This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Thursday 23rd February 2012 at 6.52pm
"If Lindzen is right..."
And if he's wrong, and everyone else is right...?
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Posted Tuesday 21st February 2012 at 9.23
Bad temper
Happy pancake day!
Pancake recipe: Start with just over half a mug of flour, add 1 egg, then bit by bit stir in most of a mug of milk (stir really fast to prevent lumps!)
Heat some oil in a frying pan till it's REALLY HOT. Then pour the oil out into a small bowl and reduce the heat slightly. Pour in 1/4 mug of batter, chase it round the pan, and use a spatula to keep the edges from sticking. Once the pancake is moving freely in the pan, flip it!
I saw this nice twist on a classic puzzle on Peter Winkler's site today:
You are visiting the South Seas, and reach a fork in the road, wanting to know which of two roads leads to the village. Present are three willing natives, one each from a tribe of invariable truth-tellers, a tribe of invariable liars, and a tribe of random answerers. You don't know which native is from which tribe. Moreover, you are permitted to ask only two yes-or-no questions, each question being directed to just one native. Can you discover which road is the correct one?
Here's a song from Standard Fare. Their new album is GREAT.
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Posted Monday 13th February 2012 at 10.39am
Magic memories
Apparently Ben Folds Five are back together and recording a new album. I used to play this song on the piano all the time, but I've obviously never paid attention to the words before, because I hadn't realised it was about dementia.
"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out."
Fanny Price, Mansfield Park
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Posted Sunday 12th February 2012 at 12.53pm
Those who can't
An article from Will Hutton. Normally he talks a lot of sense, but here he picks the wrong target. In my experience head teachers know full well who their weakest teachers are and would love the power to sack them. What they don't like is bunches of failed teachers (which is, at least, the perception of OFSTED inspectors within schools) coming in and telling them how to improve their school based on two or three days' observations, when they are slogging their guts out all year round to improve as best they can within the constraints of the system.
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Posted Tuesday 7th February 2012 at 10.55pm
Unemployed (again)
In light of various changes happening in the UK at the moment - increasing unemployment, hardening attitudes to joblessness, changes to benefits - and given my previous posts on forcing people to work, I think it's time I revisited the issue. (As is the case for all of my blog posts, I ask you to remember that I'm ignorant and uninformed - I'm a mathematician, not a political/sports/music/food writer, and this is a channel for some of my usually unthought-through thoughts!)
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I don't agree at all with the government's proposed changes to the disability living allowance; I'm also against the cap on benefits. Benefits should be assigned according to need, and thus cutting off payments at a certain point implies that either the person didn't need all that money in the first place, or that in the future that person won't have enough money to get by. If we seriously think that some people are getting too much help from the state, then for crying out loud look at some data and decide which of the allowances is too generous.
And when I say "look at some data" I don't mean data on which benefits we can persuade the right-wing press to hound large segments of the public into hating, like DLA. I mean that, for example, families with n children are (I think) paid n times as much in child benefit as families with 1 child. Having lots of children is one way in which people might move beyond the proposed £26,000 cap. And it's possible that if I have 8 children, I don't need 8 times as much in child benefit payments as if I have one child - those eight children can hand down and share toys, clothes, and so on. I'm not saying we should make child benefit decrease with the number of children, I'm just saying it's one example amongst many where we could look at the facts and figure out whether or not the current system could be improved.
This article by John Harris takes a look at some anecdotal evidence from a town struggling to cope with the crash. I think it's a good start to the Guardian's attempt to sidestep prejudices by talking to actual people who have been hit hard over the last few years.
It also brings up the point that the public's perception of the unemployed is that many of them aren't doing enough to find work. It even interviews one man who insists on taking the blame for his own previous unemployment. This is what reminded me of my own take on joblessness a while back. To a certain extent events have conspired to change my mind, and I regret what I said, or at least the way that I said it. In rosier times my attitude has been that generally there are jobs available if you really want them, which is more or less what Maria Miller (work and pensions minister) said recently. But it's become clear over the last year that whether or not that was ever the case, it's not now - there just aren't as many jobs as there are people willing to do them. Even if we had a perfect system whereby visitors to the job centre could be matched with available work instantly, we would still have plenty of people sitting around sewing cross-stitch tapestries or whatever it was I so sensitively howled last year.
On the other hand, as the article points out, something does need to be done to address the public perception of jobseekers as not-try-hard-enoughers. Ideally this something would also give the real not-try-hard-enoughers - and claiming that all jobseekers try their utmost to find work all the time is like claiming that all students put in 100% effort throughout their degree - a kick up the backside and a helping hand. My "forcing people to work" proposal was one attempt at this, but obviously I now realise it was flawed in several ways, not least in that it's already being applied and (according to reports) exploited by large multinational corporations. As an alternative solution many countries have a limit on the term over which unemployment benefit is paid, so after perhaps two years without a job one is no longer entitled to any money, which seems a rather brutal policy - I hope the UK wouldn't even think of imitating it, but it does highlight the fact that we aren't going to find easy answers elsewhere.
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Posted Tuesday 31st January 2012 at 7.27pm
All my moves are flawed
Some people say they're manufactured.
