I’m really not sure how useful this is but I think it’s pretty cool – a text to Pitman shorthand converter. It also does text to Gregg shorthand and…erm..something in German.

This means “I like owls”:

Maybe if you were learning Pitman you could use this to check you’re doing it right? Or just use it to send random notes to people that they won’t understand

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I went to a talk last night at the York Astro Society on achieving nuclear fusion – it was given by Prof. Howard Wilson from the University of York and it was really cool. Here are some things I learned:

- The sun is the only working fusion reactor in the solar system. This actually seems obvious once you say it but it’s pretty cool to think that scientists are trying to achieve something that only the sun *actually* does.

- E=mc² is totally related to fusion. For some reason this never made sense when I did physics at school, but last night Prof. Wilson explained it. Basically, when you take a teeny tiny bit of mass (for example some hydrogen nuclei!) and times it by the speed of light twice, you get a HUGE number out. This huge number, E, is the enormous energy that fusion produces.

- The simplest form of fusion uses two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. These are chemically the same as hydrogen, the only difference being that deuterium has one neutron and tritium has two neutrons (hydrogen doesn’t have any). Deuterium is really common – about 1 in 6000 parts of water is made with deuterium instead of hydrogen, so just like we get h₂o we also get d₂o. Tritium is really rare however, but it can be extracted from lithium.

- If you performed fusion on the lithium battery from your laptop and half a bath full of water, you’d have enough energy for your entire lifetime (!!).

- In practical terms, scientists have to take these simple particles (deuterium and tritium), superheat them to 10x the heat of the sun (resulting in plasma), so that all the particles smash together, and then control the reaction so that the fusion keeps going. In order to do this they’ve built really cool machines called Tokamaks, which use magnetic fields to hold the plasma in place. If the plasma hits the walls of the container it a) damages the machine and b) ruins the reaction so fusion just won’t happen.

- Europe’s Tokamak is called Jet, and its situated in Culham in Oxfordshire. This Tokamak is the hottest place *and* the coldest place in the solar system, because of the superheating and supercooling involved in making it run.

- Interestingly, they don’t use tritium in tests at the moment, although it would be the most efficient way. Apparently once they get closer to understanding fusion they’ll do it properly.

- Fusion power is measured by something called Q, which is basically a ratio of input power to output power. Obviously, scientists want the output power to be greater than the input power, and when this is achieved fusion will actually be useful. In 1997, Jet achieved 0.7 Q which sounds pretty close, but to get it even closer you need to improve the efficiency of the reaction by some big factors.

- There’s new reactor being built right now called ITER – the design of this is being improved all the time thanks to research from Jet and other Tokamaks. It’s going to be (if I remember rightly) twice as big as Jet and although this means it’s got a good chance of achieving fusion, there are also lots of things that can go wrong thanks to the huge heat and energy levels involved. Exciting stuff!

- Fusion research has been going on for decades, and in the 50′s (I think?) scientists said that they’d achieve fusion within 40 years. Of course 40 years have been and gone and we still don’t have fusion. Apparently one of the main reasons for this is funding. ITER for example will cost 10 billion Euros and is funded by six different nations, but persuading governments to work together and provide the cash seems to take a long time.

These are just the things I can remember off the top of my head. There was a lot more and I feel like I’m totally clued up on fusion research and Tokamaks. It’s really exciting that something like ITER is being built and I hope I see it in the news (for good reasons) before too long

You can see a video of Jet in action – one of the things I wondered last night was what the portholes in Jet (so that people can see into the reaction chamber) were made off. If the whole thing is steel wouldn’t glass be a weak point? Anyway, as the video description says, it was filmed through a quartz window. So there you go!

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Since the unveiling of the new Apple iPad the other day, people have been fearmongering about how it’s going to challenge the Amazon Kindle…as a Kindle owner all I can say is “yeah, right”. For a more balanced view however, trip on over to Frog’s blog for an Apple iPad vs Amazon Kindle showdown.

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Have you ever seen The Polar Express? Did it feel kind of creepy? It did for me – I remember the first time I saw it on telly, channel flicking to a scene halfway through where Tom Hanks is handing out tea to the kids on the train. After a few seconds of vague discomfort I said “eurgh! what’s wrong with them?!”

That weird feeling…of something creepy, something pseudo-familiar, something not-quite right, has a Name. It’s called the Uncanny Valley.

The term was coined by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist who apart from starting a robot-building competition in Japan, studied the relations of religion, psychology and metaphysics to the development of robots.

