Neil Hopcroft

I love spam. And hate it at the same time. How else could you ever expect to encounter someone called ‘Elmo Tent’?

The theme of the moment seems to be food – yesterday we went to Pop Bellies in Huntingdon (ulfilias, I need an up-to-date number for you, the one I have starts 0171, a touch out of date, I fear), where the food is fabulous and we got a room to ourselves, since the place wasn’t exactly busy.

Tonight, Teri-Aki, a Japanese restaurant in Cambridge. Tonkatsu! I’ll be going there again…even if I have forgotten nearly all I ever knew of Japanese restaurant etiquette.

Wow, there really is quite a lot of weather outside today. Its days like this that one particularly appreciated the neighbours windchimes in their cacophonic glory, Mozart would never have thought of that.

…a whole bunch of wicked problems, some thoughts about defining the problems and creating solutions.

I’ve just downloaded my life. Well, the last couple of years of it at least. The 6A/LJ news has finally pushed me to figuring out how to download all the entries I’ve made here. You can do it too with this command line

One of the great things about short term contracts is that when you are asked your opinion you are prepared to give it – theres nothing more dangerous than a man who has nothing to lose. Describing an entire team as ‘haphazard’ would, under most other circumstances, be somewhat career limiting.

Also, something for the serious road worrier.

Firstly, Happy Birthday to the mobile phone industry – “The first call was made [on 1/1/1985] from St Katherine’s dock to Vodafone’s head office in Newbury which at the time was over a curry house.”

“Thieves take brain remote control”

“Numerous people have been questioned by the FBI about this laser beam activity, but no one has been charged with a crime.”

I’m just watching the video for “The Grudge” by Mortiis – its a good deal sillier than I’d really expected from him. Is the rest of his stuff this daft?

We’ve made it to 2005, it was welcomed in with a healthy dose of the second most addictive thing to come out of South America (so the marketing would have it at least). Of course, Mikey, the poker player, was a clear winner. Stoo recounted the tale of the Mad Swordman of Mousehold, a tale of martial arts, mistaken identity and inability to use a helicopter for its intended purpose. Zombies is top game, better with four people than two. Recommended.

Then over the weekend I went to Kent to see my family – where I was setting up Skype to make it cheaper to call between, my ID is neilhopcroft, in case anyone else out there is a user? I know its not the best of the VoIP systems, but it seems reasonably easy to use. Except I haven’t found my microphone yet, which makes for somewhat one-sided conversations.

Everyone seems to be reflecting on the past year, and looking forward to the next year. Indeed, this time last year I was pondering being “…not very good at relaxing and I’ve an irrational fear of intimacy”, but gave myself a get-out that I was in Tokyo being surrounded by cute Japanese girls in PVC who wouldn’t help with solving either. Such excuses no longer work. I am, however, open to offers of attempting to fix either (preferably both) of these issues by PVC-clad, English-speaking Japanese girls. Failing that, I’ll have to put some work in myself. Dammit.

Snowman

This morning was spent mostly listening to New Model Army, apparently one of the favorite bands of one of my colleagues. I’d not had him marked as a cloggy somehow, but apparently he shared a house with some of them while he was studying in Bradford (or something). Not sure how this went down with the others, mind, I think they were expecting Gary Numan to kick in at any point, sounded most disturbed that there was another army out there…

Still, if anyones at a loose end tonight we’re having a bit of a board/card gaming session over here – not sure on the games yet, gimme a shout if you’re in the Cambridge area and up for a hand or two. You’ll have to bring your own chair, though, since I’ve only got three and only one of those is Mikey-proofed.

Combining:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,66146,00.html
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0705/web-finger-07-06-04.asp

We get some interesting numbers…

47,000,000 fingerprint records of ‘undesirables’ held by FBI
118,000 visitors to the US
99.6% match accuracy for two finger test against a single print (I’m going to assume false positive and false negative rates are the same since the stats don’t actually show that)

So, 4 people per 1,000 will be declared a match to each print, so on any particular day, matching against a single print there could be around 470 falsely declared matches (even assuming one is a correctly declared match – there won’t ever be more than one).

Now, multiplying this by 47,000,000 prints held suggests that with a fair degree of certainty every visitor to the US will match one or more of the ‘watchlist’ prints. Even with a watchlist of the order of 250 the birthday paradox is going to be kicking in and you’ll be seeing more people incorrectly declared matching than declared not matching on any particular day.

Which makes me wonder, how big is the watchlist right now? Surely there must be more than 250 people in the world who dangerously hate the US and are known to the US, but how do they get their prints? At what point is the whole exercise written off as ridiculous?