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.

My brain is decaying

I forgot to go to work on Sunday.

Yesterday I changed somebody's name on the library database. To a number!

I'm wondering what is next?

Is there a global electricity tide?

I was sitting on the bus thinking about electricity. As you do. Britain and France's national grids are connected, so that surplus energy in one network can be used by another. This is helpful because power stations tend to take a while to get up to full efficiency, so it is best to keep them running almost constantly. Power usage, however, rises and falls dramatically according to the time of day.

Having a national grid irons out some of the peaks and troughs, due to variations in power consumption across the country. Energy companies also sell night-time electricity at a discounted rate, often to businesses but also to consumers with storage heaters, that use power in the night and release the heat throughout the day.

The bigger the grid you have, the more that local variations are taken care of, by using power piped in from somewhere there is less demand. So it was a great leap forward to connect our little island with mainland Europe by underwater high voltage cables. We can now borrow electricity from France and they from us. The morning surge when people switch their kettles on happens an hour earlier in France, due to the time difference. So I expect we send them lots of power for that. Likewise we boil the kettle for our hot water bottles a little later than them.

Gas can be stored relatively easily, but to store electricity is prohibitively expensive and quite inefficient, so there exist various ways to store potential energy that has been created with electricity. In Wales there are a couple of 'pumped storage' power stations, that use cheap off-peak electricity to pump water up a few hundred metres to a reservoir. When there is a power surge, the plug is pulled and the water rushes down, though turbines and generates a lot of power for an hour or so.

Another proposed solution is to use pressurised air stored in huge natural cave systems. And a perhaps more practical option is to use the electricity to seperate Oxygen and Hydrogen in water. Hydrogen can be stored (although it is a lot more explosive than natural gas) and can run engines or fuel cells for static or mobile energy generation.

Anyway, my musing was more about whether the grids of France are connected to those of Germany and other countries . I was imagining this surge of power flowing westward towards the sunset. But having arrived in Ireland, where would it go? Are there transatlantic power cables? Somehow I doubt it. Guess I'll have to do a teeny bit of research, before starting my revision proper.

http://www.terrawatts.com/ - the page *for* a global electricity network
http://climate.blog.co.uk/2006/05/09/the_global_electricty_grid~786943 - an intelligent dissenter
http://www.smm.org/buzz/blog/think_globals_electric_car_city - a cool electric car project
http://www.hybridcars.com/news/car-electric-grid-utopia-caveats.html - more cool car stuff

Ok, these last couple were interesting in the sense that they are talking about car energy storage as a potentially two-way flow. In other words, the car is charged when it is cheapest, but could potentially be harnessed as an energy source at peak times. The last page linked to suggests "all the energy needs for the entire United States could be run for five hours from a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids, if those vehicles held enough battery energy to run a vehicle in all-electric mode for 33 miles". It sounds good, but are people really going to want to have their car batteries only partially charged?

Dogs barking

I just spent half an hour stomping around in the little park, building up the steam needed to write an article complaining about dog owners. And you could say that I ended up with a full cylinder.

The problem is that the sugar transporting layer in a tree is just under the bark. If you remove the bark it damages that area, and if you remove the bark all the way around a tree it will kill the tree. In fact, ring barking, as it is known, is a forester's trick for killing unwanted trees.

One of the reasons why squirrels are generally disliked is that they chew off bark from the branches of trees, to get at the sweet sugar carrying layer beneath. That layer, called the phloem, is vital in allowing the tree to transport sugars, both up the branch or tree in spring and down later in the year. If a branch gets no sugar in spring, it will die. If the squirrels kill enough branches or ring bark the trunk of the tree, the tree effectively starves to death.

In the last few years one of the most common fashions for the younger people of this area has been to have a dog. Some of the more ferocious fighting dog breeds have been banned, so a Staffordshire terrier is the favourite. To strengthen the dog's teeth and jaws, their owners will often encourage them to hang from ropes from trees. In the event that all of the ropes have broken, they will use the trees themselves. So trees with low hanging branches soon end up with no or dead low branches, or pitiful splintered stubs.

