Q

Officially my course began nearly a month ago, and I’m still settling in. Activities that seem to be frequent and recurring include:

1. Reading, reviewing and summarising papers
   1. Looking through journals, conferences etc. for interesting papers
   2. Finding interesting papers only to discover I need a subscription
   3. On gaining access to a paper, finding that the title and abstract do not really reflect the content and in fact it is irrelevant
   4. Finding a relevant paper, starting to read it and discovering that I need more background knowledge from other papers, which returns me to point 2…
2. Defending my thesis before it is written
   1. Being asked what my PhD is about
   2. Trying out a slightly different response each time in the futile hope that someone will go “oh, right” and not ask further questions.
   3. Being asked further questions
   4. Being told “that’s not science” or “that’s not art”, in roughly equal measure
   5. Being told it has already been done
   6. Being told it can’t be done
   7. Continually failing to justify it satisfactorily, probably because I’ve only been working on it a couple of weeks really, and it’s very left-field research in an area most people aren’t familiar with. Hoping to improve this by studious application of section 1.
3. Meeting with my supervisor
   1. Feeling prepared for the meeting
   2. Being asked lots of unexpected questions
   3. Feeling like I’ve been on the wrong track the whole time
   4. Feeling like I have direction again, and becoming confident that I will do the right things next week, leading to 3.1…
4. Spending a lot of time with interesting clever people in the field
   1. Feeling intimidated by their intelligence and experience
   2. Trying to look like I am clever and know things
   3. Trying to learn from them
   4. Finally, just enjoying having the time to chat with all of them, whether the discussion is serious, silly, fruitful or less than useful
   5. Making new friends.

In conclusion, I am having a whale of a time whilst also going through a bit of a rollercoaster of over-confidence and self-doubt. I’m sure it’ll settle down a bit in time. I’m also a bit overwhelmed by the range of literature I need to cover — the project touches on music theory, psychology, social science, data mining, neuroscience, computer cognition… It’s a bit all over the place. Working title is “Investigating beauty in music: a machine learning approach” — ask me about it in person if you want a better explanation. I’m getting better at that.

From JTA’s version of this, at which I did particularly badly.

1. Put your music player on random.
2. Post the first line from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
3. Let everyone guess what song and artist (or musical) the lines come from.
4. Embolden the songs when someone guesses correctly.

Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

I’m using my last.fm library for this. Who knows what weirdness will come up? Some of these I am very familiar with, others I was hearing for the first time (not the band, but the specific song).

1. I’m playing the game with earthquakes around me
2. Just breathe in the air / But don’t be afraid
3. I was talkin’ to Chuck in his Genghis Khan suit
4. Baby’s getting anxious, the hours getting late
5. Shade, stay, know / but they communicate
6. I took my love, I took it down / I climbed a mountain and I turned around
7. What I want, you’ve got / And it might be hard to handle
8. Deep down Louisiana close to New Orleans –> Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode
9. Look at them all on the inside, look at them wasting away
10. Here they come with their make-up on
11. In the here and the now I wait / down among the young and the old
12. Leading everything along / never far from being wrong
13. People / They don’t mean a thing to you
14. San Francisco Bay / Past pier thirty nine
15. We’re no strangers to love / You know the rules and so do i
16. I’m just mad about Saffron, Saffron’s mad about me –> Donovan - Mellow Yellow
17. What gives you the right? / To fuck with our lives?
18. Old world underground, where are you now? –> Metric - IOU
19. On the corner of main street / Just tryin’ to keep it in line –> The Killers - Read My Mind
20. Maybe we’re all different / But we’re still the same

What interested me most is that taken out of context, it is often quite hard to determine the genre / mood of the music given the lyrics. I bet this would be a lot better if a genre was given with it, or if the tune was given instead of the words. Memory is funny like that.

EDIT: Full answers below:

1. Colours Run - On My Side
2. The Verve - Numbness
3. Lou Reed - Wild Child
4. Kiss - Plaster Caster
5. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Leverage of Space
6. The Smashing Pumpkins - Landslide
7. Hall & Oates - You Make My Dreams
8. Chuck Berry - Johnny B Goode
9. Suede - Lazy
10. AudioSlave - sound of a gun
11. Foo Fighters - X-static
12. The Bravery - Honest Mistake
13. Stereophonics - Have a Nice Day
14. Gotthard - Human Zoo
15. Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
16. Donovan - Mellow Yellow
17. Stars - He Lied About Death
18. Metric - IOU
19. The Killers - Read My Mind
20. Bon Jovi - Welcome To Wherever You Are

Nurofen Tension Headache and Nurofen Express contain *exactly* the same ingredients. (324mg Ibuprofen Lysine) However, the one with “tension headache” on the box is £2.99, rather than the £2 the other one costs. This advice brought to you by Claire, who has had the same headache since Monday. In related news: Ow.

