Does the word ‘mank’ come from ‘Mancunian’? It doesn’t, does it? While we’re talking about all things northern, what’s with a town being called ‘Liverpool’? A pool of livers? Gross. Does anybody reading actually like liver? Really?

Argh. I need cake.

It’s a little bit funny. Unfortunate, but a little bit funny. Am I a bad person?

Having failed to see Hitch at Cineworld (this kind of thing never used to happen at UCI) we stopped into Blockbuster and picked up Wicker Park. I hadn’t heard of it before and I admit to being a little trepidatious, but enjoyed it very much. I shall add it to my as-yet-not-really-started Me-Likey-Amazony-Linky Page, at some point. I haven’t linked to the trailer as usual because I’d really recommend seeing it without any prior knowledge. Try to avoid reading the back of the box, even.

I feel like going out for lunch and having cake. Who’s with me?

Yahoo, despite putting on a great appearance of being old-and-busted, yesterday launched a Creative Commons search engine. An excellent idea, although I’m rather hoping Google sort out their own version soon. And yep, we‘re in it already…

I decided to have a quick go at adding to the ‘Transparent Monitors’ group, and it ended up taking nearly three hours! Didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, but at least I managed something. CRT colour temperature / balance is fun to deal with - the rules state you can’t alter the final photo, only the background pictures - and the perspective effects from having two monitors were something of a challenge too. Was fun though

You know what I just typed? I’m such a failure. For I have, for you, another boingboing link. But it’s a cool one, so you’ll forgive me. Won’t you? Please? I present to you the anti-gravity room. I’m shutting the computer down now. I am.

An odd duck of a day, this Thursday. I was bothered for various reasons, and it didn’t help that I had a disturbed sleep last night. Physics went ok this morning, but maths was an utter disaster. My maths textbook kept teaching me new things, giving example questions relating to the new knowledge, then setting problems that were nothing like the examples! I don’t mind that if it’s done gradually, but there was no help at all. Finding the centre of mass of an irregular shape, for example. That’s easy. There’s a question asking that, then the next question says ‘What are the co-ordinates of the centre of mass of a piece of wire bent into the shape of the previous question’. What? How do I calculate that? I’m sure it’s easy, but there’s nothing even approaching a hint, and there’s no working in the answer. So that was confusing me, and in the end I just gave up. Which was wrong of me. There’re only 50 days or so until the exams start, so now isn’t the time to be struggling.

Dancing this evening was interesting, as there were 6 of us! I had a harem. I wanted to get t-shirts printed, but the girls weren’t terribly enthusiastic. Odd, that. The other four girls hadn’t been before, so Lynsey and I were demonstrating the various dances. It was fun! Worryingly, they picked it up rather quickly. That’s not the idea at all! We’ve taken weeks learning all those steps I think we took over a good quarter of the dance floor, especially on the new chasse (is that the correct word?). We were dancing for far longer than everybody else in the class, and the teachers even took requests for music we wanted. We tried a fast jive at the end, which was exhausting but great fun.

I must have an early night tonight. Must. No getting sucked into flickr browsing or boingboing’s tributarial links.

Wooo, I like it. People have set their background images to photographs of the area behind their monitors. I’m going to have to have a go now!

Thanks to boingboing for the link.

I’m currently uploading my high-res USA images to flickr, and it’s taking a very long time. I’m stuck on 128kb/s upload here, despite the much faster download speed. Does anybody have any cunning suggestions for how I could upload 900mb of images? Do libraries have faster connections or something? I’ve found that the most efficient method is to send them via email, but unfortunately I can’t find an email program that can limit the bandwidth, so every time I send anything my connection grinds to a halt. Limiting it would let me trickle the photos continuously, which would probably work quite well. Anybody know of any free email programs that allow this?

Well, at least he’s honest.

Oh. Wow. I’m almost tempted to forget my exams and just buy one.

What are the chances, do you think…

Having ranted about the ASA last week, tonight’s television was rather interesting.

Firstly, there was the latest Pot Noodle advert. Remember the infamous ‘the slag of all snacks’ tagline that got their advert banned a couple of years ago? Their latest ad shows a man walking into a restaurant with a large protrusion from his groin, and a wide brass tube coming out of his pocket. He is accused of having the ‘pot noodle horn’, which he vigorously denies, in the process turning around and knocking a woman off her chair with said item. That was all that happened in the pre-10pm version. During CSI:Miami, however, an extended version was shown, in which he admits to having the horn, and not only does he have the horn, but he’s ‘going to blow it’, promptly whipping it out and giving it a good honk. He then returns five minutes later looking somewhat worn out, but satisfied, and his friends congratulate him on his admission. It was very, very funny, but they’re really close to the line. I bet there’ll be complaints. Of course, that could be the idea. It’s not like getting an advert banned is bad advertising, is it…

Then there was CSI. It was the 100th episode, and long-running shows often do something special for the occasion. CSI isn’t like most shows, though. It’s previously broken with tradition by not ending series with dramatic episodes / cliffhangers. It has plotlines that only come up two or three times a series. Recently they concluded the storyline of a serial killer who originally struck in the first series. Incidentally, there aren’t many shows that could finish a large storyline without anything terribly dramatic (cast members in jeopardy etc.) happening and still make it exciting, but CSI manages.

Anyway, I wondered if they’d do anything interesting for the 100th show, and as it turned out, they did. I think they pushed it about as far as is possible on US tv. It was fairly explicit even for the UK, which is saying something. The storyline involved transsexuals being murdered and having back-room operations, one of which became a rather bloody crime scene. There were graphic descriptions of exactly how gender-changing operations work. There was evidence collected from implements that had been inserted into certain orifices, discussion of fellatio by a husband on a wife and also semen collection from cheek cells. It wasn’t deliberately over-the-top, it was just a very, very grisly case. Given that the show is broadcast at 9pm, and already gets bad press from conservative groups, this was a ballsy episode to screen. Nicely done.

I’d been bidding on a couple of items, including a physics revision guide. It was listed at 99p, and I put in an offer at that price, but with a limit of

Mechanics 2 is meant to be easy. And it generally is. Except that this question is for some reason confusing the hell out of me. If somebody could take a look and help me out, I’d be very grateful.

With respect to a fixed origin O, the velocity [tex]vms^{-1}[/tex] of a particle P at time t seconds is given by:

[tex]v=2t^2i + (6-3t)j[/tex]

a) Find the acceleration of P at time t seconds, giving your answer as a vector
– No problem with this. I just differentiate, giving [tex](4ti - 3j)ms^{-2}[/tex]

b) Find the value of t when P is moving parallel to the vector i
– What? I guess this is just a clever way of telling me something like ‘t=0′ or that the differential is 0 - I just can’t figure out what it’s talking about at all. I’d write out all the various techniques I’ve tried, but that’d just confuse the issue, I think. The answer, by the way, is 2.

Please could somebody help me out?