It is common these days for machines to beep. But a few decades ago, if machines made deliberate noises to draw attention, they were usually bells or buzzers or horns. These are closely related, but distinctly different from beeps.

What was the first machine to beep? Was it the first touch-tone telephone? The BBC time pips? Or were there earlier machines that beeped? Did anything beep before the invention of radio?

The Auckland Comics Workshop is back on, after a few months of… not being on.

At present, it is not clear whether the appeal of genetic algorithms arises from their performance or from their aesthetically pleasing origins in the theory of evolution. Much work remains to be done to identify the conditions under which genetic algorithms perform well.

Ooo burn. That put those uppity genetic algorithm people in their place.

Apart from being unafraid to put the hurt on GA wannabe playas, and their thoughtful apology to Romanian readers to who are familiar with the placenames of Romania and therefore will be able only indirectly to appreciate the travelling-in-Romania analogy, another way to tell the high quality of Russell and Norvig’s Artificial Intelligence textbook is to examine the picture on the cover.

It is a computer-rendered picture of an office, and the office is cluttered with pictures of Alan Turing, and Shakey the Robot, and bits of paper with different AI notations on them, and a miscellaneous collection of other things that computer scientists think are cool. No attempt has been made to come up with a unifying image for the subject, an endeavour most academics achieve by the simple expedient of selecting a Magritte painting at random. Crucially, the picture includes the book itself, with the cover showing a smaller copy of the book in a fashion representing infinite regress.
Clearly, this is a naff picture. So naff is the picture that it conveys the unmistakable message “so great is this textbook that it requires no attractive cover design: anyone who is put off by the naff picture is not worthy of its contents”.

This is, I think, a generally applicable rule: naff picture, good textbook.

From the people who brought you Pac-Mondrian/, comes Calderoids. At last, the opportunity to fly around in one of Alexander Calder’s iconic kinetic sculptures and shoot bits of it.

The flat’s census forms arrived today. I see they have once again left the name of my ethnic group off the list, and I can only assume it was because some politically correct ignoramus thought it would offend somebody to read the word for what I am.

I understand how statistical surveys work, so I’ll tick the box designated for me so that the scanning machine can do its work. But I shall be crossing out the awful New Zealand European. It might have been an adequate designation for my great great grandparents, assuming that they’d have been willing to consider Great Britain part of Europe, but it is meaningless to me. Neither do I accept the odd notion that New Zealander is an ethnic group, when the context of a census form makes it perfectly clear that it isn’t. I will happily write that if asked for my nationality, but it has not been an ethnic group since the nineteenth century, when it was used to describe the people we now know as Maori.

After crossing out New Zealand European, I shall be writing Pakeha. That is the ethnicity I was raised in and the name I identify with, and I make a habit of writing it in whenever I’m required to fill in a form that doesn’t include it.