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Ever have the experience of waking up and checking your email, and then wondering for a moment why you don't seem to be able to read English any more until you realize that your only email is spam written in Cyrillic?

Sometimes I'll start to say something and then realize that it wasn't very interesting and shut up. This frequently annoys the people around me who will say things like "What? What were you going to say?" I'll say the thing that I was going to say and they will generally comment on the inanity of it. This seems rather unfair - if I didn't think it was inane I would have said it in the first place. You can have the filtered or unfiltered version of my comments but don't expect the unfiltered comments to be up to the standards of quality of the filtered ones.

Ever notice how, if you get a mosquito in your bedroom, it will sometimes buzz right by your ear? I suspect this is an evolved survival mechanism to check if you are asleep. If you're awake and they start sucking your blood, you'll probably notice and squish them. If you're not asleep it's almost impossible to avoid reacting when they buzz past your ear. So, as you're trying to fall asleep they will buzz past your ear every once in a while and only start to go for your ankles if you don't react.

Trouble is, some people (like me) are light sleepers and get woken up by these fly-pasts. This causes a loop as I start to drift off to sleep, get buzzed awake, swat the mosquito away and repeat. No meal for the mosquito, but no sleep for me either. Last time I got a mosquito in the bedroom I went through a few cycles of this and then tried to find it for a while and but eventually gave up and had to go to sleep in another room. The next day I found it on a wall and squished it.

If you have a big project to do, it's very difficult to get started because big projects are so daunting. Most people have probably experienced sitting down to start some project, getting a wave of anxiety about it and then thinking "I'll just refresh my news feed one more time/play one more game of solitaire before I get started". Days and days can pass this way.

The trick is, of course, to not start big projects at all - instead to start a small project and hope it grows into a big project. The trouble is that it's difficult to start modifying a project that's already big if you didn't start it yourself, since even learning enough to make a tiny change is itself a dauntingly big project.

If you can't pick a small project instead of a big project, the thing to do is divide up the project into smaller ones (which itself isn't necessarily a very big project at all - it's just writing down a short list). Then pick a sub-project and just go and do it (recursing as necessary). If you are at all susceptable to procrastination, it's important to avoid looking at the entire list - just concentrate on the one small part of it that's next and forget the rest. Completing one small part gives the satisfaction and mental energy required to start the next one.

It is for this reason that I don't think I could ever write a novel. A small piece of a novel isn't self-contained and independently useful the way that a small piece of a computer program can be, so you don't get that sense of satisfaction from completing it.

One problem I often had at Microsoft was scheduling and estimating time for large projects. Many other programmers I know have the same problem. In order to estimate accurately you need to do a full walk of the tree of sub-projects until each sub-project is no more than a day's work, add up the number of sub-projects and give that as the number of days. That's going to be gross overestimate, of course, since if you know a sub-project is going to be less than a day's work, chances are you know enough about it to do it much quicker than that. But managers (in my experience) prefer it when people overestimate than when they underestimate as it reduces risk. If you desire tighter bounds on your estimate you can figure this out with some practice, by multiplying the number of sub-projects by the average fraction of a day it actually takes to do a sub-project.

The trouble with schedules that are vastly overestimated is that they don't convey any sense of urgency - if you know in the back of your mind that you have three times as much time as you need to do a project, chances are you'll procrastinate for the first two thirds of that time. Then when the project takes longer than you estimated (as projects invariably do), you overrun the allotted time and look less than competent. Trying to achieve the delicate balance between a schedule that is achievable and a schedule that will motivate you sufficiently is difficult.

Scheduling is also very demotivating work in itself because that big list of sub-projects (and the corresponding long stretch of time) looks very daunting, and you don't even get the satisfaction of completing each part as you tick it off the list. I'd much rather not have any schedule at all, and just work at my own pace. I find that "trying to be finished as soon as possible" motivates me much better than "trying to be finished by date X". Managers do like to know when things will be finished, though.

