Kanahakkliha

Rice Gambit

2010-11-07T16:25:00.006+10:00

I was thinking about the Rice Gambit recently and read the Wikipedia article about it.

It says

The Encyclopedia of Chess Openings (1997) analyzes 1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nf3 g5 4. h4 g4 5. Ne5 Nf6 6. Bc4 d5 7. exd5 Bd6 8. O-O Bxe5 9. Re1 Qe7 10. c3 Nh5 11. d4 Nd7 12. dxe5 Nxe5 (etc etc) with a draw by perpetual check, attributing this analysis to Capablanca, Amos Burn, and Edward Lasker.

I decided to analyze it with Rybka 4. The main line it prefers is 10. c3 Nbd7 11. d4 Nh5 12. Qxg4 Bxd4+ 13. Kf1 Ng3+ 14. Qxg3 fxg3 15. Rxe7+ Kxe7 16. cxd4 Nb6 17. Bb3 Bf5 18. Nc3 Rg8, where the evaluation is +1.41 (after 28 ply) and the PV continues 19. Kg1 Kd7 20. Bg5 Bd3 21. Bd1 f6 22. Bg4+ f5 23. Bh5 Rxg5 24. hxg5 Rg8 25. Rd1 Ba6 26. Re1 Rxg5 27. Bd1 Kd8 28. Re6 Rg8 29. b3 Nc8 30. Bh5 Nd6 31. Be2 Bxe2 32. Nxe2 Kd7 33. Re3 Ne4. Wow, what an exciting sequence!

After 12. dxe5, Rybka 4 prefers 12... Qxh4 (evaluation +1.76 after 27 ply): 12. dxe5 Qxh4 13. Nd2 f3 14. Ne4 o-o 15. Bg5 f2+ 16. Nxf2 Qxg5 17. Qd4 Nb6 18. Bb3 Bf5 19. Ne4 Qg6 20. Nc5 Qh6 etc. If White plays 13. e6, the evaluation is at least +2.47: 13. e6 o-o 14. exf7+ Rxf7 15. d6 Ndf6 16. Bxf7+ Kxf7 17. Nd2 f3 18. gxf3 Qg3+ and White's position is falling apart.

The only other major option tried (according to ChessOK) was ... 12. Bb5, which isn't so good: 12. Bb5 Kd8 13. Bxd7 Bxd7 14. Rxe5 Qxh4 15. Rxh5 Qxh5 16. Bxf4 Re8 ... (evaluation +1.76). Apparently this was the starting position of a Marshall vs Napier match in 1905. Rybka analysis continues: 17. Qf1 Qxd5 18. Bxe5 Qb5 19. Nd2 Qxf1+ 20. Rxf1 Be6 21. c4 f5 22. d5 Bd7 23. exf6 Kc8 ... (+1.85).

Chesslive and Chessok have a game with 12. Na3 which fails to 12. Na3 Qxh4 13. dxe5 f3 etc (evaluation >+2.05).

So it looks like Rybka 4 has busted another line ... Black can win against the Rice Gambit, not just draw.

four themes

2009-12-05T17:15:00.004+10:00

I haven't posted anything meaningful here since June 2008. I think facebook has replaced blogging for me in a way. Anyway, recently I've been thinking about four themes.

1. Minimalism and Zen.

2. House prices in Australia.

3. Climate change.

4. Peak oil.

1. My flatmate doesn't seem to be interested in very much other than Zen Buddhism. In his room, there's nothing much except for his laptop, a PRS-505 book reader, some clothes, and "Everyday Zen" by Charlotte Joko Bech. I wish he would share the cleaning more but on the other hand he doesn't get in my way much.

There's also a guy at work, David, who reminds me a bit of my flatmate, doesn't care about whether things are dirty or neat, is anti-social, but is very minimalistic. There's not really any paper or books on his desk like on other people's desks. He doesn't have any interaction with any outside clients, for some reason.

I have a feeling minimalism is related Zen somehow after seeing this photo of Steve Jobs in 1982. Somehow, I feel clutter causes me stress, like my friend David used to say, he lived a bohemian lifestyle until his early 30s but now finds clutter stressful.

Anyway, I'm dealing with the clutter in my house. I sold some things on ebay, like the Apple shirt I got at the Chermside store opening (for $43.60!) I'm dealing with the paper by taking pictures of things and then recycling the paper. This helps me deal with the thought that "I might want to look at this again someday"; digital photos take up much less space than paper.

With the PRS-505, the Amazon Kindle, and the upcoming Apple tablet, I think we might finally be moving to a paperless office or society. I have to keep some documents for the tax office for 5 years, but that's about it.

I also want to keep my bedroom as clutter-free as possible, inspired by the book "Househould Management for Men". That should help me relax. Possibly even get it down to my bed and my piano. My sister told me about an architect Ole Scheeren who keeps his possessions down to two suitcases so that he's free to travel places. That could be the ideal. There's an article about the suitcase test.

I want to redesign the living room, maybe have canvas prints of my favourite travel photos instead of A3 laminated printouts or framed normal printouts.

I did redesign my home page, took my high school stuff off the resume, that's hardly relevant now ... I have a filing cabinet at parents' full of university notes that I have literally not looked at in ten years. So after I deal with my own place I'll deal with my room there.

2. It seems we're in a big bubble still, with the first home owners' boost propping up prices this year. But my friends at work still seem to want to get on the ladder. Suckers. Noel Whittaker in his book "Making Money Made Simple" (20th anniversary edition, which I was reading today) writes that it was hard to save a deposit and pay off a house in the days of the readers' parents, but somehow I think he's just out of touch, hasn't looked at median house price to median income levels or read Steve Keen's blog or BubblePedia. Australia's house prices will come down just like all the other Western countries' prices.

Question is, in the meantime, is the best investment (for the difference between rent and mortgage) shares, cash, gold, or something else? Gold and shares, too, could be in bubbles.

There was a comment on a blog I read today saying that young people have to not buy and live in communal arrangements, having singles avoid renting of two bedroom apartments, more for prices to go down, and another comment on Steve's blog that occupancy rates have fallen from 5.2 in 1901 to 2.7 in 2006 I think, and have only just gone up from 2.51 to 2.56 recently. Why do people prefer to live alone more often now ... ? which brings me to

3. Climate change. My parents, after reading Ian Plimer's book and hearing about Climategate, think it's a bit of a con. I guess I think the IPCC is right about their conclusions, but the authors of Superfreakonomics seemed to be suggesting a better and cheaper way to fix the problems than some emissions trading scheme. I'm cynical about some of the motives of the people pushing ETSs and carbon trading, financiers are happy to have another product to trade, creating more bureaucracy and they get to claim they're saving the world as well.

The other thing is the people at my work who seem to be the most rabid climate change activists are those who fly the most! It's ridiculous! They probably claim they offset it by ticking the box when they buy the ticket, but I am cynical about that too and wouldn't it be better to just not travel. Plus one of those guys has just bought a two-bedroom apartment that he'll live in by himself... propping up the housing bubble by buying before the FHOB finishes, and having empty rooms around the place is hardly the sustainable thing to do. He claims to have bought "400% GreenPower" but I couldn't find any evidence of such a thing. I wonder about the effectiveness of buying GreenPower, I should read more about it.

4. Peak oil. My gut feeling is that this is probably a bigger problem than climate change. The IEA coverup article basically said the International Energy Agency is lying about the amount of oil left in the world to prevent panic! That was scary. When oil becomes scarce, fertilisers and plastics are harder to produce, transport becomes more expensive, and there will probably be resource wars over the last pockets of oil.

I considered switching from my 2006 automatic Yaris (6.7 L / 100km) to a 2009 manual Ford Fiesta Econetic (3.7 L / 100km) (the new smart fortwo diesel gets even less, 3.4 L / 100km, according to toptem.info), but I still spend less than $1,000 a year on petrol, and the Yaris still works fine, I prefer driving an automatic car, automatics have higher resale value, on the other hand the Econetic has an aux in on the stereo ...

back to the topic ... it's scary to think what might happen. Updates at The Oil Drum. A lot of people are in denial. If peak oil arrives, property prices will change quite a lot, places close to the city centre or on (electric) train lines will become the places to live. If I really knew what was going to happen I'd buy oil futures, buy those properties, short sell airline shares, etc but if wars occur over access to oil these things like money will probably be the least of my worries.

I'd better work out what I want to do with my life and work on that to the best of my ability in case some of these worst case scenarios come to pass. And decluttering should be a good first step!

Google groups usenet search broken

2008-07-23T11:24:00.003+10:00

Google groups usenet search is missing lots of posts: doesn't seem to be noted in many places, but here is an example.

quoted here:

From: Tim Smith
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: [OT] Someone broke Google Groups search
User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b2 (Intel Mac OS X)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:37:13 -0700
Message-ID:
Lines: 23
X-Trace: sv3-OM99PwXIkOwetpag9oEz4AkLGRctmCh36IArIUjXSZ29tovkSnkH/uEKLmKYmNcDyb18e28Qw46mP7O!U2UsiqlALxgAC1K0Rhs2efk8NlKrZId52u1esCDDHfbzKnqtx5UHTfhhjM360a6EhVs/hRe3AOnX!SIrnoD7ZELeodjNzxr/o0w==
X-Complaints-To: www.supernews.com/docs/abuse.html
X-DMCA-Complaints-To: www.supernews.com/docs/dmca.html
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers
X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly
X-Postfilter: 1.3.39

Google groups search for "Tim Smith". 9 hits. Click "sort by date" and
then there are 161000 hits.

Google groups search for "Roy Schestowitz". 4 hits. Click "sort by
date" and then there are 104000 hits.

Google groups search for "Mark Kent". 46200 hits. Click "sort by date"
and it stays 46200 hits.

It used to be that you'd get about the same number of hits regardless of
whether you sorted by date or relevance. It's still doing that with
Mark, but for Roy and me, it gives far fewer hits when sorted by
relevance.

Anyone else seeing this? Or am I just hitting a bad server? (It's been
like this for a few days for me, but they seem to use some kind of
scheme to try to send you to the same server when you come back, so if
there is a broken server in their pool, I could be stuck on it).

--
--Tim Smith

sleep

2008-06-12T17:21:00.003+10:00

Do I want to sleep at the same time as everybody else? Would I do better work if I worked at the same time everyone else slept, and slept at the same time everyone else worked? Anyway ... Brisbane City Council has noise regulations, so I took a look:

Air conditioner noise is ok from 7am to 10pm, building work noise is ok from 6.30am to 6.30pm on every day except Sunday...

Also, the Do Not Call register says:

telemarketing calls can be made on weekdays between 9.00 am and 8.00 pm
research calls can be made on weekdays between 9.00 am and 8.30 pm
a telemarketing or research call can be made on a Saturday between 9.00 am and 5.00 pm
research calls can be made on a Sunday between 9.00 am to 5.00pm but not on a nationally recognised public holiday
telemarketing calls can not be made on a Sunday or a nationally recognised public holiday.

Plus, there's a 40km/h speed limit on weekends in Fortitude Valley from 10pm to 6am; the EPA legislation has references to a 6am outdoor shooting range noise exclusion; a QR development checklist writes about assessing noise impact between 10pm and 6am.

As for Brisbane Airport, there's no curfew on planes and their Noise Management Strategy suggests that ground running engines is only unlimited between 5am and 9pm. Tough if you live near the airport or under a flight path.

Basically I think the message is that you can sleep uninterrupted in Brisbane between 10pm and 6am, but that's it, really... etiquette says to be careful not to phone people after about 8pm or so.

sacrifices

2008-05-29T12:26:00.002+10:00

It's been a long time since I wrote in my semi private scribbling space ...

I've been living alone for five months, but I don't feel I've been saving a whole lot and I want to invest regularly in the stock market instead of haphazardly. I just want someone relatively quiet to live with, I guess ... who doesn't watch much TV ... I haven't watched TV in forever and at a gathering of people last Sunday was completely out of touch with what's on. They were talking about "Medium" and "Jekyll" and various other shows I'd never heard of. While watching Eurovision I saw ads for "Salam Cafe" which looked interesting. Oh, the things I'm missing out on!

I haven't decided on where to go on my overseas trip this year, but I am inclining towards Iran and Iceland ... as I have been for a while now. It would be good to climb Mt Damavand and be 5600m above sea level -- none of my friends have been that high, I don't think. The world should look different from up there!

