While You Were Gone

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Conway's Game of Life, implemented as a Vim Macro

Inspired by Pelafina H Lievre’s recent implementation in sed, and by Linus Åkesson’s pioneering but rather less recent Vim macro exploits, I crafted some Vim macros to play Conway’s Game of Life.

If you have heard of Vim and/or Conway’s Game of Life, you should have a look!

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Then [the police officer] went upstairs with Emily. They opened the door of her room, and it was eighteen inches deep of just chaos. The bed had been pulled apart, curtains pulled down, drawers all dumped out. Emily – five and three-quarters – looked at Officer Rodriguez and said, “I can’t tell if the burglars were in here or not.”

I thought the quote above was an absolute shoo-in to be my favourite part of this memoir by geneticist Mary-Claire King, entitled The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1.

Then I got to the scene at the airport where King needs to leave Emily waiting in a queue so she can escort her frail mother to the departure gate.

(via Paul Kafasis)

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HUNGRY for gadget reviews? Looking for something NEW to watch while you wait for the first video unboxings of the iPhone X to hit YouTube? WYWG has the solution!

Get yourself to Chris Staecker's YouTube channel, where you will find a series of FASCINATING and HILARIOUS reviews of his collection of HI-TECH calculating machines.

(via Marcin Wichary's Shift Happens newsletter)

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We already knew that Snoop was smooth as heck, but I cannot lie to you I never would have expected to be adding Bernie Sanders to my handshake team starting lineup.

How have I not posted either of these before? It is truly a mystery.

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The Encyclopedia of Matt Damon

George Clooney on how Damon looks in a Speedo! Emily Blunt on why he's "almost sickening." Matt Damon on the one movie he can't get over. AND MORE.

An exceedingly entertaining collection of stories centered around Matt Damon. This anecdote about David Fincher, recounted by Damon, was my favourite:

When Ben was doing Gone Girl, I went over and visited the set and sat behind David [Fincher] while he was directing. There was a scene where Ben and Rosamund [Pike] walk into a bookstore and end up coming towards the camera through one of the aisles and kissing each other. So before the door opens and they come in, an extra walks by at the end of the line of books. David instantly starts monologuing: “Who fucking walks like that? Are you fucking… Am I wrong? Like, who fucking walks like that? It's ridiculous. I mean, he fucking looks like an extra in a movie. What the fuck?” Meanwhile, Ben and Rosamund are acting their hearts out, and I know they're gonna go again, no matter what they do, because this person fucking blew it. So David goes over and gives them notes, and they get ready to do it again, and Rosamund's makeup artist comes walking in to touch her up. David's looking at his monitor, and he goes, “Now, that's how you walk.”

I am totally up for an evening of board games OR red wine with the Damons. Hit me up, Matty.

(via One Foot Tsunami)

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thereiclippedit - A tool for sending your clipboard from iOS to your computer and back

There are occasions when I want to copy text from my iPhone and paste it on my computer, or vice versa. For the majority of the time that I've had an iPhone, I've used the excellent Simplenote app to facilitate this. I paste into a new Simplenote note on my iPhone, then open a web browser on my computer and login to Simplenote's web app, and copy/paste from there.

The process is juuust about long-winded enough to be irritating, but hitherto not laborious enough for me to seriously investigate any of the many apps that purport to offer a quicker solution.

The basis of my reluctance was fourfold:

Said apps can cost as much as £2.99. I'm no miser, but I'm not MADE of money either, jeez,

Many of the apps won't sync with Windows. I mean, I get it: ick. But some of us still have dayjobs, you know?

All of the solutions necessitate an app running constantly on my computer, and generally will sync clipboards. Even if they are bug-free, this is unnecessarily HEAVYweight for my needs, I just want to fire my clipboards about on a strictly AD HOC basis,

Cross-platform clipboard syncing seems to me to be exactly the size of problem that would entice a developer to create a really polished iOS app, update it for a year, and then get bored or go out of business.

But if you keep on piling on straws, eventually that camel is going to have to enroll on a Pilates course.

So I made There, I Clipped It.