A couple of times I have walked through the park and intervened when I've seen a dog doing this. I'm not sure if it was the same guy each time, but the reaction was, pretty much. It amounted to mind your own business, but in slightly less pleasant terms. I said, "Let's see what the police say about that," took out my phone, and feigned dialling the police. That seemed to have the desired effect.

In any case, between the two of them the dogs and the squirrels have killed several trees in the park. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was the squirrels, as the dogs weren't really around in order to have been responsible. I remember noticing that there were several standing dead trees and in retrospect, I remember that there were the telltale signs of ring barking around many of the upper branches. (Incidentally, when tree surgeons came and removed those trees from the park, I managed to persuade them to give me a lot of the wood, which I occasionally burn downstairs in the fireplace.)

Partly I'm sure that the problem is just ignorance on the part of the owners of the dogs. In fact I think a lot of people suffer from the delusion that trees are a solid and permanent part of the landscape. And certainly don't think that they could be responsible for major injury or death to a tree. I hope that it is ignorance alone which explains the fact that a beautiful, medium sized lime tree has been almost completely ring barked. I'm sure that this is not squirrels, because it is at ground level and I think that the bark is too thick for their small teeth anyway.

I expect that that tree will die. But it may take some time, and the dog owner responsible may never be aware of the destruction that they have caused.

Today I am mostly...

..in pain. My back has seized up. Actually, I woke up with a stiff upper back and neck a few days ago. But today it is much worse, for no obvious reason. I've got a rolled towel around my neck. Along with my stiff bearing, it makes me look like a character from an Oscar Wilde.

Ouch.

Further reflections on speech input and mind maps

So having done a bit of research on the Internet, I have not managed to find any mind mapping software with built in speech recognition, neither one that implements Microsoft's speech recognition interface. Sounds like a great third year project!

My musings took me further: the web itself is a nonlinear map of chunks of information, as I said. So what about a mind mapping technology that not only will display a mind map, but would also generate web pages based on the map.

Actually, mind mapping technology does not seem that difficult to construct. Certainly compared to speech recognition technology. If that speech recognition technology is available as an interface (not being a professional software developer, I maybe using the wrong terms here, apologies), then the truly hard bit has already been done for you.

By the way, the reason that I'm writing these musings into my blog is that I have not yet found a very useful tool for jotting down these preliminary thoughts. In the running are Microsoft's One Note, the new web-based tool EverNote, and one of the mind mapping tools, which I have not yet tried.

And I still haven't written what my real current idea for my third year project is.

Musings on musings on third year projects

Finally the term is drawing to a close. We have handed in our last piece of work, and I have given myself permission to start relaxing, even if I have not really started that process. Actually, perhaps I have, a bit. I'm home, and I have poured myself a beer, and I found myself spontaneously singing some kind of religious chant-like song. Walking home from the tube a cacophony of thoughts erupted in my mind, on the subject of my third year project, which I had been discussing with another student who is just finishing off her third year

The truth is, I have so many ideas but it's very difficult to decide what to do. The remit is quite large with several different types of projects available. There are some suggested ones, but you can also come up with your own ideas. And ideas are something that I am not short of. In fact, in just rehearsing some of my ideas, I came up with a new idea, or rather, came up with an idea for a tool that will be particularly useful in brainstorming and planning my project.

It's actually quite a simple idea, that fuses two already existing technologies. What that is a is a fusion of Mind Map technology with speech recognition. As you may know, I'm dictating my blog, although I'm not dictating it straight into the text area within the browser, but using Wordpad, which enables all of the voice recognition shortcuts in Windows Vista, and then pasting it into the browser.

