Spring is sprung

Warm today, eh?

If Mat's the commander of the starship fucking enterprise what does that make me?

Every scrap of paper represents a life I've saved:

Big ships, tall ships, gay ships, girly ships, but the best ship of all is...

• There actually is a ship called the "Friendship". My ticket was for another ferry, however, which I think was called "The Floater".

• Update: hilarious
  

• I mentioned over lunch at the pare's that I wanted to try to get a good photo of the northern lights when I go to Sweden. Unfortunately, according to Dad, my entire stay in Sweden will be at the deepest slump of "solar minimum", when solar-flare activity is at it's weakest ebb, and hence so too is northern-lights activity. Damn astronomers and their predictions! We defy augury!! I say there will be an aurora! And I'll post the photographs here to prove it!

• Cast your mind back a few days, when I said that if I ever were to become a rapper, my moniker would be "Mo' Mentum". Mat had some valuable advice on the matter, which will not be ignored.
  
  But I've been thinking; I've never been one to move at great speed, so any significant momentum increases will surely be attributable to increased mass.
  
  Those who know me well know that all my life I've had a problem with obesity. Obesity in other people, I mean. It disgusts me. But I fear my prejudices are holding me back. If I could band together, say, three or four like-minded hard-arsed bigmen with coarsened attitudes, particularly towards death, we could form a rap group, a-and, assuming we're all white, we could call it "Wiggers with Lattitude". Ain't that just an opportunity too good to pass up???

• Thesis draft was checked over the weekend by Mum. Ten bajillion typing errors and non-sequiturs that had been hiding from me willingly revealed themselves to her. Almost all corrected now. The end is in sight, kiddo!
  

Wrong spray merely freshens attacker

UPDATED UPDATE: Well, I finally recovered that pesky camera from my parents' house, so here's one of the pics I took from the ferry on the way over to Alex's party.



We do live in a pretty city, and I can be touristy because I'm about to leave it!

UPDATE: Reeftrippers: Check out Kjetil's surf movies. Wikkid!!
(kinda large though, 40-100MB)


Went to see regurgitator last night with Paul and Mikey and Caveman, lots of fun. They played all the old faves, kong foo sing, f.s.o., black bugs, i.w.l.y.a., and the perennial favourite Track 1, the lyrics of which Paul and I used to recite repeatedly in Yr 11 English class, much to Mrs Elliot's (no relation to Missy) dismay. They played some new songs too, which were quite enjoyable. This was followed by some noise by a bunch of people with pillows on their heads. Now, noise is fine and all, I've got a couple of merzbow cds, but this was pretty horrible.

So we went back to the hippo lounge, where Mikey and Caveman Neil had found an insane polish girl. I mean insane. She was cute as a button, good figure, pretty eyes. Only physical blemish being, well, you know those beauty spots that Cindy Crawford made famous back in the day? Well, she had six or seven of them. On her teeth. Big black and brown spots on her horrendously disfigured buck teeth.

Did I mention she was insane? Example (one of many): She said to paul, "You inspire me, you look like Elle McPherson", here's a comparison:


Then she grabbed him and forced him to dance against his will, then kicked him in the kneecap, hard enough that he recoiled in visible pain. Then she started screaming at him "aaah, you kicked me, arrrgh, it hurts, it hurts!" so that the whole pub looked around, and clearly they all thought Paul was abusing her. Paul just stood there in stunned silence. Then she explained to us that she grew up with a lot of cousins, and therefore the only way she can get to know people is by physically hurting them. Makes sense.

Anyway, She and Caveman Neil disappeared into the night together, and the rest of us went to pontoon which was dead and empty and boring and then I went home.

bingo bango

• Most of you have seen that pic before, but it still excites me in ways that I can't quite describe. At least, not on a children's website like this. I think it's one of the best I've taken. (Motherb!tch was 3 metres long!)
  

• Another reason to post it is that on September 3rd/4th I'm actually going to be heading underwater again! About time! Twill be off Mahon's pool, Nth Maroubra, a location known for sightings of sunfish (if you're lucky). All new photos will make their debut here!

• Now that I've actually met them, Katie and Chia receive the prestigious honour of a link under the "blogs I peruse" heading. Okay, I met Katie before, but not properly.
  

