You’re still here?

Posted by Henry - 13/03/13 at 11:03:21 pm

Hello!
It’s been a while. Sorry. Happy 2013?

Some updates:

  • Perception was finished!  Many thanks to everyone who helped myself and Alex with it. Alex has taken the effort to write a long blog post about it – he is far too productive.
  • I’ve updated my about: me page. It’s not as smooth as I’d like, but the content is there.
  • GCSE Mocks! Yaarggh. If you’re interested (which I will forgive you for not being), they were so-so.
  • GCSEs in 2 months. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
  • AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!?!?!
  • DID I MENTION I HAVE GCSEs?

Moving onto a mildly interesting story. Our GCSE English Mock was a Language Paper – analysis of an extract from an unseen text, which was from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and then a creative writing piece with a choice of 3 subjects and frameworks, all related to the extract. We had (I paraphrase the exam questions)

  1. Write a letter to your local MP about Homelessness in your local area.
    I will admit I considered this. It could have run something like this.

    Dear Zac,

    I am writing this letter as I have been told to do so by my exam paper, and I’d quite like to get an A* in this subject.  I hear you have a lot of money. Whilst the homeless population of my local area seems to consist of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar and his faithful squire Ginger [Series 1 filmed in/around Richmond], maybe you should do something about this [to be fair, there are in fact homeless people in my local area, of course, but they are helped by groups such as SPEAR].

    Also, what precisely do you do? Apart from have a lot of money.

    Cheers,

    Henry Dyer
    Concerned English Language Paper Candidate

  2. “At seven o’clock the cell doors were locked from the outside”. Begin or end a story beginning with this phrase.

    This is my diary. I am a very bored person in my very boring prison cell.

    Dear Diary.

    You’ll never guess what happened today. Of course you won’t. You’re a bloody diary. Well, at six o’clock, the cell doors were opened from the inside, because I stole a key. Then they caught me. Today was fun.

    Bye bye Diary
    PS – Cliffhanger ending to my day, right – At seven o’clock the cell doors were locked from the outside.

  3. Describe an unpleasant place, real or fictional.

    This is the one I did. The piece I wrote in response to the question was described as being unconventional – to be fair, I did write more of a story that through the narrative provided a description. And the place was fairly strange. I’ve written up the story on my tumblr.  

That’s all for now.

Go away.

H./

Hens and a Henry

Posted by Henry - 18/09/12 at 07:09:28 pm

Hello.

Whilst working away at the impossible subject of differentiation in maths, a question was posed to me by a friend, Jacob.

“Who would win in a fight between 1 billion hens and Henry?”

When further questioned, the space we were provided with was 1cm cubed. Let us forget, then, the fight entirely (It is likely, given a space of a large warehouse, the hens would win; let alone their superiority in numbers, as well as beaks…), but consider instead this absurd situation.

Now, according to the internet, the average hen weights 5lbs, or 2.26796kg.

1 billion * 5lbs = 2.268×10^9 kg {this is around 2/5 the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza

Let’s add in my relatively minor mass, 45kg.

We therefore have 2.268×10^9 kg of fairly angry hen and Henry, and we wish to place this into 1cm cubed of space.

Density = Mass/Volume, therefore the density in that cubic cm is 2.268*10^9 kg/cm3.

This is extremely dense. It is about 5 times as dense as nuclear matter. It is between 10 to 30 times the density of a NEURON STAR. Which are created from the aftermath of a SUPERNOVA. One teaspoonful of neuron star, on earth, would be 1 billion tons – and a fairly strong teaspoon would be required.

Let’s find out the Pressure here, say, on the earth. Simply by placing said item on the earth.

