Neil Hopcroft

Wizards of Money – economics in 22 acts, creative commons licence.
(episodes one and two are currenly missing)

Driving around the fens is quite unlike driving around any other area I’ve lived. There are some wonderful long low bridges across the marshy landscape, a lot of these are fairly recent, made of concrete and steel. Between the bridges are sweeping curves along the dry boundaries between the sodden fields. Its no wonder these roads represent themselves as some of the most dangerous in the country, they invite overtaking, you feel safe because you can see a long way ahead and quite often you’re stuck behind a tractor or a local who seems to think that the national speed limit is 40mph. Or maybe its that their Hyundai doesn’t go any faster than that.

No destination, just driving….I stopped in Soham because it was there, and because there is an old wine shop for sale there and I wondered what kind of potential it had. Its an odd little town, hardly infiltrated by the high street names you see elsewhere, sure theres a few but so many local shops. And the whole town seems to be for sale, theres all kinds of crazy little buildings and bits of cobbled together property, each unique, each broken in its own way. Its like a dying town somehow, the shops that remain surely cannot make a viable living, but the place is too small for the big names to want a piece of the action.

“NanoHive is a modular simulator used for modeling the physical world at a nanometer scale. The intended purpose of the simulator is to act as a tool for the study, experimentation, and development of nanotech entities. Nano-Hive is a GPL/LGPL licensed open-source development”

“The simulator is targeted for two types of computational situations: a desk-top version for very simple molecular systems, and a fully distributable version for larger, greater than ten million atom simulations. The distributable version could run on a stand-alone network, or a low-cost Beowulf cluster, or be made available as a computational grid node (or set of nodes) on a network like the Globus Project grid.”

Looks like I got an excuse to make a Beowulf cluster.

I met with BenC & HuiMin for curry last night, good to see them again…though I was getting some weird vibes from one of the waiters, which made for kind of pensive service, but the food was good.

Then on to The Hibachi Dealers at the Half Moon. lark_ascending providing vocals. I arrived after they’d started, but I think I only missed a song or so….it didn’t matter too much since the guitarist from the next band hadn’t arrived yet anyway so they were having to do a few extra tracks to fill in.

As is often the case the sound was awful in the small room at the back of the pub, but the music came through anyway. Perhaps a little more stage presence from the lead singer could iron over some of the gaps between song, it’ll come with practice. Quite a prog turns metal sound, very much the kind of thing I like, and things’ll get better once they’ve had a bit more time performing together – plenty of potential, needs a bit of tightening up.

Then between the bands was the usual mix of music made somewhat more entertaining by the one of the artistic quiet spots in the music coinciding precisely with someone on the other side of the room saying “I’m a virgin”, you couldn’t do that if you’d planned it. Timing is /everything/. Poor lad.

Finally the guitarist of One Mile High turned up, and they spent a while faffing and setting up…they’d not had a soundcheck and just dumped all their kit on the stage and got on with it. Given that they came out sounding rather good. And though he didn’t look much he was worth waiting for, some really lovely dirty blues-y riffs and fabulously self-indulgent solos. These guys had a bit more stage presence, and have obviously been together as a unit for a while. Worth seeing again.

That did just say ‘process whining’, didn’t it?

GTA:Lego City
(large video file)

One of the great things about buses is that you can peer over everybodies fences when you sit upstairs. Actually, I’m not sure I can think of many other great things about buses.

It helps that they’ve cut down all the trees around the Napp Castle. It doesn’t, as I suspected it might, have a moat all the way around – its just on the town-ward side of the building, neither does it have a drawbridge. Maybe that’ll come with the next round of extensions.

Better still, once you get into the centre of the city there are walls you can see over. These walls, impenetrable from ground level, hide buildings and spaces you wouldn’t expect to be there. Places closed to the public. I wonder who uses these transformed churches and warehouse buildings, what are they used for these days? How many of them stand derelict, waiting for some legal battle over their ownership or extension to be resolved? What kinds of secrets do they hide inside?

Like the bookshop in Oxford which looks like a normal shop building on the front, but inside you descend into a cavenous library containing books on any subject you care to think of. How many rooms like that does Cambridge contain? How can I find them?

Should have had a dead finger detector…

Man Killed By Falling CF Card
Police in Bangladesh have baton charged mobile phone bargain hunters

Passed on without comment – today is not a good day for commenting, especially on stories like these.

In other news, I’m remembering what Nostradamus said about the pope. His prediction (iirc) was that John-Paul was the last pope, and that when he died something bad was going to happen. But what was/is that something bad? Has it started yet? Do I need to go and hide in the hills?

Why surveillance cameras don’t reduce crime

This post is part of a discussion between pro and anti cctv camera people…but it raises a point which worries me: “cameras target only the most stupid criminals, for a while”. My worry is that we’re effectively selectively breeding criminals to be more clever….now, in an ideal world clever people don’t have to be criminals because they’re able to turn their cleverness to things which are useful to society, and get paid enough to not need/want to be criminal. We don’t live in an ideal society.