An easy find while taking a shortcut through the woods on my way to the 2018-08-23 50 -1 geohashing hashpoint (an
expedition that was eventually successful, though not without its challenges)! Container was exposed so I placed nearby stick on top of it to better conceal it. TFTC!
Better than your usual services cache-and-dash, I really appreciated that this cache took me away from the service station and along up a delightful little bridleway, this morning, not
to mention the decent-sized container!
I’m on my way down the A34 from Oxford in an expedition to the 2018-08-23 50 – 1 geohashpoint, before doubling back to
my actual destination of Winchester. With this cache, you not only gave me a welcome break, but also an excuse to stop and eat breakfast. TFTC!
I’m keen to get to level 2 of the Minesweeper Geohash achievement, and this
far-South-of-graticule hashpoint represents an opportunity to achieve that. I’ll be at work during the day, but – energy levels permitting after what’ll have been a long day! – I’ll
find a way to get up here and see if I can get to the hashpoint, aiming to arrive probably around 18:30.
Expedition
It had been a long day at work, but it looked to be a beautiful evening and I promised myself a pub dinner if I made it to the hashpoint, so I set out by car and by foot to East
Adderbury, the village nearest to the hashpoint. The village itself is stunning: lots of old stone buildings, a very traditional bridge, and beautiful green spaces. I spotted not one
but two candidate pubs (The Red Lion and The Coach & Horses) as I passed through the village, which was a reassuring start, and then pressed on
down a lane which quickly became a narrow trail, waving to some cows along the way (why do I always seem to meet cattle on my hashing adventures?).
The trail was full of blackberries so I wasn’t short of a snack, but it soon became clear that it wouldn’t get me any closer than 35m to the hashpoint. I returned to the entrance to the
cows’ field and, hopping a stile, crossed it. The cows looked puzzled as I paced around, getting to ground zero, but didn’t object. After shooting the traditional silly grin, I turned
tail and headed back into the village and to the Coach & Horses, which proved to be the very essence of a British village pub: a husband and wife couple running it, dogs everywhere, a
jar of pickled onions behind the bar, and more beers than you can shake a stick at.
I did enjoy a rather unusual conversation at the bar, though –
Me: Can I get a ham, egg, and chips please. And a pint of bitter shandy.
Barman: One egg or two?
Me: Oh! Two, please.
Barman:(Pause) We haven't got any eggs.
Me: Uhh. Okay; no eggs then.
Barman's wife: We've got one egg.
Barman: We've got one egg.
Me: I'll have one egg, then.
(I go and sit outside; after a while, my meal arrives. There are two eggs.)Barman's wife: I found another egg.
Me: ...
The Coach and Horses, The Green, Adderbury, Banbury OX17 3ND, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Good food at spectacular prices. Friendly staff and free WiFi. A serendipitous find as I was exploring the village on my way back from a geohashing expedition: I’d certainly come back
if I find myself in this neck of the woods again.
Earlier this year, 2 friends and I decided to take on a hitch-hiking challenge to raise money for a charity called ‘The Campaign Against Living Miserably’. Last Friday Magnus, Sergio
and I set off from Brick Lane with the intention of reaching the town of ‘Twatt’ on the Archipelago of Orkney – we gave ourselves…
An especially-good post by Robin as part of his 52 Reflect series in which (among other adventures), he… hitches a lift on an
aeroplane! Well-worth reading!
Earlier this year I found a mystery cable. But today, I’ve got an even bigger mystery. What the hell is this?
It’s a… thing?
I found it in a meeting room at work, tucked away in a corner. Aside from the power cord, there are no obvious interfaces to it.
There are two keyhole-shaped “buttons” which can be pressed down about 2cm and which spring back up (except when they jam, but I think they’re not supposed to).
My best bet is that it’s some kind of induction-based charger? I imagine some kind of device like a radio microphone or walkie-talkie that can be pushed-in to these holes and the button
“spring” is just about closing the hole when it’s not in use. But the box is old, based on the style of plug, cable, and general griminess of the hardware… not to mention that
it’s got a stack of PAT test stickers going back at least 11 years.
No real markings anywhere on it: there’s a small hole in the (metal) base and PAT test stickers.
I’ve plugged it in and tried “pressing” the buttons but it doesn’t appear to do anything, which supports my “induction charger” hypothesis. But what does it charge? I must
know!
Edit:The only Electrak I can find make lighting control systems. Could it be
something to do with lighting control? I can’t find anything that looks like this on their website, though.
The plugs apparently look something like this, although I can’t find any here.
Edit 3: Hang on a minute… the most-recent PAT test sticker indicates that it was tested in… November 2019. Now my working hypothesis is that this is some kind
of power supply system for a time machine we haven’t yet built. I’ve asked a number of colleagues what it’s for (i.e. what plugs into it) and nobody seems to have a clue.
For those that don’t know, the skinny version is this: in May 2008 an XKCD comic was published proposing (or at least joking about) a new game with a
name reminiscient of geocaching. To play the game, participants use a mathematical hashing function on the current date
and the most recent Dow Jones Industrial Average opening value to generate sets of random coordinates around the
globe and then try to find their way to them, hopefully experiencing adventures along the way. The nature of stock markets and hashing functions means that the coordinates for any given
day are effectively random and impossible to predict (far) in advance, so it’s sometimes described as a spontaneous adventure generator.
The XKCD comic that started it all.
Recently, I found myself wondering about how much of a disadvantage players are at if they live in very “wet” graticules. Residents of the Channel Islands graticule (49 -2), for example, are confined to two land masses surrounded entirely by water. And while it’s
true that water hashpoints can be visited if you’re determined enough, it’s still got to be considered to be
playing at a disadvantage compared to those of us lucky ones in landlocked graticules like mine (51 -1).
And because I’m me and so can’t comfortably leave a question unanswered, I wrote a program to try to answer it! It’s among the hackiest, dirtiest software solutions I’ve ever written,
so if it works for you then it’s a flipping miracle. What it does is:
Determines which OpenStreetMap tiles (the image files served to your browser when you use OpenStreetMap) cover the graticule in question, and downloads them.
Extracts information about the colour of each pixel in each tile.
Counts the proportion of “water blue” pixels to other pixels (this isn’t perfect, because it trips over things like ferry lines on the map as being “not water”, especially at low
zoom-levels).
Some parts of Worcester College Lake are identified as “not water” on account of the text overlay.
I mentioned it was hacky, right?
You can try it for yourself, if you’d like. You’ll need NodeJS, wget, wc, and ImageMagick – all pretty standard or easy-to-get things on a typical Linux box. Run with
node geohash-pcwater.js 51 -1, where 51 -1 is the identifier for the graticule you’re interested in. And in case you’re interested – the Swindon graticule (where I live) is
about 0.68% water, but the Channel Islands graticule is closer to 93.13% water. That’s no small disadvantage: sorry, Channel Islands geohashers!
Update 2018-08-22: discovered some prior art that takes a
somewhat-similar approach.
A letter I got recently and a question I was asked in another forum really got me to thinking. The question was: How did you come to realize that poly-amorous relationships were
right for you? Now …
A letter I got recently and a question I was asked in another forum really got me to thinking. The question was: How did you come to realize that poly-amorous relationships were right
for you? Now that you live this lifestyle, do you think that it’s for everyone, or more “natural” than monogamy? I answered:…
I was pleased to see that one of my favourite poly bloggers came out and said what I’ve always argued: that polyamory might well not be for everyone! I’m a big fan of the idea
that everybody can learn some useful relationship-negotiation and communication skills from studying the practice of polyamory, but I’m certainly not suggesting that my lifestyle ought
to be everybody else’s!
Oh my Goat! We just finished reading this awesome pick-a-path story that helps children learn the power of kindness. Have a go… #OatTheGoat
Discovered this fun interactive storybook; it tells the tale of a goat called Oat who endeavours to climb a mountain (making friends along the way). At a few points, it presents as a
“choose your own adventure”-style book (although the forks are artificial and making the “wrong” choice immediately returns you the previous page), but it still does a reasonable job at
looking at issues of bullying and diversity.
If you happened to flip through a PC gaming magazine in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you would’ve probably seen an ad for a game called Leisure
Suit Larry, or one of its many sequels. It was a graphic adventure game first released in 1987 with the primary goal of helping its protagonist get laid. Since most games then
leaned heavily into cartoon violence, Larry’s sexual innuendo stood out. To young boys at the time, it had the mystique of a shrink-wrapped Playboy in a convenience store.
