising

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:30:53 GMT

A job ad in The Economist this week reads, in part:

Development Economist
St Helena

A self-governing overseas territory of the United Kingdom, St Helena is an island of 47 square miles and around 4000 people in the South Atlantic. Cape Town in South Africa is some 1700 miles distant, and the island has no airfield and a small economy mainly based around offshore employment, agriculture, fishing and tourism, with heavy reliance on UK aid.

Enjoying a quality of life almost impossible to find elsewhere in the world...

Indeed...

Sydney Craziness

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:59:02 GMT

There's nothing like an aerial image of Sydney to remind one just why all the random driving is needed to get around. I live on the bottom blob of land, just off-screen. Maybe I should sell my car and buy a boat...

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:30:52 GMT

Just for the record...

Those silly northerners

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:35:08 GMT

Impartial commentry is fantastic. Soundbite during SA vs Fiji:

"One way to ruin a game of rugby is to put a whistle in the hands of a northern hemisphere referee"

I think that, in general, the northern refs are a lot better than they were 10 years ago, but they could have had a southern ref in at least one of the quarter finals...

The dot and the line

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:17:51 GMT

A romance in lower mathematics"

Live Traffic

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 12:14:22 GMT

If you are travelling around Sydney or rural New South Wales, then Live Traffic is a neat site with regularly updated traffic details and even regularly updated camera images of major Sydney bottlenecks such as Anzac Bridge.

Mushrooms

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 04:27:18 GMT

I just bought a whole fridge full of fruit and veges. While packing some mushrooms into a paper bag at the grocer, I had a little giggle at the back of the bag:

VEGETARIANS
Mushrooms are an ideal substitute for meat.
They are fat free, contain no cholestoral,
provide dietary fibre and an excellent
source of vitamin B12,
a vitamin often lacking in vegetarian diets.

TRY THESE RECIPES

Ham and rice stuffed mushrooms

...

Camino

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 01:39:46 GMT

I just downloaded Camino and it seems great. I have found Safari a little flaky at times. Camino looks great and runs very slickly. Best of all, it has an advertisement blocker, not just a popup blocker. This is particularly great when viewing online news articles, which are usually riddled with ads. Checkout the screenshot I took below. On the left is Camino and on the right is Safari. By not displaying the advertisement, Camino is able to render the page in a much more sensible way.

\m/

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 04:09:32 GMT

While walking along, I discovered that Utopia records has opened up on Broadway street, opposite victoria park and sydney uni. I was rather impressed with their collection and snapped up a copy of Doom Saloon, which has been rather hard to track down.

Buy my shirt!

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 10:06:44 GMT

The Ebay listing says it all. Bid! Bid now!

More furniture!

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 23:04:40 GMT

This time, our ebaying has netted us a dining set. Still on the agenda: couches, bookshelves and a coffee table.

Optimism is...

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 10:50:47 GMT

Some people live each day in hope (found while looking through internet classifieds) :-)

Experienced male masseur (Aussie, late 30's) is offering TOTALLY FREE sensual full body massage to girls 18-40s. 1 to 3 hour sessions. DON'T pay hundreds of dollars for this service, like you would elsewhere. Try it for FREE. Be pampered like a goddess. Have portable equipment and will travel to you. Sydney, Illawarra, Southern Highlands, Goulburn & Canberra. Do yourself a massive favour and spoil yourself now. Apply with pic, if possible. No cost, no strings.

Oh the excitement!

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 05:16:45 GMT

Just picked up this snazzy bed on ebay (click on the pic to be whisked away to the ebay page):

It's my first ever ebay purchase and the auction went down to the wire. Now to find a dining set!

Oh yes, we also got an apartment in the northern bit of Ashfield, just next to Croydon.

Back to Sydney

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 23:42:07 GMT

I proposed, and ANU accepted, that I change to external student status in order to pester the category theorists in Sydney for another year. Thanks to the running, cycling and training around of anya_1984, I now have a deposit on what seems to be a nice 2 bedroom apartment in the inner west - I'll check it out and (hopefully) sign the lease on my return to Sydney.

I'll be back in Canberra around Sept 16 to go to a concert with elfishski and (probably) give at least one talk on my current research. On the flip side, Canberrans (or other non-Sydneysiders) who want to come up to Sydney to see a concert or such, will soon have a sleeper couch on which to rest their tired heads.

The week after that is the AustMS conference, conveniently located this year at Macquarie. This will be my third year in a row going to this conference - it's fast becoming one of the events I look forward to each year. Anyone else going?

I have also started trying to learn Russian. anya_1984 eventually managed to convince me that there is a difference in the way you pronounce ш and щ. I think that I can even vaguely pronounce them correctly. I guess this is a start at least...

I'll be speaking in the category theory special session. I'll probably be hanging out there and in the combinatorics and group theory special sessions for the most part.