• Mat: your supervisor didn't like your use of 'clearly' in proofs. I open a page of a book at random and find this:

Theorem: Symplectification of vector fields is an isomorphic map of the Lie algebra of contact vector fields onto the Lie algebra of all locally hamiltonian vector fields with hamiltonians which are homogeneous of degree 1.

The proof is clear.

• Also, if you are considering a career in information theory, I think you should keep in mind that Claude Shannon was born in Gaylord, Michigan. Also, his name is a french name, followed by a girl's name. That's pretty gay.

• Hmmm, another picture: Jessica Alba likes underwater photography, do you think she'd like to be my friend??

The parable of the second floor men's room

There is a cockroach sitting in the urinal on the second floor, been there three days, not dead yet. He's clearly unwilling to take the plunge down the dark drain, and unable to climb the sheer metal wall out. So he sits there in the trough getting pissed on by a succession of engineering students.

Makes me think "Hey, my life's not so bad"

Update: He's gone! Did he scale the wall, or take the plunge? perhaps we'll never know. Actually, we'll almost certainly never know.

p.s. just got word from my sister that further communication from Sweden has arrived at the pare's, so I can reattempt the camera rescue job.

I assume my reputation for arrogant presumption precedes me

UPDATED UPDATE: Grr, trying to write conclusions. Mat, have you done it? how did you do it? I just want to write, in size 72 font, "READ THE F#@&ING THESIS, IT'S ALL THERE!!"

On being told that someone had given up working on his Ph.D., as he had decided he had nothing original to say, Wittgenstein allegedly said: "For that action alone, they should give him his Ph.D."

Word.

UPDATE: In my continued meandering explorations of Mat's DVD, I find that Aesop Rock sample Charles Mingus! YES!!

What a fun party, putting faces to names, blue singlets adeptly worn, Hasn't Mat gotten CHUNKY?!? But now that we've all met and touched each other's solidbody-earthperson manifestations, it's time we shrink back to clean, honest, purified, Electroworld.

(I saw someone get hit by a taxi outside Mansions after we left, got up, laughed, ran off to terrorize the night rubbing his belly, Dean Moriarty incarnate)

I just read that they're going to make a movie of On The Road* and I was filled with sickness and fear. But the director will be the guy who did Motorcycle Diaries, which I haven't seen but was supposed to be very good, so maybe there's some hope...

Just an update to the previous post, old news to Chia: when that whole brain malfunction on the train occurred, I was, strangely enough, reading a paper about how lesions in the brain can result in memory loss and inability to perform certain basic everyday functions (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, 308(1135), pp 3-19). Hmmm....

Another favourite Pynchon quote seems appropriate:

Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter. "Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."
"Temporal bandwidth," is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "Δt" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even - as Slothrop now - what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment . . .
"Uh," he turns slackmouth to Närrisch, "what are we . . ."
"What are we what?"
"What?"
"You said, 'What are we . . .,' then you stopped."
"Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say."

*- Despite what the clip says, the reading is actually from Visions of Cody, not On the Road. But anyway..

One word: retard

"People said I was dumb, but I proved them." - Fry, Futurama

Firstly, this is gold.

Now, Today I had to pick up some stuff from my parents' house, and then collect a registered post package at Turramurra post office.

Went to the pare's okay, but forgot about the post office and got straight back on a train going into the city. Realised this as the train approached pymble (the next stop), so I got off, and got back on another train going back to Tuz.

After a couple of minutes, a guy on the train asked to borrow a pen. Then he asked where I was going to (i.e. how long can he use the pen). I said "Central". He said "you're going in the wrong direction". I said "No, wait, I mean Turramurra". He said "We just passed Turramurra". This train then went all the way to Hornsby, and I got off there, waited for the next train back to Tuz. It arrived soon enough, and this time I actually managed to get off the train at the right station, made it to the post office.

The envelope I was picking up was the contract for my post-doc job in Sweden. It was the first piece of mail I've ever received that was addressed to "Dr Ian Manchester".
Another word: Juxtaposition.

Also, I forgot to pick up my camera from my pare's, so still no harbour photos.
(Am I officially now an absent minded professor??)

