The Matazone blog

Well… It was burning down. One of the science blocks was destroyed yesterday after a fire spread through the building.

Southampton University has a global reputation for its computer and science research, with a lot of the UK’s best work happening there. Currently the fire is not being treated as arson but some kind of accident.

I feel so sorry for the people who were studying there. Now I’m nearing the end of my PhD I’m backing it up all over the place to make sure that I stand the best chance of not losing anything, but I would hate to think what it must be like for the students there to have lost so much of their work… It’s not just work though, it’s a whole piece of your life. The important things are there: no-one was hurt, everyone is still healthy and in full working order, but a PhD becomes a huge part of your history. To put it into terms that are more easy for a non-academic to associate with, to lose five years of research would be like losing all photos and movies from that time.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning too that Southampton University is very closely affiliated with the University of Winchester, where I’m studying, and I’m pretty sure it will be them that award me my PhD when I’m done. This fire doesn’t effect my work at all, but the shared loss of other researchers is still a strong emotional event!

More from the BBC.

This made me laugh: a chap has been fined by his local council because the pornographic videos he was selling didn’t contain the scenes that his (female) customer expected. Apparently they featured on the front cover but had been editted from the final cut.

Maybe it’s the Britishness in me that makes that so amusing, but I’ve got visions of a PVC and latex version of the dead parrot sketch in my head, although I think I might need mind-bleach to remove the idea of John Cleese in a peek-a-boo bra and panties set!

You probably didn’t want that image, but you know me: I like to share.

Slightly more here.

It’s all gone a bit creepy at Matazone Towers:

Something In Throats

Don’t forget, if you fancy donating then use the links on the top right of the animation pages, or you can buy something from my shop (there should be Little Goth Girl things arriving very soon and the corsets still have some great offers), or alternatively just start a shopping trip on Amazone.co.uk or .com using the search boxes on the pages and my site will get 5% of what you spend. It’s all good.

Well, it’s 7am here. I’ve worked on this animation solidly for a silly amount of hours, so now I think I really should try and get some sleep.

‘Night all!

I’ve written here about The Burning Man festival/event/thing before, but here’s a really nice 17 minute video by Jen Friedberg that does a good job of showing how difficult it is to explain the appeal of the place:

http://www.jenfriedberg.com/burningManIs/burningManIs.html

There are quite a few interview pieces in the film, which give some nice background to individuals’ Burning Man stories and experiences, but for me I think it’s just seeing some of the art pieces moving that really makes the video capture some of the feel of it… whatever it is!

Once again, I think I’m failing to put the pull of that desert into words, but I think the three person mobile ferris wheel at the start of the video probably does a good job of summrising it, as does the naked guy dancing with two umbrellas 14min 30secs in. His little section, with slightly off-rails interview, summarises some of the contradiction about the event too: you want to go and do things by and about yourself, but half the time you also want to constantly be recording things to show others who aren’t there. It’s sometimes tricky to get the balance right between taking part there and then and taking it home outside of your memories.

If you’ve got the time, it’s a nice little film.

I remember the first time I ever saw anything from the Burning Man. It was some sort of global new-culture documentary show and there was a small section of a man dancing in the desert as the sun came up. I think he was naked, it was pretty clear he’d been dancing a long time, and I suspect that there wasn’t any music outside of his head. I couldn’t tell you why that left such a powerful impression on me, but I wanted to be there.

My final thesis is going to consist of five chapters: an introduction, a conclusion, and three chapters making up the meat of the thing. Today I had a meeting with my main tutor and he confirmed that the final one of those three chapters is ready! Yay! I was particularly pleased because it is by far the longest of the chapters, weighing in at a hefty nineteen thousand words compared to the other chapters of around thirteen thousand. To have that much text that is ready for submission all in one chunk is a great relief.

I’m really excited because this means that the heavy theorising is out of the way. The conclusion chapter is coming along well, and I’ll have the introduction to do after that, but the end is very definitely in sight!

Did you know that an overturned swan can’t right itself and so subsequently drowns?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan

It’s in Wikipedia, therefore it must be true (now)!

taste luck taken opened book.
better changed studied across?
inside carefully steps met stopping. stopping respect matter sandwich worthy choose.
pay appear twenty-one may taste.
sorry advantage studied appearance fail.

After being away for a while, DS strikes back with a bold five line poem about buying a sandwich. Hm. Not really one of his/her classics, is it? I think the three-line ones are better.

