I recently entered two different poetry competitions on the Internet. Real competitions, with prizes and everything. One called for limericks specifically, while the other was for short poetry of any form, but I entered limericks for both because I like limericks.

Which do you want to hear about first? The one in which I won a prize, or the other one?

Yeah, I thought you would. Nevertheless, I’ll start with the competition I didn’t win, in the hope of maintaining suspense. This took place on Lynne Murphy’s blog, Seperated by a Common Language, and the prize was a copy of a book that Lynne reviewed on the blog about British culture as compared to the American. To enter, you had to write a limerick that illustrates a potential misunderstanding between speakers of British and American English.

I scoured the archives of the blog for ideas, and after some thought decided to write a limerick playing on the two meanings of the verb “table” (as in “table a motion”). In British committee-speak it means to make something available for discussion, whereas in American committee-speak it means to stop making it available for discussion and get on with discussing something else instead.

My submission follows a long tradition of limericks that are deliberately incomplete (i.e. the joke lies in the fact that one or more lines are missing). Here it is:

“This limerick must quickly be written!”
Said the visiting member from Britain.
So in need of more minds
He tabled four lines -

[pause to give it time to sink in]

I didn’t expect to win. Examined closely it doesn’t really work, because tabing is more an action of the committee as a whole, not of an individual member. But it works well enough for a cheap joke. The winning poem was written by Richard English, and is reproduced below:

My girl has a fine pair of hooters
Attractive to gentleman suitors.
But don’t rush too far
They’re both on her car
And she toots them to warn slow commuters.

Now let me tell you about the other competition, which was easier because there were fewer competitors and more than one copy of the prize. Oh, and the prize is something that I’m really looking forward to, namely an uncorrected galley proof of Chad Orzel’s upcoming book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. (If you haven’t yet heard of this book, please follow the link and browse for a while. It will give you a bit of context.)

The competition, which took place on Chad’s blog, was to write a short poem about dogs and physics, tying in with the book. There was also a caption competition, which I didn’t enter. The plot thickened after The Digital Cuttlefish entered the competition, which is reminiscent of that bit from Terry Pratchett about how the purpose of the Witch Trials is to find out who comes second after Granny Weatherwax.

In the end, Chad decided to give out two caption prizes and two poetry prizes, and I was one of the winners! (The other, of course, was the Cuttlefish.) Here is my entry:

A dog who seeks morsels organic
Such as bunnies that run when they panic
Must be fast and observing
And strong and deserving
And informed about quantum mechanic.

Speaking of quantum mechanics, this seems an opportune time to share something from my university days. Way back in the year 2000, I took a subject called Advanced Professional English, and previously on this blog I’ve reproduced one of my other assignments from it.

In the assignment that I’m going to share today, I endeavoured to write an article about quantum computers that might be published in a mass market computer magazine, the sort that more typically contains reviews of newly released software. As well as the article itself, I had to write an analysis of the writing process (covering, among other things, how the target audience influences the appropriate style and content). Also included was a copy of the email I got back from a physicist I consulted, and, of course, my references. I won’t reproduce the supplementary materials here, although I’m willing to refer to them in the comments.

Bear in mind that this was written almost a decade ago, and by a humble not-yet-blogger who never studied physics beyond First Year. I haven’t kept up with it at all, but physics has moved on since then. For one thing, the emphasis now seems to be less “how many particles can you entangle?“, and more “how long can you keep them that way?“. Also, a few more catchphrases such as “decoherence” have trickled down to the popular science books.

Comments from physicists are welcome, from assurances that I have nothing to be embarrassed about to interesting information about the developments of the last ten years.

And I’m really looking forward to that book…

Lately I’ve been thinking relatively seriously about getting some decent video recording equipment, but in the meantime I can make very simple recordings using my digital camera or mobile phone. My phone lets me record fifteen seconds of unenviable quality, and it is definitely a challenge to record anything worth seeing in that time.

I have risen to that challenge in the video below, which showcases the fractal tray that I painted a number of years ago. What do you think? Would you like to see more short videos of this kind?