As many of you are aware, Aber’s password security system can be a tad overzealous, disallowing words from any language, backwards or forwards, even with numbers replacing some letters, and doesn’t let you pick anything similar to passwords you’ve previously had. With the complaints that ensued, IS created this password phrase generator. It’s quite a laugh. The title comes out as *k_imji_ , which is probably more memorable as it is, really.

Aber Password Generator

Devil tooth has been removed. I’m not posting a picture of my mouth while there’s a gaping hole in it, however. My face was numb for several hours after the procedure, which was painful during the injections and after then just slighty creepy, and then after the anaesthetic wore off, painful again, which it still is a bit.

I have the tooth at home but I don’t know what I am going to do with it. I’m going to have to learn to reposition my tongue a bit further forward now that I have the space to do so, but I can still talk pretty much as normal so that’s a good thing. The weirdest sensation I can report is being able to touch the inside of my bottom teeth with my tongue, which is something I haven’t been able to do for about 10 years. It feels really weird.

I’m going to try a hot drink now for the first time in over a day. On the plus side I discovered I can make really nice cold lattes with the compsci coffee and a huge amount of milk. They probably won’t appreciate me doing that a lot, though.

Telling BiCon stories is a bit like telling skiing stories, I reckon. In the case of skiing, there is an unwritten rule that you must relate only tales of horrific danger and fantastic injury, nevermind the fact that most of the time you spend skiing you’re not injuring yourself or doing crazy stunts. BiCon’s rule is debauchery — all the stories that make it out are ones that involve sex, nakedness, or at very least double-entendre. The truth is, like with skiing, it’s because they are the ones people want to hear about. No-one wants to know that you did some knitting or had a beer, just like no-one wants to know you skied uneventfully down a green run and had a hot chocolate.

The problem with this is that people get the impression that skiing gets you injured, and BiCon gets you laid, neither of which is entirely true. Nevertheless, here’s my list of memorable moments from BiCon 2008, in not really chronological order.

• Arriving to find so many people I recognise it was hard to greet them all before the bar closed.
• Playing Apples to Apples with a few friends on the first night as a great escape from the tiring socialising.
• Braving the naked lunch on the first day with some trepidation.
• Arguing with Dan in the ‘conflict resolution in poly families’ workshop, in a deliberately ironic sort of way.
• Being so knackered by workshop 3 on the first day that I took a nap instead.
• Experiencing my bisexuality through building a lego and plasticine model.
• Coming fourth most impure (out of about 8 people) in a purity test party that took about 4 hours. “Does it count if…” was asked probably more times than there were questions.
• Having overcome previously mentioned trepidation, playing naked twister in the naked chillout zone.
• Sitting in a paddling pool full of people (but not water) at 4am drinking terrible Zinfandel Rose wine and throwing cushions at people making bad puns. (mostly Dan — eventually Dan got hit even when it wasn’t him who made a pun just because it was expected to have been him)
• 300 tiny toy lions, one of which I have named Brian the BiCon Lion.
• Using tantra techniques to have a conversation with my masculine and feminine sides. No, I didn’t really know what the workshop was before I went in. However, it was relaxing, fun and an interesting bit of self-reflection.
• Eating ice cream naked, which I’m pretty sure I’ve never done before, at the last naked lunch of the conference.
• All the hugs. So many hugs. I like hugs.
• Failing to leave for about half an hour because of all the people I wanted to give my farewells.

And no, not so much as a snog from a pretty girl or boy — it’s just like all those times I went skiing without getting a concussion.

My absolute favourite thing about BiCon has always been the totally accepting atmosphere. This year I really felt I contributed to that acceptance, rather than simply basking in it myself. It is thanks to the efforts of everyone present that I felt so at home, safe, and able to be myself despite being surrounded by strangers with often very different interests and ideologies from my own. The atmosphere somehow engenders the temporary suspension of prejudice and assumption and even common sense, allowing all questions and answers to be valid. It’s a situation I couldn’t survive for more than about a week before I would have to punch someone for being so damn NICE, but it’s lovely escapism.

