This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Wednesday 1st October 2014 at 10.30pm
We come from the same place
I wish...
Actually you should listen to the album version of that last one, currently streaming on Pitchfork.
I saw Andrew Wiles today! And Ailsa Keating, and yesterday I caught a glimpse of Julia Wolf, although I didn't get a chance to say hello.
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Posted Friday 19th September 2014 at 9.18pm
Hey Robbie Burns!
Hey Robbie Burns! All the Scots seemed wired last night. They tried to separate our girls from our guys...
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Posted Thursday 22nd May 2014 at 11.06am
PAM v BRW
Marcel Ortgiese and I have just uploaded a paper to the arXiv. The model we investigate is as follows: start with a single particle at the origin. Each particle performs a continuous-time nearest-neighbour symmetric random walk on Zd. When at site z, a particle splits into two new particles at rate ξ(z), where the potential ξ(z), z in Zd is a collection of non-negative i.i.d. random variables. The two new particles then repeat the stochastic behaviour of their parent, started from $z$. So we end up with lots of particles spread across a region of Zd, and the question is where these particles are located. There's a battle between the random walk kernel, which wants to spread everything out, and the potential, which wants some points to have more particles than others. Until now most of the analysis has looked at the expected number of particles, also known as the Parabolic Anderson model. We look at the actual number of particles, and things get really interesting when the potential is heavy-tailed, specifically when P(ξ(z)>x) = x-α for x>1 and some fixed α>d. We show that things essentially look like a system of growing "lilypads" (unfortunately these are L1 lilypads, so they look like diamonds, not circles). You can see the lilypads in Z2 in this simulation. Be patient!
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Posted Friday 18th April 2014 at 8.18pm
Heaven
There's an early demo of Jens Lekman's "Tram number 7 to heaven" here with a crowd sampled in at the start to make the label he was talking to think he'd played live shows. Good work Jens.
I once asked a friend from Gothenburg where tram number 7 goes, and he just said some place I don't know (obviously), but he said he didn't think it was a particularly great place. Maybe there's a halfpipe there or something.
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Posted Tuesday 8th April 2014 at 10.30am
Updates
This is a post to test an enforced slight change to my blog database and advertise the new Prob-L@B website:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/centres/probability-laboratory/
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Posted Thursday 13th March 2014 at 1.44pm
Wolf Hall
I'm reading Wolf Hall at the moment - thanks Gemma! I also read this column in the Guardian by Richard Evans just now - thanks Kat! I don't entirely agree, but this paragraph chimed with something I have noticed myself:
'It's also a form of intellectual atavism in another sense: "what-ifs" are almost invariably applied to political, military and diplomatic history: they represent a "kings-and-battles" view of the past that the education secretary Michael Gove and his friends might want to shove down schoolchildren's throats, but which historians know is thoroughly outdated – outdated because it is crudely simplistic and desperately unsophisticated. That's not to say we shouldn't study these things, but it's also important to recognise that they form only a tiny part of the past.'
Putting the irresistible Michael Gove dig aside, history is much more interesting when it talks about the details, the reasons for things happening. My sister asked me recently to name Henry VIII's wives, which I struggled with, and then to put them in order, which proved totally beyond me. That's no doubt partly because I learnt about the Tudors when I was 7 and now I'm 30, but still: why haven't I revisited this clearly interesting chunk of the history of England?
Wolf Hall has been helpful because it gives the facts context; it puts some inspiration behind the reformation. Not to mention that it's beautifully written.
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Posted Tuesday 4th February 2014 at 9.33pm
Withered Hand
Tonight, I have very much been enjoying these two songs:
Also, this video is almost as bizarre as the ECB's plan for world domination. Almost.
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Posted Tuesday 4th February 2014 at 12.15pm
Sinking in
A small part of Steve Richards' article in the Independent asks whether the message over climate change is sinking in following floods in the UK: that this is the greatest challenge we face. I think it is, slowly, but there are still a huge number of people refusing to wake up and smell the coffee.
"In 2004, the government’s chief scientific adviser, David King, warned that climate change posed a bigger threat to the UK than terrorism.
The claim seemed to me at the time to be preposterously hyperbolic. Very quickly the comparison becomes vividly precise.
Thankfully terrorists have failed to break through the various costly barriers erected after 9/11 and 7/7. In contrast, the wild weather pushes aside the pathetic, puny obstacles that stand fleetingly in its way, and wreaks havoc.
Increasingly since King made his dramatic claim, the weather has become the main news story in the UK, and not only in the winter. The floods in the summer of 2007 were as dramatic as those now afflicting parts of the country.
A pattern is forming. Each wild outbreak of extreme weather prompts speculation that the turbulence might be a one-off. Then there is another violent eruption.
The government and the rest of us must treat the threat as if it were one posed by terrorists. Far more investment is required to protect the parts of the country vulnerable to flooding. Emergency services must respond more quickly. The Environment Agency needs the resources, and the nimble resolve to meet the challenge.
The threat posed by climate change and the separate needs of a growing elderly population urgently require more public money. We should not forget the need when the pre-election tax-and-spend debate focuses solely on the virtues of cuts."
Climate change a bigger threat than terrorism? That's an understatement.
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