P=F/A

P=2.268*10^10N/1cm^2

P=226.8 Terapascals (TPa). That’s about 1/154 the pressure at the core of the sun, and 1/28 of a nuclear detonation at the warhead of a W80 nuclear missile. The centre of the mariana trench, by comparison, has a puny pressure of only 83MPa; which will still have an adverse effect on more or less everything. Ok; it’s also about 2.23*10^9 atmospheres. As this is so much larger than the earth’s atmosphere, this would crush a lot of things, very quickly. In fact; myself and Ned Summers of The Aftermatter made a rough estimate that this is enough pressure to crush the Earth to half the current size – I’ll talk to some physics teachers about this. Seeing, however, as this pressure is being exerted ON 1 CUBIC CM, my instincts tell me this would drive a 1cm hole through hell and beyond, creating some horrible type of vacuum no doubt, leading to some horrible ending. I will discuss this, fear not.

 

So, in conclusion: we’re talking about a huge density, a huge pressure, 1 billion chickens, and a very painful, scratched Henry.

No-one wins.

Comment to win absolutely nothing, but leave intelligent questions/statements…

H./

P.S: This may well be x-posted onto The Aftermatter…

The next blogpost will be about my week as @PeopleofUK. Coming… next week.

Asus EEE 1015CX – a review

Posted by Henry - 03/09/12 at 09:09:50 pm

Well; I’m back.

I’ve had several comments recently about the lack of recent posts, so I’ll give you a rough schedule of the next few posts

  1. This one
  2. The Making of … ? (to be revealed)
  3. Ethics (very vague at the moment)

Time to crack on

Due to the fact that I am a blithering idiot, amongst other things, I have a laptop for school, on which I note things – and it is an Eee. Whilst I haven’t put it in a hamster ball, I did the necessary things, such as shouting at it for having some silly “Quick Boot” weird mini-OS, based on Linux, and then installing OpenSuse 12.2 RC from USB (Gnome; KDE wasn’t being very friendly), installing Chrome, Dropbox, GIMP 2.8 (which is lovely; in-line text editing!) and Sublime Text 2, as well as setting up offline Drive.

And it works quite well; whilst the small keyboard may be a concern or difficulty to some,  I’m fine with it; the 6-cell battery lasts long enough for a school day and a bit, and, should I feel the urge, there’s even Windows 7 on it. Starter. It isn’t the best OS, to say the least (although it does play video better than Linux – I even managed to output via HDMI to a full HD projector and it carried on playing the video, lag free…). One of the most amazing things this laptop does is; and hold onto your chairs/seats/whatever tightly; it will recognise and read from an SD card using the SD card slot out of the box. No drivers required to be find online; it just works! That is amazing (yes, no doubt someone will say ‘gner gner gner macbooks recognise it straight out gner gner gner’). The 1.6Ghz Atom also chuffs along quite happily

In terms of structure, it seems fine; I would have preferred a bit more Matte Black; glossy shows fingerprints up too much, but it doesn’t seem too fragile.

Overall; I am very happy with this! A fine addition; small, portable, powerful enough.

H./

P.S: The next blog post should be out in about a month… it depends on Alex Forey

A new venture with whizzes and bangs and large explosions

Posted by Henry - 18/04/12 at 01:04:00 pm

I am happy to announce I am starting work on a new site, which will be the home of a podcast, run by myself, Alex Forey, Amos Jackson, Nicolas Weninger and a few other people who don’t have websites. More news to come.

So that’s all good. (yes, I’ve been watching Twenty Twelve)

H./

Tools, Machines and Gizmos

Posted by Henry - 08/03/12 at 10:03:28 pm

I’d like to question something today, and I am interested in your opinion, so do either post a comment or tweet me with yours. Partly inspired by the discussion of Algorithms and how they are now so complex, the data they process is indecipherable by most people, and just my curiosity; when does something become a tool instead of a machine or a gizmo?