I met a lot of very interesting people, discovered some worldly truths and learned a few new things about myself in the process. Back to the real world for now, but I’ll soon be impatiently looking forward to BiCon 2009.

To the tune of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by “Deep Blue Something”. I’ve been meaning to record this at some point but since I haven’t gotten around to it for about 6 months I figure I’ll just post the lyrics on here and you can all imagine how it goes.
Oh, and if I have any rights, I reserve them, whatever they are.

Mario Galaxy

You say, the Wii is lacking power
It sounds like a golden shower
Yet it’s designed for kids

You say, the wiimote is a gimmick
The actions you must mimic
Will give you RSI

Chorus:
And I say “What about
Mario Galaxy?”
You said “I think I
remember the game and
As I recall I think
It was spectacular
And I said “well that’s,
the one thing it’s got”

You say, an Xbox 360
Has Halo, which is pretty
And you can play online

You say, a Playstation 3
is as powerful as can be
The future is Blu-ray
CHORUS

You say Wii Play was gay
Wii Sports was okay
And Warioware was nuts

You say Red steel wasn’t ready
You’d won Zelda already
The Gamecube is enough

CHORUS

Not as exciting as the title may have led you to believe, but I’m having a tooth out.

Many of you have become aware that I have a tooth in virtually the middle of my lower jaw which has been affectionately named “Devil Tooth”. Clearly visible in the above pic, I’ve had it since I was about 14, but the dentists and orthodontists of the time kept refusing to do anything about it. Not only would they not remove it (because it’s an adult tooth) but they would not remove the milk teeth (I still have 3) that are in the place it should be, citing “we have to wait until the rest of your teeth grow through” as a reason for doing nothing. Well, come my 16th birthday, (still no more teeth, mind) they decided that yes, now they could do something about it, but since this was a cosmetic issue and I was suddenly over 16, I’d have to go on a 2 year waiting list, and pay for the privilege. I was so annoyed at being messed around I decided I’d just not bother having anything done.

Since that time, I’ve never really trusted dentists, and indeed didn’t have one for the 7 years I was an undergraduate student. However, the looks of shock and fear from those to whom I have revealed the tooth, not to mention it causing me a few annoying problems, led me to finally bite the bullet and decide to have it removed. This has taken so long mostly because NHS dentists are hard to come by in this area and they don’t take kindly to students who say “but I do live here, I just happen to also be a student…”.

Walking down the hill I spotted that Denticare on North Parade were taking new NHS patients. Booked an appointment, got seen, got told that the price of this checkup and the extraction all told would be £39, and that it could be done as soon as next week. That was so easy I should have done it years ago, it’s a lot cheaper than I thought it was going to be, and I don’t have to go into hospital or have a general anaesthetic.

Now I’m just petrified about the actual procedure. Prepare the soft non-threatening foodstuffs and the saltwater for the 2nd of September. Eeep! Anyone else had an adult tooth extracted without general anaesthetic?

This is not chronological. Let’s just say they range from about the age of 3 to now, in no particular order. All are things I have at some point believed, however briefly, but no longer do.

1. Everything happens for the best.
2. I cannot die or be severely injured.
3. The most efficient solution is always the best.
4. Everything has a reversible effect.
5. Everything can be most usefully explained by science rather than emotional or personal reactions.
6. I am perfect as I am and will always be the same me
7. Eventually I will have a job where I will be doing something I always enjoy that is exactly easy enough at all times, and it will pay me lots of money, in a location that is desirable and close to home.
8. Learning will always come so easily for me that it will never require work, let alone hard work.
9. I am the cleverest person I know
10. I can get along with anyone
11. I will never be jealous of metamours.
12. Any kind of sex is good sex.
13. Love is enough to keep any relationship together.
14. I never want children.
15. It will always be easy for me to stick to my principles and I will always do so.
16. Men make more sense than women.
17. Eventually, people will be satisfied with what I have achieved and stop expecting things of me.
18. I will be normal height one day
19. I will never have to think about what I eat or jhow much I exercise.
20. People below a certain “level of intelligence” are not worth conversing with and will never amount to anything.
21. I should always speak my mind freely, whatever the consequences.
22. I am capable of complete objectivity.
23. Doors will not close for me as I get older.
24. I will always be judged on my merits, without prejudice or assumption.
25. I have no prejudices and I do not make assumptions.
26. Things that I hold important should be held important by everyone.
27. No-one will ever want me sexually because I am too much of a nerd.
28. Everyone who fancies women wants to sleep with me.
29. If societal norms were removed, everyone is bisexual enough to sleep with people of any gender.
30. The world will never deteriorate to the point where western-style living is impossible.
31. I am a lesbian.
32. Drinking is always a good idea.
33. The wind will change and I’ll stay like that.

