hacking habits
My response to the blog wars about multiplying negative numbers. Mostly inspired by Eric’s comment on Mike Croucher’s Walking Randomly.
Big image, links to a PDF (of vector goodness).
I wanted to put the Inkscsape SVG source inside the PNG image. But it turns out wordpress.com “optimises” the image and means my klever hack doesn’t work. Bad wordpress.com.
On Friday popped into the Natural History Museum and went to the Butterfly Jungle. I’m a member, and entry to the for-money exhibitions is free (already paid for). It makes me feel terribly middle class.
Before entering into the “jungle” (it’s a temporary hut made of out polytunnel) I thought we could go see the insect gallery so we could learn something about butterflies before seeing them. Well, there is no insect gallery, there is the creepy crawlies room. Where’s the long room full of display cabinets crammed with dead insects pinned to neatly labelled pieces of cardboard? Needless to say the creepy crawly room sucks.
So we sort of wandered about at random. Hey, did you know the toilets have bacteria zapping UV on the hand dryers. Cool. But no interpretation. Not Cool.
Tania Kovat’s TREE is very good. It’s a slice of a 200 year old oak set into plaster panels in the ceiling; the pieces are arranged more or less how they would have been on the tree, in other words: in the shape of a tree. I find the connexion to Darwin a bit lame. The inspiration is Darwin’s now famous “I think” cladogram from his Transmutation Notebook B (ain’t the Darwin online project great?). The cladogram, you know, looks like a tree. And so does Tania’s TREE. Cunning. TREE is displayed in a rather nice gallery at the top of the splendid staircase in the Central Hall. Behind the statue of Darwin, and between the statues of Hooker and Owen. A holy place.
In the same gallery is Ida, apparently the world’s most complete fossil primate specimen. She’s a beautiful little bush-baby-like creature, Darwinius masillae. She lived 47 million years ago. Of course, I know the vast majority of species (well over 99%) become extinct, so it is, statistically speaking, unlikely that Ida is our ancestor. Nonetheless it is difficult to dispel the romantic notion that Ida could be our ancestor. Certainly she will have shared a lot in common, looks, behaviour, social grouping, with our actual ancestors. Ida’s cabinet featured something that I think the NHM should have a lot lot more of. A cladogram.
After wandering past the primate gallery (now quite aging) and the Sequoiadendron giganteum we found the entrance to the Minerals collection. I didn’t actually know the NHM did rocks. And this is awesome. A big gallery full of oak cabinets (original 1881!), stuffed full of… rocks! We didn’t want to spend much time here (we were getting hungry), but I thought it would be interesting to see what the NHM had to say about the alexandrite effect and birefringence. It was a simple pleasure to use the alphabetic mineral index to find the cabinet displaying alexandrite.
Alexandrite appears to be different colours under different lighting conditions. One colour under natural sunlight, and a different colour under incandescent light. I was slightly disappointed to find that cabinet didn’t have a button to press to illuminate the alexandrite with different lights. Oh well. I suppose every mineral is special in its own way, so I can’t expect every one to have a cute interpretation. Of some local interest to me was spotting the enormous Blue John specimen, about as big as my chest. Blue John is a fluorite variety local to Castleton. Of course, I’ve seen far better examples in the shops in Castleton.
I knew quartz was a birefringent material, so I popped over to the quartz cabinet. No birefringence here. As we were ambling out of the room, I luckily found a fine quartz crystal ball on display in the jewellery cabinet next to a rather fine jade box on loan from the Queen. Gazing into the crystal ball gives the birefringent double image effect (this is deliberate, there is an interpretation sign to explain the effect). Nice, but I think Wikipedia’s image is more impressive.
After lunch and a quick trip round the wildlife garden (impressive use of a small urban space, and I expect it to keep improving; didn’t see the foxes though) we did eventually make it to the Butterfly Jungle.
Which I thought was a bit disappointing. However, there’s something intrinsically delightful about having lots of butterflies flapping about, and it hard not to enjoy that rather pleasant experience. And they are pretty to look at. As for science though, there was precious little to be found (not none, but not a great deal). It wasn’t all butterflies, there was an amusing collection of slightly exotic creaturees in glass cages. Giant african millipede, death’s head cockroach, Charlie the Iguana iguana (who I last saw in the Darwin exhibition!); that sort of thing. And a kiddies playground. Which looked quite good, but no use to me.
The Natural History Museum is such a large museum and with so much on display, I find that it’s impossible to do anything but see a small sample of it in any of visit. I’ve been three times recently and I’ve still only seen a small fraction of what it has to offer. There are still things to discover in the Central Hall: I was pleased to see a Glyptodon that I had missed on my previous visits.
I did learn one thing in the Butterfly Jungle. Butterflies taste with their feet.
Damn hippies think we can just sprinkle a few wind mills around, and because Europe has “huge wind resources” we’ll be okay.
This silly web article claims that europe’s wind energy potential is “huge”, and “equivalent to almost 20 times energy demand in 2020″.
O RLY?
YA RLY, according to the European Environment Agency’s report, Europe’s onshore and offshore wind energy potential.
O RLY?
YA RLY: It’s hard to miss this sentence from the executive summary: “Europe’s raw wind energy potential is huge. … it may be equivalent to almost 20 times energy demand in 2020″.
“energy demand”, that’s the problem. Their assumed energy demand is between 3537 TWh and 4078 TWh. (By the way, notice that the EEA cover their backs with a “may” when they use the lower demand figure to get the “20 times” headline-grabbing numbers, but the web article referencing somehow manages to drop the “may”). So, Europe has 271e6 people (according to Google); that’s 15.3 kWh per person per day. Oops. They must have meant…
Electricity demand.
Twats.
The electricity demand, in Europe, in nothing like our energy demand. In the UK we travel around by burning oil, and we heat our houses and food by burning gas. That hugely swamps our electricity usage.
Energy and Electricity are not the same thing.
Double twats for the people who ignorantly repeated them. Of course the European Environment Agency know the difference. There are two occurrences of the phrase “energy demand” in the document; 7 occurrences of “electricity demand”. Both the “energy demand” phrases related to the “20 times” sentence. One is in it, the other is in the footnote of the table of data on the same page as the “20 times” sentence. Before I did the textual analysis (by which I mean I used the PDF search feature; it’s abysmal, but it’s what I have available) I put the use of “energy demand” down to sloppy practice. Now I think it’s mischievously deliberate. I think they used “energy demand” in that “20 times” sentence in the executive summary because they knew people would make a headline of it.
I have to say that apart from this headline grabbing glitch, the report is well worth reading. Map 6.1 is particularly interesting (apologies for the pixelly rendering, partly their fault, partly mine, but mostly the fault of STOOPID PDFs):
Basically the British Isles is the only place in Europe (not quite, but nearly so) with cheap on-shore wind. And we’re full of NIMBYs.
The Archimedean screw. A venerable machine for lifting water. You can run it in reverse to generate power. How much?
New Mills, where the Sett meets the Goyt, has a community owned Archimedean screw. From their blog the energy generated for each month is:
September: 11108 kWh
October: 25356 kWh
November: 24232 kWh
December: 29513 kWh
January: 19512 kWh
February: 9185 kWh
March: 20330 kWh
April: 3091 kWh
May: 4436 kWh
June: 1389 kWh
Somewhat arbitrarily, but giving them some benefit of the doubt, I’ll replace September’s figure with October’s (perhaps the low September output was mostly teething troubles), and for the missing July and August figures I’ll use May’s.
So the total is: 25356 + 25356 + 24232 + 29513 + 19512 + 9185 + 20330 + 3091 + 4436 + 1389 + 4436 + 4436 = 171272 kWh per year.
or 19.6 kW. This is considerably lower than the 31 kW quoted by one of their investors.
Nice rule of thumb I discovered whilst writing the post: 1 kWh per year is 0.1 W.
The people who built it give it a plate rating of 63 kW (it’s capacity, or maximum power output). So it’s load factor is a little less than 1/3 at 0.31. They also quote a flow rate of 2860 l/s with a drop of 3m. Neglecting the water’s kinetic contribution (which I’m not sure is reasonable), the water has a power of about 86 kW (2860 litres of water is about 28600 Newtons, dropping 3m every second). So the extractive efficiency is about 73%. Quite impressive. I wonder if it can really be that high? Perhaps at high flow rates the kinetic energy is a more useful contribution.
The seasonal nature of the power is clear from the graph:
(the empty bars are missing data, not zero generation)
Basically, you only get power in winter, when it rains. The rest of the load factor gets eaten away by maintenance (oiling, fishing, that sort of thing), high water flow (!) and HSE requests (which I take to mean noise complaints).
David MacKay, in his book “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” has a cute chapter about hydro. He analyses the total energy of the rain falling on our land and concludes that we can only ever produce about 1.5 kWh per person per day from hydro. After that there’s not much to say, and the chapter is correspondingly short. His figures for actual UK production (page 56) suggest a load factor of 0.29 for large scale hydro, and 0.16 for small scale hydro. So Torrs Hydro is doing atypically well (or I’ve been overly generous in filling the data).
The thing that surprises me is that the Archimedean screw produces a solution that is comparable, in load factor and efficiency, to large scale hydro.
When I was a young man in my first job (implementing garbage collectors for dynamic languages) we developed an informal policy of reviewing a paper a week (a paper, as in learned journal, but anything similar would be okay). It was good, I read a lot of interesting stuff, and as a result of writing something about each one, I think some of it may even have stuck.
Of course it was mostly memory management, hardware architecture, and language implementation in those days. Little has changed. My first review is Lambda: the ultimate GOTO.
Let’s hope making it public keeps me regular.
Friends of the Earth have sent our household a postcard. It says «The meat and dairy industry produces more climate-changing emissions than all the planes, cars and lorries on the planet.» They don’t quote a study, or any other source. Just a bold assertion which, on the face it, seems implausible. Even if you eat a gargantuan 250 g of meat a day (in other words, the typical US diet; Europeans eat about half that), does that really compare to all that driving round? It also seems a little bit mean to exclude trains and ships on the “transport” side. Is the balance between transport and food really so close that those 2 modes make all the difference? In the UK, rail and water account for about 4% of the total transport energy budget, so I would hope that the question isn’t so close that adding them back in tips the scales the other way. For one thing, any reasonable quantification of errors is bound to swamp that.
I think the FoE statement is false, here’s my homework.
David MacKay stacks up the UK’s energy consumption (Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air, Chapter 18, page 103), he has (per person): car 40 kWh/d, plane 30 kWh/d, food 15 kWh/d. So with 70 kWh/d (82 if we add the other transport modes) on the side of transport, and 15 kWh/d on the side of food then it does indeed seem implausible that food chain emissions would be higher. Note that we have all food production on one side, I can’t be bothered separating out meat from the rest, clearly meat forms the bulk of the energy consumption anyway. But wait…
As well as emissions related to the energy required to maintain the animals, they produce carbon-dioxide and methane all by themselves. In other words the food industry has emissions not related to its energy inputs (even if all the energy was produced sustainably, there would still be emissions). Non-energy related emissions show a weakness in David MacKay’s book; he neglects them completely. That’s okay, because his focus is Sustainable Energy, but be aware that it’s not the whole picture. Food, concrete, deforestation all have non-energy emissions. For animals I think we can neglect the CO2 emissions because the carbon originally came from the atmosphere anyway (respiration forms part of a close carbon cycle). Methane however is not negligible.
I reckon 1 kg of lamb produced between 60 g and 180 g of methane when it was walking about in the Peak District. That’s equivalent to about 2.4 kg of CO2. Let’s say I eat 100g of lamb a day. That’s (methane emissions equivalent to) emissions of 240g CO2, or about 1kWh of diesel. That’s roughly 0.1 litres; if you fill up 40 litres (about the size of my small car’s tank) every two weeks then that’s 3 litres a day. How often do you fill up? From a personal perspective, It looks like food-related methane emissions are not even close (to transport emissions).
Okay. So much for the ovine. What about the bovine, porcine, and, er, chickens? Well, I’m no veterinarian so this will take a lot of piecemeal research. Bugger that, lets go to a (competent?) summary: The UK’s Fourth National
Communication under the United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change. In 2004 UK agriculture (note: not just meat and dairy) emitted 13.8 MtC (megatonnes of carbon equivalent); transport emitted 37.4 MtC. Just what are these Friends of the Earth smoking that makes them think they can claim “The meat and dairy industry produces more climate-changing emissions than all the planes, cars and lorries on the planet” when it is so out of line with the UNFCCC GHG inventory. Is the UK really so atypical?
I suspect that what’s really happening is that the FoE are doing some clever accounting. There’s probably a little bit of double accounting (example, counting transport of feed on both sides), and I suspect some land use change. Perhaps they include chopping down ancient forest to grow soya beans for animal feed as an emission on the food change? I just don’t know, because they don’t show their homework. But I have a couple of points to make anyway. The first is that it’s not at all clear that the beef industry is too blame. If there was less demand for beef (and hence soya beans to feed the cows), then I think it’s likely that the same companies would have chopped down the same forest to grow something else. Miscanthus perhaps. The second is that while this land use change will be an emission (the UNFCCC recognises land use and land use change as a carbon source / sink), this emission occurs only once. Once the forest is cleared to grow soya, there will be no land use change emissions. So the emissions from the single land use change should be amortised over all future soya bean seasons. I think.
So FoE, how do you make the sums add up?
Appendix for the pedantic
«250g of meat a day … the typical US diet»
A quote from USDA Agriculture Factbook 2001-2002, Chapter 2, “Profiling Food Consumption in America”, http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.htm :
“In 2000, total meat consumption … reached 195 pounds … per person”. That’s 242 g per person per day (2000 was a leap year).
«rail and water account for about 4% of the total transport energy budget»
Department for Transport, TSGB Chapter 3: http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/energyenvironment/
«1kg of lamb produced between 60g and 180g of methane»:
One 60 kg ewe produces about 20 litres methane a day (see below). Boned and trimmed meat is about 2/3 of the animal’s weight, so 0.5 litres / kg (boned). Lamb is generally defined as less than 12 month’s old or less than 18 month’s old for export. 360 days × 0.5 litres = 180 litres. × (the density of methane gas) 0.717 g/l = 129 g. 60 g to 180 g gives a range around this (to account for younger and older lambs, for one thing).
«one 60 kg ewe produces about 20 litres methane a day»
See Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, Volume 41, page 9A, meeting of 1981-07-17, “Methane production in lambs fed high- and low-roughage diets”. It depends on their diet: about 23 litres for high roughage; about 9 litres for low roughage. Two things: 1) when did you last see sheep being fed lucerne hay? 2) using 20 litres per day favours the FoE case anyway.
«equivalent to about 2.4 kg of CO2»
In terms of greenhouse gas warming potential, per kilo, methane is 20 times more potent than CO2. So 120 g methane equivalent to 2.4 kg CO2.
Returning from EuroPython I got the 1730 from Birmingham New Street to Sheffield. The seat reservations in this class of train appear above each pair of seats on a little illuminated dot matrix display that shows 2 rows of text. Each row displays 16 characters (it was quite tricky to count, but it was close enough to 16 that surely, if there is any god, it must be 16).
Each row displays the seat reservation information for one seat. As a little message that scrolls along. Most of these messages were of the form: “20 This seat is not reserved”. This message is 28 characters long. Which means it needs to scroll to fit on the display. Some genius decided to pad the scrolling message with 16 blanks, so that the end of the message scrolls off completely before the message begins again. So, for the display of this message, there are 44 states that a row can be in. Each state corresponds to a position in the 44 character string (each position in the string can be identified with the display state that has that position at the extreme left-hand end of the display).
The seat number is 2 digits long. It is only displayed for 15 of the 44 states. Meaning it is only visible for 34% of the time. It’s actually kind of important to display the seat number. Especially as they made the mistake of putting the larger of the two seat numbers on the top row. The two rows display the reservations for a pair of seats: N (bottom row), and N+1 (top row). Nuts. In fact it’s not necessary to display the seat number on the display itself. Adjacent to the display (on either side) are stickers showing the numbers for the two seats and whether they are window or aisle. It would be a trivial design change for these stickers to point to the appropriate row of the display.
Some of the time the display will show t reserved or eserved or something else that could reasonably be mistaken for reserved. So if you just glance at the display then you have about a 7% of interpreting it as “reserved” (when in fact it’s not reserved).
The shorter the message is, the more likely we are too be able to comprehend it instantaneously without having to wait for it to scroll. So it would be good to get rid of unnecessary text. “This seat is” is totally unnecessary. We’re on a train, we can tell that the little display refers to a seat reservation. So all it needs to say is “20 not reserved”. And that’s only 15 characters long, so it can be displayed permanently, without needing any anti-assistive scrolling.