First, we need to work out what a tool is. If you asked someone in 1012, you’d probably not understand them, but it would likely be ‘simple’ items – an axe, a dagger and a scythe. The Dictionary of Dr Johnson, published in 1755, defines a tool as:

1. An instrument of manual operation

2. A hireling: a wretch who acts at the command of another.

For our purposes, we are not that interested in the second definition, but the first is interesting. Compare it to one of the OED’s current definition:

1. a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function: eg gardening tools.

context

  • a thing used to help perform a job: computers are an essential tool| the ability to write clearly is a tool of the trade
  • a person used or exploited by another: the beautiful Estella is Miss Havisham’s tool.
  • [COMPUTING] a piece of software that carries out a particular function, typically creating or modifying another program.

A machine is defined by Dr Johnson as:

1. Any complicated piece of workmanship

2. An engine

3. Supernatural agency in poems

and the OED as:

an apparatus having mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task: eg a fax machine.

Interestingly, the next word after machine is machine code, and 2 after that, machine instruction and machine readable – all regarding computer-processable data and instructions. One can see in the contrast between the two dictionaries the changes in technology over around 250 years, but the question remains: when does a gizmo become a machine or a tool, and can something transition from machine to tool, or perhaps vice-versa. “Gizmo” is obviously not in Dr Johnson’s dictionary, but the OED reports it to be

INFORMAL: a gadget, especially one whose name the speaker does not know or cannot recall
ORIGIN: 1940s (originally US): of unknown origin

In my opinion, gizmos are that which we do not know. Once we understand more about them, and open ourselves to them, they cease in our minds to be called gizmos, hence why grumpy grey-haired history teachers who wear blue sweaters and suede jackets call computers ‘confounding fancy gizmos’. So perhaps changing our question temporarily to help us; How do we distinguish between tools and machines; when does a machine become a tool? 

My iPod is, in my opinion, a tool. This is something that agrees with both dictionaries, and succeeds greatly. It is something I carry instinctively, and use to help me with certain tasks; History notes or calculators, or recording an event. It is not a machine. I would view a machine as something like the ENIGMA cracker. It certainly is a complicated piece of workmanship, and it has mechanical power and several parts, all aiming to crack a code. Yet it does, albeit at a much smaller scale (despite being much larger), the same sort of stuff as my iPod. It uses machine code and machine instruction; they may be in different media, but it is the same sort of thing. So why is the ENIGMA cracker not a tool; well, technically, it is. But in the more casual use of the word, is it really a tool? Perhaps not, due to its age and the fact it is now obsolete.

Let’s take a 3D printer. This is pretty close to a cutting edge of tech; something we will see in the future, something that is a common item in science fiction novels. They will be able to print theoretically anything; they’ve managed to build an artificial jaw. It again fulfills both requirements for being a tool or a machine. But I think of it more as a tool. It is something that will facilitate some damn cool stuff, although perhaps it is currently more of a gizmo – but I doubt it is a machine. It is at the edge of tech, it is something that we will properly see a full implementation within 20-30 years. The Pirate Bay is already linking to ‘Physibles’. They describe it as “Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.” I prefer “Data objects that are Physical and Visible“. Soon. But they’re still tools-to-be, currently gizmos.

So what is a tool, in my opinion? A tool is, generally, something that is not obsolete – can the same task a machine does, be done better in a more useful form, faster, practical, and cheaper, for the general public, and is integrated and made well enough that it is something that you naturally think of using; and something you have knowledge about and are open to. But it’ll probably eventually become a machine, unless it is truly unique; the wheel for instance is something that is always a tool.

A machine is something else; something deprecated and left behind, something that could be replaced but is kept either for history or a small amount of people are using; the rest have moved onto the tools.

A gizmo is in a fresh new unknown state, something that is alien to the system.

These definitions well may change, as they did between Dr Johnson and the latest OED.  But they’ll do for now; they’re not machine words, but tool words.

H./

@direthoughts

 

 

 


Muppetry

Posted by Henry - 14/02/12 at 03:02:12 pm

The House of Commons; but improved

In the time between my latest post and this one, I would like to draw your attention to something what like I made; direthoughts.com/house – unfortunately, you won’t have any success using it as of 14th February, as the House of Commons returns at 2:30pm, Monday 20th. But when that time comes, I thoroughly encourage you to go onto that site.