I came across an interesting term today while writing part of my thesis: ‘Aspirational age’.

This is a marketing term that indicates advertising to one age group can have an impact on a wider range of ages. By targetting 16-17 year olds they get those that are younger and long for percieved maturity and older people who long for the time of youthful freedom and health (even if these are false ideals).

I find this especially interesting, because the whole idea of teenage years being any different from any other time is a relatively modern concept, only really coming about with rock’n'roll in the twentieth century. Is it a coincidence that advertising was really getting into the swing of things at around the same time? We invent a concept of freedom, tell people they have it until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, then tell everyone else that it was the best time of their life to market products to them.

It’s a Möbius strip of marketing logic, and I find the idea fascinating!

‘Aspirational age’ definition here.

The irony of this is that his basic premise has a flaw.

Last night I went to a discussion up at my university about the final presentation of PhD theses. I was told about the worst-case scenario of a thesis. This happened to a young mathematician. Imagine spending at least three years, often several more, working on a hypothesis, writing it up, and analysing its meaning. In maths everything is laid on a solid foundation of calculation and then you work upwards from there. At the end of your studies you present your thesis, its read by a committee (aside: I like the word ‘committee’, it has three double-letters in it ) and then the committee gives you an interview, called a viva, about your study. This usually takes about an hour, although some places don’t restrict this and the viva can go on for up to six hours!

This mathematician had chosen his review committee, and things were looking good; however, the chairman fell ill and unfortunately had to be replaced at a late stage. The new chairman walked into the viva, pointed out a flaw in the maths on page five and the whole thesis was decreditted and it failed.

Ouch.

So, do you remember I mentioned a little while ago about there being a trial in America where a group of parents had taken a school to court because the school wanted to teach Intelligent Design theory as a legitimate rival to the theory of evolution? A British sociologist professor has testified in defence of ID claiming:

that because scientists have inferred the existence of a designer from observations of biological phenomena, it should count as scientific.

(Sourcehere.)

As much as this is a lovely idea, using the same logic as ‘it’s art because it was made by an artist’, it’s just not an accurate statement. This is the same as the mathematician’s mistake on page five: if their basic assumptions are not good science then anything built of them still is a victim to the initial difficulties in logic. Assuming that complexity can only be explained by supernatural phenomena/aliens is not a scientific proposition because it is fundamentally unverifiable. The argument ‘X did it, therefore it is a product with X’s attributes’ is acceptable for art where the product does not have to maintain conformity with rigidly logical rules and deductions, but that’s just not the same for scientists. A scientist could claim that the internal organs of a duck in flight transform into helium, but that wouldn’t make it good science; the proposition that some scientists like the idea of ID and therefore ID is scientific is a classic page five mistake.

Crikey, a car made up of only one molecule, I can think of no beginning of the practical applications for that…

There’s a nice article explaining clearly how they did it:

Ultimately the team decided to synthesize the axle and chassis via palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions.

I’m sure I would have chosen to do the same thing.

I love nanotech. There’s some great work being done to replicate solar panels that are energy-efficient to produce, and I can see why that kind of thing is useful, but I’m really lost as to the point of this exercise. I guess maybe it’s one of those things that people do as a proof of concept, so that when they do work out something to make with a practical application then they’ll have more of an idea of how to go about doing it, but for the moment this seems exceptionally pointless.

More, including a diagram which tells you very little, here.

I’ll leave the last, inconclusive, words to the writers of the article, who clearly also have no idea what a one-molecule car is for:

The development bodes opening new vistas.

The story is simple: a man in Australia was given a parking ticket despite being in his car at the time. The attendant didn’t notice him, having approached the car from the rear, and put the ticket on the passenger windscreen.

The twist is that the man in the car was dead, and it was nine days since he had been reported missing. Apparently the parking officer is ‘extremely distressed to have learned of the situation’, which is understandable because it must be quite a nasty thing to find that you missed.

More here.

So, an oddity but not beyond belief by any means, what really astonishes me is that this took place in an area of Melbourne called ‘Croydon Market’.

Many of you reading this will probably not know of Croydon, but it’s generally regarded as one of the most dreary, miserable, soulless places in the UK. I grew up there and I have a peculiar fondness for its monolithic 1960s architecture. For some reason I like the huge lumps of concrete looming into the sky. I find it particularly amusing that the council, in an effort to make the place appear nicer, decided to set up coloured lights to shine on the buildings at night. Now, instead of huge dark rectangles in the night they have eerie spectral-hued buildings lurching like forgotten geometric gods in the sky. Fantastic! That perks the place up! Of all the places in the world that you could name your location after, why choose Croydon? I realise it was probably some home-sick convict long ago who named it, but even then I find the idea quite amusing.