Here are some interesting things that have caught my attention in the last fortnight:

Astronomy:

• Size of black holes might have been underestimated.
• A type of star with really weird orbits.
• Redefining the habitable zone.
• First planet observed in another galaxy (either that or a brown dwarf).
• Catalyst special on Gravity Probe B and confirming Einstein’s theory of gravity.
• We’re learning more about sunspots.

Biology:

• Susceptability to cancer may be the cost of big human brains.
• A plant with roots that grow into snow, not soil.
• The most efficient carbon-storing forests are Australian.
• How to catch a fish, if you’re a snake.
• Some fish can learn by watching others.

Brain Science:

• I mentioned online treatments for depression in my previous installment. Here’s more information, including a video.
• A variation of the SPARC Effect for musicians.
• Babies prefer their native languages by five months.
• A recent study into binocular rivalry.

Palaeontology:

• On the lifestyle of prehistoric Arctic animals.
• On Homo erectus being eaten by predators.

Physics and Technology:

• A new element for the periodic table. Two complementary reports here and here.
• Extending life on Earth into the distant future.
• Meteorologists may be overestimating rain.
• LHC expected to be back in October.
• Radio antenna based on human ear.

Whimsical:

• I was amused to learn that “Australians are apparently dreaded by Polish teachers“. No specifics, though.
• A lovely car for a young child. More pictures here and here.
• Cyborg Name Decoder. This is very clever.

On my blog’s sidebar, I am trying out Flag Counter. This hit-counting utility is designed in such a way as to be compatible with pretty much any blogging platform, but at certain costs including vulnerability to sabotage. We’ll see how it goes. There’s also some other Internet-related software I’m about to start trialing, of which, more next time. Finally, having started from the beginning of the archives last October, I have now caught up with all episodes of Astronomy Cast. More on that as time permits.

[Update: I've decided to do away with the Flag Counter, because a day or two after activation, it adds a "visitor log" that includes information about all hits, not just new visitors. I do not wish such information to be available to the public.]

It’s fun to be whimsical, and one way to achieve that is to take a topic – however silly – and write about it, simply as an exercise to see where it leads and what angles can be illuminated on the journey. Now, various people have expressed the notion that mathematics would be a lot simpler if only pi were exactly three, and there are even stories in which the idea of pi being equal to three forms part of the plot (one modern example being Going Postal by Terry Pratchett). So it occurs to me that it might be fun to imagine a world in which pi really is equal to three, and to mentally explore some of the consequences.

A trivial way to render true the statement “pi equals three” is to invent a language in which the word for “three” is pronounced “pie“, but that is not only cheating, it also lacks subtlety. One way or another, cheating is a necessary part of the exercise, but we can at least be more subtle about it. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference, and if we want to imagine a world in which pi equals three we should at least preserve that definition.

A shape for which the perimeter really is exactly three times the “diameter” (defined here as the distance from corner to diametrically opposite corner) is of course the regular hexagon. A good way to show this is to divide the hexagon into six equilateral triangles. If we agree not to mess with the geometry of straight lines, then a universe in which pi equals three must be a universe in which the circumference of a circle is equal to the perimeter of the largest hexagon that can be inscribed within it. How can we make this be?

Straight away another trivial solution presents itself, which is to redefine “circumference” to mean the perimeter of the largest inscribable hexagon. That makes them equal all right, but is only slightly more subtle than our first attempt, and not very satisfying. It fails to respect the idea that the circumference is the length along a curve, and that the length along half a circle should be half the length around a whole one. Whatever result you get by trying to inscribe a hexagon inside half a circle (not a well-defined problem to begin with), it certainly isn’t that.

Let’s take the image of the hexagon inside the circle, and magnify the bit between one corner and the next, as shown below. If pi equals three, and we’re to insist on a more subtle means of achieving this than we’ve tried so far, then the length of the upper curve must be the equal to the length of the line segment underneath it. Our third and final attempt will involve redefining “length” in such a way that this can be true.