Title: Associative categories
Abstract: In search of a vindication for the privileged position of a binary composition operation, one might well be led to consider a general $n$-place composition operation. An immediate concern is how to generalise the notion of associativity to this setting. This talk provides an explicit axiomatisation of categories with an $n$-place associative tensor product structure, tentatively called $n$-associative categories, utilising a generalisation of the Mac Lane-Stasheff pentagon axiom and one new class of hexagon axioms. We also sketch a proof of a coherence theorem for such a structure, showing that each $n$-associative category is equivalent to one canonically generated by a $2$-associative category.

Ah, Melbourne

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 13:46:05 GMT

Well, I have settled into Melbourne now. I am living roughly across the street from melbourne uni, about a one minute walk to the philosophy department, where I am able to hang out in the very comfortable postgraduate room. There's lots of fun stuff happening in the philosophy department and even some combinatorics talks in the maths department. I've also gotten to hang out with my sister a bit, venturing into belgian chocolate shops and the like. All in all, it's shaping up to be a fun month.

Tired

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:21:43 GMT

Well, my apartment is now packed up and I am ready to fly off to Melbourne tomorrow. This is my third move of the year and I have at least one more to go. *sigh* In the process of offloading some stuff at a relative, I completed the Sydney Harbour Modes of Transport. That is, I have travelled across the harbour in the following ways:

1. Driving a car across the bridge
2. Riding in a train across the bridge
3. Riding in a bus across the bridge
4. Taking a ferry across the river
5. Driving under the river (in a tunnel, of course :)

This was in Elizabeth Bay, near Elizabeth Bay road:

Sydney Sights

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 02:28:43 GMT

I have been playing around with my new phone and snapped some pictures of strange sights in Sydney. For instance, this poster in Martin Place baffled me:

A closeup:

Warning by the naval base in Woolloomooloo. So it is ok to shoot anywhere else?

Syringe vending machine by the injecting room in Kings Cross (well, Darlinghurst):

Closeup of the machine:

In praise of 80's metal

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:46:44 GMT

It seems that everywhere you go these days, every metalhead is playing doom or death or "progressive melodic neoclassical gothic death doom"... Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of much of this style of metal, but it is rather annoying when every band under the sun is trying to sound like Opeth. And so, these days I seem to dig deeper into my metal collection. Not so deep that I hit Judas Priest, but deep enough to hit the leather lunged lyricists. Deep enough to get to the point where it just wasn't a guitar solo if it wasn't at least tapping 64'ths. Deep enough to reach a time when "Nu Metal" did not exist, when hair was big and songs were meant to make you feel good. I speak, of course, of the 80's. Sure, bands' names were meant to sound scary and tough but the songs were still rather happy. For instance, one might imagine a band called "Helloween" to advocate doing naughty things to cats at the next full moon, but instead their lyrics say things like:

"One day you'll live in happiness
With a heart that's full of joy
...
You'll say you love your life
and you'll know why"

Yes, I can see why today's angsty metalheads may not like those lyrics. It's just too hard to maintain a cool enough level of depression when listening to such things. Let's fast forward to more recent times. "Children of Bodom" may not sound all that scary until you realise that it is named after a brutal multiple homicide. Ok, we're already a bit meaner it seems, after progressing from bad puns to bad deeds. Digging slightly into their lyrics, instead of cheerful wishes for a happier world, we instead find:

"I was born in ashes of molten hatred
Raised by demons in abodes of the end
The reaper's scythe I fall upon to light my path
Wrecked by mangled wounds of life"

Yipes! Of course, the lyrics are hidden behind a wall of catchy keyboard riffs, cookie monster vocals and, let's face it, a brutalisation of the English language rarely seen outside of the Sunday paper. All of this makes the song good fun to bang your head to, but may leave the happier metalheads amongst us longing for more. And so I say step out from In Flames, toss aside your Soilwork and take your Cradle of Filth to the cleaners. Dare to be different. Dare to see past the big hair. Dare to fly the flag of 80's metal!

Syndicated

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 09:46:08 GMT

Looks like somebody has syndicated my logic blog, so LJ users can add it to their friends list. Don't all rush at once :)

Colloquium Bingo

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 02:39:13 GMT

(via Obscure and Confused Ideas)

Next time you are bored in a colloquium talk, why not play this fun little bingo game?

While most of that card is univerally applicable, some of it seems more geared towards philosophy. Anyone got some good maths and/or computer science ones? Or, heck, some other subject? I'll have a bash at this:

Computer Science:

* Speaker reads slides to audience
* Audience member checks email on wireless connection
* Speaker flashes 20 slides of graphs with no discussion of the experiment design
* Speaker discusses the one case where their algorithm is superior but neglects to mention that it is slaughtered in every other case
* Audience member suggests that their pet theory would provide a better solution, citing jargon and chanting letters like HMM, FPGA and CSP

Maths:

* Speaker writes in tiny illegible handwriting
* Audience member proof reads their latest paper
* Audience member states that the problem has already been solved but neglects to mention that the solution uses different hypotheses, a different construction and came on the back of a cereal box

A very easy modification yields a fun drinking game...

