Martin's Blog » Blogging about my blog

The problem with being on the internet is that people think you know things

martinleslie — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:30:54 +0000

An email from some dude who read a project I did (you can see it on my website):

Dear Martin Leslie,
My name is (removed), and I’m a student at Universidad de Buenos Aires, working
on Mental Poker protocols for my thesis.

I’ve read your project on SRA Mental Poker Protocol.

In some place, you state that
“However there do exist more general attacks on SRA and
the fact that it leaks some information suggests that it probably leaks other
information, perhaps not as well known as quadratic residues.”

Could you give me references to the “more general attacks on SRA” ?

Thank you very much,

I have no idea what I meant and replied as such.

Even more bizarre is this comment on my about page.

Hello,
I am contacting you from Sky News. We would like to do an interview with you today regarding Kevin Pietersen resigning as England Captain.

Please can you call me urgently on 0207 585 4570.

Best Jean

what

I just want to help people

martinleslie — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:12:07 +0000

One of the advantages of wordpress is that it gives you all kinds of ways to keep track of what’s going on with your blog. For example you can see what searches people are entering to get them here. Here are some from the past few days with my responses:

imran khan arizona – Sorry, can’t help you.
stupid metre – I disagree.
Martin Donnelly Musician – see here.
kallis,s batting average – 57.10 in test matches. Also, learn to use apostrophes.
natural number sign in latex – use \mathbb{N}. This should look like
rounders test – I do not know of such a thing.
“facebook stalking” – I recommend it highly.
“sav rocca” – He is a former AFL footballer now playing for the Philadelphia Eagles as a punter.
cricket, 156 tests – The answer is almost certainly Allan Border.
facebook axiom of choice – You are probably looking for this facebook group.
can people know if you re facebook stalk – Not as far as I know. Let me know if you find out.
sav rocca – see above.
using bullet point form in wordpress – if in the visual editor just click the bullet point button. In code use

tags just as in html.

Interactivity – the future is here

martinleslie — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 04:50:26 +0000

So I have lots of things that I could possibly talk about on this thing but I don’t really know what people are looking for in a blog. So I throw it open to you, my loyal readership. Tell me what you think of these ideas or tell me something to write about:

- A post where I see whether the concept of ‘form’ in cricket actually has predictive value: If Ricky Ponting has averaged 80 in his last 5 innings does this mean he is more likely to score above his career average in the next innings? Note that I think this would require me to learn some cookbook statistics or maybe I could just do it with simulations… (Leesa? Dave? any ideas).

- A rant against differential geometry in general and in particular question 2-1c) from Lee’s ‘Introduction to Smooth Manifolds’.

- More lists.

- More stupid videos from youtube: there is one of the world freehand circle drawing championships I think.

- I recreate scenes from the Chaser to test the putative stupidity of Americans: For example show them a map of Australia with the mainland marked North Korea and Tasmania marked South Korea and see if they believe me.

- The best of wikipedia: some examples.

- I infiltrate livejournal cricket slash communities and report on the latest goings on (If you don’t know what I’m talking about you almost certainly don’t want to).