I have been failing pretty badly in the book reading goals; but I have managed to finish some finance books, like "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, lately. That book made me wonder if all the energy modelling I've been doing at work has actually been incorrect or inaccurate. If I can write a paper and have it accepted to a conference, then my boss will support me going there; I would never decline a free overseas trip. In fact I'd never turn down a free trip to anywhere...

Investing in the US seems so unattractive right now; I had thought about investing in the Vanguard International Unhedged Shares Fund (which is like the world ex Australia) but with the Iraq war, the sub prime crisis, and the US's dependence on oil, my feeling is just that I'd rather keep my money in Australian or emerging market stocks. Consider this Reuters commentary:

Peter Schiff, president of money manager Euro Pacific Capital, warns that after years of profligate spending, the "chickens are finally coming home to roost".

"Our whole phony standard of living is imploding," he said. "We have borrowed and spent ourselves into oblivion."

"It's amazing that people can't figure out that America is broke."

...

Thanks to the "rosy spot" of exports helped by a weak dollar, plus strength in commodities like coal and grains, the UCLA Anderson Forecast Center predicts the U.S. economy will suffer only a mild recession this year.

But without that retail engine of growth, "our long-term prospect is for sluggish U.S. economic growth," Leamer said.

"Unfortunately, there is nothing on the horizon in the U.S. economy that will take over from the consumer."

Combinatorics has really gone on the back burner, and I want that to change too ... so I'll write up a new set of goals and things to do, and begin again.

the weakest link

2007-11-08T08:47:00.000+10:00

This relationship post is just about my personal experiences. Recently in relationship and job terms I have found that it's the weakest links in my friendship networks that have got me the best results. That is, in the last six months or so, all through the net, getting back in touch with people -- so through seek, linkedin, orkut and facebook. Myspace is a pile of crap and cyworld is only for Koreans :)

So it is important to work on those weakest links if your job and relationship situation is not good...

but first, economics

2007-11-01T22:27:00.000+10:00

A relationship post is coming. But first, economics: Apple is of course very slow to pass on the benefits of US dollar weakness to Australian consumers. And the current RAM prices are an utter ripoff. Currently at the Australian Apple store to get 4GB of RAM in a Macbook Pro costs $A1030 more than 2GB -- equivalent US store price is $US700. Whereas one 2GB RAM stick costs $A94 today so buying 4GB RAM costs $A188 -- and then you can SELL the two 1GB sticks you have left over on ebay... The other thing is Apple just changed the Macbook Pro on the US store so that a 2.6GHz upgrade costs $US250 and a 250GB HD costs $US150. I'll wait to see how and when this is passed on to Australian customers. (Current exchange rate: $A1 = $US0.93).

sexy maths

2007-10-11T19:14:00.000+10:00

THE Queensland Government has asked for help about how to make science and maths "sexy" for students.

I don't understand. Are there people out there who don't love maths? On the one hand I think: It's fortunate I am not a maths teacher or lecturer then. If I can't identify with people who don't love maths, I will never be a good teacher. On the other hand I think: all the students need is a teacher who loves maths, and they will start to love it themselves. But because teaching and lecturing pays so poorly in Australia, the people who really love it (a similar set to the people who are really good at it) often go into other fields. (Speaking in generalisations -- no offence intended to the good teachers out there!) Hence, the teachers are second-best, the students learn to hate maths and we have a vicious circle, like the brain-drain phenomenon. Hmmmmm. I feel grateful now I went to a school where the maths teachers always encouraged me and loved maths. Because lots of people didn't go to a school with good teachers, that means there are less good mathematicians for me to compete against for jobs! Thankyou parents!!

tonight's game

2007-09-20T22:02:00.001+10:00

At the Brisbane Chess Club tonight I played an interesting game. I had some positions which were hard to evaluate -- I didn't have much development but the computer assesses the positions as better for me.

Arash - me.

1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 e6 5. c5

Now that sort of move just looks bad. I looked for a way to punish him immediately.

5... b6 6. b4 h6 7. Bf4 Nbd7 8. Nf3 Nh5

I was still trying to punish him for 5. c5 and couldn't see a better way to do it. I wanted either to win a pawn on c5 or gain control over e5. Perhaps I should have played 7... Nh5.

9. Be5 f6 10. Qd3

I started to wonder if I'd missed something and thought about playing 10... Kf7 or 10... Qe7.

10... Nxe5 11. dxe5

I thought about playing 11... Nf4 too but I wasn't sure that I would gain anything from it so decided to block the b1-h7 diagonal. I have crap development, 1 badly developed piece compared to his 3 pieces in the centre, plus I have a weak kingside. But computers seem to think I'm better here.

11... f5 12. g4?

Whoa, did I miss something? I mean he is supposedly rated 1750.

12... Nf4 13. Qd4 fxg4 14. Qxf4 gxf3 15. Qxf3 Qg5 16. cxb6

Apparently not.

I should have played 16... Bxb4, not fearing 17. Rb1 c5, because after 16... Qxe5 he can play 17. b7 blocking things a bit.

16... Qxe5 17. a3 axb6 18. e3?? Bxb4? 0-1

evil

2007-09-20T21:55:00.000+10:00

I like some of Apple's products - I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro connected to the internet with a wireless router (Apple Airport Express). The MBP is very stylish compared to other laptops and I like OS X much better than Windows. Microsoft has done many evil things and so someone has to stick it to them, you know? Hence the Mac.

But with the iPhone and the new iPod touch, Apple has been being evil. So far it's been announced in the US, UK, Germany and France - but in each case it's locked to a carrier. This feels like an attack on consumer choice to me. Granted in the UK, Germany and France you get access to wifi networks of those carriers. Still I can wish for Apple to have a flop in Europe with this product to teach them a much-needed lesson. Bring on the competition.

As for the iPod touch, apparently it doesn't come with Mail which sounds pretty dumb -- they want to differentiate it from the iPhone.

fearlessness

2007-09-12T13:44:00.000+10:00

There was a competition in the Weekend Australian Financial Review last weekend (1-2 September) with a collage of 45 "key people in business" to be identified. I knew a few of them straight away, like Peter Beattie, John Howard, Kerry Packer, Allan Moss etc. But some of them were really difficult. I asked my boss, a few people at work, my flatmate, and my parents as well and they filled in some more. I searched using Google Images, Microsoft Images, Yahoo Images, Fairfax Photos, and NewsPix and filled in some more gaps. Allison from trivia pointed out one of them was Nicole Kidman in "The Hours". People at the chess club identified some mining leaders for me and also the "alter ego" -- the cartoon character from the AFR. But last weekend I still had four left. I started talking to random people and asking them. What kind of person would know who these people were? The business figures were mainly white middle-aged men, so I asked all the white middle-aged men I saw about the pictures (especially the tall ones in suits with glasses). Tall people earn more so would be more like the people in the pictures and more likely to know them. People with suits are more like to know businesspeople, and glasses because people who read more have glasses :) and I wanted newspaper-reading-type people instead of TV-watching-type people. I talked to lots of people like this on the street, on public transport, in coffee shops reading the Financial Review, and in the libraries. R also asked some people at a Rotary sausage sale for me.

With lots of effort on Saturday night I narrowed it down to two. Then I went to the State Library on Sunday to read lots of BRWs. I didn't get any more then, so I went back to the UQ library on Tuesday night to keep reading -- went through the 1997, 1999 and 2001 issues from 5pm to 10pm when the library shut. I got back home at 10:30 feeling kind of depressed. But then an hour later I had an epiphany and identified one more then trusted my parents on the last identification -- it was more like a choice between a few people rather than an "I have no idea who this is" person. It was fun... I learned lots about Australia's business leaders while doing it too. About indexing, renting vs buying, the stockmarket, how AMP used to be a good share to own before George Trumbull...

It's the kind of problem that cannot be solved by computers because they are no good at facial recognition and cannot be solved by programming, or search engines... like so many of my work problems. It's all about knowing people and knowing people who know people... kind of like facebook and linkedin :)

I also thought about my ability to go up to random people and talk to them. It is not difficult for me but J and R have said it is difficult for them. Their social conditioning in childhood must have been different to mine.

overcoming

2007-07-16T23:10:00.000+10:00

"Man is something that must be overcome."

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures."

I had a great time on the weekend in Sydney with Azita and Javid. Javid arrived, he can stay, there is nothing more to overcome. Azita has to overcome, she needs to stay, she doesn't ever want to go back. I am afraid I am too comfortable now ... I definitely need something to overcome. I wish I had been born in Iran, then I would have had to "overcome" all my life and I would certainly be a much greater person than I am now. The only way to overcome is to set myself obstacles. Perhaps I am slowly coming to the realisation that I should be in the US? But that is hardly a difficult goal for me... it would be too easy to get a job there. I am cursed to have had too comfortable a life! It is good that I understand both east and west though...

Oh yeah, dating non-Australian women has been more fun, there is more to overcome and so it is more rewarding in the end. Perhaps I should find someone really beautiful who is a moody bitch as well -- even more to overcome!!

Patrick White

2007-07-07T12:43:00.000+10:00

He is a great Australian writer, perhaps our greatest, but I have not read any of his novels yet. I have been buying them at the Lifeline and UQ Alumni book fairs. Now I have:

The Living and the Dead (1941)
The Aunt's Story (1948)
The Tree of Man (1956)
Voss (1957)
Riders in the Chariot (1961)
The Solid Mandala (1966)
The Eye of the Storm (1973)
A Fringe of Leaves (1976)

The Burnt Ones (1964)
The Cockatoos (1974)
The Night The Prowler (1978)
Three Uneasy Pieces (1987)

Flaws in the Glass (1981)

I will make some time to read these.

westpac, citibank

2007-07-05T17:28:00.000+10:00

It seems that one of the best ways institutions have of forcing me to make financial decisions is to annoy me in some way. I opened my Westpac account in 1988 when I won $30 in Grade 7, in the Australian Mathematics Competition. I remember when they actually used to pay decent amounts of interest... maybe that corresponded with high reserve bank cash rates?

In September 2004, I decided to move as much money as possible into Citibank, which was offering 5.4% with their Online Cash Manager account. This was in comparison with Westpac, which was offering nothing. In March 2005, they increased the rate to 5.5%. But then in April, Citibank dropped their rate to 4% for balances under $100,000. So I looked around again and this time I found Raboplus, offering 6.6% in an internet account. I can't understand how Westpac's share price has done so well when they seemingly offer so little. Today I changed my "Classic" account to an "eChoice" one and I will be striving to keep my balance as low as possible there from now on.

Dreamworld, printer

2007-06-18T22:29:00.000+10:00

I went to Dreamworld with R on Saturday. We went on the Tower of Terror, the Log Ride, Thunder River, Spooty Spin, Runaway Raptar, Vortex, the Reef Diver and the Claw once each; the Giant Drop twice (it's scary, but only for a fraction of a second!) and Wipeout four times. I liked Wipeout the most. It's one of the longest rides -- I think it lasts for over two minutes -- but it's just the unpredictability of it which I enjoyed the most, never knowing which direction you will go next. It's a shame these fun experiences are forgotten so quickly!

On Sunday I went to my friend Y's place to fix her printer, a Brother MFC-210C. It kept displaying "Unable to Init" and the solution in the manual was to look for obstructions inside the printer. This failed so she suggested trying an Epson VP-600 a Japanese friend had given her. After we found the right adapter for the power cord she plugged it in and grey smoke started coming out of the printer from the bottom in all directions. It seems that the printer only accepted 100V power! Never mind, I looked at groups.google.com and found the first reference to the printer was in April 1998, so it was more than nine years old.

I bought some furniture from Ikea a few weeks ago -- a Smille chair, a FLÄRKE computer table and an Expedit book case. After I got home I noticed that I could have got a DAVE laptop table instead! It has a hole in the back for the power cable to sneak down through. But I am happy enough with this combination for now. The FLÄRKE is better for reading or writing on than the DAVE, I think. But the DAVE is lighter and lighter == better for the environment. My room is much more organised now.

Speaking of the environment I think it's a bit hypocritical of the free newspaper MX to write about water saving. Think of all the water that gets used to produce a rag that nobody would read were it not free. Because of my work (particularly the Transpower job) I think about water as energy now... I think about GWh of rain, falling from the sky! The hydro inflows are not measured in cumecs (cubic metres per second) so much as in GWh -- so for example, the South Island of New Zealand, on average, gets about 17500GWh of hydro inflows per year.

New Zealand was great fun! Here is a picture of me on the ferry between the North and South Islands.

real men use nukes

2007-06-06T14:55:00.000+10:00

"Republican candidates for U.S. president agreed on Tuesday that Iran must not develop atomic weapons even if a tactical nuclear strike is needed to stop it and accused Democrats of being soft on the issue."

