Saturday, 16 May 2009

Rampert Dance Company

Gwen and I saw the Rampert Dance Company tonight at Sadler's Wells.

We particularly liked the piece A Linha Curva. The stage design with the colorful lights, the energy, the choreography, and the samba beats were awesome. The percussionists even used berimbaus at one point.

Monday, 4 May 2009

Epping Forest

We cycled to Epping forest today. It's a beautiful ride along the canals.


Picknicking in the forest.


Huge soccer field: only about one third of the goals are visible in this picture.

Saturday, 2 May 2009

Highly recommended: Justitia



Tonight was one of those evenings where Gwen booked the tickets in advance and all I knew was that we'd be seeing something. We were a bit late, and Gwen was running when we arrived at Sadler's Wells to pick up our pre-booked tickets. Except the performance wasn't at Sadler's it was at Peacock. Luckily the two are only a bit more than 5 minutes apart by bike if you move a bit faster than usual and you're really lucky with traffic lights (or pretend to be). We made it just in time.

We saw the dance theatre Justitia. And it was absolutely awesome! The stage design was beautiful yet simple. The story was interesting and kept me thinking. The timeline was non linear to the extreme: time-freeze, rewinding, parallel threads, and non chronological order. The dancing was great, they even had a part which reminded me a bit of this ping pong video. The music ranged from classical to electronic. Gwen and I even discussed if we'd want to see it a second time.

The only tiny bit I didn't like was that I didn't understand why her lawyer explained that her husband was a tyrant in court. That seemed counter productive to the story she was trying to sell to the judge.

Python rant: vague built-in data structures

It's surprisingly hard to find out details about built in data structures in Python. For example, the official python data structure tutorial talks about using lists as queues but doesn't mention that list.pop(0) is expensive (O(n)), and doesn't mention that the list is implemented as an array. The documentation of list is very short and omits details related to computational complexity. I like how Java in contrast makes things a lot clearer (LinkedList vs ArrayList etc).

I wonder if the decision was based on the assumption that those using Python wouldn't want to bother with computational complexity? (On the other hand they introduced array in Python 2.6.)

To quantify this rant I Google searched for "<language>" "data structure" "computational complexity". Below are the number of estimated search results.

8990 C++
8780 Java
4090 Matlab
3020 Python

Even Matlab scores higher than Python!