Subliminal photo taken after reading The Humans by @matthaig1

I was staring out of the window towards the emerging daylight. I could see a trace across the sky, probably a plane inbound to Heathrow. The moon lurked below the tree-line and some kind of satellite was twinkling towards me. Kind of "that's all you'll get with this amount of street lighting around".

I took a picture anyway, and then later I noted a similarity with the cover of a book I've just been reading. Just finished actually. The Humans, by Matt Haig.

It's an enjoyable and humorously written narrative about a killer alien sent to earth to tidy up some loose ends associated with recent prime number theory discoveries. They are the sort of discoveries that could give the earth extra powers.

If it sounds too much like a Doctor Who and the Daleks plotline, it is much more a story of alienation and then the discovery of love.

Our narrator, who assumes we are also from another world, gives us his perceptions of the strange planet earth, whilst he matter-of-factly goes about his amoral mission to remove the solution of the Riemann Hypothesis. He's been made into a surrogate of a Cambridge Professor - the one who'd originally solved the Riemann Hypothesis. If you are wondering, Riemann came up with the zeta function for predicting the incidence of primes in a defined integer number space. Something we all need, apparently.

As well as the moon and stars, the book's cover has a picture of a dog and a squirrel. If the math above sounds like dog-speak, the story still works with many discoveries relayed to the reader as simple observations:

An early one:

“I picked up these books and realised they both said ‘£8.99’ on the back. The interpolation of the entire language I had done with the aid of Cosmopolitan meant I knew this was the price of the books, but I did not have any money. So I waited until no one was looking (a long time) and then I ran very fast out of the shop."

A little later:

“Humans, I was discovering, believed they were in control of their own lives, and so they were in awe of questions and tests, as these made them feel like they had a certain mastery over other people, who had failed in their choices, and who had not worked hard enough on the right answers.”

Of course, things develop as our narrator becomes fascinated with the human condition - no more or I'll start to spoil it.

And I'm still wondering how the cover art became something I emulated in a photograph the next day, without realising the connection?

throwing dice along the wharf

The New Year has more or less resumed its normal rotation this week, with work restarted, traffic jams re-instigated in the usual places, TV schedules back to normal and an early start to the 2015 UK election featuring in every single news broadcast.

Like summer holiday adverts which start on Boxing Day, there's probably been a popular agreement that broadcasters get their spinometers out at the first hint of a new year speech.

The old colour coding won't hack it for the next time around, that's for sure.

Nowadays, there'll probably be talk of big data and deep dive analytics.

It'll be interesting to see how the pundits dance along the coloured wind without dangling from a rope of sand.

Meantime, here's an aerial view of Nathalie Miebach's transformation of some big data.

Weave away, boys, weave away.

In which I bung a heap of extra SSD into my MacBook Air

My day-to-day laptop is a MacBook Air, which I've had since 2010. For crunchier Mac processing I use an iMac and all my main files etc. are all backed up to the rashbre LAN. The amount of storage used in the MacBook Air has casually crept up over the years and although I'll probably replace it one day with a MacBook Pro, now isn't the right time based upon what is anticipated from Apple in the next twist of their product cycle.

Instead, I thought I'd try a simple update to the existing machine, moving it from 256Gb storage to 960Gb (about a terabyte). That should keep the machine current for a lot longer, well past when the predicted 12 inch Airs appear and MacBooks go extra long on battery life.

Apple advise that Airs are preconfigured and can't be changed. I must admit I was expecting to find that things had been soldered inside, but actually the SSD is slotted in.

I soon found a couple of places to get replacement SSDs and ordered one to see what would happen. My machine is quite an old generation although cosmetically it looks almost identical to the sleekest modern ones. This update would make the innards about twice the capacity of the latest Apple machine and well-capable of all its regular tasks.

So what to do? I used a Transcend memory kit. It's well packaged, includes all the tools, an enclosure for the old SSD and is boxed in a manner similar to Apple's own products. I should mention that the shape/configuration of the SSD is specific to the individual MacBook model and needs to be carefully selected. There's also very simplified instructions included and a youtube installation video (which I haven't watched).

The box includes the two screwdrivers for the back of the MacBook Air case and for the internal SSD. Weirdly I'd never really looked at the back of the case to spot the 8 or so screws needing removal.