For those who have just joined us, that was a list of things I don’t believe. But I did, once. Just making sure you are paying attention.

I highly recommend this as an exercise whether or not you choose to share your list. It was very therapeutic just to sit and think of all the ways in which I have changed as a person over the years, and to realise that it is an ongoing process that has long distant and recent elements and will continue to happen throughout my life. It pleases me to know that I have not yet stagnated, or set, in my ideas and ideals.

MOT: £44.95
Full Service: £109.05
Car parts and extra repairs:563.75
Insurance: £232.80
Tax: £120
Total: £1070.55

Not having to use public transport: Priceless?

And that’s not including petrol.

So I’ve been thinking, do I really need a car? I *like* having a car, and my Dad very kindly bought me this one, but there clearly are alternatives to it that might work out cheaper. Everybody stand back: I’m going to use MATHS.

miles a year: 10′000
miles a gallon: 44.8
litres a gallon: 4.546
pence a litre: 118.9
pence a gallon: 118.9 x 4.546 = 540.5
pence a mile: 540.5/44.8 = 12.065
pence a year: 12.065 * 10000 = 120651
pounds a year = 120651/100 = £1206.51

As you can see, the maintenance of my car has this year cost nearly as much as the petrol, the total being 1206.51 + 1070.55 = £2277.07. The combined pence per mile is conveniently (because I do ~ 10000 miles a year) 22.77p. Obviously some of these costs would not go away even if I didn’t drive the car, but let’s leave that for the moment. (y= 0.177m+506.8 if you really care) Let’s also ignore depreciation, because I didn’t buy the car.

One common journey I make is to Preston with Dan to visit his family. Let’s take this 300 mile (round trip) journey and work out the cost of travelling it in various ways. I tend to only be able to go on a weekend, so that’s what tickets I’ll look for, and I’ll try to get the cheapest possible, so I’ll try a few weekends varying distances away, and factor in a railcard if one might apply. I’ll account for there being 2 of us.

Car: 22.77 pence per mile = £68.10

There are no railcards which apply to Dan and the young person’s railcard I can only get within the next year (*sob*). I’ll try it with me having one, anyway. Costs £24 a year, so pro rata that would be 72p for this trip if I still did 10000 miles a year.

Train: 1 adult (£46) + 1 16-25 (£30.35) = £76.35 (ignoring railcard cost)

Ok, so what about buses? There must be some buses to Preston, right? Yes, you can get there from Aber with only 1 change in Birmingham using National Express. Take in a couple of hours shopping, because that’s how long you’ll be waiting. There exist such things as Young Persons Coachcards, which again Dan is too old and decrepit to have but again I’m just within range. They cost £10, which is 30p pro rata for this trip , so I’ll ignore that again as it’s tiny.

Coach: 1 Adult £61.50 + 1 young’un £43.40 = £104.90

I’m surprised the coach is more money than the train, so I’m going to look for more bus-like buses. Nope, because the best chance was the X32 linking with the X94 and onward, but the X32 doesn’t run on Sundays.

No other form of transport I can think of (do suggest one if you can) allows you to pay a visit to Preston from Aberystwyth over a weekend. So far, so car.

What if Dan travels alone? Well, he hasn’t got a licence, so he’ll have to get the train anyway. What if I travel alone? I think I might just buy that railcard.

What if we travel a lot less? How much less would it have to be to not be worth the static cost of owning the car?

y= cost in £
x = distance in miles

Car: y= 0.1771x + 506.8
Train: y= 0.2545x + 24

0.1771x + 506.8 = 0.2545x + 24
0.1771x + 482.8 = 0.2545x
482.8 = 0.0774x
x = 6237 miles (and y turns out to be £1611)

Phew, that took me right back to high school. So, what we’ve discovered is that (based on many many assumptions, not to mention rounding errors and plain old mistakes) If you live in Aber, and you travel more than ~6000 miles a year as at least a pair, it’s probably worth owning a car if you don’t have to buy it yourself. If not, get the train. Third option: stop travelling so far for such lengths of time.

Well, now that my car works and its brakes are better than “it broke when we took it off, that’s how bad it was” I shall continue to own it for the foreseeable. Hopefully maintenance will be a lot less next year, anyway.