Archive For December, 2009
Okay, that’s it. First decade of the new century over, and we’ve got almost nothing good to show for it, physics-wise.That’s bad. We only get ten of these per century. One down, only another nine to go before 2100. If we’re burning through resources at…
Okay, that’s it. First decade of the new century over, and we’ve got almost nothing good to show for it, physics-wise.That’s bad. We only get ten of these per century. One down, only another nine to go before 2100. If we’re burning through resources at…
I am adding something new to my cv – dog handling. Over the last couple of weeks I have learnt key skills such as how to walk a dog without a. strangling it and b. getting caught up in its extra long, totally impractical lead and falling over. Also, I have learnt how to pick up [...]
Normally with a field theory, you have some idea where to start. You start by defining the shape and other properties of your “landscape” space, and then you add your field to that context, and watch what it does when you play with it.But in a general …
Normally with a field theory, you have some idea where to start. You start by defining the shape and other properties of your “landscape” space, and then you add your field to that context, and watch what it does when you play with it.But in a general …
It’s not often that you get to use the word ‘treacherous’ but I’ve used it several times recently to describe conditions outside my front door. I ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ when the first flurries appeared and gaily laughed at the children shoving snow down each other’s pants on their way to school. But then my road [...]
English-language physics textbooks (before the mid-1970′s) tend to give the impression that everyone had agreed that black holes couldn’t radiate. It was supposed to be mathematically proved. Done deal.But there’s a slight geographical cultural bias. N…
English-language physics textbooks (before the mid-1970′s) tend to give the impression that everyone had agreed that black holes couldn’t radiate. It was supposed to be mathematically proved. Done deal.But there’s a slight geographical cultural bias. N…
As I’m in the process of sorting out all of my data in order to make my on and offline operations a little smoother, it seemed like a good time to tackle this oversight. I’m also tantalisingly close to having my own personal website ready to launch and have needed to deal with this as part of the background work on that.
Whilst sifting through URLs, one of the little treats I came across was this site (click on the link and follow the instructions) that enables visitors to turn their Last.fm profiles into a Wordle image. What that means to those who have or have used neither is making a word picture from the music that I most listen to.
Last.fm ‘scrobbles‘ (sends the data to your internet profile) the music that you play on your computer and builds a picture of your listening habits, enabling you to connect to other like-minded music fans. Wordle itself is a great tool for visualising texts, and is particularly effective and finding themes in longer pieces. It does this by taking the words that are used most often in a text and making them bigger than the other words that are used less often. It’s a tool that I really ought to use more in the classroom, but like with so many more of the online tools available to all these days, have yet to sift through them fully enough and actually try and be innovative with them. Guess that’s part of what my data sift is about too – might help me to become a better teacher.
Although I might contest the results, it seems that I’m STILL listening to The Beatles more than any other artist. Rhombus, a dub act from New Zealand that I came across in Tokyo, seem to come in second, which I’d probably agree with. I also apparently listen to a lot of Tom Waits and David Bowie, again something I’d agree with. One or two surprises there though. Didn’t think that I listen to that much Mozart.