(Going contentedly in my usual way against the grain, I'm recommending Windows Vista to anybody that will listen. This is partly due to its prettiness, partly as a reaction to the torrent of abuse which has been hurled at it, and in no insignificant measure to the ease of use of the voice recognition software built in. The main difficulty that I am finding is, as I've mentioned above, the fact that some software has very good built in support for this technology, while others does not. I don't yet know why, but the fact that the good compliance is found within Microsoft software might give us a clue.)

Mind mapping is a way to collate or present information in a nonlinear way. When a policeman writes down notes in his little notebook, I'd be surprised if he did not write it down in a linear way: in other words as the information came to him he would add it after the previous chunk of information. In some ways this makes sense, because it does not waste space in the notebook. But the information is hardly likely to come to him in an ordered way.

Policeman: " Could you tell me what happened to you, starting with the details that will be crucial in our investigation, and leaving out anything irrelevant. I would prefer it if you gave it to me in chronological order, preferably with times of individual events." Well, it seems a little far-fetched.

So that information in the policeman's notebook is most likely written from left to right and from top to bottom, filling the pages. Very little structure. Of course, I'm making some assumptions about the policeman here. Apologies to any police who have much more effective ways of taking notes. I'm just making a point.

Now in contrast to that linear way of taking information, mind maps allow us to write down chunks of information in the order in which they appear, and make links between them. This is as simple as drawing each idea in its own little bubble and drawing lines between the bubbles to represent links. I have used this technique to plan essays, and found it to be very useful.

You might start with a central idea of your essay, or thesis, and as ideas linked to that occur to you (as will usually be the case, if you're a human being) you write them down in a linked bubble. As you have more ideas, more bubbles will appear with lines between them, and a spider-like structure appears on the paper in front of you. This explains another name for mind maps, spider diagrams.

(I have had quite a lot of ideas for new pieces of software over the last year or so, and a disturbing number of them have appeared on the market in that time. A part of me is hoping that simply by putting these thoughts down on paper I will cause the program I am imagining to exist.)

And what that program is, is simply a tool to make mind maps using one's voice. It is a very simple idea, and I can fully visualise the software in my head. If it does not exist, it is a definite candidate for a third year project, as I think it would be both relatively simple to implement and highly marketable. But the amusing thing is, that the reason I thought of it, was that I was thinking ahead to getting home and putting my ideas for my third year project into the computer.

Just like the policeman's notebook, this article is being written linearly. It actually puts a rather a dampener on some aspects of the creative process. Writing in this way is rather like deciding to go for a drive but your car turns out to be one of those small self-propelled vehicles on a railway track. You see some scenery but there's no way of turning off and exploring side avenues. Actually, I should qualify that, by the obvious assertion that I make so many asides and it's hard to tell what the main stream of the article is about. But in any case, you may see what I'm getting at.

So I sense another avenue of Internet research opening up before me. And of course, the Internet is the ultimate nonlinear information receptacle. I can start looking for one thing, but before long, I quickly find myself in a fascinating but completely unrelated area. It may be stretching a point but perhaps we could say that the Internet is the ultimate Mind Map.

Who says computer textbooks are dull?

So it turns out that the great Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr played a role in enabling such technologies as Bluetooth. She had been married in Germany before the war to a man who made military equipment. He explained to her how easy it was to jam the guidance signal in enemy torpedoes. When she realised he was selling his products to the Nazis, she ran away from him, ending up in Hollywood. While there she seems to have invented a frequency-hopping transmitter, which generates a signal that is far harder to jam.

Bluetooth uses frequency-hopping to minimise collisions between messages that are being sent, both between Bluetooth devices and those on wifi, which uses the same frequencies.

I discovered this while reading my textbook on Networks, by Tanenbaum. Here is a link to the e-book:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Pd-z64SJRBAC&dq=tanenbaum+networks&pg=PP1&ots=RBMSCs0ZhF&sig=nXybWj9LSUmHKpL9ACvcNbo44eQ&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tanenbaum+networks&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail