Anotherblog

UFO photos

Here are some photos of the Christmas decoration competition.

First up, from Level 5 West, we have the following sentiment:

…which was a fairly widely-felt opinion, I think. I might have gone that way too, except that I was struck with the urge to go the other way, and do Christmas decorations to excess instead. There wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm at first - some people wanted to do Saturnalia, but didn’t have any specific decorations in mind, and some others wanted to do the Tibetan Butter Lantern Festival, but also didn’t really feel like doing much.

Before I get to our decorations, here are some of the other efforts - a high-tech Christmas tree from Level 6 West:

A snowman from Level 5 West:

A nativity scene from Level 6 West:

And a giant present from Level 7 East:

Not pictured is the beach scene from Level 4, tastefully done with Lego figurines and beach towels and artful lighting.

For the Level 5 East theme, I was keen on doing UFOs, because I figured they’d be easy to do, completely irrelevent to Christmas, highly visible, and fun. Here’s a squadron of them.

We put up about forty UFOs, made of plastic plates and plastic balls cut in half. Some UFOs were in fights with spaceships.

And there was an ominous circle of glowing UFOs surrounding the Earth.

The Earth had only a giant penguin (sitting on the South Pole) to defend it.

Meanwhile, other UFOs were making crop circles in the snow (not pictured) and beaming up the Doctor:

At this point, we realised that our vague attempts to link UFOs to Christmas could be made more explicit by explaining that we were celebrating the imminant release of the Doctor Who special “The Christmas Invasion”. We put up posters to that effect. Meanwhile, Groundskeeper Willie was being abducted, in a much better looking abduction:

And for extra credit, we introduced Santa in his Exterminate (because Dalek’s don’t Slay):

…being pulled by his seven UFOs.

…and from another angle:

We also made a moon (not pictured) of the correct size (1/5th the size of Earth) and distance (30 Earth diameters) from the Earth.

And we won the competition (prize: catered lunch). So, I’m happy. In the end, quite a few people joined in and added their own bits - Kevin M. provided the Daleks, Chandaka made some excellent space ships from miniature plastic bowling pins, Nelson provided enthusiasm and flying robots, Gary provided enthusiasm and the plastic balls that we cut in half to form the domes of the UFOs, a bunch of other Level 5 East-ers made a nativity scene with Thunderbirds puppets, and a whole lot more people were tolerant about having fake snow mandelbrot sets sprayed on their windows. All good fun and wonderfully silly.

Christmas Decorations

I’ve never been one for much in the way of Christmas decorations, but we have a competition at work at the moment, and I’ve gotten thoroughly involved in Christmas-ifying our side of the office. However, as normal decorations are boring, I decided to do a theme of UFOs this year, in honour of the Doctor Who Christmas special “The Christmas Invasion”. So there are currently about 40 UFOs hanging up in the office, made of plastic plates and half-balls. And we have more planned. So much more. Photos to come.

More entirely predictable obsessing over archery

Scored 262 and 275 this morning (at 30m). Best round: 10 10 9 9 8 6 (52).

Over the last two sessions of archery, I’ve plateaued somewhat, due to a couple of factors - mostly, it’s me gradually getting used to the stronger bow. But there was also the discovery on Saturday morning that you’re not supposed to have your mouth open when you shoot. At all. A lot of the technique of archery is being able to repeatedly do the same things, and an important part of that is the “Anchor point”, where you touch your hand to your face as you pull the string back. It should always be in the same place. If you have your mouth open, this point varies slightly, enough to notice a variation in height of the shots. So now I’m getting used to the new anchor point. I had to do a lot of adjusting of the sight over the last two sessions, but I think I’ve got it right about now.

My current bugbear is the Release: sometimes I jerk the string back slightly before shooting, and the shot goes high. The target usually has two clusters: one near the bullseye where I am shooting properly, and another high and slightly to the right where I screwed up. But both of the clusters are quite tightly grouped, which is nice.

As for the learning procedure - it still feels good, but I’m no longer on the crest of the wave. At the moment, sometimes the shot will go bad and I won’t know why. It may be that I’m shooting suboptimally, correcting with the sight some bad technique stuff. I’ll see if I can get some more explicit tutoring on Saturday.

Spit’s modicum of fame spreads

I got an email today:

My name is Jared Axelrod, I do a weekly podcast called “The Voice Of Free Planet X,” at http://planetx.libsyn.com/ . It is mainly an outlet for my short fiction, but I like to add complimentary music as well.
Your song “Down In The Meadow” would be perfect for an upcoming story.
I would very much enjoy the opportunity to play your song with my story, if that is acceptable to you.

No doubt this is thanks to Warren Ellis’ podcast. Naturally, I said Yes to Jared’s request, and am looking forward to seeing/hearing what he does with it. Hooray!

Film Forensics

I did some minor updates to the Film Forensics website on Tuesday - simplifying the header, really - but what was nifty was that thanks to my new wireless network at home, I did the entire thing while lying in bed, sick. The powerbook was able to get an adequate signal once I’d shifted the wireless LAN box onto a book case.

I also continued writing some forensics, and got stuck at the usual point. I start most of my Film Forensics by pointing out the most obvious flaw in the original film, and then write something like “… and it would be vastly improved by…”, and then get stuck for a while. It’s quite thrilling to start a sentence assuming I’ll finish it with something satisfying, especially when the answer does eventually fall into place. Or get hammered into place (see previous discussion on the usefulness of hammers). I used to (idiotically) do this when speaking, which earned a certain degree of irritated scorn from some of my peers when I had to stop mid-sentence and have a think. Trying to impress people almost always has the opposite effect, I’ve found.

