We walk along a lot of neat old brick walks here in Colchester. The tops of many of them are covered in moss, which has obviously "gone to seed" in the last month or so. Thus there are these tiny "forests" along the walls, which I could spent forever trying to photograph. Here’s one :-).
Tags: Photography
This cemetery is attached to a deconsecrated church that is now being used as a natural history museum. I haven’t been in yet, but it’s on the list of things to do.
The morning light on these headstones was quite surreal - I’ve not manipulated this at all - it really looked like this.
A nice halloween feel, perhaps?
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This is from a day trip to Mersea Island with Sub-Evil Boy several weeks ago. While he was being contemplative in the surf, this cutie walked by with his human. The wonderful, expectant face is because said human is just about to throw a stick into the surf to fetch, and this was obviously a very exciting prospect!
Sub-Evil and Dori returned to Mersea during her wonderful visit with us last week. The tide was out, then, however, and Sub-Evil got mired in the heavy clay out past the sand, and very nearly lost a shoe. Happily Dori helped retrieve both Sub-Evil and his shoes, albeit bringing home rather a whole love of mud in the process :-).
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First - I’m not dead, I just play a corpse on TV. It’s just been super busy, blah, blah, blah, and blogging fell off the radar for a bit.
I’ll try to get back on the wagon again, however, starting with a brief report of some fine live music that Sub-Evil Boy and I enjoyed tonight at the Colchester Arts Centre (a deconsecrated church - see some photos on Flickr). The band Afro-Tema played tonight as part of Black History Month here in Colchester, and it was a smoking evening. Most of the show was long afro-pop jams, but with reggae and even latin songs thrown in here and there to mix things up. It was a five person outfit, with the leader and vocalist on keyboards and occasionally percussion, a fine and solid rhythm section (the drummer is gonna be one tired puppy), and excellent guitarist and sax/flute players providing most of the melodic structure.
The audience was surprisingly (to me) middle-aged (uh, something about pots and kettles?) and I was really worried that they were going to sit there and politely watch all night. The third song, however, was a reggae number, and that brought all kinds of people out of their chairs and up front, and the dance area was packed from then on. Sub-Evil has a very fun time at what was probably his first “grown up” club show, although the lateness of the hour did eventually catch up with us, and we left during a break. He got a cool idea for a song during a latin piece, though, so prepare yourselves for another wacky masterpiece!
The (former) church on the left in the photo below is the Colchester Arts Centre. I think the guy on the left is part of the running of the Centre; I’ve certainly seen him there on multiple occasions.
One of my goals for our sabbatical year is to figure some things out about my photography. I really like taking pictures, and I don’t completely suck at it, but it isn’t my job and it can consume a lot of time and money. The massive ego part of me would really like to see my photographs published, hanging in galleries, etc., etc., etc. That, however, takes work, and really isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing with my days (either here or when we return home next summer).
So I’m trying a really low impact option, namely selling prints via ImageKind. They connect in nice ways to Flickr, which makes it easier for me to move images into their universe, and then they provide nice printing and framing services, sending me a small piece of the action on any of my photos that they sell. I’ve started with a small gallery of six images, and will add more in bits and pieces over the next few weeks.
I can attest to the quality of their printing and framing. I used them to print and frame one of the images I have hanging in the Horizontal Grandeur show at the Stevens County History Museum. The print was very good (probably not quite as nice as what we get from AutumnColor, but AutumnColor charges quite the pretty penny for their work), and the framing was very nicely done.
I don’t ever expect to make any real money at this, but if I’m lucky there might be enough in it to buy a new tripod :-).
Tags: PhotographyOn the way in to work today I listened to a Scientific American podcast (27 Sep 2007) where they interviewed Robert Epstein about several interesting things. In the first part he described what must have been a pretty horrifically embarrassing experience, wherein he was fooled for four months by a chatterbot. Chatterbots are computer programs that engage in various forms of electronic communication (e-mail, IM, posting to web forums, etc.), and are typically built either by people who enjoy tricking others or by serious artificial intelligence research teams who are trying to better understand issues of language and communication. Or both.