Does the average American realise how crazy this sounds to the rest of the world? "Democrats are Birkenstock-wearing, Prius-driving softies who think diplomacy works, but we SUV-driving Republicans know when Evil Countries should be put in their place and we aren't afraid to use nukular weapons to do it!"

countries, respect for boss

2007-05-22T11:51:00.000+10:00

"Focus on knowing everything." That would be a laughable goal! I think, in terms of countries, I would like to visit every country beginning with "I" and try to learn as much as I can about those countries. So far, I have been to Italy, Ireland, Iran, Israel and India. I would like to visit Iceland and Indonesia next, perhaps in that order, and leave Iraq for much later. Perhaps in some senses Iraq is not even a real country -- that is: its borders were defined by the British, who left it independent in 1932, and many people living there identify themselves by their religious or tribal affiliations first, before their national affiliation.

Yesterday my boss asked me about my passions. I mentioned chess, even though I am not that good at it. I told him about the best available chess program Rybka and he said he had read about it in the "IEEE Spectrum" magazine. I was really impressed that the magazine would mention the program as I didn't know it was well-known outside computer chess circles. Also, I mentioned that one of the designers of Deep Blue, Murray Campbell, said that "a present-day Cell processor has as much processing power as that entire [Deep Blue] system did in 1997." My boss knew that a Cell processor is the one in the Playstation 3, but at the time I read the article, I had to look that up in Wikipedia to check what a Cell processor was -- I couldn't remember. Anyway it seems my new boss has a wider variety of interests than my old boss did!

I feel sad about the deterioration of my Persian...

make friends, not enemies!

2007-05-09T09:13:00.000+10:00

On the 28th of April I went to the Mansour concert. What an enjoyable concert it was! He sang all of his famous songs like To azize delami, Bezan berim, Divooneh etc. I had never seen so many Iranian people in one place in Brisbane before. It was good to see such a mixture of ages because I had been to a few Iranian events where there was a big generation gap, ie no-one from 20 to 40 was there. I enjoyed meeting friends I had not seen for a while. Now, in the past there was a girl I was attracted to, K. Because: she seemed happy, she liked to exercise, she was adventurous and was kind of scientific (she had studied engineering). And I enjoyed talking to her. But when she got back to Australia in Nov 2005, she told me she just wanted to be friends. That was ok with me. We had dinner with my cousin and his wife (now ex-wife). But then she just started ignoring my texts and emails. When we did meet up she claimed to have been too busy to reply, "I've been working 9 to 9 in my research assistant job". My cousin said to me "oh come on R, you know it's bullshit". But it was sad to lose someone who I thought could have been a good friend. It's annoying when someone is too rude to reply to texts but I cannot waste energy on thinking about it. I would also forget all about the rudeness if she did contact me of her own accord (remembering what I read in the book "Games Indians Play" about defection and cooperation -- the best strategy is the so-called "tit for tat" strategy -- ie don't bear grudges, don't be the first to defect, but also forgive easily. Also, let insults be like water off a duck's back!)

Now I met her brother-in-law S at the concert. I hadn't talked to him for about a year. He told me that K used to be living with them, but that she had become a drug addict and they had kicked her out, and they don't know where she is living now, or care. I was shocked. He wants to destroy the relationship beyond repair, even going so far as to try to damage her reputation in the non-Iranian community. But also I wondered if it were true and if she were lonely at this time. It would be a terrible thing to have a split with my family like that.

The truly wise man learns from the mistakes of others: 1. Move out before it gets too bad. 2. Don't take drugs. 3. Don't "put all your [emotional] eggs in the one [family] basket".

And finally, for S and K and me, don't waste your energy on hate!! How pointless it all is, how much better to redirect it. At uni, I knew a guy who destroys every relationship and person he touches to the extent that I will never contact him and I don't even want to link to his page. He has been having a legal battle with his brother-in-law for over ten years. Everything is at his page. I don't even want to touch this guy ... so his website is an h, then an a, then an i, then a g, then report.com. It would be more aptly called the Hate report.

two weeks into the new

2007-04-14T14:18:00.000+10:00

I have so much to learn in my new job. I don't understand the simplest things about electricity, like the difference between AC and DC, impedance, inductance, reactance, resistance. There is so much to read. I have to have self-discipline even away from work to spend less time on the net and more time reading all the NEMMCO stuff and the other reports.

Around Christmas time I saw my first Samsung D900 phone in real life. I considered upgrading, because compared to my current Samsung D600 it has a 3 megapixel camera instead of a 2 megapixel camera, and it is thinner and 20g lighter. Then this weekend I've been reading reviews that say the battery life is terrible and the screen tends to crack. In fact there are more than 200 posts in the cracked screen thread. I had better be happy with what I have for now. I also have been reading reviews of the Nokia N95.

India made me think so much about the theme "what if everyone did this?", especially in relation to garbage and traffic. I didn't like the look of Indian cities very much. It requires very high population density, like in Bombay, to overcome the tendency of Indian people to throw garbage everywhere and create some place relatively clean. In Tehran, street cleaners were at work all the time, even before dawn, to make a cleaner environment. But in India (collective) cleanliness and hygiene are not high priorities. Religion, cricket, and family are all more important. Here, I have of course been thinking about water issues because of the terrible lack of rain we have been having in Brisbane. The fact that the Tarong power station is down to 30% capacity gets mentioned a lot at work. In the book "Games Indians Play" similar situations are mentioned explicitly -- the example given at the beginning of one chapter is: "because of a terrible drought, the government has asked everyone to shower only every second day. But what difference will it make if only you decide just once to have an extra shower?". Of course the problem occurs when everyone thinks like that. And I also thought about the other day when I was going from my work (basically the corner of Jephson Street and Sherwood Road) to the Broncos Leagues Club (98 Fulcher Street, Red Hill) on Friday after work. I was going to take the 5:57 bus from Toowong High Street (a timed stop) to Jubilee Avenue at 6:11 and then walk about 1km. That's what I did but the bus was about 13 minutes late. I could call and complain -- is it the correct thing to do? But are the people reading my complaint taking it seriously? If those people reading it do a half-arsed job responding to my complaint or doing anything about it, it makes very little difference. The bus will go on people late, people will switch to cars after a while, and our traffic problems will get worse. It made me think about my job and my previous job, where I had the same attitude sometimes -- "if I do a crap job, it makes very little difference". I didn't often think about the converse situation "if I do a wonderful job, will it make much of a difference?". I will try to be more conscientious. Back to the water: my flatmate is very environmentally conscious about recycling and water usage but in some ways I think it's all for nothing, because we use a Simpson 503 washing machine. It's 5L and I went to the water rating site to look at its equivalents. I was disturbed to find something similar gets only a 1.5 star rating. A front-loader would be more efficient for energy and water purposes.

back from india

2007-04-02T18:28:00.000+10:00

I'm back from India! I blogged my trip at Robyn's Dream Trip. It was very mixed -- I enjoyed places in India like the hill stations at Kodaikanal and Darjeeling and the trains to Ooty and Darjeeling, Kaziranga National Park, the wonderful sights and sounds of the Taj Mahal and the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and the Agonda beach in Goa. But the cities were really disgusting and travel, especially by rail, was often very frustrating (would have been OK if time were unlimited).

Libya

2007-02-02T18:53:00.000+10:00

Rome is easily my favourite city in Europe. I've often heard that the Roman ruins in Libya are better than those in Rome, so I've been wanting to visit Libya for some time. In 2004 I thought I had my excuse -- the FIDE World Chess Championship was being played in Tripoli in June and July. I wrote to the Libyan People's Bureau in Canberra asking how I might get a visa to this event, but they never replied. Possibly, the Libyan authorities prefer foreigners to go on group tours. I've been using zuji frequently lately to plan my trip, and today I visited the bookshop to check out how I might get to Libya if I wanted to go.

As a cheapest fare ($2000 + taxes ~ $2500), Zuji proposed a most interesting route:

Flight: Qantas Airways flight 503 - Economy Class
Depart: Brisbane, Australia (BNE) - Tue, 06 Mar at 5:30am
Arrive: Sydney, Australia (SYD) - Tue, 06 Mar at 8:00am
Connecting To

Airline Logo Flight: Asiana Airlines flight 602 - Economy Class
Depart: Sydney, Australia (SYD) - Tue, 06 Mar at 9:30am
Arrive: Incheon Int Seoul, Korea Repub (ICN) - Tue, 06 Mar at 6:00pm
Connecting To

Airline Logo Flight: Asiana Airlines flight 541 - Economy Class
Depart: Incheon Int Seoul, Korea Repub (ICN) - Wed, 07 Mar at 12:40pm
Arrive: Frankfurt, Germany (FRA) - Wed, 07 Mar at 4:35pm

Airline Logo Flight: Lufthansa flight 4120 - Economy Class
Depart: Frankfurt, Germany (FRA) - Thu, 08 Mar at 9:20am
Arrive: Tripoli, Libya (TIP) - Thu, 08 Mar at 1:10pm

It's quite ridiculous but I thought it was interesting that it went through Seoul and Frankfurt! This shows the limits of online booking services, because it should be a pretty straightforward flight Brisbane-Singapore/Perth-Doha/Dubai-Tripoli and return. Maybe zuji uses only certain airlines.

professorial chairs

2007-01-30T16:42:00.000+10:00

Robin: There's Henry Drucker. He has a chair in history at Princeton. Oh, and the short man is Hershel Kaminsky. He has a chair in philosophy at Cornell.
Alvy Singer: Yeah? Two more chairs they got a dining room set.

-- Annie Hall

My boss at uni has a personal chair in statistics and has recently become the head of department. Yesterday I moved his chair to his new HoD office. As most of my readers will never get a personal chair, and some will never see one, I have decided to provide a picture of his. Brown is just not in the in color right now is it? It somehow reminds one of the 70s, Holden Geminis and Sergeant Bargearse.

breaking news from Jon Swift

2007-01-19T09:06:00.000+10:00

According to Jon Swift, Michael Ledeen is dead. Or at least dying, so his sources tell him. He hasn't been able to get the sources on the phone but is running with the story anyway.

trapped inside the TV at FF

2007-01-17T12:40:00.000+10:00

The other morning at FF the FF network screwed up and so the video clip was stuck on one image for some time. This really needs a caption, can my readers supply one?

job change, travel plans

2007-01-12T17:11:00.000+10:00

I am quitting my UQ job and moving to Roam Consulting. I think this will be a good career move!! Also I am travelling in India in February and March. Anyone out there is welcome to join me because I have no idea what I'm doing. I am going to Find Myself though.

mobile phone madness

2007-01-11T13:59:00.000+10:00

I bought a belt pouch just before Christmas at Garden City for my D600. But now when I go to answer calls I pull it out of the pouch and it rejects the call!! I am going insane. I did find some answers on the discussion forums.

PokerDoc wrote:
thx in advance WebGuru
First, TY for taking the time to read this..!!!
TY even more if you can answer and help

1. I keep my phone in a neoprene hip/belt holster...everytime the phone rings and I pull it out...it rejects the call....I think the phone is either sliding and closing...or the volume key is rejecting the call...any thoughts or fixes for this...

Dear PokerDoc

I also have the same problem. I have found that it wasn't the keys that were cancelling the incoming calls when I use my D500 with my leather pouch.

I found that when I put my phone next to the magnet which is embedded within the leather pouch it changes the state of the phone. so it goes from "unlocked" to saying "menu/ok" and when I take it away from my leather pouch it asks me whether I wanted to lock the phone.

I am not going to use the leather pouch anymore because the magnet in the pouch interferes with the phone.

Best Regards,
gerryphone

iPhone and 802.11n

2007-01-10T06:44:00.000+10:00

Apple announced the iPhone! Yay! This basically means the iPod is dead as soon as the iPhone is actually released - or at least the iPod will only be for people who can't afford the phone. Everyone is comparing the iPhone to the Nokia N95, which I am strongly considering getting as my next phone, depending on the price I guess.

802.11n networking (10 times faster than 802.11g) is supposed to be in Apple's network products now. But they have not update the drivers for the laptops...

khamenei

2007-01-05T11:58:00.000+10:00

Pajamas Media alleges he has died but the only corroborating source is Ledeen. Ledeen's credibility is not good, he's the guy who posted a story about Montazeri writing a fatwa against suicide bombing which turned out to be untrue. He never retracted that story. Besides Pajamas Media (in this case actually Ledeen) reported he was sick in December but Allahpundit has pictures of him out and about since then.