Anyway, I’m still stuck on working out a really satisfying answer. One of the characteristics of FF is that it is easy to feel that the films aren’t actually worth any amount of analysis - the films are usually mediocre or bad - which I have to overcome by telling myself that there is absolutely no film so bad or bland or sold-out that it can’t be improved *within its own rules*. This is especially true of the sequel that I’m working on at the moment.

Puzzles

Here’s a sequence.

0, 1, 2, 720!, …

What’s the next number in the sequence? I read about this one in Douglas Hofstadter’s book “Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies”, and was rather impressed to see our lunchtime gaming group solve it in less than a minute. Mind you, these were people with exactly the right kind of skills to solve it.

On Friday, Al called up with another puzzle that he was attempting to solve while driving around on a treasure chase. It was supposed to somehow guide them to the next location:

C D K F G
2 3 6 5 6
5 6 8 8 9

Our group solved this one too.

Spit!

Awesome! Our Spit song “Down in the Meadow” made it into Warren Ellis’ webcast program:

The Apparat Programme: 8

Learning

I’ve been fascinated for quite a while by the process of teaching and learning. What are the most effective teaching techniques? What encourages people to learn, and what puts people off? Oddly, although I’m sure there is plenty of material on the topic, I haven’t read any books or attended any courses, so to teaching professionals, this is likely to be a rather naive look at things. So I won’t look at schooling here, but rather my experiences with ad-hoc learning.

Explaining games
I read an excellent article a while ago - which I can’t find a link to - which described the best way of explaining a board or card game to someone. The most important thing, and the thing that people often forget, is that the first thing you should say is how to win the game. The rest of the rules are then seen in the context of how to achieve this.

I found this to be oddly profound (yeah, goal-oriented teaching, huh? Never heard that one before), and started looking at all kinds of explanations with this new hammer [1]. And it’s true: people often launch into explanations of “how” without the valuable “why” bit. Sometimes, that’s fair enough - the why is commonly understood - but far more often the “why” is either not compelling, or missing altogether.

[1] As per the saying “When all you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails”.

Learning Greek
When I started learning Greek (and Japanese) I was interested to note their theories on how to get information really stuck into someone’s head. In particular, the Pimsleur course had a technique of saying something, then repeating it one minute later, then repeating it ten minutes later, and finally half an hour later. Or something like that. In any case, the idea being that there are optimal times to reinforce memories to get them from short-term memory to long-term.

Learning juggling
Learning physical things seems to have a similar dynamic to the Pimsleur idea. In particular, I read that the top jugglers tend to use the “memory reinforcement” technique, although in a slightly different way.

When Anthony Gatto (one of the world’s best jugglers) practices, he does not spend enormous amounts of time practicing difficult tricks and dropping balls. He only does tricks he knows well, and he does them once (successfully) and then moves on to the next trick. As he gets to more difficult tricks, he breaks them down into simpler elements, practices those simpler elements, and attempts the difficult trick a few times. As soon as he succeeds, he stops and goes on to the next trick. He cycles through the tricks so that he’ll try a new trick several times in a session, but never several times in a row.

This seems obviously related. Again, we have the reinforcement periods, with the added element of making sure that you reinforce only correct actions. Always finish with a successful action. Do not do something incorrectly many times - if you fail, don’t try try again, unless you are certain you know what you were doing wrong and you know how to stop doing it. It’s better to practice things you know how to do right.

So why don’t more people do this? It’s because practicing things you *can* do is boring. You want to do cool new stuff. I’m in this position with juggling and guitar. I really ought to practice tricks/music I know well and make sure they are as good as I can make them. And when I practice something new and difficult, I should approach it in stages, and only go to the stage I can confidently do well (but am challenged by). In practice, I try things that are much too hard, and do them poorly and learn bad habits associated with doing things too fast (in guitar, bad left hand technique because I am rushing things. In juggling, spending more time correcting bad throws than making sure I do good throws).

Especially with physical endeavours, it’s a tricky thing to walk that line. But when you do…

Learning Archery
You know I’d get back to this, didn’t you? I’ve been obssessing about archery recently, and that’s unlikely to stop for at least another month. But there’s some interesting stuff going on with my learning process. I have learned from my poor learning practices with my other sports/hobbies.

Archery is very exciting for me at the moment because I feel as though I am on the crest of a learning wave. Every lesson brings new developments and corrections. I’m eliminating bad habits before they have time to get hold. I’m not attempting to push my technique too quickly, and finishing on a good score. Every time I start, I feel that the benefits from my previous lessons have sunk in thanks to good reinforcement. I went to archery on Wednesday morning (yes, I know, burnout) and tried the heavier bow properly, and it worked very well this time. By the end of the session I was shooting as well with it as I had with the lighter bow, and I had consolidated my anchor point (the place on your chin that you bring the arrow back to when drawing) and fixed a few other minor errors with technique. I got four bullseyes in a row at one point, while the instructor was watching.

I think part of the reason that this this approach works well is that archery is a very contemplative sport. There is no other player to complicate matters (did I do a poor shot, or did they do a good shot?), and you have a good amount of time between shots to make yourself aware of what you are doing well, what you are not, and what you should therefore concentrate on.