I'm not going to use LiveJournal any more. Go here for my new blog location: https://timhutton.github.io/Read more... )

I'm into crochet at the moment. Here's the latest thing I made:


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I made myself a clock. Here's the original Google+ post: https://plus.google.com/110214848059767137292/posts/YKNaznQFDKX where I said:Analog clocks have always annoyed me, so I decided to make my own. This is the logical solution I think. There's only one ( Read more... )

Some time ago, my five-year old daughter and I were playing a game, where she had drawn a 'wishing circle' that we could use to make wishes. She went first, and wished for sweets. "Ta-da!" she exclaimed, and pointed on top of the fridge where we had some. I joined in the game, saying that I wished I had a lovely sweet daughter. "Ta-da!" she cried ( Read more... )

It has been an exciting few months developing Ready, our open-source program for exploring continuous cellular automata and reaction-diffusion systems. Version 0.5 has now been released, for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Go and try it out ( Read more... )

There are several interesting tilings in 2D, even if we restrict ourselves to single symmetric convex tiles:


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Sometimes it's interesting to pick up on the fleeting thoughts that your brain throws out, before they get processed as nonsense. Here's one that just happened to me ( Read more... )

This is for the long tail, because Google failed me when we needed it last night.

Our electrical sockets tripped last night. The fuse box trip switches were all still on apart from a special one labelled "RCD controlling circuit". RCD is Residual Current Device. Turns out that one of our appliances (an electric radiator) had developed an earth- ( Read more... )

In my 2010 paper on Codd's self-replicating computer I estimated that it would take at least 1000 years for the machine to replicate. If we left it running we might expect it to complete in the year 3010.

But of course computing power is always increasing, so how soon should we expect it to happen?

Moore's law says that computing performance ( Read more... )

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