Indian who wants to be a millionaire

2007-01-03T05:00:00.000+10:00

The Indian version of this show has Episode recaps. How useful. There is a very strong focus on cricket trivia from all countries - I might find it difficult. I intend to watch some when I visit... the host for the new season will be Shahrukh Khan, a famous actor every Indian recognises. That's another difference between between the Indian version and other versions, the hosts in India are more famous.

SBS ads

2006-12-20T16:42:00.000+10:00

Oh no, how dare SBS put ads in the middle of their programs! The world will end and the mute button on the remote control will wear out. I will get an EyeTV and record straight to the hard disk, then fast forward past the ads. Most annoying.

schwing

2006-12-18T11:10:00.000+10:00

Recently I saw the film Swing directed by Tony Gatlif, a favourite director of mine. I love that Manouche guitar playing! I remember Vengo which I expected to be about flamenco but was mainly about getting pished.

I think RockWiz is rigged and so does my dad. The contestants are just too good to be true. No-one ever misses an answer. This show is just making the world a more cynical place.

Toshiba finally came out with their 16GB USB flash drive. 62600 yen translates to $A682. No indication of speed is given. I see the equivalent Corsair 16GB USB flash drive is $A320.60 at Pricepoint Computers, and a fast A-DATA 8GB USB flash drive is $A207.90 at yeahdone.com.au. Corsair drives didn't get good reviews at newegg.com. Perhaps I should buy the A-DATA one. But with the 16GB version I could get an exact copy of an 8.5GB DL DVD.

Been watching a bit of cricket lately... that Retravision ad with the Proclaimers song is kinda annoying.

Canberra, job satisfaction

2006-12-12T09:45:00.000+10:00

Hello again! Long time no posts. I spent from Dec 1 to Dec 11 in our nation's capital. There are many things to see there - I visited the National Gallery of Australia, and the Egyptian Antiquities exhibition that's on there at the moment, the National Museum of Australia, Parliament House, Old Parliament House (with the National Portrait Gallery), Black Mountain Tower, Australian Institute of Sport, and the War Memorial. I tried to visit the Mint but the last entry is at 4pm on weekends.
On Sunday night I went to a party in Palmerston and had tasty Iranian food.

Often I complain here about how bad Brisbane public transport is, particularly on weekends and at peak hour, but Canberra's is worse. In order to visit many places and not waste lots of time travelling between these places, you need to have a car. So on the second weekend I hired a Mitsubishi 380 LX sedan from Thrifty's. It was fun to drive but more difficult to park than my Yaris, of course.

Now I seem to be writing this at work. I'm not feeling great job satisfaction right now unfortunately. It feels like I have been doing the same thing over and over for a while, and I haven't received any promotion for 2.5 years (in fact there is nowhere to go). Fortunately, I think someone is about to make me an offer!! I hope it's a good one that raises my self-esteem. Otherwise I will need to keep looking some more.

what is my technorati rank

2006-11-27T13:03:00.001+10:00

Technorati Profile

misheard Prince lyrics

2006-11-23T11:31:00.000+10:00

I was sure in "I Wanna Be Your Lover" he sings "I wanna be the only one you cook for". But apparently it is something else!

the wonderfulness of macs

2006-11-20T21:35:00.000+10:00

My cheap flatmate bought a bargain scanner at Aldi. It is a Medion MD 90090 (product id 0x3022, vendor id 0x05da). He couldn't get it to work on his old PC (perhaps because it's only USB 1.1, and even though it says "backwards compatible" on the box, on the back of the scanner it says "USB 2.0"). I suggested it might work on my MacBook Pro. I plugged it in and tried Image Capture, but this didn't work, so I googled the product and vendor ID. I found it's also known as a Tevion or Aldi scanner, and someone on a German-language discussion board suggested that they didn't really make it themselves, the chipset has to be from someone else. They suggested it's really the same as the Microtek S400. So I went to the Microtek site and downloaded their Mac software and everything worked! Wow. The German people were saying to the Mac guy that he should sell it and buy a Canon because the box doesn't say it works with a Mac.

fleas

2006-11-17T08:19:00.000+10:00

are bloody annoying. I don't feel bad about killing them at all and neither do truly enlightened people. There is no associated karmic problem, I am just making the world a better place!!

konglish part II

2006-11-07T11:17:00.000+10:00

On the Univera site, they have a "bland introduction" link. Bahahaha!! I have to visit Seoul again just to pick up some t-shirts!!

definitions

2006-10-27T11:10:00.000+10:00

A friend of mine sent an accommodation ad to everyone at IMB using the "Informal Announcements" mailing list.

Hi, I’m a 25 yo easy-going female working fulltime at CSIRO looking for two easy-going females ...

She's used "easy-going" twice in the first sentence! I've asked her a few times what that was supposed to mean. She said it means she is looking for someone who is "not uptight" and "not a neat freak". And the idea of emphasising this was so that if they turn out to be "uptight" or a "neat freak" then she can say "look, the ad said we were looking for someone easy-going, and you are not easy-going".

Ummmmm. I think the word is so wishy-washy that it should be left out. After all does anybody really consider themselves not easy-going? A contributor at urbandictionary.com agrees with me - check out their definition of the word. (Also see "neat freak" there.)

It's much like using the word "down-to-earth" in personal ads. It defies definition.

I did suggest that it might be an a kind of "code word" to hint at something which can't be said explicitly, for example some women's tendency to write in personal ads that they are looking for someone "educated" and "ambitious" when they really mean "rich". But I have backed away from this theory.

Westpac Offline Banking

2006-10-27T11:07:00.000+10:00

Westpac Online and Online Banking are currently unavailable. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

It's been down for two hours (business hours). How incompetent. I think I should probably switch -- is the fact that I haven't yet indicative of my inertia problems?

happy birthday from apple

2006-10-24T23:38:00.000+10:00

I ordered my new Macbook Pro at 10:53pm AEST Australian time, a few minutes after the store reopened. I'm getting the high-end 15-inch version with the 160GB hard drive. I quickly read a review of one of the available 200GB notebook hard drives and decided that this technology is a bit new for me and the performance is very average. The 200GB drive is not even available on newegg.com yet.

(About tucking fime for the Core 2 Duo update Apple!)

picture time

2006-10-20T11:31:00.000+10:00

Chinese chef at the Brisbane Multicultural Festival.

A certain train seems to be rather late (cancelled, I would think)

My desk at work - my officemate left so now I have two LCD monitors. This is much better than just one. I have Outlook open on the left one and do work on the right one.

What is that blue cord attached to my computer?

2006-10-09T16:25:00.000+10:00

It's usually used as an ethernet cable. However when I am feeling happy as I always am, it can double as a skipping rope! Yippee!

Welcome to my corporate box!

2006-10-08T18:38:00.000+10:00

antidepressants

2006-10-06T10:10:00.001+10:00

I found a poster of "Cornfield with Crows" in my office at work. After van Gogh painted it, in 1890, he shot himself at age 37. Now if they had had antidepressants in those days perhaps he would never have been a great painter in the first place. He would have died old and happy. His loss and tragedy is our gain. That's why antidepressants are a bad thing! Tom Cruise was right!!

toilet humour

2006-09-29T22:35:00.000+10:00

Because I don't have a computer at home right now, I've stayed at uni late on a Friday night to watch game 5 of the Topalov-Kramnik match. But they are both behaving like children, arguing over the toilet! I can't believe this crap. The best live updates are at Susan Polgar's blog.

MOSCOW: Referees barred private toilets on Friday for the two grandmasters fighting for the world chess championship title in southern Russia after the contest was plunged into scandal over the frequency of one player's restroom breaks, ITAR-TASS news agency said.

Update 15:30h: Topalov is sitting at the board, Kramnik's clock is running. The 'game' started at 15:22h Elista time. 15:45h: Kramnik is in his rest room, and is waiting for his toilet to open.

leaving things behind

2006-09-21T17:14:00.000+10:00

Oddur has left his mobile phone behind at home many times lately. I told him that it's his unconscious mind working - deep down, he really wants to get rid of his phone but this urge hasn't risen to his conscious mind yet.

In related news, I have gone on an ebay selling frenzy recently. Clearly, people will buy anything! Even my old computers from 1993! After living with Oddur for a while and also seeing An Inconvenient Truth my environmental consciousness has been raised. So I am thinking of trying to sell all the other old computers I have lying around. I think I will actually feel better, not owning so much junk.

things you can't find on the internet

2006-09-18T16:02:00.000+10:00

Do you remember Icy Blu of "Pump It" (Nice n Hard) fame? Her real name is not available anywhere on the internet anymore! Fortunately, I have access to Factiva at work and retrieved it.

Reuters bias in Pope story

2006-09-16T18:03:00.000+10:00

In the Reuters version of the story by Jonathan Wright:

In a speech in Germany on Tuesday, the Pope appeared to endorse a Christian view, contested by most Muslims, that the early Muslims spread their religion by violence.

The Times gets it right:

The Pope did not endorse the sentiment.

And so does the Washington Post:

The pope neither explicitly endorsed nor denounced the emperor's words, but rather used them as a preface to a discussion of faith and reason.

In this modern age you can just read what the Pope said for yourself. But I'm concerned by the obvious Reuters bias here. Should I complain?

I'm reading "The Media and Me" (1996) by Stuart Littlemore and it's full of interesting stories about his time at the ABC. Even then he was worried about the concentration of media ownership in Australia. It's much worse now.

tasteful wallpaper

2006-09-12T13:59:00.000+10:00

The ARC is reviewing our centre for a possible three-year extension soon. We have to look busy when all of the famous professors come to assess the place. The director of the centre is taking it very seriously and my boss commented this morning that my tasteful Priyanka Chopra desktop background would have to go. So I've temporarily replaced it with a microarray picture (groan!). Maybe after the committee goes away I'll move to something racier (haha!).

from a to z...

2006-09-05T14:46:00.000+10:00

Up to B.

I came across a website for BCon Korea. On the page they write "We are your believable business partner." It's Konglish and to a native speaker it sounds weird and amusing. It's hard to explain why, though. I think someone took the phrase "trustworthy business partner" and then decided to consult the thesaurus to change "trustworthy" to something else...

khatami and carter

2006-09-01T09:56:00.000+10:00

Khatami not to meet Jimmy Carter in US.

Any sort of apology for the hostage-taking “would melt a mountain of ice in Washington” but would be political suicide back home for his reformist associates.

Political suicide? But his associates are already dead politically! Why not do the right thing?

nichanneru

2006-08-31T17:24:00.001+10:00

The other weekend I was at my sister's installing their wireless network. They have Bigpond ADSL with a Speedtouch 530 modem, and had bought a D-Link DI-524 wireless router to go with it. It took me a long time to set up! I had to ftp to the address 10.0.0.138 and delete everything in the dl directory as mentioned here. Then, the DNS did not seem to be working, but I entered the DNS server addresses on their notebooks and everything was fine. I have ensured marital harmony in their household.

Now, M (my brother-in-law) can read 2 Channel without interrupting my sister. M told me that Nichanneru is a site where anybody can post anything anonymously. He uses it to follow news about dodgy surgeons in Japan. I was intrigued and immediately wondered how long a site like this would last in Iran. I estimate a few seconds -- how should I say it diplomatically -- Iranians have some cultural problems that cause them to want to Censor Things.

buy my powerbook

2006-08-30T13:04:00.000+10:00

What a bargain!

I'm not sure when I'll buy another notebook, probably when Apple comes out with their newest model.

santa rosa

2006-08-29T16:06:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, I read on the Mac Rumors site that the next Macbook Pro revision after the imminent upgrade will have the "Santa Rosa" platform by Intel, with all sorts of good things like 800MHz FSB, and 802.11n wireless built-in. I assumed that this was named after the city of Santa Rosa in California, but then I became curious to know which Santa Rosa the city was named after. Wikipedia did not explain.

After some searching I determined that it was named after Saint Rose of Lima, the first Catholic saint of the Americas. She has a public holiday in Peru dedicated to her, tomorrow, August 30.

She gives a whole new meaning to Catholic guilt...

(from Catholic Advent article about her)

In her twentieth year she received the habit of St. Dominic. Thereafter she redoubled the severity and variety of her penances to a heroic degree, wearing constantly a metal spiked crown, concealed by roses, and an iron chain about her waist. Days passed without food, save a draught of gall mixed with bitter herbs. When she could no longer stand, she sought repose on a bed constructed by herself, of broken glass, stone, potsherds, and thorns. She admitted that the thought of lying down on it made her tremble with dread.