Some people complain that they don't write all their own songs, or play all their own instruments.
Some people say the really talented one is Monster Bobby.
They're all right. But I say... who cares? It's all about the songs. And for a while, the Pipettes churned out some fantastic songs. "We are the Pipettes" was one of the best albums of 2006. Simple. The 1-2-3 of Dirty mind, It hurts to see you dance so well, Judy... brilliant songs! Even the non-album tracks - School uniform, Guess who ran off with the milkman?, The burning ambition of early diuretics, Really that bad...
I first heard of the Pipettes when they were supporting the Go! Team on tour. At that point all they had were a few demo tracks. I heard a couple and thought "meh", and then It hurts to see you dance so well (which at that time was only two verses and 1 minute 5 seconds long) came on, and I was hooked.
(I'd still argue that the demo arrangement of Judy, replete with clarinet/oboe(?), is better than the album mix.)
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Posted Sunday 29th January 2012 at 11.42pm
My two-penneth on England's travails against spin
I have some advice for England's cricketers! They haven't been doing very well against Pakistan. "But Matt," I hear you say, "you scored two runs in three innings in the Pirates of the Saint Lawrence Snow Cricket World Cup, what makes you think you could do better?" Well, you have a very good point, but I spent half of Friday night awake watching that wretched performance and now it's payback time. (And besides, even if I wouldn't have done better, I couldn't have done much worse, right?)
First of all, Ajmal's doosra is a bit of a red herring. Of course it's useful to be able to pick it, but that's not the biggest issue for England's batters. Ajmal doesn't turn the ball a huge amount. The difference between his regulation off-spinner and the doosra is probably less than the difference between Graeme Swann's off-spinner and his arm ball. The key is the pace at which they bowl. On pitches like the ones in the UAE, the turn is very slow, and batters can predominantly play back to Swann, watching the turn off the pitch. Pakistan's spinners bowl much quicker, giving the batters less chance to react to changes in trajectory after the ball bounces - and regardless of whether you can pick the doosra, there are natural variations in the amount of turn, depending on whether the seam or the leather hits the pitch, whether the ball lands on a crack or a divot, and so on.
So in effect it's impossible to "pick" Pakistan's spinners. If they pitch the ball up, then there's just not enough time between the ball bouncing and reaching the stumps for you to be able to accurately read the amount of turn. So how do you play them? The key is to judge length early. The pace at which they bowl also makes it difficult to dance down the pitch, so you need to see quickly whether you can get your foot to the point at which the ball will bounce - thus meeting it before it has time to turn - or whether it's too short for that, in which case you get right back in your crease and watch the turn off the pitch.
From what I've seen several of England's players have premeditated which of these two approaches they will use: for example Pietersen has been plunging his front foot down the track every ball, which invites the Pakistani bowlers to bowl slightly shorter so that he can't reach the ball before it bounces. Strauss, on the other hand, plays back every time, so the bowlers just bowl fuller, decreasing the available reaction time.
So that's my view: don't premeditate, but make an early judgement on length. Easier said than done of course, but we're talking about some of the best players in the world. And if they want evidence that it can be done, they should watch footage of Kumar Sangakkara during Sri Lanka's tour of the UAE last year. A master at work.
On the plus side, it was great to see Monty back in the side!
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Posted Saturday 28th January 2012 at 1.32pm
A little place of their own
I've been reading Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child". His previous novel, "The Line of Beauty", is brilliant - a wonderfully written march through Thatcher's conservatism, class boundaries in the 1980s, and the rise of HIV and AIDS. The protagonist is a gay PhD student writing a thesis on the novels of Henry James: an easy subject for Hollinghurst, perhaps, but an enthralling story written in delightful prose renders any such complaints moot. I highly recommend it - it's uncomfortable reading at times, but the 1980s was an uncomfortable decade for many in Britain.
"The Stranger's Child", on the other hand, I found plain unrealistic - off the top of my head I count seven gay or bisexual men among the main characters, plus one alleged closet homosexual and one straight man (who dies in the war, early in the book). On the female side of things there's one gay woman, whose presence seems to serve no purpose other than to persuade us that Hollinghurst isn't sexist: in his world most people are gay, not just the men. This rather exaggerated sexuality ratio wouldn't be an issue if there was a point to it, or indeed if the story was up to scratch; but I found the book a less than thrilling read, placid if not quite dull.
"The Stranger's Child" isn't a complete dud by any means. Hollinghurst still writes beautifully at times, and there's plenty of humour, and some clever and subtle observations. But the story drifts for long periods, piling such a weight on the language that the book struggles to stay afloat. On this showing Hollinghurst might do better to step out of his comfort zone of writing about upper class gay male English literati; or, if he insists on sticking with this narrow backdrop, at least return to writing books that - like "The Line of Beauty" - explore themes relevant to his palette.
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Posted Wednesday 18th January 2012 at 12.33pm
DLA
This article by Ollie Flitcroft is pretty much spot on, I think. It may well be right to reform disability allowance, but not now, and not like this. Sign the petition to stop the bill.
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Posted Monday 16th January 2012 at 9.36pm
Yuck!
I discovered the Yuck album t'other day, and it's good. Although nothing quite matches up to the first song...
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