This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Monday 20th September 2010 at 10.45pm
Make way for winter's eerie glow
Not nice reading. (And it begs the question: why are job centres so rubbish?)
Nice Reading.
More nice Reading.
My friend Emily played an album called "The ghost that carried us away" by a band called Seabear while I was staying at her house at the weekend. It's good. Seabear are from Iceland, and sound kind of like if Sam Beam fronted The Boy Least Likely To, with Architecture in Helsinki as their backing band.
Posted Friday 3rd September 2010 at 11.25pm
Gold Soundz
Even if I don't love them, I can see that Paranoid Android and Only Shallow are well-constructed songs that had a big effect on rock music. Loser, too, was really something new back then. I don't agree with the choice of Say It Ain't So, but only because I think My Name Is Jonas or Surf Wax America or the Sweater Song are even better. The State That I'm In is just a fantastic song, and as with REM it's no criticism to say Belle and Sebastian's best stuff was done right at the start of their career. I never really liked Smells Like Teen Spirit, but that's probably partly because I only heard it after grunge had already been ripped off by a million other inferior bands. And finally, I love - LOVE - Holland, 1945 and Common People. Two of the best songs ever.
But Gold Soundz?
No, really. Gold Soundz?
It's a nice song. Cute melody, half-mysterious, half-pretty lyrics. It sounds off the cuff, effortless. I appreciate that I was only 10 at the time, and that Pavement don't really mean anything to me like they do to people five or ten years older than me. Maybe I just don't get it. But is it really the best track of the 90s? Listen to what Jarvis has to say - acerbic, relevant, with arrogance and wit and bombast and one hell of a tune. Listen to Jeff Mangum on Holland, 1945 (on the whole of Aeroplane in fact) - the surreal lyrics, those churning guitars and blaring horns and the singing saw, and the drums - the drums! - and the feeling, the soul in that music. Heck, even listen to Paranoid Android - so precise, so carefully thought out, so brilliantly put together. I could have accepted Paranoid Android.
But Gold Soundz?
Posted Wednesday 1st September 2010 at 10.39pm
Some thoughts and a recipe
On Pakistani cricket: only Pakistan could have Shahid Afridi playing the straight man. But I think the calls for life bans for anyone involved in the match-fixing stuff are a step too far. The idea behind that, presumably, is that we should make an example of them and then no-one will commit the crime again. But that's the cricket equivalent of advocating the death penalty. We should instead realise that these kids have been misled by people with a lot more money and experience than them - they were greedy, which is of course a bad thing, but personally I'm not sure they know any better. As far as I know all they've done (if proven guilty) is deliberately bowl no-balls occasionally in test matches, which very rarely affects anything. It's wrong, but in the scheme of match-fixing it's like nicking three fizzy cola bottles and a giant strawb from Woolies pick'n'mix.
On the Labour leadership race: I know nigh-on nothing. I would more naturally side with the redder Ed, but I read an article by Ed and an interview with David, and I was more impressed with David's.
My dad's school's new building opened yesterday. You can see him, and it, here (buzzwords abound):
On the BBC (I think this works worldwide)
On ITV (UK only).
I have made a couple of gardener's pies (like shepherd's pies but veggie) recently, one with chick peas and the other with kidney beans. Here are the instructions I sent to a friend:
I boiled potatoes and carrots in one pan, and meanwhile fried onion and leek with garlic, then added some rosemary, sage, and a stock cube, then the carrots when they were ready. Cook for a while, then add a little bit of tomato and a tin of kidney beans. Once it's got to the right consistency add spinach and stir till the spinach has wilted. Put in a dish, mash the potatoes with butter and spread on top. Grate some cheese on top of that (preferably cheddar but seeing as we're in France that can be difficult). Cook in the oven until the cheese is slightly browned (30 mins?).
Before...
And after.
Posted Friday 20th August 2010 at 9.26pm
A* for effort
First of all, congratulations to Stas Smirnov and all the other winners at the ICM in Hyderabad yesterday. Smirnov gave one of the courses at the summer school I was at in Brazil a few weeks ago. I've seen him talk a couple of times before, and whether because of my (at the time) almost complete ignorance of the subject or otherwise, I barely understood a word. In Brazil he was brilliant, explaining things clearly despite the difficulty level of the material, and he also seemed a lot happier, regularly joking with the audience and attempting to run and hide whenever there was a power cut.
On a rather lower level, congratulations also to the many people picking up A-level results this week. This year has seen the launch of the A* grade, which seems to me a bit of a half-hearted solution to a difficult problem. It has also led to a re-realisation that kids at private schools get much better grades on average than kids at comprehensive schools: this article by Mary Dejevsky is a good example of someone jumping on that particular horse. But I think she largely misses the point. Firstly, the A* results may make this issue more transparent to her, but the universities are already well aware of it and generally attempt to take it into account. Secondly, it is entirely reasonable that the private schools in the UK should gain better results on average than the state schools. They have bigger budgets and their intake is overwhelmingly upper class. I am willing to conjecture, too, that the second of those factors is by far the more important of the two. Money is clearly extremely important, as it pays for better facilities and (on average) cleverer teachers. But probably if you compare the results of a high-performing state school in a leafy suburb somewhere with the results of a private school in a similar area the difference will be far, far less striking than the stats spouted repeatedly in the newspapers.
There are good comps and there are bad comps. My rather narrow and biased view is that things are improving slowly as far as state schools are concerned, at least compared to 10 or 15 years ago. But please don't just judge our schools on how many A*s they get.
EDIT: I meant they are improving compared to 10 or 15 years ago, but slowly - not that the improvements had slowed!
