Binary Chop

I love books and have a house full of them, so many that I’ve never read any of them more than once, there are just so many I haven’t had time to read yet. However, there are a few that get used more than once – my reference books.

We once almost spent an absolute fortune on a copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica but as we’d only just bought a house we couldn’t afford it. In the end we bought a ten volume encyclopaedia from a second hand bookshop.

A large proportion of an encyclopaedia is out of date the moment you buy it but this one was already many years out of date when we bought it. But how out of date?

It doesn’t contain a publication date. I’ve looked at the start of the first volume and the back of the last volume, but it doesn’t seem to say anything other than who edited it, who published it and who printed it.

I stuck a Post-it note in the front when I bought it in 1992 so I know it’s older than that, it’s clearly not from the previous century so I have a starting window of 1900-1992.

As a child did you ever play that game where one person picks a number between 1 and 100 and the other person tries to guess it with the only clues being higher or lower? If you’ve ever studied computer algorithms or thought a little about the game you will know there is a trick to guessing with a guaranteed maximum number of attempts – it’s called a Binary Chop.

Your first guess should be the middle number 1946 in my case. If the value is higher then you pick the middle number from what is left 1969. If you follow this process you will get to the answer in no more than log₂ n attempts. In our case 6.5 (or 7) attempts (between 2⁶ = 64 and 2⁷ = 128).

So what happened in 1946 that I can look for? WWII comes to mind and as the end papers of the encyclopaedia say Second Great War Edition I sort of know already that it will be in there. So my next guess needs to be the late 60’s.

Having read Stephen King’s book 11.22.63 I know that JFK was assassinated in 1963 but that’s a bit early. What about the moon landings? I know they were in my lifetime so that must be the late 60’s.

No mention of them so next guess is 1957. I’m struggling to think of anything now and need the help of an online encyclopaedia. Churchill resigned from office in 1955. No mention of that either.

George Orwell died in 1950 but he’s still alive and writing critical essays in my encyclopaedia.

Gandhi died in 1948, but that’s not mentioned, it does say that he moved to Bengal in Pakistan in August 1947.

As we know it would take time to prepare the encyclopaedia for publication we know it must have been a little while after August 1947 but not too long after January 1948 otherwise they surely would have included Gandhi’s death on 30^th January.

So I’m going to say it was published early in 1948. 

Kissing Gate Couple

A few months ago we went to my mother’s for a long weekend and she said we were welcome as long as we entertained ourselves on Sunday because they were going walking with the Ramblers. As keen walkers my wife and I asked if we could tag along.

We parked on a country lane and joined a group of about 50 walkers to wait for the leader. Spot on time somebody donned a high-vis jacket, blew a whistle and told us how far we were going, what the terrain was like and who the back marker was – another chap in a high-vis jacket.             

We were made very welcome and it was good to meet all the people my mum talks about on our weekly phone call. The ex-couple who turn up in two cars and walk at either end of the group, the divorcees who have found new partners in the group and talk about whose house they are staying at this week, the hard core ramblers with all the kit, the leisure ramblers in, god forgive, denim jeans, those who talk incessantly and don’t listen, those who can’t be drawn to comment on anything and the retired bank manager whose biggest decision each year is whether to buy a white or silver Mercedes – he opted for silver this year. Made me think he was a bit common, but he can’t be because my mum wouldn’t associate with him if he were.

We resisted saying ‘oh. So you’re…’ but nothing stopped them from saying ‘oh. We’ve heard so much about you.’ What on earth has my mum been telling them?

The eight mile walk took about four hours, including a stop for a packed lunch, three toilet breaks and a drama at a kissing gate.

For the toilet breaks the men were sent ahead into the next field and then my wife tells me the ladies dropped their trouser where they stood and relieved themselves. We wondered if it was a seasoned rambler activity. Only my wife and mother held it in.

The drama at the kissing gate was caused by the height of the fence. The first person to go through got stuck in the middle with his rucksack jammed between the outer fence and his back, as he was pressed up against the gate. That should have been an indication to everybody else to take their rucksack off, but oh no, each person in turn thought they were thinner or had a better technique and got just as stuck. And then they had to wait for me and my wife to kiss as we went through – a family tradition that we keep alive.

When we got home the following week we thought we could join our local Ramblers and we’ve been out with the Epsom & Ewell group every Sunday since.

As with my mum’s group we have been made to feel very welcome and we’ve soon come to recognise who is who in our group. One lady told us last week that ramblers tell you all sorts of personal things while out walking. She believes it is because there is no eye contact as you walk side by side. She’s probably right.

We have identified a few differences though. Our leader doesn’t wear a high-vis jacket (‘not proper ramblers then’ my mother said), we don’t stop for lunch and thankfully we don’t have to stop for the loo every hour – there hasn’t been a single loo stop in six weeks.

A fortnight ago my mum and dad went to their groups AGM and were surprised to discover that they have 190 members. When we went to our AGM this week and discovered our group has 409 members I couldn’t wait to ring my mum and tell her.

The AGM was interesting, we met at 10:30 for tea and coffee, went to the loo before walking at 11:00, had a lovely sit down lunch at 1:00 and then proceeded with the AGM at 2:00.

It was good to hear about the walks during the week that we miss because we have to work and the other non-walking activities that go on, such as installing a new kissing gate, a pub quiz night and a barn dance.

The only thing we had to worry about was volunteering for something when the non-committee roles were agreed. My wife expected me to put my hand up for record keeper. Nobody volunteered so there was an open invitation to talk to the incumbent about taking over at any time in the future. I like playing with data so maybe I’ll volunteer once we get to know a few more people. In the mean time I’ve included some infographics from this year’s figures presented at the AGM.

My wife and I continue to stop and kiss at every kissing gate hence the title above.

November 2016

The Race of Truth

I’ve written four books – three novels and an autobiography – and the only thing I’ve gotten out of it is bragging rights. When I started I had this wild idea that I would sell loads and make a bit of money. My wife even thought we would be able to retire early. But in practice I’ve been far too lazy when it comes to attempting to sell any of them.

I get asked quite a few questions when I tell people I’ve written these books and unfortunately the most common isn’t where can I buy one. The most common question other than where do I get my ideas from is how long did it take. That’s what this blog is about.

I’m not sure why but I recorded every writing session’s date and duration, which chapter I was writing and how many words I wrote. I only started after writing 8 chapters so I’ve interpolated the dates, etc. for those.

I wrote for 40 sessions over a 93 day period (just over three months) for a total of 79 hours. I produced 63546 words. About 1588 words per session, 804 words per hour or 13 words per minute.

I have nothing to compare that to so I’ve no idea if that’s quick or slow. Doesn’t really matter it was a comfortable pace while I was doing it.

Most of my writing sessions were on a Saturday and Sunday morning which is what I recall but there were also five sessions during the week and the last 11 chapters were all written on weekdays in a two week rush.

18 months after finishing the novel and having written two others – a sequel and a completely unrelated book, I sent The Race of Truth to a publisher in January 2009.

A month later I received a rejection letter telling me that it was too short. It needed to be 80,000 words or more and my 65,000 just didn’t cut it.  So I sent it to an agency in February and they sent a rejection letter one month later with no explanation.

I lost interest then until August 2009 when I self-published on Lulu. I’ve sold 12 copies between September 2009 and November 2014 for a royalty of 12 dollars which I haven’t collected.

I suppose I should finish by trying to convince you to buy it. The cheapest way to buy a paper copy is from Amazon for £6.29. Although a cheaper alternative is to buy from Apple iBooks where it costs £2.99.

The book is about amateur time trialling which I did for a few years in my 30s until I was knocked off in a road race and hurt my knee. I could have started again six months later but never did, it’s been nearly ten years now.

The blurb on the back of the book says: Amateur cyclist Michael Baxter has been trying to beat the hour in a 25 mile time trial for more years than he can remember. His personal best stands at 1:01:01, all he needs is 62 seconds to be under the hour, but however much he tries he can’t manage it, until one day when an opportunity presents itself which allows him to break the hour and sets him off on a journey that he wishes he had never started.

If you are wondering I never beat the hour mark, the best I ever got was 1:04:13. Although I did average higher than 25 mph in a 10 mile time trial once with a time of 23:56.

My daughter’s friend wants to be a publisher so maybe there’s a chance there – if she likes cycling.

Map Making

I’ve always loved maps and always wished I could draw my own. But they’ve never come out as I would like. Eventually I cheated by buying a plastic stencil of Great Britain and another one of Europe. I still have all my technical drawing stencils but I have no idea what happened to these ones.

My most successful maps were the ones that didn’t have to look like anything recognisable, particularly the ones I drew of the locations in text adventure games such as Zork or Planetfall (right).

Despite having drawn these maps over 30 years ago I still have them all (22 of them) along with the odd transcript of key pieces of text.

If you’ve never played a text adventure then you might not know that they describe a location “you are in a mysterious wood”, some objects “there is a rusty dagger here” and tell you where you can go “there is a path heading north and south. There is a spooky cabin to the east.”

You interact with the game by typing commands “take dagger”, “go east”, “kill ogre with dagger”, etc. The trick to success often relies on getting back to a place that you have been to before to pick up a crucial item that you left behind. Hence, the need for a map.

If the game mainly uses the four (or eight) compass points to move between locations it’s relatively easy to make a map but as soon as you come across “up” and “down” things get tricky. You can’t draw the “up” location above the current location if there is a “north” and worse what if there is no “north” so you draw the “up” location there only to discover the new location has a “south” where the previous location is already drawn on your map.

Where to draw the first location on the page is also tricky. I always started in the middle of the page but if you were on the west side of the world then you might run out of space on the right and end up with a huge blank space on the left. I have a few maps made on two pieces of paper stuck together with yellow perished sellotape.

Years later in the late noughties I went back to drawing geographic maps when I discovered OpenStreeMap. This is a service like Google Maps but where the maps have been created by volunteers. The map was very sparse in the early days which left lots of scope for me to add to it.

I attached my GPS to my bicycle handlebars, put my camera around my neck and cycled around all the residential streets in Epsom. Back at home later I uploaded my tracks and used the photos to annotate the map with street names – you can’t copy them from commercial maps because they create intentional spelling mistakes to identify copyright infringements.

When I approached 40 my wife suggested we went on a significant holiday and the first place that came to mind was Machu Picchu. When she asked if I was serious I said no, but after a lot of thinking I couldn’t come up with anywhere else so that’s where we went.

Why am I telling you this in an article about map making? Well it turned out that nowhere in Peru existed on OpenStreetMap so I took my GPS with me. When we went on the train from Cusco to Machu Picchu I propped it in the window and recorded the train line all the way there. When I uploaded it after the holiday it was the only thing to exist apart from the waterways which had been donated by a mapping company to seed the project. Today there is a complete map of Cusco and the train line has probably been improved by others, removing my authorship from the notes – but I know I was there first, not quite like Hiram Bingham but you know what I mean.

Staycation

I’ve just finished reading Mail Obsession by Mark Mason where he describes a trip around the country to visit all 124 post code areas in the UK and I thought it would be interesting to mark off on a map all the post code areas that I’ve spent the night, a bit like those scratch off world maps you can get.

 Turns out I’ve lived in three (bright green) and stayed at least one night in 46 others (orange). That leaves 78 (pale green) where I haven’t slept but I’ve probably visited most of them on the mainland except for the very north of Scotland.

Three places doesn’t sound like a lot of places to have lived in nearly fifty years, especially compared to a modern family who are more inclined to move for education and work. In actual fact I’ve lived in five places – two in CF, two in KT and BD where I grew up.

Mark provides an interesting fact for each post code area he visits but I’m not sure I can provide the same levity of choices for the ones I’ve lived in – they are more nostalgic than humorous.  

Bradford (BD) was the home to England’s first IMAX cinema screen in 1983 when the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television opened (now the National Media Museum). All I ever remember seeing were Discovery style information films, nothing like the spectacular Batman film The Dark Knight.

Pontypridd (CF) where I went to Polytechnic used to have the world’s longest island platform railway station. A bit excessive for today’s short trains.  We once travelled on the train to Cardiff on Five Nations day when Wales were playing France with some North Wales friends of ours who had the annoying habit of talking to each other in Welsh. Half way there some local South Wales passengers got on and one of them asked me if our friends were French!

After graduating I followed the work and ended up living in the South East. Hampton Wick (KT) was the first place we lived. This was the home of George & Mildred from the TV sitcom of the same name. It was a real surprise to discover that the place they lived was not fictional as I’d always assumed. And even more of a surprise that a few miles away in the same post code area was Surbiton where the Good family lived in The Good Life, another favourite sitcom of my teenage years. I was sure that was a fictional place in London’s suburbia.

We also discovered that the list of railway stations where Reggie is delayed on his way to work in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin are real and pass through the KT post code area – Norbiton, Berrylands and Chessington North.

I don’t think we are likely to live in any more post code areas but there’s plenty of scope to stay the night in others, however, our next staycation is in Alnwick which is in the already slept in Newcastle (NE) post code area.

Frank Gelder's D-Day

When I was a kid there was always talk of a box of stuff in my Nan and Granddad’s loft with something in it that explained why my Granddad was estranged from his siblings. When he died I got the task of climbing into his loft to clear it out. I’d forgotten about the fabled box but as soon as I saw it the memory came flooding back.

It contained life insurance policies for his brother and sister which must have been the cause of the falling out, but the most interesting thing was a pocket diary for 1944.

It was the sort with a week to a double page with a weekly notes section to fill the 8^th space. He’d filled it in from 1^st January until the 21^st October with the exception of May. There’s no indication of why he skipped May or stopped writing in October. There’s one additional entry post October on 3^rd December but it only says ‘Rain’.

The pages from 8^th to the 21^st of June have been torn out. We have no idea if he removed them because he didn’t want anybody to see what he’d written about the D-Day landings of whether the government had censored the diary by removing them – not sure who suggested that but it sounds like it could be true.

At the beginning of the year he is on training manoeuvres which he calls ‘stunts’ in Thetford, then Lowestoft, Inverary and finally Bournemouth before heading to Southampton and the crossing to France on D-Day.

The most striking thing about the training time is how often he goes to the ‘pictures’ (the cinema) and how excited he gets about visits from/to my Nan – he mentions how much he loves her on many pages. ‘I love my wife very much,’ he says on the day he goes back to camp after a two day visit home to Bradford.

On 6^th June he says the following: ‘D DAY Invasion started. One of the last to land. Sergeant ??? shot in the head. It was hell.’ I haven’t been able to decipher the name of the Sergeant who was less fortunate than my Granddad – he was shot in the head on 5^th July ‘Two more prisoners. Shelled again. Plenty of strafing. Hit one on helmet, souvenir.’ I find it really hard to comprehend him calmly describing this terrifying incident as a ‘souvenir.’

He advanced across France, through Belgium and was in Holland when he stopped making entries.

On 2^nd September they passed the WWI battle fields and memorials, ‘Off again. Passed through Amiens. Quite a lot of bomb damage here. We are now on battle areas of last war. Saw the Vimy memorial.’ I’ve been to the Vimy memorial and it’s a very emotional place, can’t imagine what it would have been like seeing it in my Granddad’s circumstances.

Amongst the harrowing entries: ‘Dead cows all over. Stinks of death. Rained a lot. Fed up,’ ‘Lost some of my best pals while we've been here,’ ‘Felt rotten after Abie was killed. One of the best lads I've known,’ there are some more uplifting entries: ‘Went to rest camp. Marvellous night’s sleep,’ ‘Went to pictures, had a lovely bath. Quiet,’ ‘Jerry withdrawn fast at last. We've got him moving,’ ‘Breakthrough jerry going back,’ ‘Getting ready for moving again. It's good to know that we are winning,’ ‘People here very happy to see us. Filled our trucks high with fruit, tomatoes, lemonade and beer.’ That was in Brussels on 5^th September, my Granddad would have had the lemonade not the beer.

There’s also this strange entry: ‘Saw some women collaborators have hair shaved by FF.’

If my Grandchildren find this in a box in the loft when I die I would like them to know that I too love my wife very much. 

Student spend

When I went to polytechnic (I usually say university because it’s easier to say but although it is a university now technically I went to polytechnic – the reason why is another story) I kept a diary for the first 10 weeks which was almost the whole term. I wrote in it every night before turning the light out and recorded the time of the entry, therefore the time I went to bed.

Bearing in mind that I’m in bed before 10pm almost every night now-a-days I was surprised to see how late I used to go to bed. I thought late nights was something the modern generation did thanks to late night opening (the pubs had to close by 11pm when I was a student) but apparently not.

I also recorded everything I spent every day and that showed something I would also associate with modern day students but if I’m honest I knew was just as relevant to me too – the amount of money spent on alcohol.

If I remove my rent from the chart then it’s almost 25% food and 25% alcohol.

I would say the reason for it was that I didn’t have anything else to do, my course work was trivial and there were only four channels to watch on TV (and as I never watched ITV that cut it down to three) but my friends had lots of course work to do (they were always in the library, somewhere I never went) and I’m pretty sure I didn’t go to the pub on my own, so maybe it was just the thing to do.

 I always tell people that I didn’t start reading fiction until I went to university (sorry polytechnic) but I didn’t buy a single book in my first term, the £28.64 of reading material was mainly newspapers (the American football paper First Down) and one book off my course’s reading list (the only one I bought in five years).

The other thing I tell people is that it only rained twice in Wales, once from January to June and once from June to December. As I recorded the weather every day in my diary I can see that I wasn’t exaggerating too much, it rained on 35 out of 73 days which is 45% of the time.

What things cost in 1986 (very nearly 30 years ago) is also interesting:

Lager                        82p

Can of pop                25p

Loaf of bread            38p

Corned beef              87p

Toilet roll                 52p

Swimming                75p

Take-away burger    68p

Pie and chips            89p

Chinese take-away £2.25

I’ve kept a diary on other occasions over the years but I haven’t recorded any statistics in any of them – shame I would like to have compared. I can say though that I’ve never spent as much on alcohol since!

Science Geek

I like to think of myself as a prolific reader but I’m not sure what metric to judge myself against. I’ve kept a record of every book I’ve read since I started reading at university – there wasn’t a lot else to do – that was 30 years ago. I’m currently up to 674 which is 22 per year. For the last few years I’ve also been recording my reading on Goodreads.com and it shows that I’ve read an average of 39 per year in that time.

I read fiction at home and non-fiction on the train to work. Most of the non-fiction books are about science and maths and when I get to work I bore my colleagues with the wonderful things I’ve learnt.

I like science books with good long chapters that describe the topics in detail – I don’t like those books with short snippets of information detailing why penguin’s feet don’t freeze and why elephants can’t jump.

I’ve read so many that it’s getting hard to find books with topics that I haven’t read about already. I’ve just finished reading Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker and it was a mix of things I’ve come across before such as the proof of why there is an infinite supply of prime numbers, where to find non-Euclidean geometry and details of a 4D object that can exist in our 3D world.

But it contained quite a lot of stuff that I haven’t read about before such as knot theory, the sausage conjecture and how to make a computer out of dominoes.

The latter must be interesting because instead of the usual tolerating nods from my colleagues at work I got a ‘that’s cool’ response. I agree it is cool too, but not very practical because it took Matt and his team over six hours to construct a computer to add a pair of three digit binary numbers together and worse still it could only be used once. If it didn’t take that long to construct it would be a great tool for teaching kids how computers work, but as it is it’s nothing more than a curiosity.

If you look up the sausage conjecture you will see that it refers to arranging multi-dimensional spheres or hyperspheres into a shape that can be wrapped using a minimum amount of paper. However, for those of us who can’t visualise more than three dimensions, this problem can be considered in three dimensions as how to arrange oranges for wrapping.

It turns out that lining the oranges up in a line (a sausage shape) is the best arrangement for 56 or less oranges and a cluster (or haggis) is better for 57 or more. I haven’t been able to find anything that tells me why the transition should happen at 57. I think I could do the maths for the surface area of the sausage but not sure how to work out the surface area of the non-sausage shape. It must have something to do with Pi I guess.

If you are wondering about the other things I’ve mentioned (you’re probably not) I will elaborate:

A non-Euclidean geometry is one that doesn’t comply with Euclid’s five postulates (rules) and the easiest one to visualise is the one that removes the fifth postulate – the parallel postulate. Consider the lines of longitude on a globe, at the equator the lines look like they are parallel but when you extend them north or south they meet and are therefore not parallel. These geometries defy everything we learn at school, if you draw a line between too points on a globe the shortest distance is not a straight line (it’s a curve) and if you draw a triangle the inner angles do not add up to 180 (it will be larger).

The 4D object is a Klein bottle. It is a bottle that only has one surface i.e. it doesn’t have an inside and an outside. It can only truly exist in 4D but if you cheat and allow the surface to intersect itself you can construct one in our three dimensions.

I love the proof that there is an infinite supply of prime number because it is so simple – if you can accept that all numbers can be constructed by multiplying prime numbers together e.g. 8 = 2 x 2 x 2, 75 = 3 x 5 x 5 that is.

Let’s assume that there are only 3 prime numbers in the world – 2, 3 and 5. If we multiply these together (2 x 3 x 5 = 30) and then add 1 we know that we can’t now construct that number from the known primes because it doesn’t divide by any of them (the +1 ensures that). Therefore, there must be another prime. A proof like this is called “reductio ad absurdum” i.e. prove that something is not correct to show that the converse must be correct.

I’m not sure what I learnt about knot theory other than it’s difficult to comprehend and that we are all tying our shoelaces inefficiently. Matt describes a way of constructing a pair of loops, passing them under each other and pulling to create the same knot as usual without going around the tree.