Here’s the idea. We’ll redefine the “length” of a path as something along the lines of the energy it takes to draw it, and we’ll put this in the context of an imaginary physics where you get bonus energy for moving in curves. This is now getting much more subtle, but you may already be able to see where it’s going to get unstuck.

We need a conversion factor for translating between “length” as we know it and “length” as redefined in our imaginary world. Given that our bonus energy is acquired by moving in curves, this conversion factor ought to be a function of curvature. Curvature, as defined by mathematicians, is the reciprocal of the radius of the circle that fits most snugly into the curve.

For a circle of radius one (or in other words a curvature of one), the conversion factor has to be 3/pi. This is because in the real world the circle has circumference two pi, whereas in the imaginary world it has circumference six, so 3/pi is the factor we need to make one equal to the other. But for a circle of radius two (curvature one half), the conversion factor is once again 3/pi. We’re forced to the conclusion that the conversion factor is 3/pi for any curve, with the exception of a perfectly straight line (curvature zero), in which case the conversion factor is plain old one.

To convince yourself of this result, study the diagram below and think about both the green circle and the blue one. Incidentally, if the appearance of pi in the conversion factor bothers you, feel free to call it pi subscript mundane. It’s the value pi has in the real world, not in the imaginary one.

A problem with our third redefinition is that it fails to respect the principle of continuity, that a very small change to a shape should make only a very small change to the length of a path along it. Consider, on one hand, a straight line segment, and on the other hand, a segment of the circumference of a really, really large circle, so large as to be indistinguishable from a straight line (e.g. a line drawn in the sand on the spherical Earth). We are forced to conclude that the curved line is 3/pi times the length of the straight line, no matter how impossibly close to being straight the curved line happens to be. This will not do.

Worse still, in such a universe we could define something I’ll call the pseudiameter, which is the length of an impossibly close to straight but not actually straight curve stretching from one side of a circle to the other. We could then ask about the ratio between the pseudiameter and the circumference of the circle, and … Oh! Look who’s back!

At this point I’m inclined to give up. Whatever you do to redefine pi so that it can be equal to three, one way or another the definition is going to fall to pieces. It isn’t possible to keep a good irrational number down.

Of course, we knew that all along.

I was just putting the fresh vegetables into the fridge when …

This is why we really, really need to repeal gravity.

It is now a couple of days after my 32nd birthday (June 12). Not everyone I invited turned up, several were late, and one checked in briefly but couldn’t stay, but the eight or nine of us remaining had a really good time. The only disappointment was that there should have been twelve of us.

I like house guests, partly because I love sharing those things that I see as an extension of my personality, such as the way my home is decorated or the music I play on my keyboard. Up to a point it’s possible to share such things online, but only in person can I put them in context and feel that I’m inviting people into my head. For whatever reason, I’m not very successful at meeting people and making friends, but when the opportunity arises I find it positively thrilling.

I didn’t expect any gifts, but from my parents I got a framed panorama photograph of the north beach at Balgowan, which I now have hanging on the wall near my front door.

I gave my sister some of my old religious books, such as Bible commentaries. Although I no longer have the religious faith that I had when I acquired them, she does, and I respect that. Therefore the best thing I can do is to help her faith be an informed one. I’ll have some more books for her later in the year, but before I give them away I read them through and scan any pages that I want to keep. (Some bits are really quite interesting, and I’d like to share a few of them on this blog sometime.)

As for food, there is a lot of it still left over. The main course (for which I made certain broad requests and left the details up to Dad) was a choice of pizza and/or Indian take-away. I bought the pre-dinner nibbles myself, and having no experience in catering for parties I bought a lot of them.

A close-up of the cheeses and dips:

At the end of the evening I got out the playing cards and we played a few rounds of Warlords and Scumbags, in which I was quite successful.

Writing a series like this, it’s not possible to be consistent. Sometimes I’m in a very discerning mood, and hardly anything seems remarkable enough to include. Other times I feel fascinated by just about everything I read, and the task of filtering out all but the most worthy discoveries is more than I can bear. These moods tend to come in waves: I can be in one state or the other for several days at a time before becoming, as it were, tired of it, and switching to the opposite state of mind.