Now Epstein’s not an amateur, and has in fact worked as a major player in the Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence, an important Turing Test competition to see if computer programs can fool people into believing they were human. Yet when he took off his academic Turing Test hat, and replaced it with his “She looks nice in those photos” hat, he got seriously fooled. It also helped that he believed the “she” lived in Russia, so he was much more forgiving of her language mistakes. In the end it was a comment about sitting in a park talking to a friend that tipped him off. It was mid-winter, and a quick check on-line confirmed that is was bitterly cold where she was supposed to live, and from there it all unraveled. There’s then some very interesting discussion of the likelihood of this sort of thing becoming more and more common, and speculations that read very much like a William Gibson story. Speculations about human level AI being “just around the corner” have been rife since the 50’s and 60’s; most of it’s been pie-in-the-sky nonsense, and I think some of his conjectures are a bit far fetched. That said, however, there are parts of that conversation that ring true, and it’s certainly possible that some pretty crazy things might happen in our lifetimes - HAL may be closer than we think. (I also recommend interested parties check a recent Seed articles on the Rise of Roboethics, and the associated set of videos.)
In the near term, I think the foreign language issue is likely to be a significant factor in fooling people. Not all of us are trolling the internet for possible mates (although plenty are), but we’re increasingly used to “meeting” and interacting with people from other countries, with one or both parties not using their native tongue. I’ve seen instances on Flickr where people have carried on short conversations by writing in their native languages and using an on-line translator to “read” the other person’s writing. The translators aren’t real great (Emily Christiansen did a nice paper on that), so I wouldn’t want to do anything subtle that way, but it certainly works for various kinds of basic communication. It also means that while you’re probably fairly confident that it’s not a canine on the other end (that whole opposable thumbs thing), it’s going to be harder and harder to know for sure that it’s not a computer program.
Epstein also discussed at some length a study he’s just publishing that shows very clearly that people (across genders, cultures, groups, nations, etc.) are on a broad spectrum in terms of their sexuality, with almost no one at either the “gay” or “straight” end. Yet, of course, we collectively require (or at least expect) people to “pick a team” and stick to it, and become confused and uncomfortable when folks don’t play along. He makes an excellent analogy to height, where we’re obviously completely comfortable with the idea that people lie along a continuum, and suggests that we’d probably be happier, more honest and comfortable if we could find a way to think of sexuality in similar terms. (Of course it wouldn’t hurt if we could do the same with issues of ethnicity as well, especially as the U.S. and the world become increasingly multi-ethnic.)
Little boxes suck, and not just when it comes to genre-oriented record bins at your mall music store.
If you’re interested in more, you can go to the SciAm web site and listen to the podcast, or you can go to Epstein’s site. There’s a page there telling the sad tale of his anthropomorphic confusion, and another page with links to his article on the sexual spectrum, as well as to his survey for those who want to play along at home. I haven’t read either article or taken the survey, but I’d certainly like to do all three.
Tags: Video
Can I just say how much I love the song “Doyen” from The Duellists album English hurdy gurdy music? It opens podcast 114 from Brainwashed, and it is just amazingly rich and emotive. This sort of stuff could be incredibly flat and “going through the motions”, but this song has a wonderfully lilting, haunted feel that I just can’t help closing my eyes and swaying gently. Literally takes one’s breath away. And then I have to listen to it again. Several times. In its way it has the power and depth of good piece of Bach choral or organ music.
Apparently the disc is pretty hard to find. Some Googling did turn it up in a few small on-line stores, though.
The photo is from Ann’s garden when we first arrived in the UK in August.
No tag for this post.I just stumbled across this cool essay on refactoring by Steve Yegge. I don’t agree with everything (there’s a comment near the bottom that I agree with a lot), but there’s some very cool stuff here about the “real” meaning of refactoring, and the importance (or lack thereof) of automated refactoring tools.
One of my reluctances about moving to something like Ruby in my classes (and, to be fair, my programming) is that I just love Fowler’s book (which I have read multiple times - I’ve taught a refactoring course three times now) and have found it and Eclipse’s refactoring menu to be life changing experiences. I move and rename things all the time now, and having those tools absolutely makes it easier.
That said, though, Yegge’s right that I often become so enamored of the trees of automated refactorings that I lose sight of the forest of simly trying to write clean code, and thinking carefully and sensibly about changing the code that’s already written. Clearly many people haven’t read Fowler’s splendid book, and for them refactoring is limited to what is, in fairness, the tiny (if wonderful) little world bounded by the automated tools in Eclipse or IDEA. That’s sad. And sometimes my course structures (especially in Software Design and Development) arguably encourages that. Which is far worse.
So back up, take a deep breath, and go (re)read Fowler’s book. I know I’ll have to rethink my concerns about the lack of refactoring tools in Ruby. I don’t think they’ll go away completely, but I’m sure they’ll be different, and probably lessened.
Then get back to work…
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