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I watched The BBC program “Kidult: Beautiful Young Minds” on BBC iPlayer tonight with strong personal emotions.

The show covered the final selection stages of the UK’s team for the international maths olympiad (2006) – an annual event where the best mathematically minded teenagers compete for medals on an international stage.

Although I chose to read Mathematics at university, I didn’t ever get through quite that far in the mathematical olympiad. My focus, right up until my 20s, was always on Physics – and I did get to the final selection stages for the UK physics olympiad team – the final group of 20 or so people being whittled down to the six that would be flown over the world to compete for their country.

All the elements that were captured in film for the BBC program brought back memories of my time there, and the intense emotions that were going on.

Why didn’t I get through? Well obviously I was up against some brilliant minds, but I really think it was because of myself that I didn’t stand a chance. By the time it came to the final selection process I had discovered more typical teenage activities – and I was under the impression that I could focus on Physics and maths during the day, party like a typical teenager, and still perform like the best. I was wrong – and it took me a good few years of my life to discover that fact.

What really brought tears to my eyes was when the candidates discovered who has made it through to the team. The pain of getting knocked back is intense when you’re not used to it – and that shows on film when people discovered they did not make the team. I still remember that pain.

Do I regret not focusing on physics entirely – sometimes, but just as often I’m as incredibly grateful for the choices I made and how they affected my confidence later in life. No matter how good you are, you’ll always get beaten by someone sometimes – and as the old  adage says, the higher they climb the harder they fall – and getting used to recovering from setbacks is an important skill – especially in academia.

The full show is available here (inside the UK) until the 13th of April.

Something I found at my grandmother’s house over Christmas that made me chuckle – I’d never taken the idea of a computer file so literally before:

If you don’t know what it is, It’s an EOF punchcard to mark the end of a computer program (back when code was on card).

It’s an IBM 80-column card – if you ever wonder why programmers keep to an 80-character limit, this is why.

Your computer still uses the same kind of feature internally to mark the end of every file, although cardboard isn’t needed any more.

Quick “tip of the day” for sorting large files through the command line:

sort --temporary-directory=. --compress-program=gzip <input

explanation:

• “–temporary-directory=.” – because /tmp probably doesn’t have enough disk space.
• “–compress-program=gzip” – saves on IO time for intermediate files by compressing them before writing to disk.

I was trying to remember the last time I had a phone without multi-tasking – then I remembered it was when I had one of these:

(By coincidence it was also the last phone I had without video calling – fwiw It was a great phone when I got it in 2000)

Quick note: I’ve just released our flash bullet chart under a BSD license over on the Viral Ad Network blog , and this is what they look like: