colm_l

My hands are killing me today. Partly it's because I cut my index finger, this morning, cleaning my pen knife (bloody thing cut through the cloth and my hand in one gentle motion. Good quality manufacture :P). Partly it's my finger joints being sore again. I feel like an old arthritic man...

Gamers was shut today at 6.30. When'd that start happening? Young whippersnappers...

Weirdly, I'm feeling pretty good today despite all that. May be the prospect of Cassidies tomorrow, Jonathan Coulton on Friday & Gaelcon over the weekend.

Pretty decent combination I reckon.

This is the third day.

This makes me sad :(

Pretty much broke till Monday (stupid job)

Girlfriend has moved out of the country permanently (stupid job market)

accommodation search is still going badly. (stupid housing market)

Research is going slow (stupid research papers)

Feeling the after effects of eating too much hamburger last night (stupid me - though in my defense it was delicious)

Strangely, still relatively content though. Possibly it's the pound of beef.

In other news: Anyone else find themselves growing gradually more intolerant when they notice pop culture/writer induced ignorance in their expert fields? Just finished reading a "hard" Sci-Fi short story where the writer didn't understand ceramics or Carbon bonding. Infuriating...

This came up in conversation with some mates earlier today (while I was legging it for a bus) & I figured I should explain why I find it funny:

About 1000 years ago, an ancestor of mine died within arrow shot of my current home. How do I know this? 

Short answer is a cousin of mine plotted a partial genealogy (complete with scratches & dead ends) for our family back that far for a masters.

I’m more than a little proud of him. It sounds like a pompous arrogant thing to do till you realise genealogists love to study noble families because it means their family tree is well recorded & itemised ahead of time. My cousin (second to be exact) spent 5 years of his life trawling through attics & parish records to link the last few centuries of messy Connaught family backwards. A hard thing to do, you’ll admit, even in well maintained archives (one link was found by a priests great-niece in a marriage cert shoved into a picture frame she inherited).
 

Eventually, he broke through the hard part & found a nice well recorded line to zip back along.

 
So who was the ancestor who died near me? Brian Boru – I’m descended through Diarmuid MacMurrough on my mothers side by fluke.

 
Why do I find it amusing? Simple.

 Statistically about 90% of the population of Connaught are related to Diarmuid MacMurrough (No really it’s called MRCA theory – in a nutshell you can mathemathically prove common ancestry due where random breeding is possible).

Few of these have someone in their family driven enough to get back that far. Fewer have someone that driven succeed.
 

I think my family is probably unique in that the driven genealogist is himself called Dermot McMorrow.

It’s been a long time since I wrote something more than a status update so I feel I might as well try writing up something that’s been niggling at me for a while & really struck home when I went to see the Codex Leicester in the Chester Beatty.

The Renaissance man or Polymath is often held up as the intellectual pinnacle to aspire to. A man who has encyclopaedic knowledge of many fields is considered a better creature than someone who has a single field of expertise.

Ask someone on the street to name a historical genius and the name which springs to most minds will be Leonardo Da Vinci. Painter, Sculptor, Mathematician, Engineer, Anatomist & Architect – sounds impressive & it is.

However, any Engineer by necessity has to be a Mathematician, a civil engineer has the ability if not the artistic flair to be an Architect and a Sculptor & painter must understand anatomy. So it compresses to Leonardo Da Vinci, Engineer & Artist. Still that’s pretty impressive.

Now, as an engineer, Da Vincii wasn’t the genius people like to assume* – many of his designs were cribbed from earlier works or fundamentally flawed, in his observations he frequently discounts evidence that he could not make fit his personal theories, his mathematical work was propped up by his teacher & collaborator Pacioli & it’s recorded that he was unable to even solve a simple static balance problem for a statue of a rearing horse (Michelangelo supposedly used to abuse him about this at every opportunity).

So why do people obsess over him when other equally broad/broader talents such as those of Ibn al-Haytham, Newton (look it up – his laws of motion weren’t the only thing he achieved) or even Michelangelo are ignored?

Simple. None of the others were bastard offspring who wrote backwards, survived on four hours sleep a night, spent their lives scurrying from location to location or left thousands of pages of cryptic, unclear & iconic looking notes behind them (regardless of what little they say – they look very much as genius writing is imagined).

Da Vinci is primarily held up as an icon because he was a larger than life romantic figure rather than because of what he actually achieved.

* It’s worth noting at this point that I’m writing this as Devil’s advocate. Da vinci was of course extremely talented (I’m still not convinced that he deserves all the attention that is lavished on him though). In fact, Da Vinci was one of the reasons I ended up studying engineering

[There’s also a second idea on the Renaissance man as an ideal which I may get round to posting sometime. I’ll probably clean this entry up later]

I'm now a qualified engineer - with a 1st class degree.

Vaguely scary.

I guess this means I'll be doing that postgrad

That's all folks

Asked of me by blackrobedone...

( 5 questions )

Well, I had my final talk with my "supervisor" for next year.

I've been told to make my formal application for next years postgrad - in other words I've got my funding provisional on meeting the tcd standards for postgrad (2.1 or higher degree).

Feels good

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Literature Nerd   Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and it's eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today's society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It's okay. I understand.
Science/Math Nerd
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Drama Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Social Nerd
Anime Nerd
Musician
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

Hmmm. where to start.

1.) Thesis is going better than I'd thought - turns out I've lots more to say than I'd thought (though a windows bug just robbed me of 3 pages I'd written -apparently 2 gigs isn't enough space to be allowed save a word document).

2.) Back taking mild steroids for my lungs (a few years ago, I had a bad infection which left me less able to absorb oxygen, so I'm meant to take a steroid to keep my heart rate up -exactly the same as many asthmatics), so on the plus side I don't feel achy or jacked tired all the time - though I do tend to crash and feel very sleepy about 12 hours after I take it. Not sure if that's meant to happen but it's definitely better than the alternative.

3.) No imminent college deadlines for the first time since October (the next deadline is my thesis in 4 weeks or so).

4.) As a result of 1,2 and 3 my sleeping patterns are going back to normal. This is really one of the reasons I feel good.

Apparently I'm an expert in medical micro biology.

http://www2.ulster.ac.uk/staff/cj.lowery.html

Kind of unusual for a number of reasons. I guess I'll explain the main one in a rough cut way.

My family name is old Ulster Irish and extremely uncommon there.

Lowry is the far more common variant name (coming in from Scotland in the 1700s) and Lowery is a comparatively rare version coming from Labhradha a much earlier Ulster sept (which was amusingly stamped out, except in co. Down by the plantation which brought over the scots Lowry family in the first place).

Then, Cromwell came. Those who kept the catholic associated Labhradha (Lowery)surname ended up getting shunted down to Connacht (which is where my family is from. Specifically a village called "cur na mona" [imaginative name isn't it? literally beside the bog] beside Lough Corrib). Those who stayed in co. Down mostly switched to using Labrai (the gaelic version of the Scots Lowry name) and changed religion or were wiped out when the 1641 rebellion was put down.

So, while there's a fair amount of crossover between the two names (so much that Lowry and Lowery is classed as a single Polygenetic surname with two distinctly different coats of arms associated with it (see below). It's pretty unusual to find an Ulster Lowery these days.



I'm kind of curious if "Colm Lowery 2" spells his second name Labhradha or Labrai in Irish

Comment me and I will:

1) Tell you why I friended you.
2) Associate you with a song/movie.
3) Tell a random fact about you.
4) Tell a first memory about you.
5) Associate you with an animal/fruit.
6) Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7) Show you my favourite user pic of yours.
8) In retort, you MUST spead this disease in your LJ.

Probability is less of a science and more of a black art.

A solid example of this is the Monte Hall problem.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, it goes like this.

There are 3 doors. Behind 2 of these doors lies a boobie prize, behind the last lies the reward you want.

You pick a door.

Monte then picks one of the remaining two doors to reveal a boobie prize & gives you a chance to switch door.

Should you switch or should you stay?

99% of people will get this question wrong first time. I guarantee it.



Now, the "correct" answer is you double your chance of a correct answer by switching door (think about it some more and you'll see why). However, decision theory says other things about it.

Essentially, the same kind of intuitive block responsible for the original wrong answer will push you towards a favourite solution (switch? nah, I'll always stick). This differs from person to person. We call this bias.

What I'm wondering about is: does this explain Mick and Fatz ability to only roll 20s? Are they statistically biased? ;)

This is inspired by a post by brohnos. Mainly his post dealt with fighting off the African-Roman rebellion with his family...but part of it got me thinking. ;)

Specifically it was his comment about people needing to relax and slow down. Recently one of my other mates mentioned to me that he's never seen me just sit down and do nothing for a while.

Thinking about it - he's right.

I constantly require something to do - whether it's reading a book, playing a game, fiddling, pacing, eating, tidying notes, rewriting notes, making stupid puns, listen to music, watch films, pace then stand and so on. Hell, even when trying to get to sleep I work through maths in my head.

The Warpcon weekend is the first time since October I can conclusively say I did nothing productive for a period of two days.

So, humour me on this, what about you people? I've a pet theory on which groups will turn out to be which. (I'll share it later).

So pacer or spacer? ;)

( snip snip )

I moan a lot.

It's probably a large part of people's impression of me.

I guess I'm just putting this here where most people will see this.

Thanks all for putting up with my incessant whining (& me) with good nature.

I just got asked to write a paper on the strength of my midterm presentation.

That's a bit of a shock (in a good way)