7cm a year

The introduction of the railways led to global time.  The introduction of sat nav does the same for position.

Australia plans new co-ordinates to fix sat-nav gap

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sequestering carbon, several books at a time LXI

The latest batch:

These include the proceedings of the UCNC conference I recently attended.  Several others are a birthday present.  (I also got a mug featuring the BBC Micro Owl logo, and a Hubble Deep Field throw.)

does anyone even remember what "VHS" stands for?

I saw them come.  I saw them go.

Japan 'to stop making VCR machines'

VCRs were used to play and record onto VHS cassettes

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"I did not over think it. I thought it through."

The Narcissism Of Motherhood:

Being a mother is not a job. If it were a job there’d be a selection process, pay, holidays, a superior to report to, performance assessments, Friday drinks, meetings and you could resign from your job and get another one because you didn’t like the people you were working with.

[via Danny Yee's blog]

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remember remember the 9th of November

NSFW

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a second Brexit riposte roundup

Here are my Google+ posts on the Brexit fallout I made over the couple of weeks I was away at conferences.

Brexit was a con : Referendum information: 1293 words on Brexit, v 670 pages for Scottish Independence.  "An informed electorate" my hat.

Professor A C Grayling’s letter to all 650 MPs urging Parliament not to support a motion to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, 1 July 2016.  Well said.

"Cat, what's your opinion on the UK leaving the EU?"  Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Boris Johnson made foreign secretary by Theresa May.  WTF?!  I've been having this really surreal dream for about 3 weeks now.  It's worse than Alice in Wonderland, the bizarre things that keep happening.  I'd like to wake up, now, please.

Everything you need to know about Theresa May’s Brexit nightmare in five minutes.  It's even worse than I thought:

You mean we can't negotiate any trade deals, inside or outside the EU, while the two-year Article 50 process is ongoing?
Exactly. Actually, it's against the law for EU member states (we'd still be an EU member state until the end of the two-year process) to conduct bilateral trade negotiations with other member states or countries.

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UCNC day 5

The final (half) day of UCNC in Manchester.

The last invited speaker of the conference was Steve Furber, talking about the SpiNNaker project (SpiNNaker stands for  "Spiking Neural Network Architecture").  After some interesting historical context, he told us of the SpiNNaker machine: one million processors in an asynchronous spiking architecture.  The preliminary machine, with 500,000 cores, was launched 30 Mar 2016, and more cores have been added since.  It can be programmed in the Python PyNN language.  For example, 165 lines of Python are needed for a Sudoku solver, where the neuronal groups inhibit other groups with the same integer value in the the same row, column, or 3x3 cell.  Once a solution has been found, the inhibitory links decrease, and the spiking rate goes up, solving a "diabolical" puzzle in about 10 seconds.  This isn't just a toy: it is representative of complex constraint problems.  So far people have only been running small programs, as they think how to scale up their ideas.  Although each core is a standard processor, exploiting the asynchronous spiking communication requires a different way of thinking.

Then on to the final technical session.  First was a talk on "Model-Based Computation"; an attempt to extend the definition of analogue computation (which implements a model analgous to the problem) in a way that can cover more of unconventional computation.  Then a couple of mathematical talks about chemical reaction system formalisms.  The first, "Towards Quantitative Verification of Reaction Systems" encoded the system in a formal solver to prove properties.  The next, "Reachability Problems for Continuous Chemical Reaction Networks" looked at proving safety properties in systems with continuous values of reactant concentrations.  The final talk was on "Global Network Cooperation Catalysed by a Small Prosocial Migrant Clique", looking at evolutionary game theory in networks with no global knowledge, and how a small clique of cooperators migrating into a network of defectors could change it to a network of cooperators.

So, another conference ends.  Next year, in Arkansas.

After two solid weeks of travel and listening, my brain is full of exciting science, and I need a lot of sleep!  I'm looking forward to getting home for a bit of a rest.