I like to be as consistent as I can, though, which is why I don’t publish installments more than twice a month (I need enough time for my conservative and liberal moods to average out) and why I list provisional nominations on Twitter as an intermediate filtering stage. For most of the last fortnight I’ve been in a particularly conservative mood, but then along came the nominees for the 3QD Prize in Science, and I couldn’t read a collection of 171 science articles from the last year without coming across some new and interesting facts.

As far as my vote is concerned, I chose not to consider any article that I’d read before. I really wanted to choose something new to me, something I wouldn’t have read were it not nominated for the prize. Of the articles that I had already read, perhaps this is the best (and indeed I linked to it in an earlier installment of this series) but it would have been against my policy to vote for it. In the list below I’ve indicated which items come from the list of 3QD prize nominations, and also which one I actually voted for.

After deciding which were the best candidates I found myself in a much less discerning mood, probably because my brain was exhausted from the process of selecting favourites. Anyway, here’s my latest selection of Interesting Stuff.

Archaeology and Environment:

• From Catalyst, an article on the archaeology of ancient Inca roads.
• An article on noise pollution in the oceans. [via 3QD]
• It’s amazing what sights you can see from space if you look.
• How to keep elephants away.

Biology:

• Chimpanzees can be helpful when they don’t have much to lose.
• Galapagos mosquitos: I think Darwin missed this one.
• How to confuse a white blood cell.
• Ticklish apes. Need I say more?
• Sex of skinks depends on the size of their eggs.

Blog Activity:

• John Wilkins’ blog, Evolving Thoughts, has recently moved.

History and People:

• What C. P. Snow was really trying to say. [via 3QD]
• Faraday speculated on the unification of electricity and gravity. [via 3QD]
• Some abandoned models of the atom. [via 3QD]
• One of Roald Dahl’s lesser-known writings (non-fiction).

Legal and Political:

• I’ve been following a few important world affairs. To give two examples, the health care category on Denialism Blog is the place to go to learn about issues related to the American health care system, and several of the blogs I read have been including updates on the Simon Singh case (I’ve signed the petition).

Linguistics and Psychology:

• I spent a little time recently browsing the Features page in the World Atlas of Language Structures.
• A bit of pronunciation history trivia.
• Apparently,  depression can be treated online.
• Experiments on associations between the senses.

Music:

• Recreating a lost type of horn.
• Computers are beginning to think they can compose music. I bet I can do better, though. (Admittedly, I do need to stop to eat occasionally.)

Physics:

• I tried this cute camera trick, and it worked.
• A very interesting essay about triboluminescence. [via 3QD: my second-favourite]
• Predictions of what the Large Hadron Collider will find. [via 3QD]
• A wide-ranging essay on mathematics, cosmology, history, etc. [via 3QD: I voted for this one]

Incidentally, by the time I publish the next edition of this series I will be thirty-two years old. But if you believe the theory that you’re only as old as you feel, then I’m twenty-seven and intending to remain so for some time.

Here are some things that I found interesting over the last couple of weeks.

Archaeology and History:

• One of the most interesting documentaries I’ve seen on television recently was the Secret Files of the Inquisition.
• I linked to the World Digital Library in my previous collection, and would now like to follow up by discussing the specific items to be found there. Feel free to mention your favourites in the comments. Browsing the items that are written in modern English, I enjoyed an 1883 book of poetry about London and a 1911 edition of Hans Christian Andersen.
• From Babelstone, a discussion of the ancient Chinese board game of Liubo – including historical context, literary references, evidence pertaining to rules, etc – followed by lots of pictures.
• New archaeological dating method for ceramics.

Astronomy and Technology:

• Modified Newtonian Dynamics was back in the news this month. (Note: that dark matter exists is established, but as I understand it there is still much debate between theories involving dark matter plus MOND, versus theories involving dark matter alone.)
• Life on Earth may have existed during the Late Heavy Bombardment.
• A new twist (literally) for space elevators.
• Via Catalyst, an article on robotic cockroaches. (This one’s for Itai, who is bound to dismiss it as mere tikanetics.)