He was particularly interested in the relationship between humans and robots, and carried out a study into our emotional responses to ‘non-human entities’. His findings are shown in the graph above.

Mori found that humans are increasingly positive towards robots the more lifelike they become…that is, until they become TOO lifelike. Then robots elicit not empathy, but revulsion.

If you think that Tom Hanks in The Polar Express is pretty damn creepy, you’re in the Uncanny Valley.

Several theories have been put forward to explain this reaction, from our cognitive mate-selection ability repulsing us from robots, to our pathogen-avoidance defences kicking in when we see something that looks like it could be diseased. Whatever it is, it seems that thanks to the Uncanny Valley, robots won’t be infiltrating society any time soon.

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SFF Meta is a new meta-critic site for sci-fi and fantasy, and it has the potential to be my new favourite time-waster. It’s easy to navigate, covers the kind of books I like, and just a quick browse has given me half a dozen titles to go buy off Amazon.

Downsides? Well, so far each book only has a few reviews and they’re drawn from other sites. SFF Meta lacks user-generated content. I’m really hoping this accounts for such horrors as The Court of the Air being on the 2007 ‘low scoring’ list, and The Gathering Storm scoring 84/100, when tbh I would quite gladly throw The Wheel of Time series onto a bonfire.

Anyway, I’d like to see SFF Meta open up their site to user reviews instead of just drawing them from elsewhere. It’s a neat idea and even I of so little time and so much apathy would contribute. Like any good community it would moderate itself and the seriously good fiction would rise to the top.

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First off, many thanks to Dom for organising ThinkVis and giving me a hotel room on Friday night – Drink Visibility was great fun and I got to meet lots of lovely people, including Shaun, Guy, Alastair, Joanna and many others I can’t find on the Interweb.

Nursing a hangover and with a MacMuffin breakfast sitting heavily in my stomach I made it to Think Vis itself – it was great to see everyone from Northern Bloggers again and finally meet Simon and Steven who I’ve known on Twitter for ages!

I’m not going to go into detail – lots of others have done fantastic write-ups, but I think my favourite talk was Peter Cooper who got all motivational and made me want to go out and do stuff!. All in all it was a great day, and I’ve left out loads of names so if I’ve met you there and haven’t mentioned it just drop me a comment with your site/twitter and I’ll add you in!

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We don’t all live in London. This may come as a surprise, but it’s true. Sometimes 200 miles is a bit too far to travel for a conference, especially when your boss turns white at the very mention of paying for a hotel and as for the £XXX entry fee itself, well, he’s just run off to the bathroom clutching at his stomach.

Outside the M25 we’re a bit more down to earth. Leeds’ newest and bestest internet conference, Think Visibility, organised by Mr. TheHodge, costs just £30 and speakers include:

Dave Naylor
Al Carlton
Jamie Harrop
Dirk Ginader
Tim Nash
Tom Smith
Katie Lips
Richard Hamer
Dan Lynch
Patrick Altoft
Tom Critchlow
Kieron Donoghue
Guy Redwood
Rob Lee
Peter Cooper

If that’s not enough to have you weeing yourself in excitement, there are nibbles and a party afterwards.

If you don’t know where Old Broadcasting House is, look on a map. See you there!

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I found something disturbing in Google’s search suggest feature today:

Is this such a popular phrase that it’s made it into Google’s database? Is Barry Chuckle indeed dead? All I know is, the nation cares.

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After emailing Jeff a little while ago, and since those “I’m a PC” adverts are still on tv all the time, I thought I’d email Sean. One again I got a reply quickly, but it wasn’t quite so fun:

Hi. I got your email. Well, not really. A server that receives and stores emails sent to this address got your email. I, however, don’t so much check it anymore. It was fun to get to connect with many people for a while. Thanks.

Sean

In fact, it’s not fun at all. Sean is no longer on my “favourite Windows people” list

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Ok, I cracked and emailed jeff@windows.com from that PC advert. Because I’m a massive geek.

I got a reply!

Hi –
Thanks for your email. I apologize if I can’t send you a more personalized response than this auto-reply – I’m super busy these days trying to optimize my code & squeeze out that last drop of performance. Or sleeping off a caffeine crash
In case you were wondering (you did email me, right?), I’m a software engineer working on Windows Networking technologies. (Networking, like, wireless internet and all that}.

OK. I really need to get back to work now, so bye & thanks again for your email.
–Jeff

So is Jeff real? I think so, but I bet after that advert he had to change his email address

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