Category Archives: miscellaneous

How many elephants? Get helpful comparisons of height, distance, area, volume, time, speed and other quantities.

How many elephants?

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When people are trying to convey a quantity, they will generally try to compare it to something that they think people already have a feel for. For example, ‘weighing as much as 10 elephants’ or ‘twice the area of a tennis court’. But people often come up with terrible comparisons, and this grates on my nerves. So I have done a little side project to generate comparisons for you. I named it ‘How many elephants’ as elephants (and Jumbo jets) seem to figure a lot in these comparisons.

It allows you to create comparisons for:

  • Length/Height
  • Area
  • Volume
  • Mass/Weight
  • Time
  • Velocity/Speed
  • Energy

I might add more dimensions, such as force, acceleration and pressure, later on.

You can try it at http://howmanyelephants.co.uk/ .

It is just a single page of HTML + CSS + JQuery. I used Microsoft Copilot to generate the image and, as a sort of turbocharged Stackoverflow, to help me with the coding.

Did I miss a good comparison or make a mistake? Feel free to give some feedback in the comments.

The heat death of the Internet

Anyone who has a blog will be used to endless emails along the line of:

“Hey, I love your blog. I particularly love what you said about <last blog post title>. Please can I post some irrelevant and worthless garbage on it? All I ask in return for my auto-generated drivel, is some backlinks to a mafia-run gambling website.”

No. No. NO.

Who knows how much time I have spent over the last 19 year deleting crap like this.

But this email, which turned up today, stood out for the particularly low effort that went into it.

Garbage email.

I wonder how many people this was emailed to? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? What a waste of people’s attention and time. The most precious thing we have.

I see a future where more and more of people’s attention is diverted into dealing with low-effort, auto-generated garbage like this. An arms race where the scumbags have all the advantages.

Slow handclap for ‘Giovanni’. Your parents must be very proud.

Rocket science for teenagers

This is a video of a talk about model rocketry I did this summer, at the brilliant EMF festival.

If you live in the UK, US, Japan or France, why not enter a team into your national competition in 2025? You might also get to go to the International Youth rocketry challenge at the Paris Airshow.

Visiting Tanzania

I recently visited Tanzania on holiday with my family, spending a week on safari and a week at a hotel on Zanzibar. It is an amazing country and one which I think more people should consider visiting.

On our safari we saw an incredible number of big animals. Lions, cheetahs, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, zebra, elephants, wildebeest, buffalo, warthogs, ostriches, flamingos, hyenas, jackals, gazelles, baboons, monkeys and much more. Here are a few of the photos I took (from over a thousand!):

In the national parks the animals are quite used to safari trucks and don’t pay them much attention. We got within a few meters of lions and elephants. We spent an hour parked right next to a pride of lions, including some very young lions. The one other truck left, so we had a whole pride of lions to ourselves. We were so close I thought our driver was going to run over a lion’s tail at one point, as he repositioned the truck. We also saw a leopard and a couple of rhino, but only from a distance.

There were a few instances where there were 10 or 20 trucks crowded together trying to view something. But this was mercifully rare. Perhaps it is more of an issue in peak season in some of the more famous locations, such as the Ngorongoro crater.

There were some wild monkeys living in the grounds of the hotel we stayed at on Zanzibar. They seemed as curious about us as we were about them.

We didn’t see a lot of insects or spiders, apart from lots of ants. I am interested in bugs, so that was a bit disappointing for me (other family members felt differently). The army ants were fascinating to watch, but also surprisingly fast at climbing up your trouser leg to bite you on the arse. We saw lots of lizards, but no snakes.

The accommodation we stayed at were smart lodges and camps. One of the camps we stayed at was in the Serengeti. The accommodation was in tents, but they were quite grand tents. They even had voice operated showers – you asked the man for a shower at 6pm and he turned up at exactly 6pm and filled up the gravity fed shower tank with hot water! Wild animals regularly wander through the camp at night. It is quite an experience to get escorted from the dinner tent to your bedroom tent by a Maasai with a spear.

On safari you will almost certainly travel in a modified Toyota Landcruiser. These generally seat 7 plus a guide/driver. They are pretty comfortable and the pop-top is excellent for viewing animals and taking photos.

The night sky in Tanzania is amazing. But it can be a struggle to find somewhere dark enough to fully appreciate it. When you are out in the bush it is properly dark, but you can’t wander off without risking becoming a lion or hyena snack. It would be great if lodges and hotels turned off all their lights for 15 minutes every night.

Tanzanians seem fairly laid back. Apparently there are 120 ethnic groups, but they seem to get along pretty well. You will hear ‘Hakuna Matata’ a lot, which is Swahili for ‘no problem’ (it wasn’t invented by Disney). I didn’t get any sense that mzungu (white people) were resented. We did get people trying to sell us stuff, but it was never aggressive. Our driver/guide (Lazaro) was brilliant and spoke good English. The staff at all the camps and lodges were very obliging, even if things did sometimes get lost in translation.

It is amazing to see all the children walking to and from school. Some of them very young and unaccompanied. Apparently it isn’t unusual for them to walk 5 to 10 km each way, every school day! I felt it was good for my 18 year old son to see first hand what life is like in a developing country, and not take our western lifestyle for granted.

Tanzanian health and safety is definitely not up to European levels. One of our group lent on a substantial-looking metal fence in the Ngorongoro crater. It immediately gave way and he fell, hurting his ribs and shoulder quite badly. He only just missed hitting his head on a big rock, which could have easily been fatal. On closer inspection, most of the bolts were missing from the fence. I also got a shock off a light switch in a hotel. So do bear that in mind and definitely have medical insurance.

While the main draw of Tanzania is the animals, the scenery is also pretty spectacular. We were within sight of Kilimanjaro for a few days, but the top was obscured in cloud throughout.

I would recommend Tanzania to anyone who wants to visit Africa to see animals. We had a great time. Just be careful about what fences you lean on!

Notes

  • You will probably need to arrange a visa online before you go. This was relatively straightforward and granted within a few days.
  • The currency is Tanzanian shillings (about 3000 to 1 GBP). You can’t take Tanzanian shillings out of the country, which means are unlikely to be able to get them until you land. US dollars are also widely accepted, as long as the notes aren’t too old or damaged.
  • You can get a Tanzanian e-sim for your phone from companies like Airalo. But don’t expect much reception outside cities. Most of the camps and lodges we stayed at had reasonable wi-fi at least some of time. Good enough for work email, anyway.
  • Prices in shops are (mostly) negotiable. Expect to haggle for souvenirs.
  • A lot of Tanzania is quite high in altitude and the temperatures were quite pleasant when we visited in June/July.
  • English is reasonably widely spoken, especially by people working in guiding, hotels, shops etc. Some of the guides also speak other European languages.
  • Tanzania is quite a conservative country with a large Muslim minority, especially on Zanzibar. So bear that in mind when choosing your wardrobe (ladies especially).
  • Food was good at the various lodges and camps we stayed at. It was generally a big breakfast, a choice or packed lunch and a three course dinner. My being vegetarian wasn’t a problem.
  • Lodges and camps have a tip box and it is customary to put a tip in the box as you leave, rather than tipping individual staff.
  • Malaria is an issue. So it is a good idea to cover up and use DEET. Especially at dawn and dusk. Light coloured clothing is generally recommended. I was a vision in beige. All the rooms had mosquito nets. None of us got bitten more than a handful of times.
  • We all took malaria medication. But I reacted violently to this after a week, exploding at both ends (not quite simultaneously, thankfully). Our guide said that this reaction was relatively common. I stopped taking the medication and was nearly back to normal after 24 hours. No one else in our group had a reaction. I am a special snowflake.

The AI bullshit singularity

I’m sure we are all familiar with the idea of a technological singularity. Humans create an AI that is smart enough to create an even smarter successor. That successor then creates an even smarter successor. The process accelerates through a positive feedback loop, until we reach a technological singularity, where puny human intelligence is quickly left far behind.

Some people seem to think that Large Language Models could be the start of this process. We train the LLMs on vast corpuses of human knowledge. The LLMs then help humans create new knowledge, which is then used to train the next generation of LLMs. Singularity, here we come!

But I don’t think so. Human nature being what it is, LLMs are inevitably going to be used to churn out vast amount of low quality ‘content’ for SEO and other commercial purposes. LLM nature being what it is, a lot of this content is going to be hallucinated. In otherwords, bullshit. Given that LLMs can generate content vastly faster than humans can, we could quickly end up with an Internet that is mostly bullshit. Which will then be used to train the next generation of LLM. We will eventually reach a bullshit singularlity, where it is almost impossible to work out whether anything on the Internet is true. Enshittification at scale. Well done us.

Ship Of Fools

I recently had a 3 week holiday in Florida with my family. My 17 year old son is interested in rocketry and my wife is interested in wildlife. We got to see plenty of both and had a great time. There is a lot to like about America and Americans. But the sheer waste of resources on show everywhere was pretty shocking. In Europe we absolutely aren’t doing enough to protect the environment and avert the impending climate catastrophe (I flew to Florida and drove a car there, so I am no environmental saint myself). In Florida they don’t appear to be even trying.

Let’s start with plastic. Everything seems to be made of plastic, wrapped in plastic or both. This is a hotel breakfast for the 3 of us. That is a serious amount of plastic.

Plastic cutlery is the order of the day. And even the plastic cutlery is individually wrapped in plastic! The very cheapest hotels in the UK give you metal cutlery.

Apples were individually wrapped in plastic.

We even saw oranges wrapped in plastic. Nature already provided oranges with their own wrapper! I don’t remember the plastic issue being as bad when I travelled through Wyoming, Utah and Colorado in 1999. Maybe it’s a hangover from COVID?

And then there are the cars. We did a quick informal survey and over half the vehicles on the road were massive SUVs and even more massive pickup trucks, with macho names like ‘Raptor’ and ‘Titan’. The very low tax on petrol/gas (by European standards) makes this possible. These pickup trucks are clearly being used mostly by people from the suburbs who do not need a huge pickup truck. We hired a ‘mid-size’ (but big by European standards) SUV ourselves as, in a previous trip, we had found it quite intimidating to drive a European sized saloon car on American roads.

The front of these pick-up trucks is so high that a pedestrian hit by one is definitely going under, rather than over. Especially the ridiculous ‘raised’ pickup trucks, which are very common.

Not that there are many pedestrians in Florida, of course. You are expected to have a car and drive everywhere. You can even eat your breakfast in your car.

The breakfast drive-thru queue at Fort Myers Dunkin Donuts.

The provision of pavements/sidewalks is decidely lacking and public transport is pretty much non-existent. If you are too poor to own a car, hard luck. There did seem to be some cycle lanes, but they ran along major roads and weren’t segregated from all the enormous vehicles. They looked utterly terrifying. No wonder no-one was using them. Perhaps cyclists had tried, but they had all been run over.

Everywhere has air con and it all seems to run 24×7. Often with doors left open. When you turn up to your hotel/motel room, the air con is running and it doesn’t turn off when you take your card out of the slot to leave the room. It has probably been running in every room since the hotel was built, regardless of whether the rooms are occupied or not. Heaven forbid that you should have to wait 2 minutes for the air con to cool the room down.

This might be ok if the air con was powered by solar. But it isn’t. We hardly saw a solar panel in our whole trip to ‘The Sunshine State’. This is hard to fathom, as there are solar panels everywhere in temperate and cloudy Britain. When we asked one of the locals why she didn’t have solar, she told us that solar power was penalised by the power company, so it wasn’t worth it. We didn’t see a single wind turbine either.

The irony is that Florida is one of the most vulnerable places on earth to climate change. It is already ridiculously hot in the summer. A few more degrees of extra temperature will make it unbearable outside your air conditioned room or vehicle. Higher temperatures means more air con, which means more carbon in the atmosphere, which means even higher temperatures. Florida has a mean elevation of just 31m/100ft above sea level. The majority of Miami-Dade county is less than 2m/6ft above sea level (possibly less, depending on when you are reading this). The only thing we saw that looked like a hill in Florida, was in fact a huge landfill. Probably mostly full of single-use plastic cutlery. The rich are already starting to move to higher ground in Miami. Maybe only the landfills will be left above sea level by the end of the century? Florida is also regularly devastated by hurricanes. The devastation left by 2022 category 5 hurricane Ian is still very obvious and category 4 hurricane Idalia hit a few days after we left. Rising sea temperatures can only lead to more devastating hurricanes.

And Florida isn’t even one of the worst offenders, placing 39th out of the 50 US states with around 10.8 metric tons of CO2 per capita per year. In part due to the lack of any heavy industry. The worst offending state in the USA is Wyoming with a whopping 104.5 metric tons of CO2 per capita per year. Across the country Americans average 15.3 tons per capita per year, compared to 5.6 tons for the UK. And the USA isn’t even the worst offender. Qatar clocks in at 38.1 tons per capita per year.

Climate change is not some minor inconvenience where we lose a few obscure species of frogs and have to wear a bit more sunscreen. We could be talking about widescale crop failures and extreme weather events making large parts of the globe unliveable. Leading to famine and migration on a scale way beyond anything we have seen so far. Given the seriousness of the situation it is depressing to see such profligate waste. My fear is that other people will look at places like Florida and think “why am I even trying to do the right thing? Look at them!” and not even try.

We are in trouble. The current system of sovereign states with politicians driven by short-term goals is poorly placed to fix long-term, global problems. And the billionaires are not going to save us. They are the main beneficiaries of the current system and they are going to use their money and power to keep it that way. If we let them. Geo-engineering is hugely risky. Carbon sequestration looks unlikely to make any meaningful difference. Moving to Mars is a pipedream for 99.9999% of the population. This is the only planet in the universe we have evolved to live on. We are stuck here with the mess we have created in a slow motion tragedy of the commons. Individual choice is not going to cut it. We need deep structural change. Much higher taxes on fossil fuels and less enormous pickup trucks for a start. We need to get our act together, and soon. For ourselves and our children. But, having seen the situation in Florida, I don’t hold out much hope.

Oryx Digital sponsored team wins gold at International Rocketry Challenge

The Ridgeway Rocket Club team of Ben Wigley, Sanjay Bala and (my son) John Brice, won the International Youth Rocketry Challenge at the Paris Airshow last week. After beating 180 other UK teams at UKROC to qualify, they then beat the best teams from the USA, France and Japan. I sponsored and mentored the team this year and the year before. The team placed 9th overall in the UK at their first attempt, last year. Airbus was the main sponsor for UKROC and their trip to Paris.

The rocket was designed and built from scratch by the team, with various 3d printer and laser cut components. The top tube is a Pringles can (strong, cheap and full of yummy pringles)! We used a Cesseroni F Classic solid fuel motor for the launch.

The results were scored on a combination of flight (60%) and technical presentation (40%).

The flight mission was for the rocket to reach 850 feet, split into 2 sections and land the nose section in 42 to 45 seconds with an intact raw egg. The UK team managed 872 feet height and ~38 seconds duration with an intact egg. A French policewoman accidentally elbowed the rocket on the way to the launch, so it was a good job they made the fins super strong!

The UK team got an impressive 58 out of a possible 60 points on the presentation.

I’m very proud of what the boys achieved and it was such an amazing experience. VIP everything and the team got to meet and shake hands with the French Primer Minister, various French cabinet members and 5 astronauts, including NASA astronauts Charley Duke (who walked on the moon and commanded the lunar module on Apollo 16) and Mike Bloomfield.

They managed to get Mike Bloomfield to sign a rocket fin before the launch. They also got to meet a load of other interesting people from rocketry, aerospace, the US armed forces and from the other teams. Another highlight was a personal tour of an Apache gunship helicopter by the US Army (I’m so glad we are on the same side!).

Our launch:

Our onboard video from the launch:

Yesterday we got to go into the house of commons to show off the rocket and the team met various people including: space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, our member of parliament and the Minister of State for Education. There can’t be many people who have taken a rocket into the house of commons!

Next month they have a VIP tour of the Airbus factory at Stevenage. The team has also been interviewed by the local BBC radio station.

Before getting involved in UKROC my son wanted to do something technical, but he wasn’t sure what. Now he has decided he wants to do Aerospace engineering at University. Ben is also considering an aerospace career. Sanjay wants to be a corporate lawyer, maybe for an aerospace company. I’m sure it has also got a lot of other people interested in aerospace careers. So a definite result for the sponsors. A big thank you to everyone who makes the UKROC and International Rocketry Challenge competitions happen, including: ADS Group, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, NAR, AIA and all the volunteers.

If you are in the UK, USA, France or Japan, why not enter a team in 2024? It is a fantastic way to get kids involved in a challenging STEM project. And if you are looking to employ a rocket engineer a few years from now, drop me a line!

Summerfest 2022

Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan Professional edition are both on sale for 25% off at Summerfest 2022. So now might be a good time to give them a try (both have free trials). There is also some other great products from other small vendors on sale, including Tinderbox, Scrivener and Devonthink. Some of the software is Mac only, but Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan are available for both Mac and Windows (one license covers both). Sale ends 12th July.

No-one knows what they are doing

When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They clearly don’t have a clue. A more mediocre bunch of individuals would be hard to find.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most of us who are running businesses had no real idea what they were doing when they started, and still struggle with decisions now. I’ve been making a full-time living selling my own software since 2005. But when I launched my seating planner software, I really had no idea if I would sell a single licence. After 17 years I know a lot more about my market and running a software business. But things are constantly changing and I still don’t know day-to-day if I should be spending more time on SEO, partnerships, Youtube videos, new features, a better website, or thousand other things I could be doing. A lot of guessing and gut feel is still involved.

It is easy to read 20/20 hindsight accounts of successful businesses and assume they they knew exactly what they needed to do at each stage. They didn’t. Running a business involves making a lot of decisions under great uncertainty in a constantly changing environment. So if you want to start a business, don’t be put off by not knowing what you are doing. No-one does.

Battlesnake

I have been doing some recreational programming at play.battlesnake.com. It is a series of online leagues where you enter a program to play competitive ‘snake’.

The rules are pretty simple:

  • eat food to grow
  • die of starvation if you go too long without eating
  • die if you collide with a wall or the body of another snake
  • die if you collide head-on with another snake that if of equal size or bigger
  • last snake standing wins the match

There are also some variants, such as ‘royale’ where hazards move in from the walls.

You can program your snake in pretty much any language and host it where you like. When a match starts your program recieves JSON data with the board state and has 500 milliseconds to return either “left”, “right”, “up” or “down” for each move. You can write something super-simple (move to the nearest food, avoid other snakes) or you can get as complex as you like (machine learning or full game tree with alpha-pruning).

I have written my snake in Python (which seems appropriate) and host it on a free replit.com account. It uses a series of heuristics to decide it’s next action. It uses flood fill to assess how much space is available and A* for path finding.

You can see my snake (‘RhinoCrocoPede’) in action below, it is the purple one:

You can also see it more clearly here.

At the time of writing RhinoCrocoPede is 132nd in the global league (out of 450) and steadily rising.

The Battlesnake documentation is good and I was able to get the starter Python/Replit snake up and running in 15 minutes or so. I then just built on that. Replit is a nice online IDE. I did have issues with the free Replit account timing out. But I fixed this with a 90 day free upgrade code I found on the Battlesnake discord. This allowed me to set my REPL as ‘always’ on and ‘boosted’. I still have a fairly long ping time to the server (which is in California). This eats into my 500 milliseconds. But the time remaining is plenty for my current heuristic approach, even in Python.

If I wanted to get really serious I would rewrite my snake in C++, use a full game tree or Monte Carlo approach and host it on a fast server near the battlesnake server (to reduce ping time). But it is just a bit of fun and I don’t think I’ll get that serious.

My son has also written his own snake, which has been useful programming experience for him.

Battlesnake is really slick and well done. If you feel like doing some recreational programming, I recommend you give it a try.