KT - I have no idea where Bernie has got to. Probably out scavenging for food



or lying a puddle of his own vomit somewhere



But I know his luck hasn't all been bad, he managed to bed (well, couch) sweet little gone child Soelvi:



Meanwhile, Keith sez:
Megasonic bass, with data chips in your face
Nuclear lend drums, that bang hard on dark tracks
Reacting reverb, concious spots on your nerve
I take a break like James Brown to the bridge

Schmoodle

Bzzt, just realized that a fantastically simple theorem (well known in coupled-oscillations lit) has application to coordinated control of unmanned vehicles.

Let S be homeomorphic to the unit circle, and let f be a function from S x S -> S.
Suppose f has the following properties:
1) interchange of variables does not change the result, i.e. f(x,y) = f(y,x)
2) if x = y, then f(x,y) = x = y.
Then f cannot be continuous, no matter how hard it tries to be.

Proof is simple, based on a winding number argument, and the non-retraction theorem of topology (equiv to Brouwer's fixed point thm).

Why does this pop up when I'm trying to finish writing a thesis full of old ideas and boring results?

Hopefully no one else has thought of it...

(first published on the internationally acclaimed research journal GO MORON!)

A photo? Hmm... old favourite, Bernie after a heavy night:

In a world gone mad, only a lunatic is truly insane.

Point form, minimal use of pronouns and articles:

• Update: I've decided if I ever become a rapper, my name will be "Mo' Mentum". I don't know if it's already taken, nor do I care.
  

• Had a great time at Ilana's birthday/farewell on Sat. Cushion room upstairs at Fatima's in Surry Hills. Certain people displayed far too much belly-dancing ability, others showed far too much enthusiasm (full body heave...).

• (Ilana is the little astronomer girl from my CSIRO days, came up to Avoca with Sam and Goon of Fortune Guy once, went to Fraser Island w/ me, came to my B'day thing at Bronte last yr, randomly happened to be at the Rose last fri, currently walking me home on a weekly basis as a form of mutual PhD-necessitated sanity preservation.)

• Working hard on revisions to thesis, so I can enjoy the ping pong, popcorn and polygamy at Jas's on friday.

• Saturday I will farewell, and also sorta meet, KT* , and get a chance (possibly last for a while?) to feel Island Mat's buffed new boobies. This just in: apparently Bling Bling will be there!

• Deltron is like Octagon, but with better production and Del instead of Keith. But I miss Keith, Del just ain't the same. (I first turn rainbow, close my eyes watch my brain glow)

• What's good for cricket is bad for thesis productivity.
  

• If memories show us the past, how do they show us that it is the past?

Word to your mother.

*- if you want to see something truly terrifying, scroll down to the "dog" picture on her blog.

That’s the reason I’ll be easin, eatin cheese'n

Updated Update: Gus is back in Oz on the 14th of Sept. This makes 17th a highly possible date for my farewell party, as it can also be a bit of a welcome back for him. Official invites will be sent when the time is ripe.

Update: my supervisor, having read my thesis draft, didn't slap me, or spit on me, or renounce me as student, or just sigh and look dejectedly out the window in disappointment, all of which I thought were possibilities. He just suggested a few minor rearrangements, and then wanted to chit-chat about us writing a book together (probably modelled on "A love for life" by Glenn and Jane McGrath) and yes, Sølvi, it will have a pink cover.



I just booked my flights to Sweden, the land of the enthusiastic skivvy. I leave from Melbourne on the 4th of Oct.

I shall be spending two nights in London, sleeping in the lavishly appointed bathtub of one Joanne Hacking, yes Egypt Jo.

She raised an interesting question: where are the Fezes? (or Fez's, or Fezs, what's the correct plural there?) Anybody with information as to their whereabouts, please communicate to me via this blog or email.

For people ignorant of certain basic facts of history: In the year 2000, a small band of Australian operatives smuggled 30 fez's (or was it 32?) from Egypt back to Australia, possibly the world record for most fez's ever taken on a plane as carry-on baggage. Of these, two were promised to a pair of nubile young Englishwomen that were met on tour. That was five years ago, and despite many emails to the effect of "yeah, we'll send 'em soon", the fez's remain undelivered!

Can this cosmic imbalance finally be put right?

Oh, and they were actually red, not leopard-skin. More like this, but a little bit less gay:

Now we must all get out and dig the river and the people and smell the world

Just handed a draft to my supervisor.

It has half a chapter missing, but still, only a few days behind schedule...