If you, like me, sometimes want to paste from your computer onto your iPhone, but, also like me, you instinctively shy away from actual polished solutions and lean instead towards hacky hacks that come without warranty, might not be fit for purpose, and may even set fire to your curtains whilst insulting your children, then maybe you should check it out.

N.B. Note that There, I Clipped It works by LEVERAGING several other iOS apps. If you don't already own these, then purchasing them will cost more than just going ahead and buying one of the apps dedicated to copy-pasty-goodness. And if you do already own them, you are in all likelihood perfectly capable of writing something similar yourself.

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Fresh off of TRIUMPHING in, being blackballed from, and then being apologised to because of a competition to obtain a fellowship from a company that he gives every impression of despising, Maciej Ceglowski has published the GLORIOUS first fruits of his successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a trip to the Antarctic.

It is worth every penny of the $11 dollars that I pledged towards it, and I URGE you to go read it IMMEDIATELY.

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Curry Update

A few weeks ago, I wrote a couple of posts about Stephen Curry's transcendent season.

In case you were wondering how that turned out, Curry eventually ended the regular season with 402 made three-pointers, obliterating his own record of 286.1 His Warriors won 73 games (losing only 9), the best record ever achieved in the NBA, and are currently marching through the playoffs, the favourites to win the entire bag of chips2.

And yesterday, Curry was given the league's Most Valuable Player award, winning it for the second year in a row, and becoming the first player ever to win it with a unanimous vote. Literally EVERYONE agrees that his season was without peer.

So yeah. Not a bad season.

The NBA twitter account posted a video of his top 30 plays of the season, which I can heartily recommend.

What does that look like? It looks like this:  ↩︎

Curry got injured in the first round, but after a few games off he returned, came off the bench as a reserve, and just casually scored 40 points, (including a new NBA record of 17 in overtime: this season Curry has been treating NBA records like plates at a Greek wedding), pausing only to throw eight assists and grab nine rebounds. ↩︎

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The day after I wrote this post about Steph Curry's ongoing remarkable season, he went and did this.

By the start of the video above, Curry had already scored 11 three pointers, leaving him one shy of the NBA record for the most threes made in a game. His 11th three was also his 286th in the season, tying his own record for the most three-point field goals made in a season, set last year. (And note: we're currently less than three quarters of the way through the season.)

He'd also picked up what looked like a nasty ankle sprain, when an opposing player, Russell Westbrook, trod on his foot.

As the video starts, the game is in overtime, the score is tied, and there are less than 5 seconds left to play.

As you watch it, remember that, as J.E. Skeets, of NBA TV's The Starters, points out:

"He practices these shots. That's what the best part is. We see all these clips all the time of him in pre-game warmups--everyone goes and watches him now, they go an hour and a half early to the game--and he practices these shots. That's what makes this even more special: it's not luck, at all. It's not luck!"

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Isaiah Thomas knows how to throw a nice pass.

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Steph Curry is Historically Ridiculous

In the NBA, you score two points for regular baskets, and three points for shots taken from outside of the three point line, which is 23′9″ from the basket,

If you have ever stood on a basketball court, you will know that 23′9″ is a long way,

Generally, NBA players will stand as close to the three-point line as possible when taking a three-point shot, for obvious reasons,

Occasionally, a player will take a shot from further away from the basket, either to give them more space from defending players, or because there is not enough time left to get any closer,

Stephen (pronounced "Steffen") Curry, is really, really good at shooting the ball a really, really long way.

In fact, 57 games into the 2015–16 season, Stephen Curry has taken 52 shots from distances between 28 and 50 feet, (considerably beyond the three-point line) and he scored a basket on 35 of those attempts.

The all-time record for three-point percentage over a single season was set by Kyle Korver, in 2009–10, when he was successful on about 54% of his attempts.

35 out of 52 is roughly 67%.

If you score 35 three pointers in 52 attempts, you have scored 105 points.

If you take 52 two pointers and make 100% of these, you have scored 104 points.

At this point in time, if Curry is bringing the ball up the floor and he sees a team-mate standing, unguarded, beneath the basket, it is better for him to just pull up and shoot it himself, five feet before he gets to the three point line, rather than to pass the ball to his team-mate for a certain score.

