Posted by martin on
Thursday, 18 May 2006 at 09:26
Two weeks today until exams; the past papers seem to be reasonably doable - at least when you are used to olympiad problems that take hours each. We are still getting some lectures as well, of which the most interesting and hardest are on topology; I have been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this and learning it by discovery. (Very briefly, topology is the study of continuous maps: you start off with some space or surface, then map each point from that space to a point in some other space; the map is continuous if points that started off close together end up close together.)
There have been three TCMS concerts in the past couple of weeks, including a special one in the Wren Library instead of our normal venue of the chapel. That meant lots of moving of chairs from the chapel store to the library. It’s a nice building but a slightly odd concert venue; actually both the Wren Library and the chapel are very long and thin, which seems to me a strange shape for a chapel.
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Martin
Tags exams, tcms, trinity, tripos
Posted by martin on
Friday, 05 May 2006 at 17:21
I have become warden of the College Chapel for Thursday evensongs. This means ensuring there are readers (a rota is produced by the Chapel Secretary, but I have to sort it out if someone can’t do it), lighting the candles, giving out orders of service, closing the doors at the start of the service and opening them at the end, and counting the people in the congregation - this has to be recorded in a register of services (is this some sort of peculiar Anglican custom, or does it happen in the Presbyterian church as well?) Last night it added up to 64 people (counting 28 in the choir) which is far more than I thought there would be!
Yesterday we had elections to Cambridge City Council. These work in a somewhat bizarre fashion, with one third of the council elected each year and a break every fourth year. The reason this is so silly is that people get to vote the same way every time, so each ward has three councillors from the same party; whereas if all three were elected at once, a candidate from a second party could be elected if more than a third of people voted for them. Secondly, I did not have to prove my identity to vote; even the polling card which I received in the post said I did not have to bring it. Elections in Northern Ireland are clearly much better organised.
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Martin
Tags chapel, elections, trinity
Posted by martin on
Monday, 24 April 2006 at 17:02
Last term I got out of the habit of posting; sorry about that. You will consequently have missed that I have become Membership Secretary for the Trinity College Music Society and Bookshop Manager for the Archimedeans (University maths society). The first is not a terribly difficult task, which means maintaining the members database and making membership cards for new members, and also stewarding at a few concerts per term. We had a committee meeting this afternoon, held on the Fellows’ Bowling Green thanks to the sunny weather (although it is not yet very warm).
A major event this term will be exams. I have four exams at the start of June. We are expected to work pretty hard before that, doing a year’s worth of past papers each week, with two supervisions a week to go through them. There are also four weeks of lectures, but these are not examined until next year and you can choose not to go to some of them until next year. In any case, we will get no supervisions on them this term.
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Martin
Tags archimedeans, tcms, tripos
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 21 February 2006 at 13:50
The room ballot, when we choose our rooms for next year, will take place on 6th March. The way this works is: the second years have already made their choices and the college has allocated rooms for prospective first years, so we get what’s left. We are assigned a random order, then choose rooms in that order. Next year the same list is used in reverse order, although people who get firsts are moved to the top. I am 44th out of 199 which is reasonably good.
Tags accommodation, trinity
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Posted by martin on
Friday, 17 February 2006 at 13:50
IP stands for the Internet Protocol, the system by which data on the Internet finds its destination. Every computer or other device connected to the Internet is given an IP address, a series of numbers which identify where the computer is. Whenever a message (called a packet) is sent from one computer to another, it is given to the IP system along with the address it has to be sent to, then passed from one router to another until it arrives. An important point is that IP doesn’t care what is in the packet - that is determined by other systems, and it could be a part of an email, a Web page, a downloaded file or an action in an online game.
The Internet is not by any means the only system that needs to pass data between many different devices: for example the telephone network is a far older and almost completely separate system; on a much smaller scale, the different alarms in a building security system need to talk to each other. This is where the versatility of IP which I mentioned above comes into play: by using the existing IP network, people setting up a new communication system avoid needing their own cables and having to design a routing mechanism. You may have heard of VOIP (Voice-over-IP) which sends telephone calls through IP packets across the Internet. And one surprising place where IP is taking over is in controlling the heating systems in large buildings.
This isn’t really what I sat down and intended to write, but hopefully it is helpful in explaining what IP is, and why you may hear people get excited about it.
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Martin
Tags internet, phone, techexplain