Before I started to dismantle the machine, I made a copy of its existing disk to the new SSD. I used Carbon Copy Cloner for this, instead if the recommended Disk Utility. That's mainly because CCC handles any errors along the way whereas the Apple-supplied Disk Utility just stops. I then had a cloned copy of the original disk.

I decided to boot the still unopened MacBook Air from the clone attached to USB to check everything had worked. Reboot the machine with the Option key held down, select the USB-attached SSD and yes - it worked. I was moderately surprised that it was a relatively quick boot considering it was across the USB connected drive.

Then to open the case. I arranged the removed screws in a square copying the shape of the MacBook - to ensure I put them back in the right places.

Inside, the vast majority of the MacBook Air is taken up with battery. The processor, memory and SSD are a strip along the top quarter of the innards.

Carefully removing the single screw hooding in the SSD, I swapped in the new one and reassembled everything.

Then a reboot, holding down the Option+R so I could reset the startup disk to the new one.

And Yes- everything works.

Total time - 10 minutes to read instructions and assemble the initial SSD in to a small enclosure. A couple of hours to clone the disk. Ten minutes to test the replacement clone. Fifteen minutes to replace the SSD and reconfigure.

My old free space was around 50Gb. The new free space is around 830Gb. The new speed of the disk is fine. It's slower than a modern machine, partly because of the slower electronics of the 2010 version of the MacBook Air (3Gbit bus being used with 6Gbit SSD) but it is still respectably fast for its expected use.

Even more technical bit, stop here if it is already starting to read like Martian

There's a facility on SSDs called TRIM which is an adjunct to the garbage collection of deleted data. SSDs work differently from hard disks. Some say to switch on TRIM, although with Apple's latest Yosemite OS/X, it is disabled for third party SSDs. Part of the kernel extension signing to prevent rogue changes to OS/X's most sensitive components.

I decided I don't care and won't use TRIM. There is anyway a small utility called TRIM enabler, which can get around the Yosemite restriction, and I do have a copy which I could use for a short time if TRIM recovery was ever needed. Pragmatically, I don't think use of TRIM is really an issue though. I've so much more space than I'm likely to need on this machine that running with/without TRIM is rather academic. Purist tekkies may disagree, but I'll take a slow 2-3 per cent degradation over a few years in preference to twiddling around with the inner protection layers of OS/X.

So all in all, a good and simple upgrade for the MacBook Air.

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (II)

Part of the view from The Shard for New Year included a vista towards Tower Bridge and The Tower of London. Last time I walked past the Tower, it still was still surrounded by the bright red ceramic poppies, which have now been removed.

Apposite then, at the weekend, when the poppy I requested from the original installation arrived at home.

It's one of the 888,246 poppies used in the Tower of London installation 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red' which ran from 5th August to 11th November 2014, as a commemoration of the centenary of the start of the First World War.

rooks, buzzards, red kites, a little owl and a black cat

We were out and about around the country lanes.

Already fuelled from a stop in Alresford the spin through Preston Candover and Farleigh Wallop yielded plenty of unexpected wildlife spotting opportunities.

Long shadowed late afternoon sunshine silhouetted livestock as well as a few birds of prey including red kites lazily circling for easy pickings.

Not too difficult as the road edges had their share of the carnage from smaller animals. We stopped to let some moorhens cross at one point and silly pheasants could well have been on borrowed time.

The bare branches of trees at both ends of one village were filled with rooks beginning to settle for the evening.

I noticed a little owl sunlit high in a tree. Later a large buzzard swooped and accompanied us along the road for several hundred yards, branching off when it decided that an approaching black cat was perhaps somewhat ambitious.

spiky start to 2015

We welcomed the New Year from neo-futuristic Shard, which is the tall spiky building in Central London. It's still the tallest building in the European Union and was designed by Renzo Piano.

I should have read the instructions about how to get inside. Forget breweries, I can't find my way to a party in a skyscraper. I took us confidently to what I consider the front door (which is the entrance on the concourse at London Bridge).

Wrong.

It turns out that another entrance on the other side by Joiner Street is the main one for revellers whereas the one I'd gone to was more or less the 'business' entrance.

Into the second entrance, which also turned out to be wrong. There's another one right next to it which houses the express lifts to the right floor and its panoramic views across London.

A useful tip to remember is that there's also a bar area which at other times should be easier to access and for the price of a London cocktail gives fabulous views across London.

