January 2011
4 posts
A moment of evangelism
If I can be forgiven for a moment’s evangelism…
750words.com is great. Any readers of my regular (full length) blog will know that this simple website is responsible for me getting my act together and finishing the first draft of the work in progress novel that has been whirling around my brain for three years.
But since the completion of my novel it’s also help me start...
Data Compression
See this picture below. See it. Complex isn’t it? And yet it can be generated using a very small number of bytes, namely:
The equation zn+1 = zn2 + c (the Mandelbrot equation)
The centre position -0.6848180212901469 x -0.3061535919354604
The radius 5.283963397984483e-05
The number of iterations 10,000
Altogether less than a hundred bytes (letters or numbers).
And yet the image...
Graphic misdesign
In June 1982 the Teardrop Explodes released their penultimate single Tiny Children. It failed to get in the Top 40. This bugged me at the time because I thought it was a brilliant single; psychedelic and creepy. I don’t think it was this low-key melancholy that prevented it from getting in the charts, after all this was the year that earlier on had seen Japan’s Ghosts at number 5. And...
A Clever Trick
One of the cleverest tricks ever pulled in the 20th Century was when personnel departments worldwide successfully convinced management that appraisals and annual reviews were of any value whatsoever other than simply to ensure that staff in personnel still had something to do after payroll and staff records were computerised.