To give some perspective to people who don’t know Croydon or its reputation here’s an example. The BBC cult TV series Red Dwarf is set three million years in the future. The human race is reduced to one man who is stranded a massive distance from earth. This man has extremely low standards of hygiene and etiquette, and even he thinks that Croydon is a dump. Yep, that’s the place that I called home. It probably shaped a lot of my attitude to cities and the bizarre sense of humour, because I think you’ve got to have a bit of a laugh if you live there otherwise you’ll turn into a psycho and start attacking church goers with a sword while naked (which happened a little while ago just outside Croydon).

Now sing along with me (to the tune of ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’:

Maybe it’s because I’m a Croydoner,
That I think the human race is doomed!
Maybe it’s because I’m a Croydoner,
That I love buildings that loom.
I get a funny feeling inside of me
Just walking up and down. (Which could be a knife)
Maybe it’s because I’m a Croydoner
That I love Croydon Town.

Due to a massive lack of funds caused by international trade issues out of my hands, the economic slowdown in the UK, and goodness knows how many other things, I’m re-opening my on-site shop.

http://www.matazone.co.uk/shop

At the moment I’ve only got corsets by Snobz in there and some badges left from the last time I was running the shop. Little Goth Girl bags and T-shirts will turn up at some point in the next two weeks, but I’m not sure when.

I’m really pleased with the deal I’ve got on the corsets. They’re really good ones and I’ve got them for 10% cheaper than you’ll find (decent ones) elsewhere, plus there’s the chance that you won’t even have to pay for it…

I’ve decided that after every twenty corsets that I sell the next person will get theirs free, so I’ll refund the money for the corset and pop it in the post to them. You’ll never know if it’s going to be you, but you won’t find other websites giving away free corsets!

As usual, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got it all tested, but if you do have any problems with the shop please let me know as soon as possible!

In other news: I’ve got the Halloween animation written, and so I’m going to try and allocate some time to making it over the next few days. I’m really pleased with the way the story has panned out, so I hope that I can give it at least reasonable graphics in time for Halloween. It may end up with a lot of static shots: they also take up a lot of time to draw, but they’re usually faster than animation.

Okay, so this is just my personal opinion, but I’m pretty sure that Bill Gates is getting way ahead of his market.

Speaking at Harvard University, Bill Gates has picked the hard drive and streaming over the Internet as the likely death knell for disc formats. Gates branded high-capacity discs like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray “the last physical format we’ll ever have.” With Live on Xbox 360 set to deliver full games as well as demos, videos and music, Gates’ comments appear to explain why Microsoft hasn’t embraced the HD-DVD for the Xbox 360.

Source

I know how much of a pain it is to have to move data from one hard-drive to the next, but when I had to buy a new computer I didn’t need to do anything with my DVD collection. It was still there. When my hard-drive died from a mechanical fault and most data was utterly irretrievable the DVDs on my shelf didn’t mind. When I pay for a film I want to be able to know that I own it for as long as I look after it, rather than hoping that the data on the drive doesn’t corrupt because a kid in Brazil worked out a clever way to get past my firewall and anti-virus software. Some of the videos I own I’ve had for well over a decade, in the meantime I’ve seen countless computing platforms disappear beneath the wave of progress, but that video is still there, ready to be watched without me needing to work to upkeep it (other than perhaps giving it a bit of a dust occasionally!).

I don’t deny that in maybe ten or fifteen years that data will have become so fluid that these issues are finally outdated, that the memory of the average computer will be sufficient to carry every film I’ve ever owned without blinking an eye, and that this data will be as secure as a physical media but as easily transferable as lending a DVD to a friend or putting the box on a shelf in a new house, but we’re not there yet.

Perhaps the most important thing that I think Bill Gates is overlooking is the fondness people have for physical formats. We have lived for millennia with the idea of physical ownership and I don’t think it’s going to entirely vanish overnight, especially not without a major rethink in the way that entertainment media operates. To give an example, I’ve got an original copy of Fight Club, a great film that I thoroughly enjoy, but somehow the DVD has become scratched. This is the first time that this has happened to a disk that I own and it’s pretty frustrating (yes, physical media definitely has its risks too!) but I don’t want to pay for it again, so I might get a friend to run off a copy of the one he owns. I’ve paid for it, so why shouldn’t I own it? In the future of Bill Gates there will be no physical evidence of ownership to justify replacement and if one film becomes damaged the whole collection could go.

