Palfrey's life

N-dimensional hypersurfaces make Tom mad! (/insert obligitary "Hulk smash!" here, except destroying purely abstract things is pretty damn difficult, no matter who you are). I *think* I've just about managed today to confirm a working method to get an intuitive hunch of mine to actually work properly and sanely generate and merge these things, along with code that should be viably efficient on a processor that gets 4MHz on a good day. In short, representation of states of a system as points in phase space, and then figuring out ways to (sometimes) merge various points such that a collection of merged regions can later be used to generate a minimal information loss view of the system at a later point. And I wonder why it's been making my head hurt.... For the interested, this would be the Foxtrot thing I've been occasionally wittering about, and a core part of my eventual PhD thesis.

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Other things been done with my time recently:

• Playing with my new camera: a Canon Powershot S3 IS. It rocks lots. 12x zoom, optical image stabilisation, 6 megapixels, and lots of options for me to play with. Some of my test images are here. The first one would be me video-conferencing with my parents over Skype (which is something else new). The fourth one would be me and colleagues out for chinese food tonight, including Andreas (middle on the left) who's been over here from ETH Zurich for the last week. There's also a test video of housemate's rodents


• Going to the "Native Speakers Group" meeting today. My hopes of meeting fellow English PhD students have been trashed by the note that everyone else in the group is at least 10 years older than me, and most are 20-30+ more. Still, it was pretty interesting. It's entirely possible that nothing will really be done with our recommendations, but at least it was a free lunch


• Watching odd films with Faculty Films: "Everything Is Illuminated", "Me and you and everyone we know", and "Memoirs of a Geisha"


• Playing Black. It's very fun

Thing I forgot to blog about last week, and just got reminded of: had a really weird experience with a sudden cloud of little sparkly things appearing in the air in the middle of my office. Things of note here: they persisted for ~20-30 seconds, officemate couldn't see them, they went blurry when removing glasses. Given the last item, it was probably an actual physical phenomena and I'm probably not just going nuts. Alternately, some unknown reason is causing phosphenes (maybe I need to tweak my screen settings somewhat) *or* I'm just high on my own neurotransmitters. As this was a one-off (well, I haven't seen things like it for a few years) I'm not worrying too much.....