Posted Tuesday 17th August 2010 at 11.13pm
Another experiment with Processing
I wanted to simulate some property of the binary search tree again today to try to decide whether it's worth following up a possible idea for a proof. I couldn't find my CCATSL code so I rewrote the thing in Processing. It turns out the the idea could be worth a shot, and I couldn't resist drawing some pictures to go with it. They're nowhere near as useful as my old CCATSL ones for actually visualising the process, but they do look nicer. There are no axes unfortunately - as I say, if you actually want to know anything about the process, the old pictures (also on my research page) are much better. Here the number of leaves in the fringe - the top level of the tree - is drawn in orange/red, with those on the second layer down in blue/purple, and the third level in green.
Posted Friday 13th August 2010 at 9.28pm
"Intelligent folders" in Thunderbird 3.1
I updated Thunderbird today to version 3.1 - and what used to be called "intelligent folders" (I think) had disappeared. Turns out there's a quick fix though - above your mailboxes, where it says "All folders", click the right arrow and it changes to "unified folders", which seems to be exactly the same as intelligent folders used to be.
Poor form from Mozilla on that. To be honest I don't think Thunderbird is great overall, but it's better than any of the alternatives I've seen for Windows now Eudora no longer exists. I'm still waiting for someone to make a nice, simple email client that just works nicely.
Posted Monday 9th August 2010 at 11.28pm
Dynamical percolation
I was experimenting with a language called "Processing" today, which was recommended to me by Shaun Maguire and makes doing stuff visually nice and easy. It has some downsides but is certainly worth a spin if your programming skillz are as bad as mine. Anyway, here are the results:
Click here to see the program in action (and get the source code if you want it) - it requires Java. Also click here for a smaller, faster-moving version. We have Jeff Steif and collaborators to thank for the model, which is called "dynamical percolation" - although the program is a discrete-time approximation (the smaller version is a worse approximation but is a bit more lively than the bigger one). I just saw a course involving this model in Brazil and liked it, so it made a good example to play with as I got started with the language. I'll write something about it on my research page at some point, but for those who know what the following means, it's just critical bond percolation on Z^2 where each bond randomly updates its status at independent exponential times. The clusters belonging to the origin and four other evenly-spaced points (one in each corner) are shown in different colours. The important thing to note from a mathematical point of view is that "large" clusters (of each colour) appear and disappear very suddenly.
Posted Friday 6th August 2010 at 4.17pm
Black cab
I feel like going home, but at the same time I don't.
Posted Saturday 17th July 2010 at 1.36pm
Who is this Martin Gale, and what's he done to his spine?
It's surprised me this week how many of the people I've spoken to have never attended a proper course on martingales and Ito's formula. Hugo, the guy doing the TA sessions for the SLE course, asked who knew Ito's formula - and maybe slightly over half the audience put their hands up. I almost didn't because I thought he must be talking about something else - surely everyone knew Ito's formula?
For me, doing probability without having martingales in your back pocket is like hiking in bare feet - you can do it, but it'd be so much easier and more enjoyable (and you'd probably get much further) if you had some boots. I've given a talk several times called "The unscaled paths of branching Brownian motion" in which, after stating the main theorem, I say "So, how are we going to prove this? We want to know about N, and I'm a probabilist, so when I want to know about something, I look for martingales associated with that something." People sometimes laugh, but I'm serious! Someone once said that you could get a chair in pure maths at Cambridge just by saying "Cauchy-Schwarz!" at the right times. Perhaps it's not quite so succinct, but my tactic for doing probability pretty much just involves finding martingales in the right places.
I remember talking to James Norris, while I was a Part III student, about doing a PhD. It was the first term so I was going to the Advanced Probability course at the time (lectured by Gregory Miermont), and James asked if there was any part of the course that I particularly liked. I was kind of young and a bit nervous, so I think I just mumbled something about liking it all. But actually there was one lecture that I really loved - it was when Gregory proved the recurrence and transience properties of Brownian motion, just by looking at the right martingales. I think that was the moment when I decided that maybe I should think about doing probability. I didn't like probability in my first year of undergraduate, and only did the Probability and Measure course in the third year because Julia Wolf (my Analysis II supervisor) promised me it was all analysis and no probability. But once I knew measure theory, probability became analysis and it turned out to be the bit of analysis I was best at, except perhaps Fourier analysis. The Cauchy-Riemann equations in complex analysis and the linearity in linear analysis introduced too much magic for me - they destroyed my intuition. Probability, on the other hand, made sense - and martingales suddenly made it exciting too.
Posted Thursday 15th July 2010 at 1.56pm
"I don't want to see the quality of universities cut, we don't want to narrow the opportunities for young people to go to university, so therefore the only possible way forward is by having a bigger graduate contribution."
The words of Vince Cable.
He's summed up in one sentence how easy things used to be for the Lib Dems, and how difficult they are now. On the one hand they ran around saying things like "we'll abolish tuition fees!" and never had to back up their claims. On the other hand, we should remember that actually things could have been different if the Lib Dems were in power by themselves - perhaps they would have held their nerve and not renewed the UK's nuclear deterrent, something that the Tories are committed to and which costs a lot of money.
I was against tuition fees as a student - most people were - but having seen things from the other side a bit more, Cable's quote is pretty accurate. A graduate tax (one of the options Cable proposes) would be an interesting way of doing things in principle (one can perhaps imagine headstrong youngsters deciding not to go to university because they are convinced they are going to make millions and don't want to be taxed more), but would probably end up being fairly similar to the current system in reality, albeit with people paying more than they do now.
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