"This is one of the craziest runs in NBA history. Maybe the single most freakish sustained performance in the history of the sport. He belongs in the Hall of Fame for the last 18 months alone." —Jenkins_Palabro_ESQ

"I've watched all year. I've seen a lot of these shots happen. You can actually still find a lot of these circus shots on youtube.

"And yet, in spite of a tremendous amount of empirical evidence supporting this statistic, I can't believe this shit. It's un-fucking-fathomable." —fireglz

"This is how I feel.. like my brain cannot accept what he is doing as real.

"This run is starting to have a strong case as the most dominant, freakishly outlying, impossible performance in the history of the sport" —Jenkins_Palabro_ESQ

"Curry is having the greatest offensive season of all time. He's been definitively better than Kobe, Lebron, KD.... even better than Jordan.

"He's so good that he's making feats like this — previously thought impossible — seem incredibly mundane.

"He's so dominant, such a game-breaker... that reading about his dominance is becoming boring.

"Every once in a while, life conjures up a genuine ultimate. Curry is one of those." —YourLatinLover

"Did anyone mention how insane this is. BECAUSE THIS IS PRETTY INSANE!!" —Cholecosa

"It's maybe the most ridiculous and unprecedented extended performance in the history of any sport. It's so outside the bounds of what anyone ever considered possible.

"It still doesn't feel real watching these plays night after night." —Jenkins_Palabro_ESQ

"The problem is by now you just expect it to go in…

"Curry broke Basketball." —FiTTjE

Plus, you know…

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How my dog finds me in a field, by A Mac

The dog in question is called Alfie.

Dogs!

This post is brought to you by Project Clear Out the Drafts Folder.

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This went round twitter a few weeks ago. Posting it again here because it's so rare to find something that combines my two greatest areas of expertise.

Parallel processing in game development. #gamedev pic.twitter.com/0poIUH1ZgG

— Glenn Fiedler (@gafferongames) November 23, 2015

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If squaring a number means multiplying that number with itself then shouldn't taking square root of a number mean to divide a number by itself? For example the square of $2$ is $2^2=2 \cdot 2=4 ...

With the obvious exception of the (terrific, correct) top-rated entry, virtually all the answers to this question on the Q&A site, Mathematics Stack Exchange, are a perfect illustration of the fact that expertise in an area does not usually translate into the ability to teach that subject.

I have two A Levels and what is essentially a degree in mathematics, and yet I still found myself struggling to follow most of them, my eyelids getting heavier as the boredom flooded in.

That several of these answers have multiple up-votes (awarded by other site users), further underlines the point that most people, once they understand a concept, find it extremely hard to comprehend what was so difficult about it in the first place.1

On a related note, I recently discovered this charming blog by an American grade school maths teacher. Either she's just a great teacher, or the way that maths is taught has changed a lot since I was at school, and for the better2. She clearly strives to get her students to understand how numbers work, and not just how to perform calculations.

Some good examples:

Multiplication: Finding the Greatest Product

Grade 6 Rocks Visual Patterns

(My favourite post is probably this one about how to divvy up two pizzas between five people3, but it's a bit less relevant to the point I'm trying to make.)

Some people are lucky enough to get figure this stuff out for themselves early on, but others don't, and then, turned off by the consequently mystifying rote-methodology being taught, they end up forever saddled with the notion that they simply "can't do" maths, which further hinders them from picking up the genuinely useful life skills basic mathematics provides4.

This is a failure of the education system, and, more to the point, a shame:

Maths is fun!

This phenomonon is by no means restricted to the realms of DUSTY academia. For a more kinetic example, pop on down to your local beginners' breaking class and watch the instructor attempt to describe how to do a baby freeze. ↩︎

Or, I guess, both. ↩︎

Previously, on While You Were Slicing Pizza ↩︎

Such people won't have bothered clicking on the links provided above, or indeed have made it past the title of this post. ↩︎

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This Is How NOT to Do Customer Service

Last week, my broadband internet did not function from Tuesday morning till sometime on Saturday. Attempting to contact the service provider throughout the week proved... frustrating, to say the least.

There follows below the content of an email I sent to a certain tabloid tech news outlet in a futile attempt to SHAME the company responsible and also to find out a little more about what went wrong. The website declined to investigate the matter, so I thought I'd post it here:

Hi there!