(from Appleton's Cyclopedia)

She showed great piety in early life, and, to avoid hearing the praises of her beauty, disfigured her face with oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid).

I'm reading a book now about the problems with Islam. It's full of all sorts of criticisms and written by a Catholic. But what is to be gained by the Catholic Church continuing to venerate saints like Santa Rosa? How much further society could have advanced if the church venerated scientists instead...

salaries, look alikes

2006-08-28T10:25:00.000+10:00

The median salary for Masters Research/PhD graduates in mathematics in 2005 in Australia was $63,547. Nearly five years after my PhD, I still don't make that much. I, too, must be an "unassertive person" like the kind of people who work for Ginga. Why doesn't someone just come along and offer me a better job?

I did look at myheritage.com's facial recognition site. It failed to come up with anything impressive. It kept comparing me to Christina Ricci.

Every time I look at RTM's site it feels like I'm looking in the mirror.

Tupolevs

2006-08-23T09:35:00.000+10:00

I've only flown on a Tupolev once, on September 11, 2003, on a Tehran to Khorramabad flight. (Yes, check that link!) As we arrived in Khorramabad I could see how easy it would be to crash into the mountains nearby.

Anyway Tupolev safety is a national joke in Iran so I am not surprised by the latest crash. However, Tupolev deserves some credit for inventing the world's first supersonic passenger aircraft, before Concorde.

the team weakness

2006-08-17T22:42:00.000+10:00

There's a first time for everything... tonight we had a team of six. I had tried to enlist a TV specialist but she cancelled on me. It was an amusing night though, guessing Madonna's height, beating a team of gay people :-)

Here were the questions for the TV round, where we scored 8.

1. What are the names of the two boys in Diffrent Strokes?
2. Mrs Garrett moved from Diffrent Strokes to which other show?
3. The ABC is also affectionately known as...
4. Who is the host of "Temptation"?
5. Who has an uncle Jimbo in South Park?
6. Who is Edmund Blackadder's servant?
7. Veronica Mars is set in which fictional town?
8. Who plays Veronica Mars?
9. In which ABC show are DC Carver and DCI Burnside?
10. This Desparate Housewives character commits suicide and season 1 and now narrates the show.
11. Denny Crane is the main character in...?
12. How many seasons of Friends were there?
13. Who is the uncle in the Addams Family?
14. In the OC, Marissa died in whose arms?
15. Who won It Takes Two?

"I wouldn't want to be on a team which did well in a TV round" -- Matt

fond memories

2006-08-14T23:09:00.000+10:00

I saw many films at the South Bank Cineplex. I decided to go past a nearby well-known restaurant and take some pictures. (I mean, well-known for paying its employees $9 or $10 an hour, under the award rate! They do this by employing unassertive people who are here on working holiday visas.)

free french lessons

2006-08-09T11:12:00.000+10:00

I have been working very hard lately...

Today, I got some spam in Spanish sent to my maths account (ending in .edu.au). I became curious about what it said. (Because I could understand most of it.) Apparently they think I am going to visit a holiday reserve near Lima in Peru.

I commenced a lengthy vigorous discussion with my French officemate. Why did they send it to an Australian educational address? And why do some people get so much Korean, Chinese, and Japanese spam that they cannot understand?

I asked him if there was a French word for spam and he said there wasn't. So I typed invent french new words into google, and the very first result was discussing this exact topic on a blog! Some of the commenters said there were two words for spam in French -- pourriel and polluriel. I decided to research when each of these words were first used using groups.google.com. Pourriel is first, being first used on 1999-03-26 and polluriel was first used on 1999-09-15. Then I spent some time discussing the Academie Francaise with J. He said most French people would not understand any of the words used in the 1999-03-26 post above. Ok, back to work!

traxler

2006-08-07T16:12:00.000+10:00

I spent $100 buying Rybka, the chess program, two weeks ago. The computers at work have been enjoying their weekends analyzing positions for me. But, I realized that other people have had my idea too. In particular, John L Jerz uses Rybka to analyze one of the sharpest variations in chess, the Traxler variation. Another player Maarten de Zeeuw wrote a survey of the variation and it was voted the best from the past 25 volumes of the New In Chess Yearbook Series. (!) de Zeeuw claims White has many ways to get a clear advantage, but Jerz finds better moves for Black.

funerals, languages, films

2006-08-04T14:27:00.000+10:00

My boss went to a funeral of a friend yesterday. The friend got pancreatic cancer and was told he had three months to live, but it turned out to be only three weeks. He was 59, twice my age. I hope to live longer than that. What am I going to do with the next thirty years of my life?

A French student is visiting us at the moment. I have been trying to learn French words in the midst of procrastinating. Yesterday I had a discussion with him about programming languages. He vigorously promoted Caml to me. It has really good reliability and type-checking features. But I am just so used to C now. Am I too old to learn a new programming language well?

Last night I saw a wonderful film called Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul at the film festival. It was so good I want to buy the soundtrack. On Saturday night I could see the Iranian war film Gilaneh. But it was not a favourite of audiences at Fajr and so I don't think I will see it then, if it all. Instead, I will go and see the world premiere of "Quest" because I loved the director's last film Paheli. Unfortunately, I have many friends who are quite closed-minded about Bollywood and refuse to see Bollywood films on principle.

buses

2006-08-01T10:31:00.000+10:00

Brisbane City Council (Bus Complaints)
GPO Box 1434
Brisbane Qld 4001

Dear Sir/Madam

Today, the 1st of August, 2006, I arrived at the bus stop next to Indooroopilly Station (Stop 35, 30 Lambert Road approaching Central Avenue) at 8:04am, intending to catch a bus to the University of Queensland, St Lucia. In the next twenty-three minutes, four buses, apparently full, went past – a 432 at 8:06am, a 432 at 8:08am, a 427 at 8:12am, and a 427 at 8:25am. Finally I caught a 428 at 8:27am arriving at UQ at 8:46am.

I think the council has probably known about these problems for a very long time, since I have seen BCC employees counting passengers stationed at this bus stop many times. A friend of mine, Ken Gray, who rarely commutes via bus, commented that he had complained about the problem as long ago as 1990. But the problem of a lack of buses along this route has reached a new peak of ridiculousness recently. I should have written earlier about these problems but today was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I would appreciate it if you would note the extreme problems here and if you would send a reply consisting of something other than platitudes and vague promises. A solution needs to be implemented as a matter of great urgency, otherwise it makes more sense for me and everyone else to catch a taxi or drive. (Alternatively, you may be able to advise me that fewer problems occur along the route from Toowong to UQ.)

(Attached for your reference: picture of line at bus stop at 8:25am today with annoyed commuters stretching out to the corner of Clarence Road and Lambert Road).

brisbane public transport routes

2006-07-26T23:27:00.000+10:00

Yesterday I caught the 104 bus from the Corinda Railway station to the PA hospital. Apart from the Great Circle 598 and 599 routes and the various routes servicing the University of Queensland in St Lucia from the western suburbs, I think this must be one of the very few buses that doesn't run on an into-the-city/out-of-the-city axis. But it only runs Monday to Friday. What a shame. I suppose in 2007 with the Green Bridge opening across the river, that will be another way to get from Corinda to UQ.

social networking games

2006-07-25T23:34:00.000+10:00

Linkedin.com is fun. Here is my public URL. I am connected to 13 people and waiting on another 11 invitations. Instead of guessing people's names I just went through all of my email and took everything with an @ sign, then uploaded it to the contacts list on linkedin. Now it says "You have 8450 contacts and 120 are already users". I've had some contact with 16 of those 120. It's interesting seeing what people who have some connection with me are doing.

I would like to get in contact with friends on Myspace but I don't seem to know many. Perhaps I'm too old (turned 29 3/4 yesterday) and Alexa statistics merely reflect its huge popularity among teenagers.

ghormeh sabzi

2006-07-19T09:06:00.000+10:00

Last night I made my first ghormeh sabzi. Even though I used chicken instead of lamb/beef, lentils instead of kidney beans, and lemon juice instead of the usually recommended limes, it still tasted really good. The recipe I followed was from Forough Hekmat's "Art of Persian Cooking".

social networking

2006-07-17T20:58:00.000+10:00

I was speaking to Jenny on the phone the other day and she said she received a message on hi5 from a mutual friend, Nami, after a prolonged period of no contact. So I decided to do the rounds of invitations again on the services I'm a member on. hi5, friendster and myspace have a useful feature where you can invite your MSN and Yahoo friends automatically, but it seems to be broken on myspace today.

From this list I am a member on Friendster, Hi5, Myspace, Orkut, Wayn, Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, and an unlisted one, Gazzag. That last one is Brazilian and looked a lot like Orkut last time I checked.

My favourite is still Orkut, I have more friends there than on any other service (107).

these people

2006-07-15T09:53:00.000+10:00

Googling "only thing arabs understand", "only things these people understand", and "only thing they understand" arab gives predictable results. I wish I could google in Arabic, so I could see if Arabs say similar things about Israelis.

In a story from news.com.au Israel requested jet fuel from the USA.

The Pentagon said the sale would help "improve the security of a friendly country which has been, and continues to be, an important force for stability and economic progress in the Middle East."

Surely no-one from the Pentagon was able to say that with a straight face?

superiority

2006-07-13T22:45:00.000+10:00

At trivia tonight we won the $500 grand final prize (taking into account the scores for the last 9 rounds). It was an interesting format that I hadn't participated in before and which John explained to me beforehand. The host distributes cards marked A, B, C, and D to the top four teams (plus a random team) and asks a multiple-choice question, repeating it once, and then on the count of three a person from each team holds up their answer. The last question was "which country does not border on Iran" -- A Afghanistan, B India, C Turkmenistan, D Turkey. And somehow the team which almost always came first put A, I think, and was eliminated. The other remaining team held up C. Clearly even our most competent opposition are just a bunch of bogans, at least when it comes to geography. (I can't explain how we scored 88 and they scored 100 tonight). We can't rest on our laurels though -- got to keep our minds sharp and our team name fresh!

move 15 in Kasparov vs World

2006-07-13T17:15:00.000+10:00

So I ran a few programs on this position.

Spike and Toga II like ...Ra8 and Rybka likes ...b5. "The World" played ...Ra8 but Kasparov feared ...b5.

Spike 1.1

info depth 24 score cp -32 pv h8a8 c1e3 e7e6 e3b6 f6d5 c3d5 c4d5 d1d5 e6d5 f1b1
a8a4 b6e3 d7c7 b1d1 g7b2 a1b1 b2d4 e3d4 c6d4 b1c1 c7d7 d1d2 d4e6 d2d5 a4a2 c1d1
a2a6 d5d3 hashfull 1000 nps 527191 time 297483992 nodes 156831064410 tbhits 0

Spike 1.2

info depth 24 score cp -15 pv h8a8 c1e3 e7e6 e3b6 f6d5 c3d5 c4d5 d1d5 e6d5 f1b1
a8a4 b6e3 d7c8 g2g3 c8c7 g1f1 d5d4 b2b3 d4e3 b3a4 e3f2 a2a3 g7a1 b1a1 f7f5 f1f2
d6d5 hashfull 1000 nps 564996 time 209331429 nodes 118271594633 tbhits 0

Toga II 1.2.1a

info multipv 1 depth 25 seldepth 82 score cp -12 time 342210312 nodes 180871282838 pv h8a8 c1e3 e7e6 e3b6 f6d5 c3d5 c4d5 d1d5 e6d5 f1d1 g7b2 a1b1 b2c3 d1d5 a8a2 b1d1 c3e5 b6e3 a2a3 d5b5 d7c8 d1b1 c6d8 g2g3 h7h5 e3b6 d8c6 f2f4 e5f6 b6f2 c6a5 g1g2 a3a2

Rybka 1.0 beta

info depth 23 score cp 0 time 351281642 nodes 1461490788 nps 4260 pv b6b5 f1e1 h8c8

rybka; kangaroos

2006-07-13T10:27:00.000+10:00

I had lunch with Alejandro today. He wrote the smallpotato chess program. It takes a lot of effort to write a good chess program. We talked about the programs that came out of nowhere. First there was Ruffian by Per-ola Valfridsson of Schweden. He was not a participant in chess groups or discussion boards and then one day he released Ruffian which just beat all the other programs available. It was extraordinary. Alejandro told me that the same thing happened with Fruit, for which the source code of one version is available. He said it doesn't do anything special, just does the usual stuff very well. Finally in December 2005, the international chess master Vasik Rajlich came out with Rybka which is clearly the best program anyone has written up until now. He must have some new idea which ensures its superiority, because there is no way to "cheat" in computer chess. You can tune your program against some other programs to ensure good results, but you can't do it against all of them. It's impressive, because usually the best chess players aren't necessarily the best chess programmers.