Purple

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 04:10:41 GMT

On the flight over to Perth, the usual tray of food of disputable origins contained a little piece of chocolate. Upon close examination of the wrapper (boy, was I bored), I discovered:

"Cadbury, ellipse device, dairy milk, the glass and a half device and the colour purple are Cadbury Limited trademarks "

Jeepers! Upon a bit more digging this morning, I discovered:

Multinational chocolate maker Cadbury has been told it does not "own" the colour purple, as its attempt to sue a rival was rejected by Australia's Federal Court.

In other news, I am now in Perth, walking dogs, watching soccer, writing and being a bum...

Jonjon updates!

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 12:35:37 GMT

I have become rather used to using this internet cafe in Kings Cross to check my email, nestled as it is between two stores of dubious moral fibre.

Since most of the research group is overseas, including my supervisor, and since I have all the papers and books I need at home, there is no need to make the arduous journey northwards to Macquarie. Consequently, my life has become rather routine, alternating between doing my uni stuff, watching soccer and bumming around some of the excellent coffee shops and restaurants in the area

I am quite happy that an African team made it through to the knockout rounds. Sure they're west african, but whatever. I'll stop my feeble attempts at soccer commentary right there!

My routine will be interrupted for the first two weeks of July, since I'll be in Perth, visiting family and friends and (hopefully) getting some serious writing done.

Well, that's it. Fairly unexciting, I know, but what can you do...

Noodles

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 13:24:46 GMT

It took me ages to get this joke (via ernie):

If it's Saturday, it must be Melbourne

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 11:57:54 GMT

After walking easwaran all over Sydney trying to show him a bit of the place after his 14 hour flight (I even managed to get a beer into him), I jetted off to Melbourne for a few days to see some of my family. During this time I met someone with possible accomodation when I am in that fair (and freezing) city for August. The place is fine but it is a bit far from the city and such, so I will try and see if I can find something closer to the city (though don't hold up much hope since I only want the place for a month).

Hmm, what else have I been up to. Work has been progressing merrily and I now feel that I have made the transition to mainly working on my own stuff, rather than trying to learn things about the area (naturally, I still do the latter). Alas, this meens that my poor ol' logic blog has suffered because of my policy of not posting details of my own research. *sigh*

I'll be nipping back to Perth for roughly the first two weeks of July and spend the last two weeks of July in Sydney before hopping down to Melbourne (let's hope the place has warmed up by then!). Where I will be after that is anybody's guess...

While in Melbourne I picked up a copy of Nelson Mandela's "Long walk to freedom". I've been racing through it, since it is very well written and explains the influence of many of the people who I only vaguely knew about. Given when I grew up, most of my experiences and memories of South Africa is of the transition to democracy and the subsequent tense relations between the various groups who were suddenly mixing freely. On the other hand, I was too old to get taught about modern South African history, my primary school history classes consisting mainly of tedious details of the Afrikaner voortrekkers (pioneers) - an unsurprising syllabus given the incumbent nationalist government. Things were a lot different by the time I left, for instance my neighbour in Johannesburg at the time was at one time a fairly high ranking member of the MK (Umkontwe wesizwe - "the spear of the nation"), which was the armed wing of the ANC (african national congress). I have not yet reached the formation of the MK in the book, but I'm getting there. Since Mandela is Xhosa, the book includes some details of Xhosa history, which was quite interesting since I was previously only familiar with some Zulu history (the nationalists saw fit to teach about Shaka Zulu, since he managed to wallop the British on several occasions) and a tiny bit of seSotho history (since this is the dominant group around Johannesburg and even a young white boy hears a little about Moshoeshoe (pronounced something like moh-shweh-shweh)!). I'll probably post more details of the book and such when I finish it.

Internet apathy

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 04:09:04 GMT

Since I don't have internet at home any more and am now living in an interesting part of Sydney, I haven't had much of an urge to do anything on the internet other than check my email. In the spirit of keeping a log of what I have been up to, here are some things I have been up to in the last few days:

* I bade farewell to C, who left for his Canadian tour.

* I moved into C's place in Potts Point, which involved driving over the Harbour Bridge. Oh, the excitement.

* I had a pie from Harry's Cafe de Wheels. This is a Sydney institution and down the road from my new home. I wasn't game enough to have it covered in mushy peas, mashed potato and gravy. Maybe next time.

* I briefly visited the New South Wales art gallery. This is also down the road from my new home and I walk past it when returning from the city on my less lazy days. I only checked out the asian exhibit. I walk past it so often that I can take it really slowly.

I'll post photo's of the view from the roof of my new home, once I get batteries for my camera. You can see pretty much all of the interesting bits of Sydney from up there.