Biology:

• A tale of two viruses: how being resistant to an extinct ape virus makes us vulnerable to HIV.
• An iceberg ecosystem.
• Whatever you may have read in Douglas Adams’s Last Chance To See, it turns out that Komodo dragons actually use venom.
• Some answers to the questions that really matter.
• A study of how corals are adapting to warmer temperatures.

Blog Activity:

• I’ve received a few links from other blogs recently, mostly from articles in blogs I’ve linked to in the past, but of particular note is a sidebar link from www.whicklefiskers.com. Thanks for the completely unexpected vote of confidence.

Geology, Oceanography and Palaeontology:

• The Andes Mountains turn out to be much older than previously believed. On a personal note, one of the dating methods mentioned in the article is part of my father’s line of work.
• When I started university in the mid nineties, my original plan was to study oceanography. The conveyor belt model of ocean circulation was no small part of the course, but reality now seems to be more complicated.
• Fossils of giant trilobites.

Photography and Visual Psychology:

• Photo gallery of the Cloud Appreciation Society.
• Winner of an optical illusion contest, with real world applications.

As for the special offer in the previous installment of this series, in which I promised to reward people for using Twitter to promote my solitaire game Elemental, nobody took advantage of this. Nobody at all. I think it was worth a try, though. People do occasionally tweet that they are playing Microsoft versions of solitaire (often commenting on their success rates, etc) so I thought it would be nice if I could encourage at least someone out there to do the same for mine.

So, in the process of trying to solve the commenting issue discussed in my previous post, I’ve upgraded to Firefox 3. This is something I’d been putting off until absolutely necessary, because of the effort involved in updating extensions and finding replacements. However, I’ve managed to find satisfactory updates or replacements for all of them.

The hardest extension to replace was Read Easily, which provided a toolbar button for toggling the menu option View -> Page Style -> No Style on and off. I often use this option for distinguishing between visited and unvisited links on pages where they are ordinarily the same colour, and it’s also useful for finding stuff on pages with complex or distracting layouts. Anyway, the nearest I can find is Custom Toolbar Buttons, which lets you create buttons for various menu items (particularly, in this case, Toggle Styles). The old Read Easily button was better, though, because you could tell by looking at the button whether it was active or not.

There is one happy bonus. Previous versions of Extended Cookie Manager were incompatible with Tab Mix Plus, so in order to use Extended Cookie Manager (a higher priority for me) I’ve always left the latter extension disabled. This is no longer necessary, so I am now using Tab Mix Plus instead of NewTabURL. It’s overkill, but below is an image of the main feature I was interested in (to lock tabs by double-clicking on them):

[Update: I've just discovered that pressing Forward or Back on a locked tab doesn't, contrary to expectations, open a new tab. This counts as at least a minor gripe.]

Other extensions and themes I use are:

• Whitehart (theme). I like this look; nice and simple.
• Character Identifier. Useful when reading websites that use character ranges I don’t have fonts for, and for finding out the Unicode value of any given character.
• IE Tab. Opens an Internet Explorer session from within Firefox.
• Link Visitor. Marks links as visited or unvisited. This is invaluable if I’m reading a list of pages one at a time, and using the link colour (visited vs unvisited) to remember where I’m up to (I do this a lot). For example, if I start to read a page but realise I’m too tired to finish, I can mark the link unread to indicate that I haven’t actually read it yet.
• Zoom Toolbar. Adds toolbar buttons for zooming in and out (equivalent to View -> Zoom).
• I also have the BugMeNot, Gears and Java Quick Starter extensions, of which I don’t think I need to say anything.

Other aspects of the upgrade weren’t too bad, but could have been smoother. For example, Firefox reverted to its default setting of retaining my history of visited pages for ninety days. I’ve changed it back to my preferred value, which is three days. My rationale is that I want the link colour to reflect the likelihood that the page has changed since I last visited it (see also my comments on the Link Visitor extension, above) and three days is a good value for the sorts of pages where this is most useful.

