Thursday 26 April 2007

Kingdom of Summer

I've started to read Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle series again. This is a series set against a backdrop of Roman Britian and Celtic legend. To my way of thinking it's like "...what would it be like if King Arthur was a Christian...". It's a gripping read.

The first book, Taliesin touched my heart. There are passages that I read that makes me feel brighter, stronger, more noble, and gives me hope that walking this path in life really is worth it all in the end. Taliesin's vision of a future kingdom of peace sounds like a vision of heaven to me. The following quote is from book 2, where Charis is speaking the vision once again to their son Merlin:

There is a land shining with goodness, where a man's word is his pledge, and falsehood is banished, and children sleep in their mothers' arms and never know fear or pain. It is a land where kings extend their hands in justice rather than reach for the sword; where mercy, kindness and compassion flow like deep water over the land, and men revere virtue, revere truth, revere beauty, above comfort, pleasure or selfish gain. A land where peace reigns in the heart of man, where faith blazes like a beacon from every hill, and love like a fire from every hearth, where the True God is worshipped and his ways acclaimed by all ...

There is a golden realm of light, my son. And it is called the Kingdom of Summer.

(From Merlin, by Stephen Lawhead)

I long for a place like that.

Wednesday 25 April 2007

ANZAC Day

Kings Park War Memorial





The Last Post



The Ode came from 'For the Fallen', a poem by the English poet and writer Laurence Binyon and was published in London in The Winnowing Fan: Poems on the Great War in 1914.

The Ode
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

We went to the ANZAC Day Dawn Service, and I was surprised to see the number of people gathered. News reports say that there were 40,000 people there, and judging by the sea of people I saw, I'd believe it. There were a number of video screens, so everyone could see what was happening. It was a moving ceremony with a solemn address.

Lest we forget.

Saturday 21 April 2007

Point Fraser

Today we rode our bikes down to Point Fraser, just off the Causeway in East Perth. When we first moved to Perth, this was just a carpark, then some lawn and aging playground. The City Of Perth started a redevelopment project and the first stage is now open. There is a car park, playground, amphitheater, and art.

The aim of the project was to recycle the storm water and runoff from East Perth, to recreate a mini-wetlands, and provide another recreation area close to the river. I think the result is fantastic, and like other developments along the Swan River foreshore adds tremendous value to Perth.








There are many seats along the pathways. Along the back of the seats are parts of a story, so if you follow the path you can get a picture of life in Perth. There are also snippets written in the paths. A couple of the seats also had snippets written in braille, made of raised chrome dots on the concrete background.

The amphitheater faces the river, and consists of four grassed tiers.

Behind the recreation area is a carpark, a bus bay, and roundabout.






There is a board walk over a spring that feeds into the river. Other board walks skirt some of the developed wetland areas and contain a marker with street signs and directions.

There are also free public BBQs throughout the area.












The playground in the center has swings and slides, a climbing wall, as well as a Liberty Swing, designed for children with mobility problems. This swing appeared on ABC's New Inventors program.

There is also a lookout which provides an excellent view of the playground and river.











There is a bust of explorer Nicolas Baudin, and a short biography of his life. This bust was donated to the City of Perth by the Terra Australis 2001 committee to commemorate the bicentenary of the Baudin Expedition.

Monday 16 April 2007

Ignoring Beauty

This article comes from the Desiring God website:

The Washington Post conducted an experiment to see if beauty could be recognized through the mundane malaise of day-to-day life. They arranged for Joshua Bell, a preeminent violinist, to play incognito in a busy corridor in D.C. one morning--a free concert from a musician who plays a $3.5 million instrument. He had his case open for donations and played the best music most of the workaday passers-by had probably ever heard. To what effect? Virtually none.



The article asks those who come into contact with street musicians: "Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? ... Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?"



Is it immoral to ignore beauty?



I couldn't help but read it as a parable:




As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.



Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.



"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?" (my emphasis)




She was appalled that anyone would have either the naivete or the gall to condescendingly flip a quarter at one of the world's greatest musicians. She was shocked that something as astoundingly beautiful was so easily disregarded.

Sunday 15 April 2007

All Will Turn Out Fine

This year I'm going to write music again. I thought I'd start by pulling out all the songs I'd ever written, and putting them all together. Below is the lyrics to the one I'm working on recording now.

All Will Turn Out Fine
© Paul Mulroney 1996

V1
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever make the grade
Someday, somehow, I won’t be afraid
To walk by faith and not hold back
Whatever, come what may
Someday, somehow, I won’t be afraid

Ch
I see the Then and don’t know When
All this dreamin’s for
I see the signs and don’t know Why
Heaven seems so far
I see the Now and don’t know How
In all of these dark and troubled times
That all will turn out, all will turn out
All will turn out fine

V2
It seems the road I’ve set upon has dangers by the way
Someday, somehow, I will find the way
They beckon with their false perfume and lead so far away
Someday, somehow, I will find the way

Ch

V3
I hear a soft familiar voice cry gently on the wind
Someday, somehow, I’ll find my rest in Him
Resting in my Saviour’s arms I know I’ll finally win
That day, somehow, I’ll have my rest in Him

Ch
I’ll see the Then and I’ll know When
All this dreamin’s for
I’ll see the signs and I’ll know Why
Heaven seemed so far
I’ll see the Now and I’ll know How
In all of those dark and troubled times
That all has turned out, all could turn out
All has turned out fine

Saturday 14 April 2007

Magical Square Root Implementation In Quake III

One of the sites I regularly read is Worse Than Failure which looks at bizarre bits of code that programmers come across from time to time. (It used to be called WTF, short for "What the F...???", something that Rove has shortened to "What the?" and made a regular segment in his TV show.)

In the comments of one of the recent articles was this code snippet to calculate the square root of a number, which was originally written for Quake III.

float Q_rsqrt( float number )
{
long i;
float x2, y;
const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

x2 = number * 0.5F;
y = number;
i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking
i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the f...?
y = * ( float * ) &i;
y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration
// y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed

#ifndef Q3_VM
#ifdef __linux__
assert( !isnan(y) ); // bk010122 - FPE?
#endif
#endif
return y;
}
Try Goolging 0x5f3759df and you'll find lots of references. It turns out that the above routine implements a theory called Newton Approximation of roots. The square root of a number can be approximated using a certain calculation, and can be refined by repeating using the results of the previous calculation. The tricky part is the magic number, which generates an initial result which is very close to the actual result, good enough for the purpose.

John Carmack is the programmer who wrote this piece of code. A genius indeed.

Very cool.

Thursday 12 April 2007

The Ashes

We were talking about cricket the other day, and the question of The Ashes came up. I had heard a long time ago that The Ashes came about because of a crushing defeat of England at the hand of the Aussies, and someone had presented to the Aussies an urn which contained the ashes of the cricket stumps from the match.

Wikipedia says:

The Ashes is a Test cricket series, played between England and Australia - it is international cricket's most celebrated rivalry and dates back to 1882. It is currently played nominally biennially, alternately in England and Australia.

The series is named after a satirical obituary published in an English newspaper, The Sporting Times, in 1882 after the match at The Oval in which Australia beat England on an English ground for the first time. The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. The English media then dubbed the next English tour to Australia (1882-83) as the quest to regain The Ashes.

During that tour in Australia, a small terracotta urn was presented as a gift to the England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of Melbourne women. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of an item of cricket equipment, possibly a bail, ball or stump. The urn is erroneously believed, by some, to be the trophy of the Ashes series but it has never been formally adopted as such and Ivo Bligh always considered it to be a personal gift.



While I was looking for related articles, I came across this flash-based game of cricket. Enjoy.

Wednesday 11 April 2007

World of Warcraft as a contraceptive?


Warcraft Reduces Sex Drive - Click Here for more great videos and pictures!

Skullcrusher Mountain



A music video for the Jonathan Coulton song "Skullcrusher Mountain". Jonathan makes his songs available online (www.jonathancoulton.com) via the Creative Commons license, which enables projects such as this video. He has a podcast called Thing A Week where he puts out a song a week to keep his creative juices flowing. He's said he's going to keep it up until someone pays him to do it for real.

The song at the end of the video is "So Far So Good", another great Jonathan Coulton song.

Friday 6 April 2007

Little things you should know

1. The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

2. Coca-Cola was originally green.

3. Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.

4. Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better.

5. The state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska

6. The percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28% ( now get this...)

7. The percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%

8. The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6,400

9. The average number of people airborne over the US any given hour: 61,000

10. Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

11. The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.

12. The youngest pope was 11 years old.

13. The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.

14. Those San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.

15. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:
Spades - King David,
Hearts - Charlemagne,
Clubs -Alexander, the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar

16. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

17. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

18. Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.

20. "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

21. Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that make them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.

22. No NFL team which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Super bowl.

23. The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League all-stars Game.

24. Q. What occurs more often in December than any other month?
A. Conception.

25. Q. What separates "60 Minutes," on CBS from every other TV show?
A. No theme song

26. Q. Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of what?
A. Their birthplace.

27. Q. Most boat owners name their boats. What is the most popular boat name requested?
A. Obsession

28. Q. If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter "A"?
A. One thousand

29. Q. What do bulletproof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers, and laserprinters all have in common?
A. All invented by women.

30. Q. What is the only food that doesn't spoil?
A. Honey

31. Q. There are more collect calls on this day than any other day of the year?
A. Father's Day

32. Q. What trivia fact about Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny) is the most ironic?
A. He was allergic to carrots.

33. Q. What is an activity performed by 40% of all people at a party?
A. Snoop in your medicine cabinet.

34. In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase "goodnight, sleep tight".

35. It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month or what we know today as the honeymoon.

36. In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's"

37. Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle" is the phrase inspired by this practice.


AND FINALLY

39. In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden.... and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language