It’s the job of people like Bill Gates to be optimistic about the future, but I think on this one he’s underestimated people’s attachment to physical media. To use another paradigm, electronic ink may be the future of newspapers, but I can’t see books disappearing in our lifetimes.

During the 1990s the ATM system (hole-in-the-wall cash machines) had a massive critical flaw in the way that PIN numbers were generated, and the one barrister who could force the banks to take action was taken off the case.

This sounds like a pretty dull read, but it’s weirdly gripping. If you’ve got a few minutes on a break I highly suggest going through this article just to see how unsecure our financial institutions were for over a decade and how little they did about it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/21/phantoms_and_rogues/

Interesting stuff.

I know this is very un-geek chic of me, but like many people the foibles of Microsoft Word frequently escape my understanding. Things that I set one day seem to vanish, other times it will constantly decide to print everything in blue with flowers instead of dots on the ‘i’s.* This chap has worked on The Daily Telegraph for many years, sorting out those simple but niggling problems with computers and now he’s started a blog:

http://www.propellerhead.tv/

It’s only been going for a little while, but it’s already got some nice tips on there, like how to create a desktop shortcut to shutdown Windoze XP. It’s not life changing stuff, but it’s the little things that make the difference sometimes.

*may not be entirely true

It’s a tough choice: do I give my details to countless rubbish firms I don’t want to hear from in return for a very funky Jesus T-shirt?

Tricky. I’m not sure if they supply to the UK, so it’s probably not a real dilemma. The design is pretty cool though…

http://www.hipchristians.com/

I suspect that they don’t really intend to be linked to by people who enjoy kitsch Christian merchandise!

Anything $ony can do, Ninten-cando too.

Do you remember little while ago I wrote about a trojan that could turn your PSP into a very nicely designed brick? Well, not to be outdone, Nintendo’s DS has got a couple of its own too.

The first one is getting in the same way as the PSP trojan, using home-brew creation/playing software to trick people into putting the software onto your machine. Dubbed the ‘DSBrick’ trojan, it works to turn your lovely fun toy into a lump of unusable plastic and components. More about that one here.

The second one apparently gets in through downloads of applications to show hentai (Japanese cartoon pornography of women) on your machine. This is a more common approach for hackers. Pornography has always been a good way of launching attacks on people’s machines because the user is less likely to report what they were trying to do to authorities. It’s sneaky, but nothing new, other than the fact that it’s attacking hand-held machines. Source here.

I really fail to see how anyone other than Nintendo stands to benefit from this, all that happens is that a load of strangers end up scared to use non-commercially produced products, putting users off from experimenting with new software on their machines. That certainly doesn’t do any favours for small software designers, who are the kind of people who have the jobs that many of these malicious programmers would one day like to get.

To look at this from another point of view, the PSP’s curved corners make it a difficult building block, but the DS has straight edges. Out of the two, the DS is ultimately going to prove the most useful building material, so if you own both and fancy turning one of your machines into a brick then I suggest that the DS with give the best results.

After the massively successful recent series of Doctor Who there will be a new series next year. After that series has finished there will be a new 13 episode series called Torchwood starring the Captain Jack character.

It will be shown on BBC3, a slightly off-mainstream branch of BBC television that generally aims its programming at a slightly more cult audience. The programme is described as being aimed at adults so it will be shown after 9pm. Unlike Doctor Who, that travels around many locations, Torchwood will be set in Cardiff, keeping the same location each week. “The drama features investigators solving human and alien crime.” Who would have thought that so much alien crime happens in Cardiff?

Actually, having met a few people from Cardiff…

“It’s going to be a dark, wild and sexy roller-coaster ride…I can’t wait to explore Captain Jack even more,” says John Barrowman, the chap who plays Captain Jack. Given Jack’s flirting with the Doctor and the writer Russel T. Davies’ history of writing scripts about gay issues (Queer As Folk, for example) I’m going to be very interested to see how this turns out. It should be a good laugh, and Davies hasn’t done anything bad yet. Even his very early work on the children’s sci-fi series Dark Season was fantastic.

Torchwood should be on screens at the end of 2006 after next year’s Doctor Who series has been shown. More details here (BBC News) and here (official announcement with links to interviews).