Thu 2006-11-16 
Each week day I walk past various drab buildings as I walk to and from the railway station. Just recently, I realised that most of them look much better reflected in the river. Now I often carry my camera with me so as to be able to take photos when the lighting and the river surface are just right. Here is one of the results.
Wed 2006-11-15 A couple of weeks ago on Radio 2 I overheard a piece about Wynford Dore's proposed cure for dyslexia. When I heard the phrases 'miracle cure', 'techniques developed by NASA' and 'Daily Mail', I immediately suspected that the story was not quite as solid as it was being presented and, sure enough, a few days later I found out that it wasn't. I was tempted to sit down right then and post a fiery rant about the abysmally poor level of science reporting which seems to be the norm nowadays but, instead, I let myself cool down, and leave it to some people whose rants carry far more weight than mine: Ben Goldacre, Mark Trodden and Peter Norvig.
Sun 2006-11-12 While I am wallowing in YouTube-inspired nostalgia, here is a clip of the excellent John Cooper Clarke reading Beasley Street. Try to ignore the visuals, which are rather distracting. I saw JCC only once: at Leeds Polytechnic in 1978 or 1979, supporting Stiff Little Fingers. He usually performs without musical backing.
Fri 2006-11-10 Back in the autumn of 1977, when I was a young and impressionable student at Leeds University, I went to my first rock concert. This is how it started (you need turn your sound up really loud to get a true impression of what it was really like). Four days later my ears were still ringing. (The video is actually from a concert in Munich, but the one that I went to in Leeds was very similar).
Wed 2006-11-08 Yesterday evening my train from Ascot to Reading was delayed for over an hour by a signal failure. Fortunately I had my commuter's survival kit with me: thick pullover, woolly hat, pencil and paper. So I dressed up warm, sat down and set to work thinking about a problem that has been worrying me for a while: "What does the root class of an object-oriented system actually represent?". I already have what I think is a satisfactory way of understanding the non-root classes as specifications of sets of objects, but with root classes this breaks down: there seems to be no set of objects that root classes correspond to. I find theories which have exceptional cases unsatisfactory and, when using them, I often get distracted trying to generalise them to remove the exceptions. Anyhow, I didn't solve the root class problem that evening, but I did work through several possibilities far enough to eliminate them, and by the time my train came, though quite chilled, I was feeling pleased with myself. These days it is quite rare that I get the chance to think about a single problem for such a length of time.
In the first volume of his 'Narrow Roads of Gene Land', evolutionary biologist William Hamilton writes that he worked out some of his early theories while waiting for trains at Waterloo. He was then working at Silwood Park near Ascot. I wonder if, in the evenings, he waited for his return train at Ascot or at Sunningdale? While I am waiting on platform 2, I like to imagine his ghost sitting on one of the benches over on platform 1 scribbling equations.