I think the ideal way to cope with this would be to work one project ahead - work on project X+1 while management thinks you're working on project X. Then when you're asked to schedule project X+1 you'll know exactly how long it takes because you've just finished it. Add in a little extra time in case project X+2 takes longer. I never managed to get to this state, though - mostly because I was continually playing "catch up" and also because we weren't planning sufficiently far ahead that I had any idea what project X+1 would be at the start of project X's officially allotted time.

I remember with great fondness the Christmas when I received my first Lego Technic sets. It must have been 1985 or 1986. I had some other Lego sets but these were something else. I seem to recall that I wasn't old enough for them according to the age range on the box but my parents thought I was sufficiently mature.

I think I had this set:

and I may also have had a supplementary set:

I learnt a lot about mechanics from this - for example that (contrary to my initial expectations) if you made a loop of an even number of gears, it would not create a perpetual motion machine. Also, that if you made a loop of an odd number of gears they wouldn't turn at all.

I think I also had a pneumatic set at some point, probably this one, and probably for a birthday in one of the following years:

and also a motorized set. But looking at the lego catalogues which came with each set, what I really lusted after was this robot:

(I was a big fan of robots) and, especially, this car:

I had friends who had these desirable models, and it was always a lot of fun to the houses of these friends and play with their toys.

Almost all aeroplanes have round cross-sections. This doesn't seem to be the best shape for optimal use of the interior space. In particular, it means that there isn't much headroom above the window seats. On my most recent flights I found that could not even stretch my arms above my head.

I don't think the reason for these round cross-sections is an aerodynamic one - if I recall my fluid dynamics correctly, drag is a function of turbulence, which is caused by chaotic vortices being shed from the trailing edge. I don't think that would be affected by a square cross section.

I suspect that the real reason is that with our current materials, it's easier to make planes strong enough if they're round - a square cross section would have weak points at the corner edges and might lead to parallelogramming. I wonder if future advances in materials science might be able to counteract this.

One of the most annoying things about flying is that airports are generally a long way out of town. This means that you have to leave extra early in case of bad traffic on the way to the airport, and it means that upon arriving you still have to get a taxi/bus/shuttle to the place you actually want to go to.

This seems to be an inevitable consequence of aeroplane technology - it's very loud and smelly and requires a lot of space for take off and landing. But if cities and aeroplanes were designed from scratch with each other in mind, one could imagine that this could be different. While take-offs and landings would still have to happen a way out of town, perhaps boarding and deplaning (what a silly word - what's wrong with "disembarking"?) could happen in the middle of the city and then the plane could taxi all the way to the runway. Perhaps pieces of the plane essential for flying but not for passenger comfort (like wings and tails) could be made detachable - they would be attached right before takeoff and detached right after landing. The rest of the plane could then fit into a tunnel for taxiing into the city. Sounds a bit dangerous, perhaps, but I'm sure there's a way it could be done without compromising safety.

Of course, because this would require massive infrastructure investments simultaneously all over the world it's unlikely to happen for a very long time (if ever) - probably not before our current idea of air travel is superceded by something altogether cheaper, faster, more comfortable and more environmentally friendly anyway. So I guess it will remain just another of my more crazy ideas.

I am a big fan of Lost. It has beautiful scenery, wonderful, well-paced storytelling, an incredibly compelling plot and some terrific acting. It always keeps me guessing and often surprises me. Many of its concepts ("The Others", "Constants") seem to be destined to become cultural symbols like "Big Brother" and "Room 101" from 1984 (it always used to amuse me when the TV shows of these names were on at the same time in the UK - what would George Orwell have thought about that?).

Lost's most notable feature, though, might be that it is (as far as I can tell) the most complex story ever told. Most fictional television shows (like Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) tell a story of the course of an episode or two - the only point of the continuity is to avoid having to introduce all the characters for each story. But you can't really watch a single episode of Lost outside of the context of the show and have it make much sense. Nothing ever seems to happen on the show without a reason - every detail seems to have some purpose (even if isn't revealed until much later in the story).

Most novels seem to take 2-4 hours to tell on screen, and even multi-novel series like Harry Potter or the Belgariad/Malloreon are at most only 8-10 times as complex as this. "War and Peace" was made into a 7 hour film. "Lord of the Rings" was a little over 11 hours in total for the extended editions. Wagner's "Ring Cycle" is about 15 hours. Lost will be about 85 hours (without adverts) by the time it is finished. The only thing that even comes close is Babylon 5 at 77 hours, and much of that consists of standalone episodes.