On Saturday I was driving to Venman Reserve when a kangaroo jumped out in front of the car. It was rather frightening because there is no effective action possible. ABS brakes would have helped, though, so my next car will surely have those.

silly nationalism

2006-07-08T08:15:00.000+10:00

On the night of July 2, 2000 I ascended the Eiffel Tower in France. Everything was quiet and peaceful. Suddenly there was lots of noise from down below! I descended again and Paris was in the middle of a big celebration. France had just beaten Italy and won the 2000 European Football Championship. Will there be similar celebrations after this year's World Cup final? As an Australian, I hope to see Italy defeated :-)

I watched all the Australia matches because of the feeling of euphoria when we scored. I admit though, it makes sense to be proud of your country when it is small, but I find the nationalism of large countries kind of amusing. If someone says they are proud to be Chinese or Indian, particularly, I think "you are hardly special, coming from a country that makes up 1/5 or 1/6 of the world's population. Wouldn't it be more sensible to be proud of belonging to a smaller sub-group?". Perhaps what they are really proud of is some kind of values the country is perceived to have, like Indian parents in the US celebrating their children's success in the national spelling bee. That would make sense.

long dongs

2006-07-05T22:35:00.000+10:00

People have known about the Taepodong since August 1994 and the Taepodong 2 since June 1995. After 11 years North Koreans still can't get the thing to fly. Doesn't seem to be much of a threat.

publications

2006-07-05T22:19:00.000+10:00

I like the concept of Digital Object Identifiers. I need to make sure people can find my papers easily, and the idea of a permanent URL is exciting. Here are all my published papers with DOIs (nine out of 20, soon to be 10 out of 21).

A mixture model-based approach to the clustering of microarray expression data

A simple implementation of a normal mixture approach to differential gene expression in multiclass microarrays

Modelling high-dimensional data by mixtures of factor analyzers

Using mixture models to detect differentially expressed genes

Steiner trades that give rise to completely decomposable Latin interchanges

Cluster Analysis of High-Dimensional Data: A Case Study

Application of Mixture Models to Detect Differentially Expressed Genes

Clustering objects on subsets of attributes (with discussion)

A new bound on the size of the largest critical set in a Latin square

I am able to link directly to other papers I wrote, but the URLs are not permanent.

Closing a gap in the spectrum of critical sets

Robust cluster analysis via mixture models

And two more available through the arxiv:

The size of the smallest uniquely completable set in order 8 Latin squares

Critical sets in the elementary abelian 2- and 3- groups

OS X 10.4.7

2006-07-05T22:04:00.000+10:00

Apple released an update for Mac OS X, 10.4.7. I installed it without thinking too much. Unfortunately, I have an April 2004 Powerbook and need to put a PCI card in the PCI slot to get any USB 2.0 slots. This update just doesn't work with the USB adapter in the PCI slot at all - things are very slow and upon waking from sleep, the mouse pointer works but I just get the spinning beach ball of death. I'm not happy and lots of other people have the same problem. Fortunately it seems possible to downgrade that part of the update.

EDIT 18 July: "the same problem" link disappeared. So I am copying the fix from here.

!!!USE WITH CAUTION!!!!

Make sure you have a good backup. If this fails for you, you will need to Archive & Install.

I was having the same issue with the computer not waking correctly from sleep after the X.4.7 update discussed in this thread. The problem had to do with having a USB 2.0 PCI card installed.

To fix it, I replaced the /System/Library/Extensions/IOUSBFamily.kext file from the 10.4.7 installation (2.5.6) with the 10.4.6 version (2.2.8).
If you're already on 10.4.7, you'll have to revert to 10.4.6 or use an app like Pacifist to get the 10.4.6 Extensions folder and copy it to another location on disk. Then update to 10.4.7 and after restarting replace the IOUSBFamily.kext installed with 10.4.7 with the copy from 10.4.6, repair permissions, and restart.

So far everything seems to be back to normal and I can put my G4 to sleep and have it wake up ready to go again.It worked for me, hopefully it'll help others having sleep issues.

NOTE: I don't know yet if this will cause conflicts later, but again, so far so good. This was a last resort effort after normal maintenance and disk repair, resetting NVRAM, verifying that it was not account specific (it failed to wake from sleep at the login screen after a restart), and several attempts at Archive&Install, Combo Update from 10.4.0 and 10.4.6, and Delta update from 10.4.6

weekend work

2006-07-05T18:31:00.000+10:00

I was at the Gold Coast over Easter and played a game against someone in Charlie's Cafe in Cavill Mall. I lost but I found the opening interesting. As White I played 1. e4 e5 2. f4 d5 (Falkbeer Counter Gambit) 3. ed e4 4. d3 Nf6 5. de Ne4 6. Nf3 Bc5 7. Qe2 and then he played 7... o-o which I was sure was bad.

I was thinking I could just take his knight with my queen and then in order to get it back he would have to weaken the a2-g8 diagonal, which would be really bad for him. Play continued 8. Qxe4 Re8 9. Ne5 f6 10. Bd3 g6

I couldn't see the correct continuation here. I went and looked up the variation in "Nunn's Chess Openings" and it said that Estrin (former world correspondence chess champion) said White has a clear advantage after 11. Qc4. But I couldn't really see that either. Over a few weekends I let the chess program Crafty analyse the position using computers at work. It suggested the best sequence of moves after that is 11... Bd6 12. Kd1 fe 13. fe Bxe5 14. Re1 Nd7 15. d6+ Kg7 16. dxc7 Qf6. It's not clear to me that White's advantage is obvious in that position.

Recently my officemate has gone on holidays, and a PhD student we had has left, so there are computers sitting around doing nothing. I have been thinking about what I could possibly do with them on the weekend. I used to think that Crafty was one of the best programs around. It seems that's not the case anymore. There's a confusing array of rating lists and tournaments right now. It really reminds me of compression software. Every few months, a new program appears that just blows all the old programs away.

The two historic lists are SSDF and the Selective Search list. There's a program called Rybka by an International Master Vasik Rajlich which tops both of these lists, along with the SCCT, CCRL, CSS, WBEC, and CEGT rating lists. I'd have to pay 59 euro for the latest version though, and the free version (1.0 beta) is stronger than any other free program anyway, according to the CEGT list. I remember back in 2002 a program called Ruffian was released by an unknown author and became the strongest program around. Some established chess programmers were very skeptical that this was possible because experience had shown that previous programs which proved to be very strong were almost always clones or rip-offs of other programs. Strangely, Ruffian 2 is said to be no longer available.

The very latest version of Crafty, 20.14, is performing very badly in fast tournaments. In the latest World Computer Chess Championship and CCT Crafty's performance was only average, though it has won twice in the past, CCT-1 and CCT-6.

There are a confusing number of other programs to choose from -- there are even many open source programs stronger than Crafty now. I just looked at all the lists and picked the free ones which are above Crafty. That's Rybka 1.0 beta, Toga II, Spike, Glaurung, Pro Deo, Naum, Ruffian etc etc. I don't have a lot of time to think about which is best, so perhaps I should just stick with Rybka.

From July to October 1999, when I was a PhD student, I worked pretty much full time analyzing the Kasparov vs the World game. I used Crafty exclusively and often used the maths department's computer network to examine lots of positions simultaneously. But the computers I used back then are just a joke now, even compared to the computers in my office at work. "The World" was assisted by four young analysts and voted on which move to choose at each stage. One of the analysts, Irina Krush, worked very hard on the game with the assistance of her trainers and participated heavily in discussions on the bulletin board provided. If the World had followed her recommendations at every step, the game would have been a draw. I suppose the most interesting positions in the game are those where the four analysts recommended four different moves - and this only happened twice, at moves 15 and 16. I plan to analyse these two positions extensively over weekends using my wonderful work computer. Maybe I'll throw in another 2Gb of RAM so I can max out the RAM and have more hash, making the programs stronger.

There are many other interesting positions in the game and it is hard to rank them. As I followed the game and bulletin boards pretty much full time, I remember lots of places where obscure moves were suggested. Apart from the four official analysts, there was also correspondence grandmaster Roberto Alvarez, OTB GM Duncan Suttles, and "IM2429" suggesting moves that no-one else considered. I also have Kasparov's book on the game, which is unfortunately out of print now. I'll just list them here.

Move 6. The Russian Grandmaster Chess School strongly recommended 6... Nd4 and wrote that it "equalises the game completely". The official analysts recommended Ne5, Nf6 and g6.

Move 7. Again, the official analysts diverged and recommended Ne5, Nf6 and g6.

Move 10. The most exciting move -- Qe6 and o-o were recommended. o-o would have led to a boring game.

Move 15. Apart from the four analysts' suggested moves, Motylev and Kalygin have played ...e6, Werner has played ... Ne4 (originally recommended by the Barnet Chess club), and ...Ke8 looks reasonable.

Move 16. Again ...Ke8 looks reasonable. (and ...e6 too?)

Move 18. Krush recommended ...f5 and the other three analysts recommended ...Nd4. In his book Kasparov suggests ... Bd4 draws easily and ...e6 is solid.

Move 19. Krush recommended ...Qb4 and the other three analysts recommended ...Qd4 and ...Nd4. IM2429 and the Computer Chess Team recommended Be5.

Move 21. Felecan recommended ...Rh8 and the others ...Rxa4. Kasparov said ...f4 leads to a balanced position.

Move 25. Pahtz recommended ... d5 and the others ... Bd4. Kasparov wrote that ... d5 and ... Nd4 would draw too. Alvarez recommended ...b5.

Move 26. Krush recommended ... f4 and the others ... Bc5. Here Duncan Suttles had an unusual recommendation, 26 ...d5. And lately Crafty has been suggesting ... Ne5.

Move 29. Kasparov wrote that ... Qe2 is a draw.

Move 33. An interesting question is whether ...Bxg3 might draw, but perhaps computers will not be able to answer that question.

Move 34. Kasparov wrote 34...Bh8! is an easy draw.

Move 35. Kasparov wrote 35...Ne5 is a draw.

Move 36. Suttles recommended ...Bc3.

There were no more choices until move 51... at which point the World played the wrong moves and went downhill. Unfortunately I don't remember what Suttles, IM2429, Computer Chess Team, GM School etc were recommending at some points. I'll have to pull out my old files!

Back to the Falkbeer counter gambit position above. I've briefly run it through Toga II which seems to prefer 11. Nc3 Nd7 and thinks White is about a pawn up. Interesting.

Yazd from the Hosseinieh

2006-07-02T21:11:00.000+10:00

A great place and my favourite city in Iran, but I wish I had worn newer jeans!

A windy day at Stonehenge in August 2000

2006-06-27T23:46:00.000+10:00

polite Korean fans

2006-06-20T16:46:00.000+10:00

Korean cleanup leaves Leipzig litter-free. If only they would do the same in Seoul :-)

another favourite picture from Iran

2006-06-18T19:09:00.000+10:00

Here's another of my favourite photos from Iran. Me, Maryam, Minoo, Marjan and Hossein. Hossein is one of my best friends in Iran and I spent my last night in Iran at his place, in Ekbatan, a logical place to stay near the Mehrabad airport. He held a 26th birthday party for me there. Naturally, I met him on the bus on the way from my place in Ekbatan to Azadi Square, where I would catch a shared taxi to Tajrish Square and then my work in Niavaran.

fact-checking the fact-checker

2006-06-17T12:02:00.000+10:00

The exiled Iranian journalist Amir Taheri reviews Dilip Hiro's book on Iran and tries to fact check him.

Robert MacFarlane was not National Security Advisor when he led a secret mission in Tehran. And he did not talk to “low level officials” but had as interlocutor Qorban-Ali Dorri Najaf-Abadi who was, at the time, Chairman of the Islamic Majlis’s Foreign Affairs Committee and contact man for Hashemi Rafsanjani, then Speaker of the Islamic Majlis (Parliament).