As is apparently the fashion, I've added my audioscrobbler, or last fm, link to the side---->

(hidden behind the heiroglyphic emblem "Songs")

Robbed...

The explanation for this pic is at the end of the story

I was all ready to begin my blog entry this morning with a fantastically witty quote, as I'm sure you're coming to expect from me, but did some browsing first and found to my despair that someone who I don't think I've ever met, not even once, drunk, on the lounges upstairs at Suzie Q's, but have somehow got into the habit of reading the blog of, used exactly the same quote to begin her post!

This is like turning up to a party, and finding that someone else is wearing exactly the same selection of fruits in their Carmen Miranda outfit, right down to the Ski Double-Up yoghurt containers on their feet and the coconut dangling suggestively below the crotch.

The quote is of course "I really like deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make when they fly past" from the dead but surprisingly huggable Douglas Adams. But whilst Chia had to make a word substitution for it to fit her life, for my purposes it can be used straight out of the box, as will soon become clear.

Firstly, though, Teresa's birthday do at The Rose was very enjoyable, including a surprise meeting with a strange little astronomer girl who had a furry beer and wombat suit, and a very awkward moment when, using the word "homo" with gay abandon (natch) as a universally applicable verb/noun/adjective/adverb, I apparently offended someone whose mother just came out as a lesbian... Wikkid. Reminds me of a certain set of marraccas.

Then, after a lovely evening at the Manly Wharf for Alex's, where everyone was nicely soused, which is the best way to be soused, despite it not being a particularly big or late night for me (the advantage of starting early), for some reason I didn't sleep that well afterwards, so I was as tired as all copulation on Sunday, and it was all I could manage to sit at my computer, adjust a few graphs and typographical errors, and listen to the DVD of mp3s that Island Mat sent me, hilariously labelled "Gay Porn", meaning I've got to be very careful about leaving it lying around on my desk at work (when to, when not to, etc).

Which reminds me: Pop77 is indeed a fantastically enjoyable aural experience. I'm also enjoying Madvillain, DJ Shadow and Deltron. The rest is yet to be explored.

But anyway, the upshot is that I won't be giving my supervisor my draft thesis just yet, hence the quote. It turns out he's not here anyway, which provides a useful alternative excuse.

I had a lovely ferry trip from Circular Quay to Manly for Alex's, during which I took some fantastically touristy shots of the sun setting behind the opera house and the bridge, but then due to my tiredness and/or general incureable vagueness, I left my camera at my parents' house. So to make sure my blog stays pretty, I went to the archives again and found an old favourite of the sun setting. This is also at Cape Cod, taken just minutes after the one in my last post, as we hurried back to the car freezing our jubblies off.

The age of Vikings

When the age of the Vikings came to a close, they must have sensed it. Probably, they gathered together one evening, slapped each other on the back and said, "Hey, good job."
- Jack Handy

The freezing grey Atlantic, taken looking east from Cape Cod on the NY trip.
Standing on snowy sand looking east towards Vikingland.

This, apparently, is an ancient Viking proverb:

"Praise not the day until evening has come; a woman until she is burnt; a sword until it is tried; a maiden until she is married; ice until it has been crossed; beer until it has been drunk."

What??
Okay, some of it makes sense, but praise not a woman until she is burnt??
Sweet percival jebus!

This weekend is going to be a bit more social for me. Had a pub crawl with the dive club last night, at which Guro literally belted me over the head for going to Sweden and not Norway. And again for suggesting that Swedes were Vikings. "Who raped all of Scotland? Who raped all of England? Norwegians! Not Swedes! Swedes are boneheads, Ian".

Tonight is Teresa's birthday, and tomorrow Alex's, so thats my three main social groups covered in successive evenings. All very efficient!

Writing this big ol' thesis is a strangely cathartic experience. This is what the last three and a half years consisted of. But of course, there's an element of fiction, because the thoughts didn't occur in this order, or this smoothly. Like old Witters says:

"After someone has died we see his life in a conciliatory light. His life appears to us with outlines softened by a haze. There was no softening for him though, his life was jagged and incomplete. For him there was no reconciliation; his life is naked and wretched."

Hmmm, so writing a thesis is a bit like being at your own funeral? The funeral of one of your aspects, anyway, and one where you get to write your own eulogy.