I'm not counting soap operas or the Xanth series (a guilty pleasure of my youth) here because these are really separate stories that happen to occur in the same setting, involving overlapping subsets of characters, without an overall story arc.

Live animal testing seems to be a particularly contentious issue, given the number of people who protest against it and the lengths that they go to to attempt to prevent it.

The first question is, I suppose, whether we should be using live animals for testing in the first place. I think we should - a living animal is an extremely complicated thing, so we can't get the same information with a computer model. If it were possible to get the same results without using live animals, you an be sure that the scientists would, because live animals are messy and expensive (and dangerous if you factor in the increased risk of being victimized by animal rights terrorists). Testing on humans would be even more contentious. And not doing the testing at all would pretty much bring a stop to the advances in medicine and macrobiology that we have been making for centuries, and which account for much of our life expectancy and quality of life today.

The second question is whether animal testing is unnecessarily cruel - i.e. more cruelty is involved than is actually necessary to perform the experiment. Certainly there are documented examples of such cruelty. I suppose this is inevitable - as long as there are some people who get a kick out of hurting animals, and no matter how good the screening processes and safeguards are, some of them will be drawn to careers in animal testing, and when they do these things will happen. But I very much doubt that these isolated incidents are indicative of systemic failure of process - if they were then the animal rights people would not need to distort the evidence so much to make it look that way.

The number of animals killed for testing purposes is tiny compared to the number of animals killed for food, and I suspect that the science animals are better looked after on average. Yet there don't seem to be quite so many protests about that. Perhaps this is because monkeys seem more human than cows and chickens. Or that farming, being more common, is seen as less mysterious and therefore less threatening. Or that extracting sustenance from animals is somehow nobler than extracting information from them.

Cool Stuff You Can't Find On The Web has been updated:

...there used to be a magazine (I think) which came with a tape which had various childrens stories on it. The one I remember was "The thin king and the fat cook" but there were a few on each tape. I had a couple of tapes, but I've lost them now. Maybe they are still at my parents' house somewhere.

[Update!] - This is what I was talking about. Apparently I had "Story Teller 2" parts 5 and 16 and possibly also "Christmas Story Teller" part 2, because the titles Bored Brenda, Noggin And the Birds, The Snow Bear, The Inn Of Donkeys, Shorty The Satellite And The Brigadier, The Nightingale, Hugo And the Man Who Stole Colours, Mole's Winter Welcome, The Tale of the Little Pine Tree and Grogre and the Giant Nasher seem familiar. I remember very little about any of these except that (as I recall) some of them made me feel quite sad. And there was something about a picnic of bread, cheese and apples in one of them. And people getting swallowed up by a bog. Derek Jacobi's voice still makes me think of these stories to this day. It's quite possible that at least some of these tapes were chewed up by my tape player - it used to do that every once in a while (particularly when I stuck things into it - I was a little scientist).

[Update!] - I got a hold of a digital copy of all of the tapes and magazines, and they are just as good as I remember - extremely well done. I have been playing them for Alexander but he’s a bit young for them at the moment. I look forward to the day when he is old enough to enjoy them. The one with the picnic was “The Snow Bear”, and the sad one was “The Nightingale” (all these stories have happy endings, though). “Mole’s Winter Welcome” still brings a tear to my eye.

There's something very surreal and very wonderful about finding something you remember from a very long time ago in early childhood, and having memories of that time come flooding back. This has happened to me a few times now (mostly because of the internet). Sometimes they things you remember are even as good as you remember them being.

That happened to some extent when I watched The Mysterious Cities of Gold again at university. Some parts (like the butterflies on the approach to the New World, Tao's sadness at the destruction of the Solaris and the first time the Golden Condor flies) were as magnificant as I remember, but some bits seem a bit implausible now and I had forgotten just how destructive those kids were - just about every magnificent ancient treasure and building gets turned to rubble in their wake!

Speaking of MCOG - Oh wow, I just noticed that they're making a movie of it - awesome!