I was wondering if you’d be interested in writing a story about a SHOCKING 4-day (and counting) Virgin Media Broadband outage and the SCANDALOUS LIES they've been telling their customers about it.

TL;DR: Virgin Media currently has a fault causing the loss of broadband service to hundreds (or possibly thousands) of homes and businesses in several postcodes of South East London. This was apparently caused by workers cutting through a cable in Lewisham on Tuesday, and Virgin Media cannot get access to fix it until Saturday. However, for the duration of the problem they’ve been telling all their customers that the fault will only take a few hours to fix.

Below are most of the gory details. Feel free to email back if you want even more information about my personal contact with Virgin Media (I’ve skipped quite a bit for “brevity”), or if you have any questions. I’d also be happy to chat on the phone [NUMBER REDACTED] or Skype if that helps you.

Facts I Actually Know

My broadband has been down since Tuesday morning,

On Tuesday evening, I was informed by Virgin Media customer support that the problem affected many other people in the area. This morning I was informed that it affected 851 people in multiple postcodes with SE- and E- prefixes,

Over the past two days, various customer support reps have repeatedly assured me that their engineers understand the problem, are on site, and are physically working on the fault, and a couple of times, that they have already fixed it,

I have been given the following estimates for when the outage would be fixed, none of which have been met. Notably, each is roughly 5 hours after the time of the call in which I was given it:

Thursday, noon

Thursday, 5pm

Thursday, 10pm

Friday, 4pm

Friday, 9pm

Stuff I’ve Heard from Randos on Twitter

According to the tweets pasted and linked to below, the outage was caused by workers at the big construction site at Lewisham roundabout cutting through a cable.

Contrary to what they are telling almost all of their customers, it seems Virgin Media are actually unable to access the site to make the required repairs until Saturday.

There is also no shortage of people on Twitter complaining about the problem and the continually-pushed-back estimates for a fix, which you can find by looking at @virginmedia’s mentions and responses, or by searching for “virginmedia” with a postcode, such as SE10 or SE8.

Tweets:

@virginmedia wo internet for 4 days. All wk told eng on site. Today told LA not given permission for VM to dig until Sat? #virginmedia #se10

https://twitter.com/fragilityofself/status/675299873466540033

We're told that @virginmedia was KO'd for 1,000s of people when fibre cable was cut by workers at #Lewisham roundabout 3 days ago. Ouch!

https://twitter.com/GreenwichVisitr/status/675049198371368960

#Greenwich peeps @vmbusiness say that BB problem caused by a developer in #Lewisham and on private property. Access not poss until 12th! RT

https://twitter.com/mikecurryphotos/status/675012288848465920

Why I’m Writing

Obviously partly I want REVENGE and failing that CATHARSIS, but really I’d just like to find out:

Whether the cable-cutting story is true,

Who cut the cable,

Why Virgin Media cannot get to the cable,

Whether Virgin Media are LYING, or if they are just so incredibly INCOMPETENT that none of their customer support reps have the information that a fix is impossible until Saturday,

If they are lying, why they think that a constantly moving estimate would be better received than just telling everyone the truth in the first place: the outage isn’t even really their fault!

I have no idea how to go about getting this information, so I’m hoping you can winkle it out.

Thanks for your time!

Previously, on While You Were Engaging in Capitalism.

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This post is brought to you by Project Clear Out the Drafts Folder.

This article, about a group of seniors who have been playing a weekly basketball game since 1972(!), is just terrific.

Couple of my favourite bits:

Pagnotta holds an unofficial title as the group’s general manager, which means that he is responsible for picking teams. He has done so for decades, even though other players accuse him of stacking lineups in his favor. Of course, Pagnotta admits that he does this.

[…]

Marsh, 71, likes to do his damage in the paint, even if that annoys certain defenders.

“Harry won’t let me take him inside,” Marsh said. “He gets mad at me if I try to post him up.”

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This post is brought to you in an untimely fashion by Project Clear Out the Drafts Folder.

Jeremy Lamb and Perry Jones of the Oklahoma City Thunder have a strong handshake game.

Nick Collison and Steven Adams (ibid) also know how to bring it: