Let's all laugh at Franchise, The Team Formerly Known As Wimbledon. "Officially, the attendance was 25,151 fewer than it was the last time I had been. At 849, it was the smallest ever crowd recorded in English football's second tier. And that 849 included season ticket holders who hadn't turned up, 211 Rotherham supporters, roughly 200 complimentary tickets given to players' friends and relatives, and the members of Wimbledon's junior teams, who mostly spent the match watching a Champions League game on the television in the bar. Plus a larger than average press contingent, who were there, overwhelmingly, to mock. Which does not leave a lot of paying Wimbledon supporters. In fact, there was so little public interest, the catering manager at Selhurst Park had ordered only 12 pies." - Jim White, Sport Graunaid.

Increasing Entropy

Walk on.

Through the snow.
Hear the soft groan underfoot,
like a door closing,
ending one state of being
and introducing another.

The snow is no longer virginal.
It's trampled.
The air is knocked out,
and it will not return.

Nature will perform this act
in her own time;
walking on the snow
has removed its purity.

Walk on.

To the sheet that was ice,
and is now almost melted.
Tread on the edge,
turning the frozen sheet to liquid
and diminishing it.

Nature will perform this act
in her own time;
walking on the ice
has hastened its demise.

Walk on.

To the frozen slush.
First snow
then melt
then freeze again.

Step on the melt.
Hear it crunch
as a gazillion tiny ice crystals
snap
and reform as a gazillion tiny ice particles
on the ground.

Nature will perform this act
in her own time;
walking on the ice
has hastened its demise.

All around, a stable state,
snow and ice on the ground.
Transforms to
melting snow and ice.

Pisspoor American Drama Of The Day, Today: ER 901. Dr Corday gets on a train. It's clearly a GNER train, we can tell that by the distinctive and fully funky livery, so our good Doc must be at Kings Cross. "Is this OK for Heathrow?" asks the medic. "Yes," says the attendant, who must clearly be Mr Bugs Bunny in disguise.

The route from King's X to Heathrow would be via the Strawberry Hill freight spur, emerging about 1.5 miles up the WCML near Chalk Farm, then up the line from Euston to Willsden Junction (nowhere near Albuquerque), turn sharp left to head back down the Western Spur to join the Great Western line somewhere around Greenford. Then follow this line to Heathrow. Total journey length: about 35 miles. Total journey time: somewhere around 75 minutes, as the various spurs are very slow lines.

Alternatively... go directly Down to the Picadilly line underground, and take first train to Heathrow. This journey is exactly 28.87 km and (at that time of the morning) will take slightly over an hour.

From A Demi Grauniad, the paracomedy wing of the newspreap: "Viewers tuned in to watch the aftermath of the last series' cliffhanger ending, when Rachel had a baby and accepted Joey's marriage proposal - by mistake." The GistOMatic, a device for reducing sentences to their essentials, chops that to "Viewers tuned in by mistake." And apparently, "The new series of Buffy began." No it didn't. That's not till next week.

Further to Tuesday's article, Chris reports that LiveJournal has a Jolly Clever Feature that will score one's interests by rarity, then find the closest match. The logic is that someone with a very rare shared interest (say, The Flightpath Of The Kampuchean Moth) is somewhat more likely to have similar interests to yourself than someone else who is interested in Eating Food. These correlations are performed on each listed interest (shared interests are stored as index numbers, referenced in a Big Lookup Table) and are then summed. The results come back as a Top X list of other users - that design must further reduce the workload, as it enables quick lower boundary conditions to be set and a lot of combinations thrown out as irrelevant to the Top X. Also a good use of Third Normal database design, storing the interests as one huge index file.

But I digress. LJ's system is clearly optimised for calculating the closest matches to one's most obscure interests, and is clearly a very good metric for that. My proposed Dissonance Number calculates the distance between a set of interests, and in this early implementation does not take any notice of how common or rare the interests are. DN can be roughly estimated in one's head, and calculated precisely with a simple calculator. Magic Numbers require the entire LJ database for computation - perhaps that's why they're only available to paid members. Different metrics for different functions.

Those annoyances at Dime Aniagaurd have been rubbishing BBC4 this week, claiming that the fledgling channel didn't attract enough viewers; they've also been carrying reports critising the BBC for chasing ratings... Anywhoo, this doesn't hurt the first episode of Eastaway and Bodycombe's Mind Games on BBC4. Simon Singh hosts a madcap half hour, mostly intellectual puzzles, a few involving props, and the occasional anagram. The puzzles seemed a little on the easy side for the first episode, though perhaps that was the guest appearance of some conundra that were old when Richard Whiteley really was twice nightly, and quite possibly a deliberate ploy on behalf of the compilers. The aim seemed to be to cram in the puzzles, without quite explaining the answer. Useful mathematical ideas - like everything being encoded in the letters in pi - just dropped in from left field, and people who didn't understand the concept of transcendental numbers before the show wouldn't have gained much. However, let's not detract from an enjoyable and fun half hour, and one that once again justifies the establishment of BBC4. As they'd say at Denim a'Gaurdia, "Vegy Rodo."

Earrings.

The Washington Post notes a new drink offered by the Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe in DC: The "Trent Lotte." The $3.25 item (ECU 3.12) consists of "separate but equal parts of coffee and milk." Customers are encouraged to mix them together.

Repeat of Iranian Embassy last night, the BBC's dramadoc on the siege at that London institution in 1980. Missed the original in September, it was opposite Celeb Survivor. Caught the repeat, but couldn't help feeling that it was glorifying the role of the army in general, and the SAS in particular. And will they be doing something on a similar scale to mark the 20th anniversary of the Lybian Embassy siege in April next year? Somehow, I doubt it. That just ended quietly. No satisfying big bang.