The case where the seat is not reserved is a bit special, but it’s worth concentrating on, because those are the seats that people will want to find when they are boarding the train. At least, people without reservations. People with reservations don’t need the overhead displays at all because they can just look at their ticket to find the seat number. To recap: The reservation displays are only useful for people without reservations, so they should be organised around making it clear which seats are free.
The remaining cases, where the seat is reserved for some of the remaining journey, should probably be handled with text that is something like “free until chesterfield” or “reserved until york”. Possibly the “free” and “reserved” can be “stuck” at the left-hand side of the display while the remainder of the display scrolls to show the whole message. Dunno. But I bet a day of trying out a dozen ideas would be a vast usability improvement on how it works now.
We gather in the dim space afforded by the overgrowing ash (Fraxinus excelsior) and cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris). The trees provide some shelter from the rain, after all, it is July in the Peak District. The key is brought forth. The old iron gate swings open. We step down into a small stream, and through the gate, passing under a stone reading “DEEP ECTON: DRIVEN 1774″. A tunnel arch leads inward, towards the heart of the hillside.
My wellingtons are in muddy water. The pavement beneath, which I cannot see, is uneven. The daylight fades, but my eyes have not yet adapted to the dim torchlight. Stumbling forwards, reaching out for the walls. Tracing my hand along the wall to steady myself, missing my footing as my hand discovers crumbling gaps in the walls. The dwarves that once worked this place left over 100 years ago; they must have been dwarves, for sure they were smaller folk than me, for I keep banging my helmet on the odd out of place stone in the ceiling. We are in Deep Ecton Mine, once the source of the Peak District’s copper.
After a short while, plaster gives way to (limestone) brick. Little nooks appear, presumably once filled with candles. Then the brick gives way to a rough unlined tunnel through the bedrock. The horizontal tunnel we are walking, stumbling, along would have been called an adit by the dwarves. Its upward slope is imperceptible save for the fact that we are walking through a stream; running downwards and outward to rejoin its brethren waters of the Manifold. My eyes are adapted now, and my foot and inner ear give me mostly steady passage.
We pause at the first “chamber”, a swelling of the rough tunnel. A crawl above a pile of rock debris, “deads” as the dwarves called them, leads to a much older, smaller, adit. Its roof has fallen in, now blocked and unsafe. A narrow shaft leads upwards, presumably once connecting to the surface. The surface, and all evidence of the outside world, seems very distant now.
Passages leading off into the gloom. Stepping over discarded ironwork, occasional rocks (fallen from the roof?), and… tramway sleepers. The adit would once have been busy with minecarts. I see a little metal tag marked with “A6″ (a modern survey tag). One dwarf has mezzotinted his initials, IB, into the wall with his pick. The whole thing reminds me of, well, what else but Colossal Cave (and damnit, why didn’t I think to try saying “PLUGH”?).
The “IB” chamber has a big rectangular hole in the floor. Full of water. We are on the lowest dry level of the mine (the entrance that we used is only a few meters above the River Manifold). Just around the corner we come to the main attraction. A huge vertical cavern, or pipe. Big enough to contain a house and extending upwards in a complex series of natural shafts, platforms, and other connecting chambers. The house would have to float, for the “floor” of the cavern is a gigantic pool filled with crystal clear water. No plant infiltrates, and no animal stirs the mud. A tiny waterfall chirps and trickles its way down into the pool from some higher cavern. Downwards, through the water, we can see that the pipe continues. Occasionally we can see massive wooden props, essentially whole mature oaks trimmed to a rough rectangle, fitted across where they once would’ve supported platforms. The mine continue downward, as does the pipe, for at least another 300m. But the underwater areas remain unexplored since a diver’s death here in the 1960’s.
This pipe is where the copper was. Formed when the bedrock flexed and cracked, allowing copper carrying water to seep in and deposit its lode. Of course the dwarves took all the copper, but we can see occasional spots where copper has remineralised and formed a greenish colouration on the walls (copper carbonate?). All around we can see places where the bedrock has bent into huge curves, cracked, and the cracks filled with worthless calcite (by contrast, the limestone bedrock nearer the entrace has no calcite veining).
