Schinckel.net

It started on Friday night with Touch training. I coached rather than training, as I was carrying a bit of a hamstring injury, and I wanted to give it a bit more rest. Still, it meant I didn’t get home until around 8. I’m just glad I chose not to ride my bike! Saturday was the annual Colley Reserve 5-a-side Touch Carnival. Normally Touch is played with 6 on the field, but for a more exciting game, and because the fields are a bit smaller, this carnival plays with 5. It’s mixed, so 3 boys and 2 girls are the order of the day. I played in the UniSA team, knowing only two of the players beforehand. The guys, and most of the girls were pretty nice people, and we wound up making the final in the Pool B division. Which we lost, to a team that pretty much plays together all of the time. When I got home, at around 6pm or so, I started doing some editing on my post I’m writing over on OmniNerd. I actually spent a fair bit of time on this, and although I disagreed with the editor’s comments on a couple of things (like placing an embedded clause in commas, something I do) I feel that the feedback made my article better. It’s still not ready to publish, but it’s probably 75% of the way there. The most interesting thing for me is that it’s a different style of writing than a blog post. A blog post, by it’s nature, is very free-flowing, and can at times lack structure. I very rarely edit my posts on this blog, although I sometimes correct errors. If I make them. (Reminds me of the joke: I was wrong once. I thought I was wrong, but I was actually right.) By the time Jaq got home from little Shae’s birthday party (9:30pm), freaking out because there was a big spider on the car, which I had to squish for her, I was about ready for bed, so I dozed almost right off. Jaq had to head into Uni this morning at 11, so I got up just as she left, and started finalizing my Tax documents. I put all of my stuff into a spreadsheet, and it didn’t really take as long as I thought it might. Then, I caught up on all of my RSS feeds, and by the time Jaq got home this time, I had to head off to State League. I played in the Mixed, where we won 8-2 (I only scored one of these, but set up a couple of others, including a great boomer with Karina McL), and then coached the Mens from the box (there is another playing coach, but sometimes it’s handy to have extra eyes off the field).

‘I will pledge to never purchase a CD contaning any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM),’ – PledgeBank

Deadline to sign up by: 6th February 2006 3,745 people have signed up (3245 over target)

I’m continuing to archive and present the pick (IMHO) of the week’s PostSecret entries. Actually, a very similar thing happened in my family. Apparently my Dad kicked a cat, and my sister and I didn’t find out until her 21st birthday that it hadn’t been bitten by a snake. This last one is only in here for the Speeling Poleese. That’s a horde of barbarians, but people hoard things. From Apple’s Dictionary.app:

USAGE Take care not to confuse the same-sounding words hoard and horde. A hoard is ‘a secret stock or store of something’ (a hoard of treasure), while a horde is a disparaging word for ‘a large group of people’ (hordes of fans descended on the stage). One way to remember the difference is to think of ‘stashing your hoard behind the loose board’ (note the spelling likeness of hoard and board).

As an adjunct to another project I am working on (basically an extended version of the experimental writeup I did about iTunes Ratings), I had cause to wonder as to the distribution of ratings in my iTunes library, and in other peoples. I may be unusual in that when I import an album, I grab the whole lot. Even if I really only like one track. I just feel some day I may want to listen to the whole lot! Anyway, I came up with the following script to get the data. Mac only, I’m afraid. Possible to write a much slower version that scans the XML file manually, but I’ll leave that as an extension to the avid reader.

 1     #! /usr/bin/env python
 2     
 3     import Foundation # Required PyObjC installation.
 4     import os
 5     
 6     library =  os.path.expanduser('~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml')
 7     
 8     db = Foundation.NSDictionary.dictionaryWithContentsOfFile_(library)
 9     tracks = db[u'Tracks'].itervalues()
10     
11     ratingcount = {}
12     for i in range(101):
13         ratingcount[i]=0
14     
15     for track in tracks:
16         try:
17             ratingcount[int(track[u'Rating'])] += 1
18         except KeyError:
19             ratingcount[0] += 1
20     
21     fp = open('RatingData.csv','w')
22     for i in range(101):
23         fp.write(str(i)+","+str(ratingcount[i])+'\n')
24     fp.close()

Plotting this data gives the following graph: Clearly, there are a couple of spikes, most likely from having rated tracks initially on a normal iTunes scale (0-5 stars). I’ve changed the plot scale so you don’t see the zero-rated tracks, as they skew the data totally, and most of them are in fact unrated, rather than zero rated. If I scale my ratings down to full stars (and discard all of the unrated tracks), then my data looks more like: Which is what I expected. And shows that I am probably pretty harsh on my music library – or I dislike most music a bit. • The final plot shows when rating as half-stars, that is, rounding down to the nearest 10, and discarding unrated tracks.

I’m partway through the 24/9/2005 edition of ABC Radio National’s Podcast of their program All In The Mind. The program description is:

SUMMARY: Cotard’s syndrome is the belief that you have died, and for sufferers it is a terrifying state. Delusions can take many forms, from widespread paranoia to a specific and singular delusion – you might think an impostor has replaced your spouse. These misbeliefs are commonly associated with schizophrenia, but they can also occur in people with brain injuries, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s disease and dementia. The Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science is seeking to explain delusions by developing a model of how we all come to accept or reject beliefs. We see how this research is progressing.

I don’t know that much about Schizophrenia, but early in the program they are talking about how people with this condition cannot (bear to?) look at faces of people who are angry or fearful. A little later on, the following phrase is used:

[Delusion is] a strongly held belief for which there isn’t any evidence.

I’m not going to make a further statement as to the similarity between this and religion. I’ll let you decide. Flames cheerfully accepted.

For some reason, there is a small bug in the Quicktags.js script I contributed to Blogsome. That is, when putting in an abbr, or an acronym, only some Browsers will automatically add what the abbreviated term stands for (or what it might stand for). I coded in a series of common values, so that, for instance, if you have AAC selected, and press abbr, then it will put Advanced Audio Coding into the title field. It works with Firefox. It also works in Safari, but only if the User Agent is changed – older versions of Safari didn’t support Quicktags at all, so the authors of WordPress coded in a check, and the Quicktags don’t appear in Safari. I must fix the check in the Blogsome code, and submit it to Roger. It doesn’t work, however, with either Opera or Internet Explorer. Something to fix, later.

The Science Creative Quarterly » A GAME THEORETIC APPROACH TO THE TOILET SEAT PROBLEM

The toilet seat problem has been the subject of much controversey. In this paper we consider a simplified model of the toilet seat problem. We shall show that for this model there is an inherent conflict of interest which can be resolved by a equity solution.

We’ve found the ideal solution is that the Toilet Seat Lid is to be left down at all times: then everyone using the toilet incurs the same cost each time they “perform an operation”, be it a #1 operation or a #2 operation.