Fratricide

I’m working on a project, a short film adaptation of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, with some people like Alex Forey, Nicolas Weninger(author of thecompblog) and Amos Jackson We’re trying to restage it to take part in a school, due to social constraints barring us from parts of the book, such as the romance, prisons and being 16/17 year olds. What’s more, we’re shooting it on Canon EOS 600Ds, which I have to thank Nicolas and Roo Reynolds deeply for, and my way of paying them back, being taking photos and publishing the good ones under a creative commons license, can be seen as they come out, once a week for a year (and possibly beyond) on my flickr. At some time I’ll move them over to direthoughts to avoid the compression. We’re also borrowing a large amount of stuff from the school, including a rather large heavy tripod and a steadicam. Our pace of film making is rather slow, but I guess that it’s not too bad at 3.5minutes of footage for 5 hours work on a cold Friday. There may be some proper production stills put online, but for now you can look at this rather awful instagram photo of the tripod, Alex’s 600D and me bending over…

The Muppets

Your reading experience of this post will be greatly improved and enter you into the environment if you hit this lovely play button. Probably, anyway.

Audio MP3

On with the review; I dragged along my friend Alex to watch this film, and in his opinion it was hell. Mine, however, was not the same. Fair enough, the town of Smalltown (Population 102) coincidentally has a dancing routine that the entire town goes to, and once it had finished they all collapsed from exhaustion, but it had the fourth wall breaks, such as Stalter and Waldorf saying “Hey do you think we should repeat this important plot point” (I paraphrase, but that was the gist). The film was, in fairness to Alex, a bit too dancy, but the variety in jokes and music sequences was highly amusing, in an almost cut-away sequence style. Also, Walter (the muppet protaganist) had his human counterpart played by Jim Parsons (Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory), which was highly amusing. It did what I think it was supposed to do, which was to give the 3rd greatest gift of all time; Laughter.

NOW GIVE ME MY PIXAR FILM DAMN IT I NEED TO CRY.

To finish off, I will be writing my next blogpost on a subject of your choice. So either tweet me or comment what INTERESTING topic you’d like me to write about.

H./

On the subject of Libraries,

Posted by Henry - 28/01/12 at 01:01:47 pm

Returning to a blog post forced upon most of my fellow school compatriots, in this course, I’d like to talk about Libraries. I am currently partaking in the DofE Bronze course, something that I will talk about at a later period, probably after I have completed it, due to my opinions on the true nature of it and perhaps how those comments might be taken in a way not beneficial to my completion of it,  and as part of my volunteering, I am working at a homework club, after school. This is a rather simple task, where I sit there and help children with their homework, and attempting to impart my knowledge to them in an interesting way without them vomiting profusely. But this has brought something back to me; the fact that Libraries are darn useful. I can recall myself, sitting in a library and reading books about Physics and History at the ages of 6 and 7. But Libraries are now an endangered species. They are at risk of cuts by local councils, bottlenecked by old systems and ideals for running the libraries. But as the internet is becoming more and more powerful, libraries are being sidelined. The extra services they provide over the books, such as the homework clubs, or use of the computers are required for some people, and indeed help to flourish people and their skills. But I think that for now, libraries are to stay – for the sole reason the internet is not fully open. Libraries represent the diversity of knowledge and the freedom of that knowledge currently does not exist fully on the internet. It is possible that if several censorship laws are passed, knowledge previously garnered from the internet would have to be found in a library, a nostalgic experience for many. Thus, I think what has to happen is we use libraries as our backup, for the possible burning of the modern day Library of Alexandria; the hub of knowledge that is the internet. We require an equilibrium between the two. This may simply be the case however in countries with more wealth, but I think that in poorer countries struggling to make the jump, knowledge is what is needed, and the library can provide that. But libraries have to be supplemented by the great hive-mind of the Internet, to allow the extra services and knowledge that the library provides become a small amount compared to what the internet provides, but have enough force to show the governments that Libraries are here to stay.

