The End of Week 1

Well, that's it - the end of the first week of the third year. Already I feel like I have several weeks worth of work to catch up with although, after today's lab session I feel slightly more confident about being able to learn python reasonably quickly and without too many problems. Pure Data is something I am much less sure about, as the lecturer was explaining some simple examples, he kept mentioning words like "simple", "easy" and "basic" and the whole process seemed somewhat alien to me and I have never seen a program that works like this before. I don't really know a lot about waves and sound and that was always the area of maths that I struggled to understand, the only reason I picked the module in the first place was because for some reason, speech recognition fascinates me and I am very interested to find out how it works - whether I will understand and be able to replicate that is a different matter and something that I will probably find out very soon.

Slightly disappointed by Derren Brown's effort tonight, although on reflection it is possible that he got it wrong intentionally. There was nothing in the programme to suggest that he was live when he was placing the bet - even if he was only one off, I still maintain that it is almost impossible for him to be able to make the necessary calculations in his head to pull something like that off for real. Also, he managed to sneak in a pretty hefty looking camera up his sleeve without being found out and therefore could have quite easily done the same with a computer.

Don't ask me to come up with any plausible theories for anything else though, I am pretty useless and working these kind of things out and illusions and magic fool me every time. Until someone reveals their secrets, I am none the wiser and normally cannot begin to formulate any possible hypothesis; I much prefer to sit there completely baffled and I believe that that is half of the fun.