For the past 9 months I have been presenting versions of this talk to AI researchers, investors, politicians and policy makers. I felt it was time to share these ideas with a wider
audience. Thanks to the Ditchley conference on Machine Learning in 2017 for giving me a fantastic platform to get early…
Summary: The central prediction I want to make and defend in this post is that continued rapid progress in machine learning will drive the emergence of a new kind of
geopolitics; I have been calling it AI Nationalism. Machine learning is an omni-use technology that will come to touch all sectors and parts of society. The transformation of both the
economy and the military by machine learning will create instability at the national and international level forcing governments to act. AI policy will become the single most
important area of government policy. An accelerated arms race will emerge between key countries and we will see increased protectionist state action to support national champions,
block takeovers by foreign firms and attract talent. I use the example of Google, DeepMind and the UK as a specific example of this issue. This arms race will potentially speed up the
pace of AI development and shorten the timescale for getting to AGI. Although there will be many common
aspects to this techno-nationalist agenda, there will also be important state specific policies. There is a difference between predicting that something will happen and believing this
is a good thing. Nationalism is a dangerous path, particular when the international order and international norms will be in flux as a result and in the concluding section I discuss
how a period of AI Nationalism might transition to one of global cooperation where AI is treated as a global public good.
Excellent inspiring and occasionally scary look at the impact that the quest for general-purpose artificial intelligence has on the international stage. Will we enter an age of “AI
Nationalism”? If so, how will we find out way to the other side? Excellent longread.
This footpath is less overgrown than I feared it might turn out to be.
The first field I found myself in was – just about – navigable by a (pushed) bicycle.
But eventually my bike had to be left behind and I carried on alone.
Success! Silly grin engaged as I stand at the hashpoint.
The fields had recently been harvested of their corn.
It’s a whole lot of fields (panoramic photograph).
On the way home, I spotted a gasometer and photographed/filmed it for my US friends (they’re even rarer in the US than here)!
For obvious reaosns, they don’t let idiots like me get up-close with enormous containers full of flammable gas, even when (like this one) they’re actually empty.
Success! Because I didn’t EXPECT to be hashing today, I didn’t have my GPSr and so didn’t make a tracklog, but my phone managed to get me there.
My meeting this afternoon got cancelled and my nearest hashpoint is only 6.5km (4 miles) away from my office. I can get this!
Expedition
After a productive morning’s work, I was genuinely slightly disappointed that a meeting I was scheduled to have this afternoon had to be rescheduled. But on the other hand… that meant
that I could get away with extending my lunch break slightly and getting out to the hashpoint! I’d initially worried that it’d be inaccessibly buried on private land when Google Maps
and satellite photography showed it to be deep in a block of cornfields, but OpenStreetMap came to the rescue and showed a public footpath somewhere in the very close vicinity of the
target coordinates. And so, jumping aboard my bike, I set out!
600m from the coordinates I ran out of road and switched to the footpath, which I was pleased to discover was in reasonably-good condition: many underused local footpaths are not being
very well-maintained at the moment and are often overgrown, but I was even able to bring my bike along this one and into the first field, although I had to push it rather than ride and
I soon learned the error of my ways when the terrain got even rougher and I reached a narrow bridge – too narrow for my bike – spanning a dyke and entering the second field. Both fields
had recently been cleared of corn, and whatever route the official footpath was supposed to take became rapidly unclear, but that’s probably for the best because I’m pretty sure I
wasn’t on it by the time I reached the edge of the next field.
The hashpoint seemed to be along the fence somewhere so I followed it along – waving to some nearby cows – until my phone told me that I was under 3m from the spot. Hurrah! I snapped a
panorama photo and started heading back, pausing a few times when I realised that I really, really couldn’t find where I’d left my bike. On the cycle home I passed a Gasometer which, because I’m told they’re super-rare in the USA, I thought I’d snap a picture of for
those of you who ‘hash on the other side of the pond to oggle at.
Video
I actually remembered to shoot video of this expedition (well, all within a kilometre of the hashpoint and mostly within the last 350 metres!). It’s mostly just me rambling as I ramble,
although there’s (brief) explanation of the Surprise Gasometer for those of you who live in countries where you don’t routinely see these interesting structures:
Photos
Setting out by bike to the hashpoint.
This footpath is less overgrown than I feared it might turn out to be.
The fields had recently been harvested of their corn.
The first field I found myself in was – just about – navigable by a (pushed) bicycle.
But eventually my bike had to be left behind and I carried on alone.
It’s a whole lot of fields (panoramic photograph).
Success! Silly grin engaged as I stand at the hashpoint.
On the way home, I spotted a gasometer and photographed/filmed it for my US friends (they’re even rarer in the US than here)!
For obvious reaosns, they don’t let idiots like me get up-close with enormous containers full of flammable gas, even when (like this one) they’re actually empty.
Success! Because I didn’t EXPECT to be hashing today, I didn’t have my GPSr and so didn’t make a tracklog, but my phone managed to get me there.