I write this blogpost inspired by, and hoping to share awareness of Save Our Libraries day, occuring on the 5th of February. I thoroughly encourage you to spend some time in your library that day, and perhaps help out with spreading this post, and Save our Libraries day.

On 2 interesting library related notes, firstly, has anyone seen my hardback copy of Snuff, by Terry Pratchett. And secondly, the library I volunteer at, well I owe them about £1350 in late fees for a book I “borrowed” when I was 5. It was about trains. Yeah…

H./

Hong Kong

Posted by Henry - 28/01/12 at 01:01:41 pm

As the factories of Foxconn manufacture the technology of today, some of it isn’t travelling very far – simply over the border, to Hong Kong. At one of many bus stops (where people wait in immaculate order), the majority of people will be reading the news that day. Say there are 20 people waiting – probably 15 of them are reading the news on their phones, 2 or 3 will be reading the newspaper, and the others simply waiting. Technology is big in Hong Kong. And it isn’t just private use – there is public use of technology. The MTR system (the equivalent to the tube in London) has, at the colour coded stations (THEY HAVE THEIR OWN COLOUR), iPads (which cannot be hacked) show information using a custom firmware, displaying information about status of the MTR and a map, and a system to determine the fastest route! This is quite frankly amazing, and in some cases surreal. On the trains themselves there are ads for the MTR app – for Android. It is indeed a multicultural country in the sense of technology – a plethora of devices flock the area, from the old orphaned Android tablets to the mollycoddled iPhones.

On the financial side, there is a system that goes beyond the call of duty. It is called “Octopus”. It is a card, much like the oyster card, that can be used for public transport, but the great addition is that you can buy things with it, in a shop. So very simple, but so useful – no longer do you have to get your wallet out, choose the right amount of money, but you can simply tap your wallet on the reader, and pay for your items. This speeds up the entire process of buying and selling, increasing numbers for revenue.

Another stark difference between London and Hong Kong; wi-fi. In the stations, even at the deepest levels, waiting at the platforms, there is Wi-Fi. What’s more, it is fast AND free (8MBps). And whilst walking about, every single telephone box has a wifi network connected to the telecommunications system, and that too, is free. Connectivity and information sharing is at the very heart of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is probably where the “Internet of Things” can be seen the best currently. Unfortunately, they STILL haven’t got Apple TVs. I’d like to apologise for the lack of pictures in this post – I had some but I was a stupid and went and wiped my iPod without taking them off. So just take my word for it.

My god this post was reedited time and time again,

H./

A short broadcast

Posted by Henry - 05/01/12 at 05:01:05 pm

A short blog post on a variety of things here. Starting off, Thank you. This has been quite amazing, and I hope that the new viewers will stick with me. I am doing a follow up post, and I am currently on holiday in Hong Kong, where I went on the iPads, which I am pleased to say can also be bypassed in the same way. Sadly there were no Apple TVs in this Apple Store, so I instead did a bit of digging which deserves its own post. I’ll also be reviewing/comparing the two Sherlock things that have been going on recently (Sherlock 2, Sherlock Series 2 (BBC)). There will also be a post about Hong Kong, and technology in it; it is amazing. If any of my viewers come from or have been to Hong Kong, do comment on this post if you have something to add. I’ll try and make a start on the Hong Kong post, and I may do another very long post about the iPad bypass and the firmware on it, after I make a visit to an Apple Store in the UK with a friend (I don’t think I’ll go for Westfield Apple Store though…).

 

Expect more, and a belated Happy 2012. I look forward to another year of tech lulz and random stuff.

 

H./

@direthoughts

 

So I was out on a walk…

Posted by Henry - 29/12/11 at 12:12:58 pm

2 short videos recorded and edited with a potato (iPod). Off to Hong Kong. May blog. May not. I am mysterious in my ways.

Derp

H./

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