It is good to know one's Iranian trivia, especially when the answer is not to be found on the Internet. (How many people would be able to correct him?) Taheri has his Najafabadis confused. McFarlane (not MacFarlane) met with Mohammad Ali Hadi Najafabadi not Qorban-Ali Dorri Najafabadi. Hadi Najafabadi was the Chairman of the Majlis's Foreign Affairs Committee, as Taheri states. (Source: "The Iranian Triangle" by Samuel Segev, page 273 and "Special Trust" by McFarlane -- also named "Dr No" in Oliver North's book "Under Fire".) Taheri has got his names wrong before. I still respect him, I just thought he'd be a little more careful with facts after his screw-up on the dress code story. I emailed him about his 1984/1988 mistake in that post, but didn't get a reply and have lost his email address since then. I wonder if I'd get a reply from him on this one, I did get a kind reply from Eleana Benador once.

scanning

2006-06-16T11:14:00.000+10:00

At 4000dpi, the output of the film scanner produces a 24 megapixel image. It is more than even the most expensive digital SLR, the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II (16.6 megapixels). Unfortunately the files it produces are about 140 megabytes each, so they are not easy to store at full size. My SLR is a Canon EOS 500N, with a 35-80mm, 80-200mm, and 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens. The lens is much bigger than either of my digital cameras so in that sense it should take better photos. I am not sure if there really is as much detail in the image as "24 megapixels" would suggest.

Going through all my old film and trying to find it all has been a very time consuming process. Sometimes I have found shots that are so good I am not sure if I took them. Here is a striking image - I think my Dad might have borrowed my camera and taken it to O'Reillys one day.

favourite photo

2006-06-12T13:19:00.000+10:00

This is still my favourite photo of me and Jenny in Korea. She said she looks cold but I think she looks hot. Hohoho.

respect

2006-06-12T11:19:00.000+10:00

The Beatles sang "all you need is love". But for me it is not true. I need respect as well. Sometimes I just feel I don't get much. I know that my boss respects me in a way, and the reason he doesn't complain that I work only nine to five is that his research would go much worse without me. I have been thinking so much lately about respect. To a large extent in our Australian society, money equals respect. It worked the same way in Iran. Dr Mahmoodian, who helped me get my job in Iran, told me that my salary in Iran was really good, and because I was not married, it made it really wunderbar. (Am I overusing this word?) The problem was that I didn't respect myself because the salary was less than my PhD scholarship had been, and it was about a third of my Australian salary after tax. There were also lots of other signs that people didn't respect me. For example, I went to lots of parties at the Australian consul's house in Niavaran (actually Manzariyeh, a posh area in north Tehran) and the consul jocularly remarked to his guests that I was an idiot for coming, and I already believed it myself. All his other guests had come to Iran for a good reason, that is, as diplomats or to work in some kind of engineering job, and everyone was being paid about ten times as much as me. (Yet obviously being so far above the average Iranian meant that they were completely out of touch with the way most people lived.) I told my English students about my salary and they said it was good but I could not lead a good life in Iran with it. Lastly one of my fellow postdocs said she had been talking to a relative and the relative couldn't understand why I had come here. Ziba, the postdoc, suggested I had discovered what Iran was about in a year and I should go back... but I enjoyed learning the language, and I was tired of Australia, so I stayed a bit longer.

So that was an intangible lack of respect based on the tangible aspect of money. (I don't have to worry about height.) More tangibly, it bothers me when people don't respond to my emails. I think it demonstrates a lack of respect, too. Dr Mahmoodian and Dr Khosrovshahi frequently did not respond to my emails when I was in Iran. Probably, this should have caused me to leave there earlier. And concerning the most unpleasant incident in Iran, when a policeman came to check one of my neighbour's reports that a foreigner was living a next door (!!), I don't feel that IPM or Dr Khosrovshahi took the incident as seriously as I did.

This should help explain why respect is very important to me and also salary. I will do almost any job, but it has to pay more than my current one, because for long periods of time in my life, I have had both a low salary and a lack of respect from people. And I am never going back to that.

(As a footnote I will say that in the past the way the vast majority of my interactions with women have gone is like this: I meet them, get their phone number/email address, then text them/write to them, and they ignore me. On the one hand, it has sometimes been good being poor, because it has weeded out superficial people, but I could never help feeling that if I earned more it would have happened much less often, and I would have got more positive attention.)

sexually frustrated computer nerds

2006-06-09T13:40:00.000+10:00

Today I was wondering why the default random seed in the impute.knn package in R is 362436069. I was looking at it wondering if it had any special properties. The standard google search did not help, so I went to the Groups Google search and looked at the oldest article containing the number. I was flabbergasted. Truly, sex drives all research!!

The highly respected G. Marsaglia published a lot of work
on pseudorandom number generation using the modulus 362436069,
because he found it particularly easy to remember
(thirty-six twenty-four thirty-six Oh sixty-nine).

film scanner

2006-06-05T22:23:00.000+10:00

The Coolscan arrived! I have only scanned in three shots so far, but the results are good - much better than a flatbed scanner would do, I think. Thanks Beards & Hats Photo! The first photo I scanned is of Herculaneum near Naples in Italy... compare it to the scanned photo.

And of course the next two I scanned were of cute girls. When I taught English in Tehran I insisted that my class consisted only of pretty girls in their 20s. I sort of wish I were back there, but I was only being paid $6/hour or something...

trivia questions

2006-06-02T10:38:00.000+10:00

Last night the host asked "who made the world's first laser printer?". I wrote "Xerox" and showed it to Erina or Scott, I think, and Oddur showed me a piece of paper with "Hewlett-Packard" and I shook my head. But obviously there was a miscommunication, because Erina agreed with Oddur and wrote "HP" anyway. The correct answer is "Xerox" although the host said "Canon" - he must have meant to say "desktop laser printer".

Later one of us seemed to be certain that "pixel" was short for "picture cell". I did know the answer was "picture element" though I must have had too many glasses of wine to care too much about correcting him...

It's all fun, though it did demonstrate the problem with having ten people on the team instead of five or six - it makes it much harder to communicate with the person writing the answers - "too many cooks spoil the broth".

comparing countries

2006-05-30T19:16:00.000+10:00

After I left Iran, I used to go every day to Google News and type "Iran" to read about the latest news from there. Once, I believed that there was some hope that things would get better in Iran, that the economic or political situation would somehow improve. The country has a restless young population, some very clever people, and the tolerant King Cyrus as part of its history. But after living there for nineteen months (April 2002 to October 2003) I realised the future there is bleak. Most intelligent people living there want to leave. I know some who don't, but generally they are eternal optimists, people with wool in their eyes, or people with even more inertia than me. The most useful thing I learned from my stay was Persian itself -- though that will deteriorate without constant practice.

Financially Iran was not good for me - and I have promised myself not to move to a country where I would be paid less than Australia, because I think I would lose self-respect. I wonder what I gained from it; I think the experience made me a much more interesting person, although Australians aren't that much interested in Iran and I don't suppose that will change unless George and/or Johnny decide to invade. (I note though that The Diplomat magazine seems to have an article about Iran every month.)

I've been thinking about Quality of Life lately. Is Australia the best place to live and is Brisbane a good city in Australia? Mercer and the Economist Intelligence Unit seem to think so. (Though compare Ireland's position in the latter with the broadband penetration mentioned next.) Perhaps Brisbane just doesn't seem exciting to me since I've lived here most of my life.

Recently I visited South Korea. Since I came back to Australia, I've been typing "Korea" into the search box at Google News instead of "Iran". There is some good news - OECD broadband figures show Iceland and Korea have wunderbar broadband penetration. Whereas Australia is still living with 256kbps "fraudband"; there was an article about it in the Australian Financial Review on the 8th April. In this respect, I feel Australia is very backward compared to Korea. Also, Korea has the world's first HSDPA network.

And yet, economic indicators are falling in Korea and the Australian economy seems to be strengthening. (Though I am confused about which way the dollar is heading: the Big Mac index predicts up to $US0.90 whereas the head of Queensland Investment Corporation predicts $US0.50. Bloomberg shows traders divided in their recommendations.)

Somewhere, perhaps in a Korean English newspaper, I read that Korean fertility is the lowest in the world. (Correction: quote from Robert Samuelson article about Russia - "by not having children, people are voting against the future - their countries and perhaps their own." So how is the future in Korea?

I need love and excitement while still maintaining a high quality of life and not working excessive hours. Can I have all of that?

Ali Kaboli

2006-05-26T18:23:00.000+10:00

Much energy and many words have been wasted on a story which turned out to be false. Here is a story which is true and I have a first-hand source in Iran to confirm the story.

Iran Christian convert faces possible death penality.

The authorities have warned his family not to publicise his case, but he has been in jail for 25 days now and they must do something. So if you read this, just link to the story on your blog and maybe something can be done. Perhaps an Amnesty-style letter writing campaign might work, if I knew who to write to? If the story gets enough publicity, the Iranian government will be shamed into releasing him.

national post retracts Iran Jews story

2006-05-25T10:31:00.000+10:00

The National Post apologises to readers for their monumental screw-up of last Friday. Their apology fails to address many issues - but clearly someone at the National Post should resign over this. And they could say they are dropping Amir Taheri as a correspondent. This retraction appears on Page 2 and is only available to subscribers to the website!! So they are hardly "facing up to their mistakes in an honest open fashion" as they claim. I'll put their apology here to help them out. (I saw it at born with a tail and MEPForum.)

As noted at The Gazetteer, and by myself, the story was "circularly sourced" - the letter from Rabbi Marvin Hier to Kofi Annan quoted Taheri's story "to appear in Friday's National Post". So all of this traces back to Taheri, and the NP doesn't admit this, nor the circular sourcing. As a comment at Born With a Tail notes, all of Wattie's sources were second-hand and outside Iran and that is not good enough for a story of this magnitude. Having lived in Iran, I have lots of sources there who could check that quickly - but the idiotic journalists at the National Post just couldn't be bothered making calls outside the US and Canada. They relied on Iranian exiles no-one has ever heard of. Nor could they be bothered looking at an Iranian news website containing the text of the bill.

The reaction of the Iranian embassy was just about believable though - relations between Iran and Canada are really rock-bottom, though they haven't gone as low as the crediblity of the National Post after this story.

I wonder if the Murdoch rag, the New York Post, will publish a similar retraction, as they published a similar article on May 20, the day after the National Post story appeared?

Our mistake: Note to readers

Douglas Kelly
National Post

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Last Friday, the National Post ran a story prominently on the front page alleging that the Iranian parliament had passed a law that, if enacted, would require Jews and other religious minorities in Iran to wear badges that would identify them as such in public. It is now clear the story is not true. Given the seriousness of the error, I felt it necessary to explain to our readers how this happened.

The story of the alleged badge law first came to us in the form of a column by Amir Taheri. Mr. Taheri, an Iranian author and journalist, has written widely on Iran for many major publications. In his column, Mr. Taheri wrote at length about the new law, the main purpose of which is to establish an appropriate dress code for Muslims. Mr. Taheri went on to say that under the law, "Religious minorities would have their own colour schemes. They will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faith."

This extraordinary allegation caught our attention, of course. The idea that Iran might impose such a law did not seem out of the question given that its President has denied the Holocaust and threatened to "wipe Israel off the map." We tried to contact Mr. Taheri, but he was in transit and unreachable.

The editor who was dealing with Mr. Taheri's column wrote to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The Wiesenthal Center is an international Jewish human rights organization that keeps a close watch on issues affecting the treatment of Jews around the world, and maintains contacts in many countries, including Iran. Asked about the specific allegation that Iran had passed a law requiring religious minorities to identify themselves, Rabbi Cooper replied by e-mail that the story was "absolutely true." When a reporter spoke to Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, a short while later, Rabbi Hier said the story was true and added that the organization had sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking him to take up the matter. (Rabbi Hier has
since said that, contrary to the understanding of the reporter, the Wiesenthal Center had not independently confirmed Mr. Taheri's allegation.)

The reporter also spoke with two Iranian exiles in Canada -- Ali Behroozian in
Toronto and Shahram Golestaneh in Ottawa. Both said that they had heard the the story of the badges from their contacts in Iran and they believed it to be true.

Canada's Foreign Affairs Department did not respond to questions about the issue until after deadline, and then only to say they were looking into the matter. After several calls to the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, the reporter reached Hormoz Ghahremani, a spokesman for the embassy. Mr. Ghahremani's response to the allegation was that he did not answer such questions.

We now had four sources -- Mr. Taheri, the Wiesenthal Center and two Iranian exiles in Canada -- telling us that according to their sources the Iranian law appeared to include provisions for compelling religious minorities to identify themselves in public. Iranian authorities in Canada had not denied the story. Given the sources, and given the previous statements of the Iranian President, we felt confident the story was true and decided to publish it.

The reaction was immediate and distressing. Several experts whom the reporter had tried unsuccessfully to contact the day before called to say the story was not true. The Iranian embassy put out a statement late in the day doing what it had failed to do the day before -- unequivocally deny such a law had been passed.

The reporter continued to try to determine whether there was any truth to the story. Some sources said there had been some peripheral discussion in the Iranian parliament of identifying clothing for minority religions, but it became clear that the dress code bill, which was introduced on May 14 and has not yet been passed into law, does not include such provisions.

Mr. Taheri, who had written the column that sparked the story, was again unreachable on Friday. He has since put out a statement saying the National Post and others "jumped the gun" in our characterization of his column. He says he was only saying the provisions affecting minorities might happen at some point. All of the people who read the column on the first day took it to mean the measure was part of a law that had been passed. Mr. Taheri maintains the zonnar, or badges, could still be put in effect when the dress code law is implemented.

On Saturday, the National Post ran another front-page story above the fold with the Iranian denial and the comments of the experts casting doubts on the original story.

It is corporate policy for all of CanWest's media holdings to face up to their mistakes in an honest, open fashion. It is also the right thing to do journalistically.

We acknowledge that on this story, we did not exercise sufficient caution and skepticism, and we did not check with enough sources. We should have pushed the sources we did have for more corroboration of the information they were giving us. That is not to say that we ignored basic journalistic practices or that we rushed this story into print with no thought as to the consequences. But given the seriousness of the allegations, more was required.

We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story. We take this incident very seriously, and we are examining our procedures to try to ensure such an error does not happen again.

Douglas Kelly,

Editor-in-Chief

National Post

new computer

2006-05-22T11:32:00.000+10:00

My new computer arrived at work!! Woo-hoo!! It's state of the art as of now. It's better than my boss's computer, so he suggested swapping them around. But it's mine, mine, mine!! And it belongs to the IMB so he can't do that. The old maths computer is going back to Maths, probably for some sucker of a PhD student or postdoc to use. Ha ha.

I am reviewing some of the trip photos on the new 19-inch LCD monitor and I can see how out-of-focus many of them were. Oh well.

national post Bush propaganda

2006-05-21T00:28:00.000+10:00

One of Canada's two major national newspapers had a huge banner headline on May 19, 2006: "IRAN EYES BADGES FOR JEWS". Just below, there was a huge picture of two Jewish people in the Budapest Ghetto in 1944 wearing yellow badges. The story claimed a new law required Iranian Jews to wear yellow badges. The only problem was that the story was complete fiction. The next day the same journalist, Chris Wattie, published a "retraction" which seemed to blame Amir Taheri, their alleged source. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also cited Taheri as their source in their letter to Kofi Annan. Taheri has written many great books about Iran, but I remember in one of his articles he wrote that the US navy sank half the Iranian navy one day in 1984 (he should have written 1988) and he has a very unorthodox theory about Iranian hijab, that it was somehow invented by Imam Moussa Sadr. But I don't think anyone believes this except him.

It reminded me of the time when Michael Ledeen claimed that Ayatollah Montazeri had written a fatwa against suicide bombing. That story was completely false too, but no retraction has yet appeared in the National Review.

This story has served only one aim - it's helped associate the Iranian government and Nazi Germany in people's minds. There's a book by Norman Solomon called War Made Easy about the steps the US president needs to take when he wants to attack another country. And one of the steps is to say "This guy is worse than Hitler." Today, I saw a clear example of this propaganda in action.

UPDATE 20 May 2006

The story appeared in the New York Post today, unchanged! The banner headline is "FOURTH REICH" and one of the journalists is Andy Soltis. He is a chess grandmaster and a good chess author - but his fact-checking sucks. The article is available on the Benador Associates website and the original Canada Post article is there too.

I also noticed that the letter from Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to Kofi Annan was dated May 18, 2006 and referred to an upcoming article in the Friday National Post - I suppose this enabled the National Post to give another "source" for their article in a circular fashion. What a crock this has all turned out to be.

UPDATE 24 May 2006

Not only is the story false, it lacks any foundation. I have no idea where it came from. All the discussion on the bill was carried live on state radio and Reuters has an article debunking the story now also. I know the Tehran-based journalist who wrote the Reuters article - she is very hard-working and an impeccable source. Taheri "stands by" his story. Let's look at what he wrote again...

[A] law passed by the Islamic Majlis (parliament) on Monday [...] envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public.

But the bill is available on the net as pointed out by Hoder and there is nothing like that in the bill as Taheri claimed. So his story is a lie based on rumors which is not backed up by even one Iranian source.

Finally a good reason to disbelieve everything in the original article is that Taheri mentions a minister named "Pourhardani" in his story and there is no minister with a name even close to that - the Culture Minister's name is Mohammad Hossein Saffar-Harandi. See Jim Henley "Taheri-ng it up" and Jim Henley "Taheri-ng it up again". (Actually, Taheri writes "Pourharandi" and "Pourhardani" in the original National Post article, not corrected at the Benador Associates website article yet. It was very sloppy work.)

hardware

2006-05-17T23:01:00.000+10:00

I dream about computer hardware in my sweet, happy dreams! Realistically, I should be happy with this Powerbook G4 which I got in April 2004. But I am feeling greed or something. I covet after and lust for the Macbook Pro! I want the 15 inch version. On the next iteration, it had better have the 8x dual-layer DVD writer (or a Blu-ray drive) and a 160Gb hard drive. I just learned that 160Gb notebook drives are available today, they are $345 at Nintek. And at the NewEgg site lots of people are saying there will be 200Gb notebook hard drives very soon. The price of everything drops so fast! On August 2, 2005, I bought a 2Gb SD Card for $207.80 and a 2Gb USB flash drive for $169.40 from YeahDone. Now the price for a 4Gb SD card is $141.90 and a 4Gb USB flash drive is $152.90. Wow, so much money down the drain, as my parents would say.

My new work computer should be arriving on Friday! What a joyous day it will be! It's a 3.2GHz Pentium-4 640 (whatever this means) with 2Gb of RAM. On the weekends, it will be running Crafty to analyse various chess positions. Maybe the game I played on Thursday night. Who knows. It will be doing something anyway. It's always a shame to see computers not being used.

dorks

2006-05-16T12:00:00.000+10:00

Sometime in April I added port forwarding for SSH to a WGR614v5 router so that I could connect to my old crappy Evo N115 running Debian Linux from anywhere. The router is on a BigPond cable connection.

Since then a lot of people have tried to break into it. I have no idea why as it's a very old computer (from March 2002) and there is nothing at all personal or interesting on it. I use it for integer programming problems in combinatorics and for playing with Debian Linux and that's it. The first people were from the webserver www.aname.co.kr (210.123.71.5) at ANAM Electronics in Korea, on April 26 from 11:14 to 11:45 and on April 27 from 04:46 to 05:26. They tried 482 passwords for root (the system administrator account) and 7 passwords for "guset" (they couldn't even spell "guest"!) before giving up. Shouldn't they have been working hard? Anyway it made me curious, I wondered what kind of passwords they had been trying - I read the manpage for sshd_config to see if it could log the plaintext passwords they tried, but even debug level DEBUG3 doesn't do that, so I gave up. I couldn't be bothered editing the source code to keep track of what idiots are doing.

(It also made me think again about Korea, and whether people there have more tolerance for spam than in other countries, because it used to be one of the worst spam-origin countries. Now it's dropped to 7th place on the Spamhaus list of countries. But now having been there, I think people there are just as annoyed by spam as people anywhere else.)

niavaran:/var/log# (cat auth.log auth.log.0; gzip -dc auth.log.?.gz) | grep failure | tr ' ' '\n' | grep rhost= | sort | uniq -c |sort -n
1 rhost=192.168.1.5
1 rhost=218.78.214.92
1 rhost=219.232.62.48
2 rhost=218.1.65.233
3 rhost=192.168.1.20
6 rhost=222.216.27.40
7 rhost=
8 rhost=60.28.9.243
9 rhost=cpe-071-071-245-176.carolina.res.rr.com
66 rhost=63.216.32.68
87 rhost=58.71.32.197
144 rhost=testmail.enserg.fr
182 rhost=velos.avacom.net
489 rhost=www.aname.co.kr
654 rhost=221.148.123.219
946 rhost=221.133.1.209
951 rhost=203.86.72.252
1312 rhost=59-106-15-169.r-bl100.sakura.ne.jp
4467 rhost=220.128.57.147

hospitality

2006-05-14T21:45:00.000+10:00

I want to publicly thank Jenny and Sule for their hospitality in Korea and Turkey. Jenny's sister drove me to Incheon Airport from downtown Seoul and petrol is much more expensive in Korea than in Australia. And in Turkey it's the most expensive in the world. Koç University has an idyllic location in Istanbul, it comes at the cost of being hard access via public transport though.

Someone told me that there were Baduk (Go) columns in every Korean newspaper. I decided to test this theory - I looked at the eight Saturday dailies available on the Korean Air flight and looked through each of them for the Go column. But only one of them had such a column. I should not have believed the person who told me that because she doesn't read newspapers anyway. :-)

Today, I burnt most of my pictures to DVD. Everything fits on one DVD if I leave off the "panoramic" shots... like for instance when I was going north on the Dangsan bridge from Dangsan to Hapjeong and took many shots of the bridge out of the left-hand windows (which bridge is that?) and also about 100 shots from the Seoul Tower windows (there are 48 windows in the observatory). One day I'll play with Photoshop and make it into a panoramic picture. The Homeplus DVD failed to verify correctly so it's just a coaster now. Waste of 1900 won.

weight

2006-05-14T11:56:00.000+10:00

Today I returned from Seoul! I have been eating soooooooooo much stuff: desserts at Twosome near Hongik University, Outback Steakhouse in Mokdong, Ipanema in Chung-dong... Today I got home, had a shower, walked over to the scales and I am 76.2kg and 14% body fat!! (It was 15% or 16% when I left.) This is just bizarre. Of course I have been walking all day every day catching the subway and so on. But still. Korean food must be good. Perhaps if I move to Seoul I will look like Hugh Jackman within a few months!!

movember

2006-04-27T21:00:00.000+10:00

Who is this sexy and good looking man from last year's Movember gala parte at the Gold Coast??

israel lobby

2006-04-25T23:10:00.000+10:00

There was an paper about the Israel lobby in the US published last month that I just noticed. As an Australian who's lived in Iran and visited Israel and the West Bank, I don't see anything controversial or strange about what they wrote - I just thought it was rather factual, actually. But the Israel lobby has gone into overdrive trying to naysay it.

wan-giri returns

2006-04-25T16:40:00.000+10:00

Got a missed call from 03 8102 9565, but I have no intention of calling that back, thanks to google.

freeloaders

2006-04-22T14:47:00.000+10:00

Finally we got broadband this week at home! I attached a WGR614 wireless router, the cheapest 802.11g external router around (as opposed to a PCI card router). It's the third one I've bought, I think the first one I paid $205 at Hardly Normal after pointing out that their $269 sticker price was being beaten by some highly dodgy Edward St outlet i-central. Now it's $69 at Umart.

It was difficult to get iChat working with this WGR614 (v6) but this page has all the instructions. More seriously I looked at the router status page this morning and someone in our building was leeching off the connection!! I immediately did some research on whether WEP or WPA is better and put a WPA password on it.

casino

2006-04-22T13:53:00.000+10:00

I was at the Treasury Casino last night (no this wasn't my idea). Blackjack is the only game there where skilful play can result in the player instead of the casino having the edge. On the tables I saw, the Casino seemed to be using a machine called the one2six with six decks. I have been reading about it today googling around.

It is called a "continuous shuffling machine" (CSM) and the idea is to reduce the effectiveness of card counting.

There is a guy ZenGrifter who found a strategy to beat one of the first CSMs but claims there's no strategy "practically speaking" to make the one2six beatable. Other opinions - "CSMs are not worth playing"; CSMs are not enjoyable for the dealer to work with and cost $15,000 each; don't even try to beat one2six; not aware this is beatable; expected player return 0 etc.

Most useful though was an an Australian FAQ page about CSMs. There are lots of disadvantages to them. In summary I won't be sitting down at a blackjack table any time soon, but it's fun to read about others' successes there. It is romantic somehow, but I don't know why. A carefully constructed advertising campaign perhaps? Or I am a thrill-seeker?

Last night there was also a guy playing with $100 and $500 chips at the table where everybody else was using $5 chips. Someone said he was a famous jockey. Do jockeys really make lots of money? Or could he have been working for the casino, encouraging everybody else to bet more, like a shill on eBay?