So to tonight's telly, and BUFFY features Willow and Amy and Tara and Dawn and everyone has either a very low-cut top or is drinking a lot of milkshake. Would be far more entertaining if they didn't have that blonde bloke doing a rubbish English accent.

FRIENDS is back for season 9, and it's TOW People Don't Propose, a comedy subplot involving Monica and her father. And TOW Chandler Falls Asleep, but any plot involving yowling babies will lose a lot of marks from here.

Gee whizz, you've gotta love these meta-posts. Decision of slight arbitrariness and not insignificant method: weeks will now run Sunday-to-Saturday, allowing me to pop a link to each individual entry and compose a quick and dirty highlights roster for the weekly summary page. It'll become clear next week, and best results will be on a Gecko-engined browser or other supporting the Navbar. (If you're using IE, you don't know what you miss.)

Laura muses on the decorations and personal items one has at work. My workspace is nothing more and nothing less than a desk. Think of a table in the middle of the room, and that's it. No soundproofing, no wall, not even a pillar to put a phone extension list.

Amongst the clutter on my desk is a small purple stressball, to squeeze when callers are being especially thick. There's a small radio, which I brought in for the quiet period over Crimble and haven't taken home, and whatever woolies and warmers I need for outside - it's the full monty today: thick gloves, woollen hat *and* scarf.

Why do I have so little to personalise the area? It's simple practicalities: without so much as a wall to call my own, and a desk that is too small for my needs, there isn't the space for me to do my work, never mind for me to be me.

Discussion of the Southall crash on BBC2 last night. Though there's a CGI reconstruction of the event, and an annoying reliance on talking heads more than the actual physics and design failings, this wasn't at all bad. Well researched, decently informative if one can cut through the dramatic cliches, and not at all hysterical.

Two glaring omissions: no mention of how to stop trains from passing through red signals, and no mention of a broadly similar crash at Ladbroke Grove two years later. The latter, I think, is still sub judice; the former may also be covered. One incredibly anal quibble: someone is seen buying a copy of Het Grauniad with a masthead that wasn't introduced until 1999.

And one very good hook into next week's show, where someone suggests they feel safer taking control of their transport, when driving...

One of the fun and funky things about livejournal is the way everyone has long and exhaustive lists of interests. Maybe we can make some sort of Closeness Relationship, based on how many matching interests there are between two people. If two people have the exact same list of interests, then they're going to be very close. If two people have completely different lists of interests, they'll be wildly different people.

My thought is to work out a Dissonance Number, the number of unmatched entries in each list. Perhaps [Person A's interests] * [Person B's interests] / [Shared interests + 1]

So, if person A has 150 interests, person B 55, and they have nothing in common, their Dissonance Number is (150*55)/(0+1) = 8250

If person B adds one interest from person A's list, their DN slips to (150*56)/(1+1) = 4200.

Now take C, with 10 interests, and D, with 90. C's interests are all on D's list, so their DN is (10*90)/(10+1) = 81.

C's list is also a subset of A's, so their DN is (10*150)/(10+1) = 136. This is slightly higher, as A has more unmatched interests.

A and D share 22 interests, giving a DN of (150*90)/(22+1) = 587.

Hmm. These are quite large numbers, and not particularly user-friendly. Let's try taking the natural log of everything, and computing to three DP. The figures then become:

A-B: 9.018
A-B': 8.343 (adding one common interest)
C-D: 4.404
C-A: 4.915 (A has slightly larger list)
C-B: 6.310 (nothing in common)
A-D: 6.374

What's the internal dissonance of a list of length N? It's ln (N^2/(N+1)), so slightly less than ln (N). A list of length 150 will have internal dissonance of almost exactly 5, while one of 10 has internal dissonance of only 2. This means longer but well-matched lists will tend to have larger values on this metric than smaller but distinct lists. There's no way C and B - with no intersection - are a closer match than A and D, where almost a quarter of D's list is shared.

To get the dissonance tending towards zero as the lists tend towards equality, let's try deducting ln (min(A,B)) from the computed value. For our examples, this then gives:

A-B: 5.011
A-B': 4.317
C-D: 2.102
C-A: 2.613
C-B: 4.007
A-D: 1.875

This is a bit more like it. 22 matches on lists of 90 and 150 is less dissonant than a subset of 10 from 90? Perhaps, perhaps not; this metric is fairly easy to explain. Bearing in mind that ln (20) is roughly 3, ln (50) a little less than than 4, ln (150) almost 5, one can just about do the maths in one's head.

So, let the Dissonance Number of two lists A and B, with common interests C be defined as:

ln (A * B / (C + 1)) - ln (min (A,B))

Now, this feels like a result that could be used in more general set theory, where A and B are sets with a given cardinality, and C is the intersection of those sets. Given that the lists are unranked, Spearman's and Kendall's various Rank methods may not apply; because the lists are potentially infinite, I can't see how vector spaces would be particularly useful. Any readers with a better knowledge of statistics than myself are welcome to contact at this address: (..more

Following the New Year slaying of two teenage girls in Birmingham, Home Secretary David Blunkett is now considering tougher gun laws. The Minister for Culture, Kim Howells, has said those recent murders were "symptomatic" of UK rap and garage music developments.

Don't feed the trolls

These publicity-seeking maniacs are completely out of touch with the society they're ruining. All they're after is attention, and we shouldn't give them the oxygen of publicity they so desperately crave. We can live without the hate-filled "manifesto" of these self-proclaimed "voices of the man in the street." It's the only way they know.

Pay no attention to these "politicians."

Twelve of each. Are these meant to be trivial?