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PMC

Software engineer, former telecoms strategy consultant, former mobile telecoms technical sales engineer, former mobile datacoms/Unix systems engineer, ex-physicist, aspiring novelist living in Kew Bridge, London.

Interests: jonathan coe, wine, personal development, red wine, paul simon, ideas, science fiction, restaurants, transhumanism, atheism, cyberculture, life coaching, postmodernism, woody allen, weirdness, nanotechnology, frasier, skepticism, james bond, art galleries, economic history, depression, relationships, champagne, whisky, parks, psychotherapy, alan turing, albert einstein, alternate history, apocalypse, arthur c. clarke, asteroidal impact, b.s. johnson, baked beans, beethoven's ninth symphony, bitterness, bookshops, bordeaux, brentford, caffeine-free diet coke, catastrophes, charles darwin, christopher priest, cider, citalopram, city lit, contemporary fiction, corned beef, coupling, cultural criticism, curry, daniel c. dennett, dave langford, david lodge, donald e. knuth, douglas r. hofstadter, ealing park tavern, eggs and bacon, end of world, ennui, eschatology, evelyn waugh, fermi paradox, frustration, full english breakfast, gastropubs, gin & tonic, hypertension, ibuprofen, intellectuals, james joyce, k. eric drexler, kew, kew bridge, kew gardens, kurt vonnegut jr., lancashire, links, living and loving, london review of books, loneliness, losartran, mass extinctions, mbas, metafiction, neal stephenson, night school, ny review of books, olaf stapledon, origin of life, peugeot 206cc, philip k. dick, preston, pretentiousness, pub lunches, pubs, rationalism, richard dawkins, richard p. feynman, saskatchewan, scientific american, secondhand bookshops, seti, skyros, space travel, ssris, strangeness, submarines, swagelok, technobabble, tex, the baroque cycle, the london underground, the modern metropolis, the proclaimers, the river thames, the technological singularity, thomas frank, time travel, tunguska, tweaking my profile, wmd, reading, books, walking, shakespeare, jared diamond, museums, eating, london, sex and the city, physics, futurology, romance, talking, sandwiches, creative writing, catholicism, drinking, cynicism, orange juice, artificial intelligence, vernor vinge, enneagram, evolution, alcohol, dating, ray kurzweil

Recent Activity

The mechanisms for taking into account league position and form do make this a heck of a lot more interesting than something purely aleatory. I did do a quite a bit long form Owzat! As I remember, you rolled the bowling hexagon and if it's "Not Out", rolled the batting one. The problem was that the one reason a tailender was less likely to score a century than an opener was because he came in later. But you could, after a fashion, reproduce an entire match. But something more sophisticated, taking into account the ability of batsman and bowlers would have been great. I'm sure lots of people made their own and that probably thing like that might have been available. They weren't advertised in "The Cricketer" though if they were.

Commented Oct 18, 2014 on The Great Football Game That You Play on Your Own at Atomic Razor

"As most sets that were sold have now been consigned to the dustbin, original copies of the game sell on eBay for inflated prices.[citation needed]." Yes, that's the one. Thanks for this. What I'd have given for that in 1976. By early 1977, I'd given up football for cricket. But Logacta must have been something in the mid-1970s.

Commented Oct 17, 2014 on Football Simulation at Atomic Razor

Typepad's not free, so it's not an issue of paying. The main problem would be to migrate across all of the posts and comments. Would there be a tool to do that? As for SEO, yes, I need to look into that.

Commented Apr 27, 2014 on Up and Down Like a Yo-Yo at Atomic Razor

I can remember making up radio schedules, although I can't remember whether it was local or national. "This Week's Obituaries" was one programme.

Commented Apr 4, 2014 on Live from London at Atomic Razor

I seem to recall Cameron, for some reason, implying that it was the EU or nothing, ruling out EEA membership. This seems unlikely, although it is what the Swiss have to do.

Commented Feb 17, 2014 on If Not Now, When? at Atomic Razor

How much confidence do we have that the Taliban aren't going to be back in power in another year or two? And long where that got the people of Afghanistan and of the world last time that happened. Both Iraq and Afghanistan have been examples of criminal folly and incompetence on the part of the Western elites who us into those conflicts. 911 could probably have avoided had the available intelligence been acted on, thus no Afghanistan, and Iraq was a completely unforced error for which GWB should have swung from a lamppost. Afghanistan is possibly the hardest place in the world to fight a war. But we were never going to win given our failure to commit anything like the necessary resources needed.

Commented Feb 1, 2014 on The Decline of the West at Atomic Razor

There might have been briefly in the early 1990s. But, no, not now, not at all. I am sure there are punning names for French restaurants, but frankly it's too late for my brain. And, I think, people generally avoid restaurants with punning names because fun food almost invariably isn't.

Commented Jan 28, 2014 on Closing Time at Atomic Razor

It gave me a thrill at least to see the hits rising into the stratosphere!

Commented Jan 25, 2014 on A Very Palpable Hit at Atomic Razor

If it is the 1950s novel, there is every chance that it will be set in a MWCT. Although were Stephenson's parents in one in the 1950s? I don't think Stephenson was born in one. I hope the kids still read GEB. It's still in print. I need to read the two most recent Hofstadter books. "I am a Strange Loop" is supposedly most just a rehash of GEB. DRH as that article suggested has drifted far from the mainstream of A(G)I research, but not very obviously in a particularly interesting direction if he is still working on the same kinds of projects described in the early 1990s in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought". Is TGV not well-known? I suppose it officially no longer be Powers's best-known novel. I need to read more of his (I know, I know). There's lots of GEB-influenced to be had there.

Commented Jan 13, 2014 on How Far Can You Go? at Atomic Razor

There's a lot of really interesting stuff going on with translation at the moment. I liked the recent Google on using vector analysis to relate the underlying structures of potentially very languages to one another. This might be one way of dealing with the Winograd Schemas discussed by Levesque, which are linked to handling pronouns.

Commented Jan 12, 2014 on Watson Going On? at Atomic Razor

Skeletons

Here is picture of some skeletons. Of course, these monsters aren't supervillains - there is an evil sorcerer somewhere who has reanimated and controls them. Continue reading