And not something I'd normally mention, but the loos have an exceptional outlook too. In my case right across to the Houses of Parliament...

But, of course, we were there to celebrate the start of the year.

Here's to a fine 2015.

Happy New Year.

end of 2014 photo recap

Bike ridden for the last time in 2014 this afternoon. Can see the back of the fridge again in places. Video snapshots created. Now to start the 2015 prep.

frozen end of year chirped pulse amplification of petawatt beams

A few end of year reflections on the state we're in. I know, it will all be on t'internet, where everyone can read and gasp over these comments for years to come.

Except, in general, even privately authored public blogs only get a generally small readership.

When I first started this blog thing, I deliberately kept the name away from my own as a sort of air gap. Actually, various systems are able to rejoin the broken links nowadays, probably by following the IP breadcrumbs as well as the larger cookies. All so they can try to sell me a lawnmower/telescope/wine subscription and confusingly sparkly jewellery,

It leads nicely to the lazy journalism stories of social media being hacked and secrets of all kinds being spilled. Yes, if you are famous and put a selfie of something embarrassing about yourself onto a public forum, it will probably get re-tweeted. And if you are a big corporation, expect people to want to dig into your secrets. Take the Orion project's laser performance at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, for example.

And yes, if you reply to one of those chain mail get rich quick things, you will certainly get more. No surprises there, nor with the Russian bride and other scam letters.

Still internetting, narcissism accelerates with the continued rise of the selfie. I used to take self portraits as a kind of test or to use up the last frame of a roll of film. Nowadays there's a special stick for a cameraphone (it has a rude name sometimes which I won't repeat here) and it's used to take 'better' selfies. It's commonplace to see theses sticks brandished around certain parts of London, like Traf Square.

A similar effect also extends to videos, with the celebrity buckets of ice tipping and a curious lack of information about the amount actually donated to related charities.

Of course, donations to charity by phone and online continue, although the next twist of the Search Engine Optimisation scams create interesting dilemmas. The winner of The Apprentice has a derivative business idea based upon SEO although I assume it won't be the guerrilla format increasingly used. Take the new Dart Charge - the regular 'Dart Charge' search can be disabled and a substitute result applied. The parasitic substitute 0903 phone number site then charges £1.53 per minute to connect to the real call centre site.

Disappointing to me is the lack of political satire now available as we watch destabilisation politics from the main parties as they try to keep us guessing about what is really happening. The Beeb are probably scared because of their charter renewal and the commercial stations have to worry about the advertisers, so we are left to puzzle at daily conflicting information.

I can only watch George Osborne in so many colourful hard hats and high-via jackets and like many (but not - it would appear the deficit avoiding Opposition), I'm wondering about: (a) what happens to all that Quantatitive Easing money we keep printing? (b) why some of the dodgy bankers don't get put in prison? (c) who is getting fat eating all the pies? There's many more questions, but I'll save some for next year.

The Westminster villagers continue to have cosy expenses whilst idling and posturing for the next fixed term election - they find ever imaginative ways to look busy whilst doing little until next May.

I'm of a view that we need somehow to have an operating system upgrade for the U.K. It's hard to know what is possible given the lack of options? It can't include that dangerous cartoon character who has boasted of using his European expenses allowance to fund his 'get out' party.

It's probably a calculated positioning by the other parties to let it run because bizarrely they become the 'least unacceptable' choices instead of a genuinely good choice.

But that's probably enough for the moment.

I usually keep these blog posts to ten minutes and a picture, so this one is already something of an overrun. In the words of that frozen cartoon movie that I only just managed to watch: Let it go, let it go, let it go.

changing the London meaning of red circle with white C?

I drive regularly in and around London and so have my car set up for the Congestion Charge payment scheme via Automatic Number Plate Recognition. It means I don't have to worry about manual payment or penalties when I trip the London Congestion Charge zone.

The symbol for congestion charge is a red circle with a white C inside it. Easy enough? Yes, until the recent Dart Charge system opened for the Dartford crossing. It's at the east side of London where the River Thames is crossed by either a tunnel (northbound) or a bridge (southbound). For years it had a series of toll booths, but they have been recently replaced with ANPR style cameras which match the car registration with a payment.

The symbol for the system? A red circle with a white C.

Exactly the same as the Congestion Charge.

