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The logic behind the "singularity" applied to razor blades. Personally I think there might be something in this one...

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about the supposedly looming “technological singularity“. For the uninitiated, this is based on a principle called Moore’s Law. Broadly speaking, Moore’s Law states that every couple of years, computers get twice as fast for the same cost. The impressive thing is that in the 40 years or so since Gordon Moore first cooked it up, it’s been remarkably accurate, even though the tech has gone through changes he could never had foreseen.

What gets all the singularity nuts excited is the idea of what happens next. According to Moore’s “Law”, computers will get smarter and smarter, until eventually they’re smarter than us, and begin (according to the singularity folks) designing themselves at a rate we couldn’t match. The machines take over, humanity becomes irrelevant, etc, etc.

Except that’s a load of bollocks, and here’s why:

In the real world stuff never continues to grow exponentially forever. Projections based on unbridled exponential growth are the mathematical equivalent of perpetual motion machines. It’s called a Malthusian growth model, after a bloke who made some very dire predictions about world population back in the 19th century. Lucky for us, the complete lameness of this type of model meant that the world didn’t implode under the combined weight of humanity, and the mathematicians went back to the drawing board. The result was a new, better model they called the Logistic model, which acknowledges the idea that even if something can grow at an exponential rate for a while, eventually forces that may have been too small to notice begin to slow the growth rate. This model has been far more successful at accurately modeling real-world processes.

Sure the idea of the singularity is fun, but the less sexy reality is that your wrist watch is unlikely to ever be able to out-smart you, let alone usurp your position at the top of the food chain by creating it’s own army of super-intelligent wrist watches. Moore’s Law will eventually break down, machines will stop getting smarter so quickly, or even stop getting smarter at all.

A picture of me the next time I buy light bulbs

UK electricity companies are in the habit of sending out packs of free energy saving lightbulbs to their customers. It’s one way they satisfy their climate change obligations to government. During the course of a couple of house moves i’ve ended up getting sent 3 packs of four bulbs each, so 12 bulbs in total.

Now, I already had five spare bulbs, so that means i’ve got 17 spares kicking around now. We currently use eight low-energy bulbs around the house, and i’ve yet to have one die in about three years of use. If one blew tomorrow, that would put my usage at 0.042 bulbs per year. If they all blew, that would mean 2.67 bulbs per year. So in the very worst case scenario I have 6.37 years before I have to buy stock up on bulbs again. If you take the lowest estimate, i’ve got enough for 404 years.

I mean, free stuff is great, but I think i’m pretty much sorted for light bulbs now. If you’re listening power companies: you can stop sending them now. If you feel you have to send us free stuff, alcohol will do nicely.

Not content with possesing enough conventional firepower to squish pretty much anything on the battlefield, the US military seems to now be plundering the future for cool new tech to waste people with. Next up on the US military’s agenda: autonomous walking battledroids. No really.

It turns out walking is actually a pretty practical way of getting around over rough terrain, so DARPA is flinging money at tech labs who can build them a droid that can lug heavy loads across rough ground. Presumably these poor bots would end up doing the jobs that the humans find difficult and dangerous, such as resupply and EOD. They’re kind of creepy, but i’ll bet they’d be popular with the meatsacks that would be doing these jobs otherwise.

Possibly an image of Barbara herself...

St Barbara is the patron saint of armourers, miners, gunners and (bizarrely) mathematicians. Now most armourers I’ve known aren’t too bothered about obscure Catholic saints, but since St Barbara’s Day is a great excuse to drink a lot of port I’ve never heard them complain.

So happy St Barbara’s Day to all past and serving armourers!

Starting 29 June UK domestic rail passengers in Kent can make a little bit of history. The first high speed line for commuters (imaginatively named HS1) will be open for business.  I took a ride on the new service to check it out.

Ebbsfleet to St Pancras = 17 mins

A shiny new Class 395 train at Ebbsfleet

The initial shuttle service doesn’t cover the full area that it will when full service starts in December, but for now there is a regular service from the new station at Ebbsfleet up to the renovated St Pancras in London.

Ebbsfleet is pretty smart, and station is roomy and well laid out. I found a shiny blue high speed train waiting for me at the platform. These are Class 395 electric multiple units, made in Japan by Hitachi as a derivative of their Shinkansen trains. They’ve been adapted for the UK network, and operate out of a new purpose-built depot at Ashford. Hitachi maintain the trains, and their operated by Southeastern. An upgrade to your season ticket to allow you to travel on HS1 will cost you around £20 a week, or you can get a single trip upgrade for around £3. That’s a bargain IMO, as the journey drops from about 50 mins currently, to 17 mins. If you do that twice a day you’re talking about spending at least an hour a day less commuting.

Yep, it’s fast

Notice the blur...

Leaving Ebbsfleet the train quickly enters the tunnel it uses to cross under the Thames, and it’s not until it pops out the other side of the Dartford crossing that you realise just how fast the train is moving. And the good newsis that since it’s direct to St Pancras, so there’s no slowing down.