This is more of a public service announcement than a regular blog post. It is intended to draw attention to a problem, in the hope that doing so will lead to a solution.

The problem is that I’m unable to leave comments on certain blogs in the Blogspot/Blogger domain. The problem is not with most such blogs, but only with a few of them. Details follow.

[Update: the only solution I've found is to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. See the comments section beneath this post for more information.]

I’ve never used any blogging platform other than WordPress, so I don’t know how they work from the administrator’s point of view. However, I’ve noticed that people using Blogspot have a variety of options for the enabling of comments. Whether I am able to leave a comment on a given Blogspot blog depends on the commenting form the owner has selected.

On most Blogspot blogs, comments are submitted through a form such as the following. I can leave comments just fine on these blogs; they do not present a problem.

On others, a similar form appears in a separate window. These do not present a problem either.

My problem is with those Blogspot blogs in which the commenting field looks like this. I’m sorry, but if your blog is one of these, then it appears that I cannot leave a comment.

To illustrate, I will pretend to leave a comment on the following post by John McIntyre.

[scrolling down a bit]

(This is not an earth-shattering comment, but it will do as an example.)

Now, this is where things start to go wrong. When I hit the Preview button, I do not see a preview of my post. Instead, I am taken back to the empty comment form as it appeared before I wrote the comment or selected my profile. If I scroll up, I see the comments that were already there, but no indication that my submission ever existed.

It’s reasonable to suppose that it might work with different profile. However, I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t. Here is the list of possible profile types.

In the example above, I used my OpenID profile. Other choices available to me are Google, WordPress, or Name/URL. I am inclined not to go through the tedious process of posting images to demonstrate that I have tried all of them, and on this particular occasion I haven’t tried the other choices. I did that last week, trying to leave a comment on an earlier post. None of the profiles worked then and there’s no reason why anything would have changed.

Incidentally, my Google profile is the one I would least prefer to use, partly because it doesn’t automatically link back to this blog like the other profiles should. I use it – successfully – on blogs where no other option is available, notably June Casagrande’s blog (the fact that I’m referring to two different copy editors’ blogs in this post is coincidental). However, last week when I tried using my Google profile to leave a comment on John’s blog, it failed, just like all the other profiles (and yes, I was logged in to the relevant account at the time.)

Having established that the problem isn’t with the profile, one might suppose that it has something to do with the preview button. Perhaps if I post the comment without a preview, it will work. I tried that last week, too, but only with one profile. Still, you have to admit that if the Preview button doesn’t work with any profile, and the Post Comment button doesn’t work with at least one profile, then the odds are very slim indeed that the Post Comment button will work with any profile.

When I tried it last week, I chose the Name/URL profile, so that I could comment with the same name (Adrian Morgan, my real one) that I always used when commenting on John’s old blog. In the interests of science, I will now have a go using my WordPress profile. Here is my comment just before pressing the Submit Comment button.

Immediately after pressing the Submit Comment button, I see the following verification form.

After filling this in correctly, my comment appears to be submitted. Certainly, the status bar tells me that it is transferring data. Here is a complete screenshot of what I see when it’s finished. No scrolling or anything.

As I write this, I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out if it worked. John’s blog is moderated, so I have to give him a chance to approve it. However, if you are reading this, then the waiting is over and the verdict is in. Pending that verdict, I’m leaving this post as an unpublished draft.

[The next day]

And it’s now the following morning, and my comment has not appeared. Comments by other people have been approved on John’s blog in the meantime, so we can rule out theories involving John being away from the computer. We can also rule out the theory that John chose not to approve my comment; you only have to look at the variety of comments he does approve to know that this is implausible (besides, I never had a comment rejected on his old blog). The data supports previous observations that the comment form simply does not work for me.

I don’t know why not; it obviously works for other people. Posting this may lead to some answers. Other blogs on which I am unable to comment, for the same reason, include John Wells’s phonetic blog and The Engine Room (more coincidence – I’m linking to three copy/sub-editors’ blogs in this post). My browser is Firefox 2.