So someone using the Congestion charge ANPR system for payment could be forgiven for thinking that the same system works for the bridge and tunnel?

Brrrp. No.

It doesn't. Although its another automatic number plate recognition system, it's entirely different. The hours of use are different and the messages on the approaches say you'll need to pay by midday the following day, although it's not really that clear about how, except they say 'find us online'.

Actually, especially from the south side the toll messages can blend in with the various road works, diversion, no unaccompanied flammables, new road layout under construction and similar sets of signage. There's also still a barrier which automatically rises and which, particularly during the Christmas/New Year period, gives the impression that the system may be switched off. Just like London Congestion Charge which is suspended from 25th December to 1st January.

Fortunately I've done all of the search online stuff and am suitably Dart Charge enabled.

When I enrolled, it asked for the car registration and payment detail, and, at the time, I had two crossings to pay for. This is where there's another interesting aspect. There is no Pay button on the website. After enrolling, I still had to phone a separate 0300 number to pay for the prior crossings. And I had to pay the full price instead of the "I'm enrolled" discount price. The call centre system helpfully asks for the vehicle registration number when you call it, before placing into a queuing system.

Unfortunately, the chap that answered the call didn't have the car reg. information from the queuing system. Nor did he have the information from the payment system that I'd entered, so I had to go through it all again. I asked him why there was no pay button on the web-site. He said he didn't know, but I was far from the first person to make that comment.

I've used the system again since that time and it does seem to be working now, so I won't be one of what The Highways Agency calls 'first time offenders' with 14 days of grace to pay the first bill.

Apparently on the first full day of the scheme roughly 10,000 Penalty Charge Notices were sent out to motorists. The full fine is £70 unless paid by the midnight after the crossing and it rises to £105 if not paid within 28 days.

I should be paying £1.67 per crossing now on the significantly faster toll gate.

analogue games overtake digital at rashbre central

We're far more analogue in our choice of games at Christmas. The ones that involve curling up newspapers and wrapping up people. That kind of thing. And oranges. Yes. Games with oranges where we all end up on the floor.

Maybe a board game or two - I'm expecting to play the one where we have to be Uranium Miners at some point. For computerised games, I'll stick to 'Heads Up', which is the very simple iPhone game that sort of replaces paper in the usual stickers on the forehead type of games. Great fun, free and easy to set up.

I've posted some of the games involving old wrapping paper, sticky tape, fruit and the like in past years. Here's a few, which can be played at everything from amateur through to full Pro standard.

Required items: Wrapping paper, sticky tape, magazines, newspapers, highlighter pen, pins, people mainly capable of speech.

1) Guess the name : Yes - simply providing the guests with paper hats or pin on labels which they can't see with the name of a sleb on it. They have to guess with the Yes/No answers. Marilyn Monroe, that politician bloke who drinks the beer on telly, Frankenstein, Albert Einstein, Justin Bieber, Jason Bourne, 007, Mickey Mouse, Madonna, Beyonce. You get the idea.
2) Dress the person : Kinetic Game, two teams: 2-5 minutes. Select someone to be dressed using either old wrapping paper or a couple of recent magazines or newspapers.
3) Kipper racing : multiple teams. needs a long clear indoor space. cut or tear a largish fish shape from a sheet of wrapping paper or anything similar to hand. Add detail such as a hole for the eye, maybe a dorsal fin. Lie them flat on the floor and give other team members further sheets of paper/magazines to use to create air currents to propel the fish from a start line to a distant improvised finishing line.
4) Tell a tale : Pre select some groups of 7 unusual words from a magazine or newspaper article. Hand them to each team and and ask each team member in turn to tell a story using the seven words. Other teams have to try to guess the words.
(Example words from random article today : luckier; heterosexual; chevrolet; banana; promoted; quitter; eggs. and from another page: emissions; cruise; leisurely; overcome; scoop; howling; endurance...you get the idea.)
5) Pass the orange : Why wait until after the dinner has finished to play this game? goes great with coffee.
6) Pictionary: drawing fast pictures based upon words. The boxed set is best for this one.
7) GrEEn GlaSS dOOr : The person in charge suggests playing this and that everyone else can try to be selected to go through the green glass door by suggesting appropriate pairs of things. Things that get in are a pOOl but no water; glaSS but no picture; MiRRor but no reflection (ie the first thing needs a double letter in it.. Play till last person gets it)
8) GGD variants : Play GGD (7) where instead of double letters, each sentence said by the next person has to start with a vowel "...and blah blah bla; ...or blah blah blah ...obviously" and another variant vowel/then consonant and another variant is start with next letter of alphabet.
9) Alphabet Game : Choose topic (Animals, Cars, Candy Bars, Popstars, Drinks). Start at A and round robin through to Z.
10) Stirring the Mush : Announce you are stirring the mush and (eg stand up, sit down, scratch your ear etc). Then start stirring the mush by any hand/body gesture you like. The invite someone to copy. the trick is thay have to do what you did BEFORE you started stirring the mush (eg scratch ear etc). Tell them whether they have passed or not then select next 'victim'. Repeat until all have worked it out.
11) Erect-a-pup : More newspaper for this two in -oner. Part one. Teams. who can make the longest tube in 2 minutes from rolled up paper? Sounds easy. Just watch what happens. Part Two. Now, in another three minutes make a model life sized puppy out of tubes of newspaper. Warning that some puppies will have 3, 5 legs at the end of this.

And remember, avoid injuries.

airborne particles of glitter

Surprisingly, the now illuminated home-made snowman face assembled from fuzzy felt and copydex has survived the tree quality patrols. I'll blame the Hendricks for that, and anticipate the return of good taste to the tree by tomorrow.

A discerning Santa popped by on the right evening and left a pile of goodies. We provided the usual refreshment, although this year he seems to have been partial to 12 year aged Scotch rather than the more conventional sherry.Rudolph was still partial to the magic carrot and a bite from the mince pie.

Then time for a few glittery presents and I must admit our whole lounge has a slight sheen of glitter now, from presents, crackers and that some sort of particles just raining from the air.

From all at Rashbre Central - A Merry Christmas.

Santa speed calculations, NORAD tracking and links to Xmas games

Time also for this year's update of the Santa Calculations, which I first published back in 2006 and then updated in 2010. I'm using 7 billion as the world population.

Firstly, here's the link to the Santa tracking system created by NORAD. I noticed it being publicised at Heathrow airport yesterday, too.

And my usual reminder that an ideal last minute gift is, of course, the rashbre novel - The Triangle, now also available as a Kindle download for less than a couple of quid.

For those of you who are more interested in the technology of Santa, NORAD's FAQs provide the following:

I've again used the Joel Potischman and Bruce Handy calculations as the basis for the speed calculations, with my own adaptations:

The most notable corrections to be applied are:

- Santa delivers no gifts to naughty children (not even coal)
- Naughty to nice ratio is 1:9
- As confirmed by NORAD, one Santa distributes all of the gifts.
- There is only one family per household.
- Santa bypasses non Santa belief system houses.
- Reindeer have recently eaten fresh magic acorns.


Calculation Assumptions (2014):

- World population = 7.06 billion
- Children under 18 = 2.353 billion (Hmm may be higher)
- Global Santa based belief systems: 33%
- Max children requiring delivery therefore 784 million
- Children per household: 3.5 (may seem high?)
- Number of households requiring distribution 224 million
- Naughty to nice factor applied but not many all naughty households
- Remove all naughty households (25% 0f 10%) = 5.6 million
- Eastern orthodox using Jan 5 instead of Dec 25 = 16 Million
- Target Households = 202 million on Dec 25
- Estimated child bed time 21:00 (9pm) with 7 hours sleep.

(child sleep duration on Dec 24 may also require revision)

Gives circa 31 hours (24+7) for all deliveries
Time is 1860 mins or 111,600 seconds

Average number of homes to visit per second = circa 1810.
So average delivery per household is 552 milliseconds, which is why Santa normally appears a bit blurry (I previously thought it was the sherry)

Land surface minus Antarctica is around 79 million square miles. Distribute destinations evenly = 0.7 miles between households creating a total distance of circa 110 million miles.

So 110 million miles in 31 hours = 3.6 million miles an hour or circa 1000 miles per second or Mach 4770 at a linear speed.

This explains Rudolph's red nose because of air resistance creating around 20 quintillion Joules of energy per second, which would convert a non reindeer nose to charcoal at such energy levels. I think the acceleration and deceleration per household may also need some examination.

Luckily Santa has lots of special powers so these mere physics facts are no problem to such a superhero.