Here’s a fantastic and quite extensive guide (including sound clips and scores) to irregular meter used in video games. I spent a happy 20 minutes listening/reading through this.
I’m not the only person in the world who loves irregular meter. 5/4 excites me. It’s a real shame that unusual time signatures don’t get more use in popular music.
I’m at the point in my PhD where there are various different workshops and symposia to be applied for. Certain large companies want to court final year PhD students at just about the time students are looking for jobs. Even if the companies are laying off employees by the hundreds.
I’ve been caught up in these applications for CV fodder. Perhaps the most interesting is a competition to write a 250 word lay summary of your research.
Whenever I tell somebody that I’m a chemist they always ask what I’m working on. It’s hard to explain. And I think I’m good at explaining. So if you have ever wondered what I do, here it is, as straight-up-plain-English as I can manage it…
Controlling Reacting Molecules to Make New Compounds
We have discovered a way to control the shape of reacting molecules to make a class of compounds that could not be made until now.
We have used new chemistry involving reactive lithium-containing molecules to move groups of atoms across a molecule onto a carbon atom next to sulfur. This kind of reaction is called a rearrangement. Once we have carried out the rearrangement we can do a second very simple reaction to form a thiol, a biologically important class of compound.
This reaction can be done very efficiently, but the trick comes in controlling the shape of the final product.
Many molecules in nature can exist in two shapes called enantiomers. These shapes are mirror images, just like your hands, but they can possess very different biological properties. For example, one ‘hand’ of a drug might be useful for treating a disease while the other ‘hand’ might be inactive or even toxic. Because of this, a vast amount of modern research is focused on controlling enantiomers in chemical reactions.
In our reaction, rearrangement can occur at two sides of a lithium-bonded carbon atom. By using a relatively large additive that surrounds the lithium atom we can ‘block off’ one side of the reacting molecule. This forces the migrating group to react on one side exclusively, forming only one of the two possible enantiomers.
Using this method we are able to make single enantiomers of large thiols very effectively.
I’ve just stumled across this little page. http://go.infinise.com/
I think this is my ideal homepage.
For some people who are neurotically organised about Christmas 2012. Here are some ideas of things I would like. If you would like to get something from this list, add a comment at the bottom (anonymously might be a good idea) and I’ll take it off the list. I will keep adding to this, if you don’t see something you want to get me, check back later (or hassle me to add more stuff).
XKCD Volume 0
Comic strip collection
Price: $18.00 - whatever that is in £ these days
Enemy of Chaos
Novel
Price: £4.79
Makers
Novel
Price: £10.49
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip - Angles
CD
Price: £7.99
Sombrio Forensic Long Finger Glove
Cycling gloves
Price: £23.40
The Periodic Table - Its story and its significance
A geek book
Price: £18.99
8 GB Micro SD card
For my phone, I don’t mind the make but it needs to be 8 GB.
Price: ~£15
Seagate 1 TB external hard drive
Wishful thinking, perhaps. Money towards it would be good.
Price: £62
Creations of Fire - Cathy Cobb and Harold Goldwhite
An interesting-looking geek book
Price: £13.59
Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball - Trevor H. Levere
More geek bookage
Price: £12.15
It’s got to be here,
It’s got to be there,
It’s got to be now
Space dementia in your eyes
Peace will arise
and tear us apart
And make us meaningless again
Bury it
I won’t let you bury it
I won’t let you smother it
I won’t let you murder it
Follow through
Make Your dreams come true
Don’t give up the fight
You will be allright
They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
Dark shines
Bringing me down
Making my heart feel sore
‘Cause it’s good
Everything about you pains my envying
Your soul can’t hate anything
Everything about you is so easy to love
They’re watching you from above
Matt Bellamy, great lyricist or Greatest Lyricist?
Spent the weekend at Greenbelt. Had a cracking time. One particular highlight for me was the performance of Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip. I’ve been listening to their album ‘Angles’ all day, and, as strange as it sounds, I feel like I’m a better person for it. It’s an inspiring record.
One of my favourite tracks:
Ok, so I’m trying out Soundcloud. I might be able to stream music in blog posts. One. Two. Two. This is a test. Two.
John Scalzi’s Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design
Death Star
An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can’t get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.
I was reading halting state on the bus this morning and then I come across this video.
Pattie Maes demos the sixth sense
Amazing stuff. In Halting State (near future SF) people wear glasses with cameras in the frames and projectors projecting onto the lenses of the glasses giving the wearer augmented reality overlays on the real world. It’s a small step to take the technology in this video, put the camera in a pair of glasses and project onto lenses in some way. The potential for this technology is incredible.