Deep. Too deep, more Handy wisdom from Jack required*:

I can still recall old Mr Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he'd spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he'd yell out, "Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!" We all thought he was crazy. But then we had some growing up to do.

*- hilarious pun on Jack Handy's name c/o Dockta Cok, all rights reserved.

You win this time, Kalman

Yes, well, if I'd remembered that a year ago when I wrote this program, I defined the weighting functions to be the inverses of the covariance matrices, there would never have been a problem!

Now, if I'm not mistaken, I can generate all the graphs I need. And that is good, because all thats left then is writing and discussion, which can only be bad (and it will be, that much is certain), it can't possibly not work.

I'm constantly thinking about the many things I will soon be doing outside this office - indeed, outside this country! So I'll write about a couple of them.

Like many of you, I'm excited about the many weddings coming up: Big Richie in Melbourne just before I go. Then a month or so after I arrive in Sweden, I'll be ducking out to Paris or London to hook up with Paul:

(the one in black, sucking on the quintuple straw) to join his whirlwind honeymoon world tour, which he's headlining with Sarah. Although I'll, very sadly, be missing their wedding, they needn't be in any doubt that I'll show them a good time, European style.

Rumours abound that some time in March, Asim:

also known as Prince, will be tying the knot, and there will be a week-long festival in his grandfather's "tribal kingdom", in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, involving much singing and dancing and the shooting in the air of many an AK-47 (I'm assured that this is waaay gangsta, and will attract the chicks like nothing else). This would be followed by a few days of hiking around the base of the world's second tallest mountain, K-2, and the beautiful region of Kashmir.

If I can somehow work that into my travels, that would be swell!

And, while I'm writing tenuous excuses to upload funny pictures of people, I should also add that I'd love to pay a visit to Tim:

a.k.a. The BEAR, who has recently married a girl called Serin, whom I have nothing against, having never met her, and they are now living in a peaceful little hamlet called "Jakarta".

After that pleasant little interlude, now its back to the thesis...

Guuuu Rock 'N'Roll, VIK!!

UPDATE: Pending Guro actually adding anything at all to her blog, I hereby withdraw yesterday's enthusiasm.

Wait just one manizzle, internet - the bad doctor of norwegian pain has started a blog!
(although its hella boring at the mo, work on it, sis)

Guro's Ass Dot Com
(I assume she's referring to a donkey she owns)

And if you're going to keep pace with us neo-futurist electronic webkids, you shouldn't be replying to such old posts. But any help with the comic while you're there??? My first thought on seeing the camera down the pants was actually that it must roughly translate into "Hey B-Roq, Guro wants her camera back" or some such.

When (not if) I go diving in Norway, there will be many many pics for all to see. Including me flying up to the surface in a michelan-man-like overinflated dry suit.

(Natalia, if you're reading this trash, you thought you looked like Maggie in the snowsuit, you just wait!!)

If you can't die you got to dream, and we aint gotnothing to dream(come on kidlet's go to sleep)

UPDATE: I now have TWO hyphenated friends who are quitting smoking: J-Girl and B-Roq. YAY!

Say to those cancer sticks: "Hasta la bye-bye, enchiladas"

Maroubra again...



Damn you Kalman, and your infernal filter!

The pains of debugging a strangely behaving Kalman filter coupled with an optical flow algorithm, to generate the last two or three graphs I need for my thesis, are really getting too much!
WORK DAMNIT!!!

Then I can sleep.

Jack Handy sez: If life deals you lemons, why not go kill someone with the lemons (maybe by shoving them down his throat)?

someones married their everyones, laughed their cryings and did their dance

(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

Anyone who isn't already a regular reader of Katie's blog should pay it a visit, just this once, to check out the wonderful poem Bec wrote to Lil' Lleyton. It's just below the drug-induced gorilla story.

A sample:
A text message or two is what kept us in touch
And I want you to know that I love you so much
It wasn't'til late in 2004
That I received another phone call
When we decided to meet,
we went up the street for something to eat,
...
Having a family with you makes me so glad,
I know I'll never get sad,
...

(Swoon!)

Update c/o alex: The blog universe goes crazy over the greatest poet in the English language since the guys that wrote "dogs are hogs, they eat lots of meat" and "speedbump the roadkill possum".