Be Excellent To Each Other

So now I'm prayin', oh Lord I'm prayin' to you...

Indeed, I was just objecting to Grim…'s bold assertion.

The Child has Stridor which is nowhere near as cool as it sounds. In fact, she sounds like a knackered car.

And HOW FOGGY IS IT TODAY? I need more discussion about the fog.

He's the one who made the bet, and knows he'll be exactly right on time.

IN PEOPLE ARE NICE NEWS: A STORY OF LOSS AND REDEMPTION

Yesterday, I took The Child down to Robert's Park in The Village because she requested it. Off we went in the pushchair and whilst waiting for the lights to hang I thought to myself "I hope she doesn't lob Rhino Neal(stuffed toy, favoured) under the wheels of a car". She didn't and we went on our way. At the park I realised RHINO NEAL WAS NOT THERE ANYMORE so I prepared for the worst. After we ran around the bandstand and the statues for a bit we left to gozome. But what us that on the wall? Could it be? Hurrah it is! So that was really nice of whoever bobbed him on the wall. The Child was so pleased she fell asleep so Rhino Neal and I had a pint. And then we went home. This qualifies as an exciting event in my life now.

Good of you to buy the Rhino one as well.

Oh, and yesterday was foggier - made riding a bike interesting what with not being able to see stuff.

Here's a picture out of my (temp) office window.



That's Liverpool City Centre over there.

I drove to Gatwick airport for 8am yesterday. It was fucking foggy then.

Went to go flying planes with Zardoz yesterday morning, anyway it was too foggy for that but where we parked we could hear thousands of geese in the field.

It was flat calm, the rumbling noise on the video that sounds like wind is sound of all their wings flapping, there must have been thousands of them:

I don't understand. Does fog not happen much over there* or something? Is it the Autumn version of Snowmageddon?

*England.

Not that often, no.

Not this much fog, no: https://twitter.com/sarahjwells/status/ ... 32384?s=09

As evidenced by all the cancelled flights at Gatwick yeaterday, which is (obviously) not normal.

Our island is too big. And fog doesn't like to pay tax, so it goes to the IOM.

That's not fog, that's a Doctor Who filler episode.

Between the hill fog and sea mist, it seems like we're always under a blanket of it at this time of year! My morning commute consists of trying to get to the mountain road before the guy in the Micra or else I'll be stuck behind him in the fog for 12 miles. All the flights here are cancelled too but only because the planes are stuck over there in your fog but I'd say, at a guess, Gatwick handles one or two more flights than our airport! Liverpool and Manchester flights in and out were cancelled first thing as well.

Fog is pretty eerie, even sound is different in it. I don't like it much because I always think there's a monster just at the edge of where I can see. One day, it'll step out and my first thought will be "Fuckin' knew it".

http://retroresolution.com/2015/10/26/3 ... 81-review/

"Review" of 3D Monster Maze (ZX81)

I remember 3D Monster maze. T'were terrifying - At any moment, someone might sneeze and cause the ZX81 to reset. Or turn on something elsewhere in the house and cause the ZX81 to reset. Or look at funny and cause the ZX81 to reset. Or... R TAPE LOADING ERROR

I don't think I ever saw the titular monster.

Pretty sure R Tape Loading error was the speccy - not enough memory on the ZX81 for loading errors it either worked or it didnt :-)

Anyway - through the wonders of emulation you can play it online

http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/emulat ... ter%20Maze

My Bitboy turned up today! This is a little box that connects to your Gameboy and can copy the images off a Gameboy camera to an SD card.

Doesn't that sound amazing? I think so...

Mate.

Does anyone know of a website that will find the optimum route between a number of waypoints?

It seems that google maps has a limit of ten on the free version, but there are 14 on my list.

Google maps?

Oh, no it won't.

Is it round Britain rally time again?

Trying to work out if it's possible to get a photo of all 14 surviving UK Vulcan bombers in 24 hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Vulc ... on_display

Thanks. That one will give me ten waypoints, and has a link to https://www.speedyroute.com/ which does 12 without paying for access.

Getting close.

Considering one's in Ohio and one's in Kentucky, I suspect not.

Oh, you said UK. Never mind!

Could you not just put the first 10 waypoints into Google Maps, then do a second route for the other 4, and overlay them in Photoshop or something?

Yep - I did a guesstimate of the fastest route and just split it into two halves, starting in London and running up the East of the country before turning round and heading down the West side.

That's given me 1000 miles and 20 hours driving, but I wasn't sure if there was a faster option.

Helicopter

An excellent plan, with just two minor drawbacks.

I read that as 'Drawbridges'. I may be tired, or this may be the best journey ever...

Wings?

1) he doesn't have a helicopter and
2) he doesn't have a helicopter.

Now I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw; but I thought it was such a big one, it was worth mentioning twice.

I remember watching some documentary a while back about algorithms and this type of problem was given as an example of one which is surprisingly difficult to solve. The Travelling Salesman Problem or something they called it.

It is tricky to find the most optimum solution because of the massive number of potential solutions, so many things try stuff at random and dispose of any that are not as good as the best so far until they hit n cycles and call a winner.

You don't do it at random, you try every possibility until you can't get any further in less steps that you could on a previous run.

I've had to do it a few times when making games - it's the same problem for finding the most optimum route across a game board.

Ah interesting. Ta. That is a nice way of doing it.

Apparently it's very difficult to solve with a brute force approach:

http://www.wired.com/2013/01/traveling- ... n-problem/

The publishing of a proof for the solution to the Travelling Salesman problem is the basis of an excellent Charles Stross short story "Antibodies".

I literally have a PhD in this. Good luck solving the travelling salesman -- of any NP-complete problem -- via brute force for non-trivial problem sizes.

That's Dijkstra's algorithm. It can only between two points, it can't consider routes (a key part of the TSP.) It runs in polynomial time, so can't scale to large problems. And it's naively greedy, so on some networks will always fail to find the best solution.

This is literally the greatest unsolved problem in computer science. Go read P=NP if you want more.

Presumably if you are trying to program this, you can discount a load of combinations right at the start, as it's never going to be quickest to go from London to Scotland, then back to Southend, etc
Calculate the distance/time for each potential hop - A to B, A to C and so on, and rule out the worst performing three quarters (or similar) for your brute force calculation.

Just to complicate my example of the Vulcans, some are easily accessible 24/7 and others inside museums and hangars are only visible during the day so if I was seriously considering attempting this, I'd need to take that into account and plan my route timings to take that into account.

As long as Zeppo isn't rolling the dice everything will be fine.


It's also the one you told me to use

You'd have to teach the computer how to know about that first.

According to Cormen et al, Dijkstra's algorithm runs in O((E + V) log V) and so actually scales pretty well. I've never heard mention that it could fail.

True.


By which I mean (for example) http://cs.stackexchange.com/a/1761 Edit -- and this even more obvious example, which I'd somehow forgotten about completely http://cs.stackexchange.com/a/1750