contains multiple
entries of utter piffle.
A gallery of digital pictures.
I've added some pictures from my recent (hah!) trip to Cornwall. 
is slightly easier to navigate and maintain meaningful categories. blog for code.Being in the autumn of my life I have started taking an interest in ancient history. I've been using The History of Rome podcast to remind myself what it was like in the olden days. It's a very good introduction to Roman history for someone who knows absolutely nothing about the subject. <Note to self: Punic wars were against the Phoenician city of Carthage>
Archaeological wonder: Göbekli Tepe
The Bible: The Codex
Cousin Ed bought me a digital
microscope device called a Dino - Lite. I've used it to take a number
of pictures which can be found in it's own section of my
on-line gallery. You can also view a wmv film of a small grub or
some algae
swimming about in pond water. The software that comes with it is great
fun and has a time lapse facility which I've used to make a few little
sequences (time
lapse films) stuck together into one file. The Dino-Lite should also work
under Linux as Fedora recognises it using the cheese package. It was a little
over exposed but that should be adjustable in one of the settings, or possibly
another Linux program.
The trouble with modern computers is that people now want to control what you can and can't do with them. The best computers and programs enable you to do what you want. Modern OSes like Vista and Apple are fundamentally disabling technologies. Take a look at Defective by Design.
Merely thinking about Vista drove me into the arms
of Linux. I'm currently running Fedora
11
for everyday browsing, writing assignments and things. It's a very nice
experience. When I was setting it up I found that I was always coming
back to
this fantastic web site for advice on how to set things up. The Fedora Forums are a good place for general comments and workarounds if you are having problems.
By being an OU student (and after registering for a student card) you can be part of the Dream*thingy* offer. They let you download and use MS 2008 server (standard edition), MS SQL 2008 Developer, MS Studio 2005 or 2008 pro and a few other odds and sods. It's kinda groovy for a 'freebie'; although you have to include in the price the cost of a course and the approx Ł10 for the student ID card. Courses with the OU, in general, offer excellent value for money. You can access the online library to read all sorts of journals and magazines. For geeky courses like maths or computing you get to use all sorts of exciting kit like older versions of SPSS or MathCAD.
If you want to have a less restrictive set of mathematical or statistical utilities then I recommend that you install a species of Linux and use or install SAGE (also available as a vmware image for windows and the early stages of a native port) and programs such as R (also available under windows) or PSPP.
R___________Wiki_link______________
Now that I've put some time into using R it's really quite groovy. You have to get used to the foibles; like the rabid case sensitivity and the dislike for spaces in data.
If you invest some time in the program you'll be rewarded.
One useful hint is read.table('clipboard', header=TRUE) for pasting from Excel spreadsheets into R. Rcmdr is also good for a few things.
If you are using R under Linux the way to install packages is using the command install.packages("package name here",dep=TRUE)
Here are a few good web sites for using R:
ONLAMP,
FRESHMEAT and a
pdf book
Using the R GUI in windows had left me feeling the lack under linux. However I've recently
found that RKWARD is as good, if not better, than the windows GUI.
No Doubt over the next few months I'll expand on my R hints and add a LaTeX section as well.
______________________________
The
restrictions essential to the creation of an artificial 'knowledge economy' feel
profoundly maladaptive to me, giving in to weak thinking. This is a regressive step for our society from
which we may not recover. Hopefully others won't be so feeble minded and short
sighted. I wonder where we would be now if creative people where not restricted
by other peoples 'ownership' of an idea. Society is a collaborative effort and
those who restrict and impede collaboration for personal gain while using fear
to intimidate other 'competitors' are not doing the world any favours.
intellectual property is an oxymoron.
There is a free (online version) book available called
the public domain which discusses
a lot of salient points of intellectual property. Current EU law states that
mathematical methods and computer programs (amongst other things) are not
subject to patent protection. I think it should stay that way.
Check out the free software foundation, creative commons, GNU, Project Gutenberg and Ibibio
A while ago I undertook the study of an MSc from Bangor Uni in Health & Social Care Leadership. Unfortunately Year 2 was all about management (whatever that is) so I thought that 1 year was enough. One
section I did find interesting was the health economics section. That really lit my fire.
The following table contains a few relatively good sites to search for abstracts, articles, odds
& ends and economic reviews. I've joined the
Operational Research Society I would
like to distance myself from the society so that they not be tarnished by
any association to monkeymike.co.uk
There are many journals available for free. The Directory Of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) web site provides a list of many of them, another valuable source of free online information is the JISC web site. I graduated from Bangor Uni many years ago, I was mates with a lad called Dave Lambert. I haven't heard from him for a while but I occasionally Google to see if he's about.
Job web sites; C&DT trust, www.jobs.co.uk, Conwy Council, Denbighshire Council, Fish4Jobs and Jobcentre Plus.
Oh the joys of gyroscoping about. You can buy high precision gyroscopes and other sciency stuff at gyroscope.com including LASERs capable of popping black balloons.
While browsing about idly one Sunday
morning I found this fantastic
site for optical illusions!!! One thing I just can't help but be interested in is the fallibility of the human mind and it's organs and modalities. The illusions which surround us all and of which we are constructed. Our false memories, errors of the senses and general oddities of perception that form the foundation and building material of human
existence. A recent (22 Sep 07) edition of New Scientist had a section on just this sort of thing. With some web links to examples of the curios in sense or perception.
Here are some links to sound exotica:
Sentences sliced and diced
Sine Wave Speech also at this one
The Mc Gurk effect is an illusion that uses knowledge and vision.
Attendance/attention illusions:
Rutgers
Flicker images
and others and still more (warning FLASH required). There is a famous (at least I've seen reference to it a few times) film where you have to count how many times a basket ball is passed between people...Don't forget to count the passes It's VERY IMPORTANT
Perhaps we can include the knowledge of these fallibilities into our everyday thinking and so be closer to the truth of our perceptions. (?)
I've been spending a little too much time watching BBC TV online recently so here is a quick link to the BBC Three web site, or the new iPlayer thing that's fantastic for watching TV on your computer.
Only follow the link to "The best page in the Universe" if you've never been offended in your life and your looking to rectify that sorry state.
Heavens above is a web site for tracking all sorts of things in the nights sky. You can find the iridium satellite flares and visibility of the ISS for any point on the earth's surface.
These other sections of the site contain relatively static sections and cover various topics. These pages will expand slowly as I have time available or as I become inspired by my muse.
Sources of information relating to Physics etc. including links to
online video lectures and sites like arXiv.org that publish papers
online. I remember a visit to Jodrell Bank many years ago and I hope to
re-visit it soon. However the planetarium and science exhibits are
currently being renovated so I'm keeping a link to the
web site here to remind me to keep checking back.
Technical speaking I should be very interested in this subject (as it's
the sort of thing I do at work) but I am a reluctant statistician. I
prefer absolute certainty to the Gaussian curve. Here are a few items
relating to Statistics together with some basic concepts and
distributions. These pages are very much a work in progress and tend to
stop in odd places, have words missing and are probably wrong.
Possibly the best thing in the whole world. Maths is something everyone
should learn. Thankfully all that tedious maths stuff has been worked
out and has all been written down. You can learn about it here.
The OU course M381 covers Number Theory and Mathemtical Logic that, eventually,
covers Godel's Incompleteness theory. Hopefully I'll survive the steep learning
curve and get a rudimentary understanding of the subject.
Happy numbers were mentioned in an episode of Doctor Who. It's nice to see TV not dumbing down completely.
A little while ago I tried to visualise my odds of winning the lottery using grains of sand as an example. I thought I'd be reasured about how little sand I'd need to have (maybe a small jar) to visualise the 1 in 14,000,000 (or so) chance of winning. However when I did the simple calculation it turned out I'd need a bigger jar.
Assuming a sand grain weighs 0.67 mg (on the light end of the definition of a sand grain) then to represent all the number combinations that would win the lottery you would need a pile of sand weighing roughly 9 kg. Just sit there and visualise that. Now imagine the sand required for the Euro Millions with odds of 76,000,000 to 1.
A mish-mash of assorted links that I have come across or had
recommended to me.
While compiling this web site I found THIS
web site very useful. It's to do with CSS
I love computers. They check my spellink for me. They do my sums and
they helped me to make this wonderful web site. Unfortunately they can
also be used for evil.
If you are curious about what sort of Virus is currently infecting your machine then why not visit Viruslist.com it does what it says on the tin.
Whatever you buy in this one life DON'T BUY IT FROM SONY. Home of the expiring products (ebooks), the secret viral root kit DRM tech' and the inability to back up 'your' CD or DVD. Whenever you buy something from SONY you never really own it. Don't let these freaks win. Vote with your wallet. For more general rants have a look at this page: www.weasel.com
They also reduce the usefulness of their modern handycam products by tying the video codec to their proprietary format so it becomes a lot harder (and more expensive) to share your movies with others. I'd like to think that some of this behaviour is directly responsible for their losses in business.
Is trying to screw every last penny from your customers, by hobbling your products, a broken business model? I'd like to think so but I suspect that there are a lot of companies out there that think it's the only way to go.
If I am testing a CGI script (which I have never actually done in the history of this website) it will be near this section.
I have been studying with the Open University for a couple of years or
so. They have a wonderful online library that allows you to access a
number of technical journals that are available online. I have set up
some links on this page to magazines that interest me. To be able to
view most of these journals you would need to be studying with the Open
University and have your login details to hand.
My interest in geology is a relatively new thing and it keeps me
entertained. I hope to put pictures on this site and any observations I
make.
This is linked to my interest in geology. I thought a separate page
would be appropriate as there are lots of images involved.
I used to work for Social Services
and cycled to work from Colwyn Bay to Prestatyn, or took the train if
the weather was bad. That's why these next couple of links are here.
They are still of use if you want a live departure board, or to know
the weather in Prestatyn.
Colwyn Bay train Station Live Departure Board
Journey Planner for planning your journey on the British public train transport system (please note that: trains may not arrive when indicated, may be cancelled without notice [or replacement service] and tickets may be more expensive than you thought).
Prestatyn weather forecast.
The Met office has a slightly more grown-up version of the weather forecast on their web site.
Tidal Predictions. The link goes through to one of numerous web sites that you can use for high and low water heights and times etc. They are particularly handy if you want to smuggle some rum from continental europe but need to land on a cove somewhere to avoid the tax man.
Here are some dull images from my archives. Misc.
Images including pictures of people I know, or have known in the past. I
knocked this page together before monkeymike.co.uk came into existence.
Otherwise they'd have ended up on the photo gallery.
Cool lines or quotes/song lines:
"Enjoy life. It's later than you think"
Here are the first few digits of pi and e
3.14159265358979323846264338327950...
2.71828182845904523536028747135266...
Last updated on
26 August 2009 C.E
