Arbitrary

Arbitrary is not my favourite word, these days. To say the least. Whether it is a real concept or not is not a matter for this blog to discuss. Ok, maybe it is, a bit. Arbitrary is defined as

1.	subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one's discretion: an arbitrary decision.

2.	decided by a judge or arbiter rather than by a law or statute.

3.	having unlimited power; uncontrolled or unrestricted by law; despotic; tyrannical: an arbitrary government.

4.	capricious; unreasonable; unsupported: an arbitrary demand for payment.

5.	Mathematics. undetermined; not assigned a specific value: an arbitrary constant.

[ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/arbitrary]

These are some emotive definitions, right? And apparently arbitrary events can be extremely irritating. A job interview that is only offered at one specific time, which happens to be at the very time when you need to be on the other side of the country. User names you are given over which you have no control, especially when they have a vulgar connotation. A computer fault which means you may or may not have access to the Internet.

In fact none of these events are arbitrary, as such. There are valid reasons for them to occur. Interestingly, computers may be involved in all these situations. The computer is simply folowing the instructions with which it has been programmed, leading to a situation which is not ideal for somebody. The 'computer says no' scenario. We have checked our records and you do not exist.

A computer can easily allocate user names according to a certain rule. In the case of the Computer Science Department here at Queen Mary, the first two letters of your first name, the first letter of your last name and an integer are concatenated. My username is therefore sil1. Quite reasonable and appropriate, in fact better than my real name, no? short, sweet and impossible to confuse with sil2 or later sils. But what if my name was Sam Peterson? I'd be sap1, or, perhaps worse, sap2. How about Burton Moffat, Tim Taylor or Vanessa Gordon (the sixth).

Ok, I'll stop making people up now. I know ruts and peds and various other slightly uncomfortable (to me) user names. I'm sure that if you really had a problem with your name, you could change it, the people here are very nice.

The point I'm making is that actually, there is nothing arbirary about the process of allocating names. I expect a lot of thought went into choosing the appropriate format. At least the names are short, and quite easy to remember. My general username for the university is much more of a headful - ac06187. It took me quite a while to remember it, and on the library helpdesk I often encountered people who had forgotten theirs.

Likewise, decisions made by people may appear arbitrary but are made according to rules applied by that person. They may not even be aware of the rules, and the rules may be as simple as 'I want to get home, so I'm going to go with the first timeslot I have available, without checking whether this fits with the other person's availability'. This is laziness. I recognise that a lot of the things I criticise as being arbitrary, are where a fellow human has not been prepared to negotiate; they have simply imposed a situation on me. It's that lack of communication, lack of care, which is frustrating.

Lucky number seven

A computer contains a (surprisingly small) number of interconnected main components. Main ones:

• CPU or chip
• RAM or main memory
• Hard drive or other bulk storage
• Buses, the wiring between these components

All of them need to operate at a similar level. It's pointless having a super-fast chip when your memory can only input and output data very slowly. And vice versa. And that pretty much applies to the cartesian product of all four of these components (i.e. how each interacts with each other).

Well, I've come to the conclusion that I have some kind of mismatch between the components of my brain. My thoughts sometimes go so fast that there's no way to store them, and I sort of lose them halfway. Apparently our RAM is pretty small, or rather, contains a small number of discrete storage areas, seven being the classic number. It may be that this is the bottleneck, that because I need to keep track of more than this number of things, that suddenly the whole idea just kind of collapses.

I don't know. Anyway, what was I doing?

The Joy of Texts

Sorry for the unoriginal title. This is a discussion of when texting is appropriate and when not.

Is texting appropriate in the following situations?

1. You're running late for an appointment.
2. To ask somebody whether they are free on such and such a date
3. To update somebody on your mood
4. To ask someone to marry you
5. To dump someone

Answers:

1. Yes
2. No
3. Yes
4. Duh
5. Maybe

Comments are welcome. I think the only contentious one is 2. I will supply the reasons later...

Happy birthday happy world

It's the New Year now (Tibetan) which feels about right, as the sap is rising.

I don't have a lot to say, except, who could doubt Darwin, when watching a human eat a banana? I mean...

Anyway, unprovable theories. Which are called theses, as it happens, due to their not having been proved. One of them is that of Church. Church's thesis, says, in a nutshell, that any computable function can be computed by a Turing machine. Which is possible to disprove, by finding one that isn't, but never to prove. Because there happen to be rather a lot of computable functions out there.

But is Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection provable? Well, it has been observed in various populations that they can quite swiftly change in response to changing environments. Not just micro-organisms, either, Darwin's own Galapagos finches have been extensively studied and seem to morph in response to changing climatic conditions. I say 'seem to' because one can never say with certainty that the change in beak thickness has been caused by the fact that there has been a drought, and that that in turn has favoured young with thicker bills. Perhaps it is a natural fluctiation; perhaps both effects were caused by another factor.

But common sense, such as I have, leads me to believe that one has caused the other. Indirectly, but nevertheless unstoppably. It is such an obvious idea that creatures that mutate (and surely that has been proven) would mutate in directions which enabled them to live longer and therefore be more likely to breed, that I cannot resist it.

As for Church's thesis, I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to disprove it...

Stuckness

I always seem to be stuck on something, these days. In the mathematical modules I'm taking, I'm always stuck on some theorem or other. And in the more practical programming courses, I'm inevitably stuck somewhere in the program. It's extremely rare that I just code and it's done, there's always a process of looking at the error messages and trying to figure out a) what they mean and b) how to correct them.

I guess this is how one learns, but it's a bit frustrating.

Lack of inspiration

I haven't had much inspiration to write new posts recently. This is not because I have completely lost interest in life; the topics I've been interested in have either been too personal (my love life), too nerdy (setting up web servers) or slightly confidential (my third year project). Perhaps my generally relaxed condition after the summer is also helping. Or rather, hindering.

All you never wanted

Round my way, eBay is not the preferred way of disposing of unwanted items, nor is it Gumtree. It is not even the fantastic bulky item disposal service provided gratis by the council. No, indeed, we prefer to just put stuff out on the street. If it is stuff that we are proud of, or we don't care what people think of us, we put it in front of our house. Sometimes, if it's something we are not so proud of, we put it in the shrubbery across the road.

I recently disposed of quite a number of items in this way. I have to say, the quality of the items I left on the street was fairly high, knowing as I do, that items will only get taken if somebody can think of a use for them. 9in fact, I myself was temted by a few things, and did stop to pick up a couple of pens on my way to school.) Having said that, I surmised that I really have very little idea of what somebody else might come up with a use for, so I tried my luck with all kinds of things. I will itemise those things that I can remember. All these things have been taken, over the last week.

An electric lawnmower (working)
A Dyson vacuum cleaner (hmm, not quite working)
A small radio/cassette player
Assorted small tiles
A large tub of tile fixative
A coat
Some brocade curtains
Various rubber stamps and ink
Assorted stationary
A hostess trolley
Assorted plates
Two calor gas fires
Three calor gas bottles (2 were later returned!)
A speaker
A thermos flask
Two pyrex dishes with lids
A pink lamp
About 8 beautifully made shutters with louvres

The only things that did not get taken were:

Four white dining chairs (I took them inside after 3 days when it rained, and decided I should keep them)
A box of large tiles (I'm leaving them outside:somebody must want them)
A canister of diesel oil
Two walnut effect curved cabinet doors (when my neighbour said he thought it unlike that anyone would take them, I mentioned that I had picked them up from outside somebody else's house)
A trestle table! I thought this would be highly desirable.