This pipe was formed by hacking out valuable copper ores. The next cavern is 10 metres across and big enough to stand in (and in parts up to about 8m high). It was dug out not for copper, for it never contained any, but to house an engine. It is the engine chamber. Housing engines for pumping water out of the depths. Engines powered not by steam, but by horse, and by water. The amount of effort involved is quite incredible: all that worthless rock removed to create this large room, rivers diverted, engines installed, a vertical 300m oak beam (bolted in sections, naturally). All just to remove water so that the lower sections of the mine could be worked for their copper.
Then the tour was over. We had to make our way to the endgame before our batteries ran out and the cave collapsed (just kidding, another text adventure reference). Whilst we had been underground for quite a while, it didn’t take us long to go back along the adit and reach daylight and the smell of fresh air, a smell you really appreciate when you’ve been underground.
Thanks to the staff of the Peak District National Park who used their own time to give us the opportunity to see the mine and benefit from their experience.
On 2009-07-01 I gave a talk at EuroPython called “Python Sucks!”. They made me change the title of the talk, but the first slide sticks, so “Python Sucks!” it is.
It was a bit of a misleading title. As I did actually mention some things that I like about Python.
The slides (updated in blue to add useful things that people said in the talk itself) are available in PDF. I’m not sure the slides are particularly useful without a transcript; it’s not always clear if the point illustrated on the slide is something that I think is a good thing, or a bad thing.
I was a bit overwhelmed with the talk actually. I was thinking that, as I am not as famous as Bruce Eckel or Tony Hoare, about 30 people would turn up; and I think I could probably wrangle about that many people. The Recital Hall holds about 150 people, and it was pretty much full. *gulp*.
The audience included Tony Hoare (Man of Science); when I spotted that I sort of thought “oh no, Tony Hoare is in the house, I’d better behave now”. He usefully (and somewhat embarrassingly on my part) suggested that Occam be added to the cloud of “languages I don’t know enough about”. And it should.
One of the points of the talk was to get the audience talking; I think I did okay at providing a very lively forum for people, not just me, to get their python gripes off their chest. The contributions from members of the audience were well appreciated, and often informative. Certainly I felt that the audience provided a useful contribution, which of course made my job easier.
Later on in his keynote Tony Hoare said something like “from what I’ve seen here today you are doing a good job” [of being scientific engineers, or of steering Python, or something]. I hope he wasn’t referring to me.
Note to self: do not show a slide with “distutils” on it to 150 people. Unless you have nothing to say.
At EuroPython, on 2009-07-01, Tony Hoare gave a very interesting speech on the opposition between science and engineering (video here). In many ways it reprised the themes of Laura Creighton’s keynote from PyCon UK 2007, but from a science perspective rather than a history of science perspective. In the middle of the talk, some wit twittered “Stand back! Sir Tony Hoare is about to do science!”; shame it wasn’t on the big twitter wall.
Tony Hoare is clearly old skool. His slides had the calm and aged patina of the OHP era, and I thought they were all the better for that. If you have a message, then that message can be conveyed without all the flash and shine that PowerPoint tempts you with (although, being a Microsoft man, of course his slides were in PowerPoint). As Andrew Kuchling says: “(good talk, plain slides) > (bad talk, fancy slides)”
I was particularly impressed with this slide from Tony’s talk outlining a few “special interests” of the scientist and engineer respectively:
On the scales on the side of Science we have things like “long-term”, “perfection”, and “originality”. Balancing the scales for Engineering we have “short-term”, “adequacy”, and “best practice”.
What I liked about this slide is that many of the things on the Science side would be seen as defects in an engineer, and many things on the Engineering side would be seen as defects in a scientist. We have all seen scientists attacked for relying on intuition or merely amalgamating best practice. And what engineer has not been barracked (by their manager) for attempting solutions that were too perfectionist or wasting time on long-term goals?
Tony Hoare’s insights are clearly the product of long and hard work. He seems very optimistic about the possibilities of a virtuous feedback between the engineering and scientific sides of computing. Perhaps we have every right to look forward to the day when “Software will be the most reliable component of every product which contains it.” (the last slide from his talk). But right now… it seems a long way off.
