Into the Wild

This morning my alarm was most unwelcome at 8. I had to drag my body out of bed, to the table, where I checked that my exam was at 10. The sheet says it's tomorrow. I find it hard to believe, as my timetable is firmly in my head, and it's today. But I have to believe the blue official-ness of the paper. I go back to bed, now only worried as to whether the shock will have made me unable to sleep. I doze for a while then sink into strange vivid dreamworld.

I am taking a party of fellow students to visit another student's house. Her father is going to pick us up from the train station. We arrive, and mill around with the hundreds of other people there, some of them other people I know. My phone rings and it's Jason, who is the brother of the person we've come to visit (at least in the dream, in real life he's the brother of a friend of mine from years back). I say "where are you" and he replies "look in the mirror". There being no mirror in sight, I look behind me, but he says, "no, look in the mirror". Then he says nothing more, but I hold the phone to my ear still, listening to the faint white noise.

Blessed Relief

People told me that I would probably do better in my exams than I thought I would. After my second (of seven) exams this morning, I'm beginning to think they were right. I've already had the two I was most worried about, and I think I did ok. When I had attempted past papers at home, I had been pretty stumped. The papers did not just highlight some areas where my knowledge was lacking, the whole glorious fraud of my student career seemed brilliantly illuminated.

Perhaps these papers were harder than those of the last couple of days, perhaps the last minute cramming I did managed to fill the voids. But I suspect a large factor was my sheer inability to muster any kind of excitement about doing the mock exams, whereas the real things carry some power to wake me up and shine light into the dark corners of my knowledge.

The flora of my garden

My garden is what you might call a small pseudo-woodland. Those who have seen it are probably already giggling, as it could equally accurately be described as a neglected mess, but bear with me, please.

The high storey of vegetation consists of sycamore trees (Acer pseudoplatanus), in my and my neighbours' gardens. The understorey contains large shrubs like elder (Sambucus nigra) and Forsythia. The groundcover consists largely of buttercup, or celandine (Ranunculus ficaria), bluebells (Hyancinthus) and spurge (Euphorbia). At the moment, there is an attractive burst of their various colours - the blue, white and pink bluebells, the green flowers of the spurge and the orangey-gold of the buttercups set each other off well.

One could certainly call that a typical woodland flora. There are a few anomalies, though. Sycamores are not native to the UK, they have naturalised over the last few hundred years. Because they have not co-existed with the insects of this country for all that long, they do not provide habitat for many species. Anyone who has parked their car under a sycamore in spring or summer and had it covered in honeydew (excreted by aphids in their millions) may dispute this point. I'm speculating here, but the non-native status of sycamore may just explain why aphids are so abundant on it. My hypothesis is that few of aphid's natural predators have found their niche in sycamore trees, whereas the aphids themselves have.

The bluebells are probably not native, either. These are unlikely to be the native bluebell found in old woodland throughout England, but more likely the larger Italian species, or a hybrid between them. Again, purists and ecologists would regard them as inferior to the native species, as they have not cohabited, so to speak, with the natives, so they do not have an established role in the ecosystem. I'm assuming that this is also the case with the spurges, as I don't think a native spurge would grow to almost three feet tall, as those in my garden do.

Funnily enough, the celandine is native, although it is regarded as a problem species in gardens, being very hard to eradicate. It's also known as pilewort, as it is reputed to help with the irritating condition called piles. Another hypothesis: that it has acquired this name through the shape of its miniature tubers (which scatter when you try to remove it - so often when inexperienced gardeners are weeding, instead of achiving the desired result of removing the plant, they are actually propagating multiple clones) - enough said.

Other vegetation includes nettles (Urtica dioica, native and lovely), lemon balm (Melissa officinalis, not native), Fatsia japonica (maybe native to Japan?) and loads of ivy (Hedera helix, native). There used to be a California lilic (Ceanothus) but it died. There's also a lot of a pretty variegated dead-nettle, don't know the Latin. Relics of previous tended gardens include a climbing pink rose, pampas grass, reeds. Weedy trees such as the sycamore and also the native ash (Fraxinus Exelsior, native) are seeding themselves. There are occasional brambles, although I tend to pull them out if I ever go out there, as they trip me up.


The common factor in most of these plants is that they are shade-tolerant. Obviously, that 's a big advantage in a woodland, and in a neglected patch of shady land, I suppose those are the species that will thrive.

I have occasionally thrown a few seeds on some bare soil, but nothing I have planted has been able to compete with the established vegetation. I don't think I'll try again. Many of the species may not be true natives, but they're doing OK and amidst the chaos, lots of insects and larger animals can find a niche.

Exam stress and fish

Seesaw is the word, I think, to describe my stress level fluctuation. It's funny to me how ubiquitous the term stressed has become when describing how one is feeling. In engineering terms, stress is a measure of how much force is acting on an object. Clearly, the meaning is quite different when applied to a human. But everyone seems to know what I'm talking about when I say I'm stressed. Strain, by the way, is the deformation which occurs to objects under stress. I think I've been feeling the strain, too!

Anyway, exams are nearly upon my fellow students and myself. I find myself getting stressed to the point where I can't think any more. I have done a little training in maintaining one's awareness in high stress situations (providing security to visiting dignitaries), and I recognise that cognitive impairment is a normal result of stress. In fact, there is an interesting progression in impairments as the level of stress one is under increases. I can't remember the details too well, but other things that are affected by rising adrenaline are one's fine motor skills (relatively quickly) and at some point gross motor skills (if these decline, you're really in trouble). In other words, if you think someone's about to attack you when returning home late at night, you might struggle to insert your doorkey into the lock. You'll probably retain the ability to turn around and knock them flying (before realising it's your inebriated flatmate).

Anyway, the level of stress that exam revision gives me is a more chronic one, rather than an acute attack. I wake up in the morning and think "Oh, God, I have to get myself together for my exams'" and the feeling often stays with me all day. Certain things help: ironically not the things one would expect. Although actually doing some revision is of course important, I've found it equally important to get out of the house periodically: to go shopping, to visit friends, or just to have a walk. Exercise has been good: my friend has been teaching me a bit of yoga. The pain took my mind right off the exams!

I was also lucky enough to spend a few days in Menorca last week. And I found the best cure for stress. Swimming in the icy sea with hundreds of fish all around me.

Eliza and Tony

Eliza has been in the news a bit recently. She was the computer program back in the sixties, I think, that could act like a psychotherapist. All she, let's say 'it' did was to make encouraging or challenging comments, feeding back a little of what someone had said to it.

Anyway, I was just reading various blogs on technology, and I found one which works the other way around. I think the writer is actually a human, but he does a good impression of a lifeless robot! I was going to be nasty and include a link, but I found out that you can search for who links to your blog at blog search. You just type in "link:your-blog-here.blogspot.com" and it tells you who links to your blog. So Tony might have been a bit miffed, if he is indeed human.

A new use for a USB stick

Also known as pen drives, flash drives or memory sticks, these little devices are used by many of my fellow students to carry their work around on, so that it's available whatever computer they are using. You can now get 4 gig ones, big enough to carry large movies. Mine is 256 megabytes; I only bought it because there is a minimum amount for a card transaction in the College shop. I've rarely used it, instead relying on SSH, email, google docs and my laptop to carry stuff around, but mostly relying on not bothering to organise stuff so that I have lots of different versions of my work on different computers. I have to say, I wouldn't recommend it as a way of working.

Included in Windows Vista is a nice little feature that enables you to use your flash memory as virtual memory. What's virtual memory? Ok, a little explanation for those that are interested. Programs that run on your computer use memory, right? Also known as RAM, this stuff is (usually) volatile (i.e. what's on it is lost when you turn off the machine) and fast. In fact it's many, many times faster to access than a hard drive. There are other memories on your computer which are faster, namely the caches, which store bits of memory which are accessed frequently, and, fastest of all, the registers, which store tiny snippets of vital stuff, like what line of the program comes next. The latter two things are generally on the processor chip itself.

So when you start a program, it will load some or all of itself into memory. There is typically a maximum of 4 gigabytes of addressable memory in a desktop machine, hence the limit on how much RAM you can install. In the past this limit was absolute: you couldn't write a program that needed more that 4 gigs (and it would have been unthinkable in the days when this limit was set) and all the running programs could add up to no more than that figure. Indeed, the limit was usually a lot less, depending on how much actual memory was in your machine. I remember my iMac telling me No you can't start another program up.

The workaround for these problems is what is known as Virtual Memory. To say it simply, this involves allocating space on the hard drive which can be used to store parts of running programs. Usually a program will be using only some of it's code at any time, so large chunks can be written out into the hard drive. If that bit is needed, it's fetched again. This of course takes time, so there are ways of guessing whether particular bits of code will not be needed. Sometimes when you're doing a lot on the computer, it can pause for a time. This background process of swapping stuff onto and off the hard drive is one of the reasons. If you're not using a program, but it's still open in the background, much of the memory used can be swapped out, so when you start to try to work with it again, it can take quite a while to "warm up".

In order to make this process faster, you need a virtual memory storage that is faster to read than a hard drive. That's where flash memory comes in. It's cheap and much quicker than a HD. Recognising that, Microsoft have enabled flash memory in the form of USB sticks to be used for a certain amount of VM. Sorry, getting a bit acronym heavy. That seems to happen in IT. Urg. Within the settings for the stick you can allocate a certain proportion of it to be used for VM. The computer will then recognise it and use it whenever you insert it. And apparently you can remove it at any time, with the only penalty that you lose the speed advantage again.

I have yet to try it, as it seems my USB stick has give up the ghost. But I will. I'm looking forward to seeing if it speeds up performance.

I have eco balls

What these are are balls that you put into the washing machine when you do a load of laundry. They do the same job as washing powder or liquid, but last for much longer.And I think I could say that they work. Apparently "they produce ionized oxygen that activates the water molecules naturally and allows them to penetrate deep into clothing fibres to lift dirt away." They cost about £35, but should last long enough to do a thousand washes. That's a lot of money saved. I just read on the website that you can use a low temperature, short wash with them too. Pretty cool. They get the seal of approval.