The trains are modern and spacious

The environment on board is quiet and comfortable. Overall it’s pretty similar to other modern stock. The seats are reasonably comfy, everybody gets a table of some sort, and there are power points available, although no wifi. Air conditioning is a welcome addition, as is the roomy 2-by-2 seating arrangement. Nobody sits facing another passenger, and there’s only one class of seating, the idea presumably being that everybody is a first class passenger on this service. On board there’s a costumer service bod, but no guard, as the train is operated solely by the driver.

The Class 395

A trio of 395s at St Pancras

The 395 is a new machine based on a Japanese design, but incorporates familiar technology found on other modern UK stock. Some sources mistakenly refer to the 395 as a “Javelin”, but this is actually the name of the service that it will run during the 2012 Olympics, not the train itself.

The units are dual-voltage, able to run on either the 750V DC 3rd rail system, or the 25kV AC overhead lines used on HS1. Traction is provided by 8 AC induction motors controlled by IGBT power electonics, giving smooth acceleration and the ability to use regenerative braking, which is bound to save a ton of electricity. HS1 uses European signalling standards, but the approach to St Pancras uses UK systems, so the train is fitted with both AWS/TPWS and TVM430/KVB equipment. Formations are currently 1 6-car unit per train, but will eventually be running as 12-cars. Top speed is 225km/h on HS1.

Other refinements include a GPS-powered Selective Door Opening safety system, Driver Only Operation provided by external CCTV cameras, and a modern Train Management System running the whole shebang. It’s an impressive machine.

Conclusion

If you live anywhere near Ebbsfleet or Ashford, this service will get you into London seriously fast, in substantially more comfort than you’re used to. I say cough up the extra dosh and step into the future of rail travel in the UK.

I’ve recently been brushing up on some basic maths as part of a degree course. Which is fine. But the more evil number magic you do the more it creeps into your brain and changes the way you think about things.

Take, for example, the oft repeated Rule of Non-Creepiness when it comes to partners. According to common wisdom, the minimum non-creepy age for anybody you’re shagging is half your own age, plus seven. Or in geek:

y=0.5x+7

Which, any maths knob will tell you, graphs as a straight line. Now, it occured to me that this rule works both ways, and that your prospective partner also has to satisfy a similar non-creepiness equation. So the upper age limit of your partner is bounded by:

y=2x-14

So what you ask? Well it occurred to me that these two straight lines diverge.

This means that as you age the number of eligible partners increases. I actually found that a rather encouraging thought. Most things get steadily shittier with age, but your chance of finding some loving (assuming you aren’t sold off into wedlock already) actually improves over the years.

But just how much better do they get? We need some hard figures. So I went to statistics.gov.uk and got some population stats for the UK.

Their nice .svg graph comes with hard numbers as well. This allows us to calculate, for any given age, the total number of people of the opposite sex within your upper and lower non-creepiness limits. Of course, only looking at the opposite sex completely overlooks the love that dare not speak it’s name. If anyone wants to track down some hard stats and redo the numbers adjusting for gayness, be my guest.

So this brings us to our second graph:

Total Number of Available Partners

Lo and behold, we can see that for both sexes the number of eligible partners increases stridently well into our 30′s and 40′s. From the raw data we can see that it doesn’t level off until age 47 for males and 49 for females. Eventually the rot does set in, but not until the surprisingly late age of 51 (for both sexes) and even the then only declines at a maximum rate of 2% per year until death.

Note for pedants:
These figures involve a certain amount of fudge. First of all, the population data for 2009 is a projection, latest official figures are 2007.
Also, due to the fact that the non-creepiness rule produces ages such as 23.5, and we only have data for ages that are whole numbers i’ve had to average the numbers between whole number ages to keep the things relatively sane.
If that bothers you, then +10 maths geek points. Now shut up.

On a roll, I decided to make another graph, this time showing how our fortunes change over the years.

Rate of Change in Available Partners

Sure enough, although the raw numbers of actual partners is low, it’s the young ‘uns that are experiencing the fastest rates of growth in the eligible partner numbers. Good for them. But the graph does also show that it takes a long time for the line to crash down to zero, and even then doesn’t dip too far into the negatives.

At this point, it occurred to me that the next step was to get more data. How would marriage (and divorce) figures affect the shaggable population? And what about getting some numbers from Hot or Not and introducing some kind of munter factor? However, enough is enough. If I carried this maths lunacy any further I was going to have start flushing my own head down the toilet for being a weedy poindexter.

So i’ll leave it there, and will hand over this important line of research to the faceless geekosphere. Stride on, my nerdy brothers!

Clearly the work of a minor genius, this is the kind of business card that’s unlikely to find it’s way straight to the bin:

Full instructions on Instructables

Our word “salary” comes from the Roman custom of paying soldiers in salt. Presumably the empire found it’s boys wanted to be paid in a currency which (in ancient times) was valuable everywhere.

Times change though, I wonder how practical would it be to get paid in salt today?

• Average wage in the UK (Apr 08): £25,100 source
• Retail price of iodised table salt at Tescos: £0.87/kg
• Equivalent amount of salt = 28,850kg

That’s a lot of salt. In fact it’s:

• At 1201 kg/m³ = 24.02m³
• Too much salt to carry in any size ISO shipping container
• Equivalent to 8.24 ISO standard elephants

Elephants are the official measure of equivalent weight for trivia