This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Saturday 18th December 2010 at 9.06pm
How to learn French
There we go... watch my hit count speed along now!
Things I won't miss about Paris:
Guy going "Ahhhhhhhhhh"
RER B
Jussieu canteen
The fact that supermarkets don't sell pharmaceutical goods, so pharmacies can charge exorbitant prices
Rubbish internet
Rubbish heating
Things I will miss about Paris:
Vélib'
Speaking French
Friends
Fantastic probability group
Ping pong table
I am sad to be leaving Paris, and there's no way I thought I would be saying that 6 months ago. Not that I didn't enjoy my first 6 months, just that there were enough things that annoyed me about Paris that I would rather have been somewhere else. But I guess it was the same with Bath - it takes a while to get used to any city, to explore its depths...
I still find the French attitude odd in some respects, but again probably the English attitude is peculiar in different ways - I just don't notice because they're the ways I know best. For example the heating in my office and those around it has worked for about one week in the last two months, and in that time it has been freezing - I've been sat shivering in two jumpers. That would just not be acceptable in England - a fuss would be made and something would be done very quickly. In France, nothing happens. Two people have resorted to bringing hairdriers into their offices to warm themselves up, and one person even has a raclette-making machine turned on all day sans cheese!
Finally, the language. I'm convinced French is not as good a language as English. Sorry if that offends you - I realise I'm not exactly fully qualified to make this point, being a limited French speaker at best. But it's less flexible and has more unneccessary rubbish. However, you'll see that I've put speaking French in the "Things I will miss" list. There are some things one can express better in French than in English - English isn't perfect, just great! - and I've really enjoyed trying to speak it over the last few months. So here's how to learn French: I recommend hanging around with Italians - they tend to speak pretty decent French (bar some pronunciation problems) but speak way, way slower than real French people! This makes conversations far less difficult and conversations are what you need - it's all about practice. To be fair to my office-mate, Clément, he has really tried hard to talk to me and has improved a lot at speaking slowly and taking time out between sentences, which has helped me a lot.
Posted Monday 6th December 2010 at 10.06pm
I wish
I had an interview last week. I don't think I put on a very good performance. My presentation was ok - it's tough to give a very good talk in 25 minutes and I think I (along with the other 4 candidates whose presentations I saw) was solid if unspectacular. But the actual interview caught me a bit cold - I should have done more thinking about my answers in advance.
One of my main problems was questions about the future - where do I see myself in 5 years, am I going to be a research star, do I want a research group of my own? The honest answer (and more or less the answer I gave, subject to a lot of waffling) is that I don't know. I still don't really have an accurate picture yet of where I fit in. I don't know how good a mathematician I am, or how good I can be. I know I'm not the most talented mathematician in the world but that I work hard and am very interested in what I do, which can make up for a shortfall in raw ability. Andrew Thomason, one of my directors of studies and supervisors in Cambridge, wrote in one of my first-year supervision reports "quiet but sometimes has good ideas" which I think is the most accurate and concise description of me I've seen.
So far it's been enough to just chug away and work on maths to the best of my ability, and let other people decide how good I am. But at some point I have to take charge of my own career. Maybe it's time to be more confident in myself.
I wish I hadn't written "maybe" though - there's the rub!
Posted Monday 29th November 2010 at 4.17pm
Binary search tree pictures
I drew some new pictures of the binary search tree (aka quicksort) at the weekend, for a presentation I'm giving at Warwick on Friday.
Here's the description from my research page: "Drawing discrete trees in a useful way is tricky, as the number of possible leaves in each generation increases exponentially. Here are a couple of attempts at drawing a random binary search tree (random quicksort) with 20,000 insertions. Colour represents age (red means the node was added early on, blue late). Click for higher-res."
Posted Tuesday 23rd November 2010 at 1.50pm
Fighting off a rhino with Graham Gooch and a set of stumps
A funny article about what the Ashes means, by Mark Steel.
"... for the rest of the summer [in 2005] millions began the day by asking "Did you see the cricket?" It felt like being a scientist who'd spent his life defending a theory, but everyone else thought he was crazy, and now finally he'd proved right, as those who'd derided cricket as a pointless exercise started to follow every moment."
Posted Sunday 14th November 2010 at 3.21pm
The youth and beauty brigade pt 2
Will Hutton says what I said, and more, more articulately.
Posted Monday 8th November 2010 at 9.31pm
The youth and beauty brigade
I feel like I have paid
My debt to society...
They said son,
Come join the youth and beauty brigade
Nothing will stand in our way.
I think I wrote a while ago about how being a researcher made me able to see more of a case for tuition fees, as a way of getting more money into UK universities, than when I was an undergraduate. However from what I can see the new proposals, while increasing tuition fees by a large amount, don't actually provide universities with any extra cash. State funding will be cut by as much as - if not more than - the higher fees will raise. There are some improvements like the increased salary threshold for repayments, but they're just window dressing when students will be paying two or three times as much for the same service as they're getting now (and disincentivising early repayment is just cutting off everyone's noses to spite rich kids' faces). They're claiming this is a good deal for students: but would you rather be given £24,000 and have to pay back £9,000 slowly when you're earning £15,000 a year, or be given £24,000 and have to pay back £24,000 slowly when you're earning £21,000 a year?
The Browne report was meant to find the fairest way of getting more money into university budgets1, not the fastest way to cut state funding for higher education.
1: Reference: Mandy interview. Ignore the tail-on-donkey stuff from UCU.
Posted Tuesday 2nd November 2010 at 12.04pm
Unscaled paths
Yay! The main chunk of my PhD thesis (unscaled paths of BBM) has been accepted for publication by AIHP. This was written about a year ago but for various reasons (one of which was me worrying more about getting my PhD finished than submitting papers) has been delayed a while. It's by some distance the most original part of my thesis, and I think it contains quite a few non-trivial ideas. The other big part (scaled growth in an inhomogeneous breeding environment) was also hard work, but mainly from a technical point of view - most of the ideas can be found elsewhere, even if putting them together in the right order was a challenge.
One (very) small disappointment is the following. At the end of the unscaled paper there is a proof of a theorem about a "very critical" case. Here "very critical" means a certain parameter is 1/3. The reason why 1/3 is critical is slightly complicated, involving various integrals of various functions etc. Completely separately from this, the proof makes use of the fact that 1/3 + 2 * 1/3 = 1. It's not clear at all that this has anything to do with why 1/3 is critical, and yet it turns out to be crucial in the proof. To me this is still rather mysterious and coincidental. So I wrote
Our proof ... takes advantage of the convenient - and well-known - fact that 1/3 + 2 * 1/3 = 1.
And of course the referee report asks that I take this line out. Spoilsport. Do papers have to be 100% serious at all times? Although thinking about it I guess I should actually try to explain in the article what I've said above rather than just making a rubbish joke.
Posted Monday 1st November 2010 at 5.30pm
What do we want?
Posted Monday 18th October 2010 at 9.09pm
Il faut agir maintenant
So, the French continue to strike hard in protest against a very sensible new law requiring them to work till they're 62, having sat and watched as two stupid laws (banning the Burka and expelling the Roma) were written. And meanwhile, the British get worked up over an (admittedly stupidly constructed) attempt to get rid of some unneccessary child benefit payments, but just frown a bit as the rest of the benefit state collapses under the weight of ridiculous cuts.
If this goes belly up, can we give Osborne an ASBO?
Posted Saturday 9th October 2010 at 9.34pm
Mmmmmmmmmm curry
I very much agree with this article - even though it does slightly fall into the London-is-the-centre-of-the-world school of thinking. Living in Paris it's not like I can't find food from a wide range of cultures reasonably easily - but it's still the exception rather than the rule, and you have to go out of your way to find it.
I think a big part of the difference is that Britain doesn't look down on any other cultures' diets (quite possibly because the "traditional" British cuisine used to be so bad!), unlike for example France, which looks down on - well, certainly British food, and many other diets too. And the UK's giant high-street-killing supermarkets have something to do with it too (but that's another story).
And you can't get a decent curry here for love nor money!
On the plus side, today I wore shorts and a T-shirt all day, even though it's the 9th of October.
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