This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Tuesday 26th January 2010 at 10.04pm
Can you guess what it is yet?
Graphs without labelled axes... tut tut... (And yes, I still use CCATSL! One day I'll learn to program properly.)
Posted Friday 22nd January 2010 at 9.43pm
Pancakes and email
My "kitchen" only has 2 electric hobs, a microwave, a tap and a fridge. No oven, no freezer. So after several years of proper kitchen facilities, I'm relearning how to cook with just 2 hobs - I had the same facilities in my first two years in Cambridge, which led to my friend Immad (now a successful - touch wood - internet entrepreneur) attempting to fry a pizza. He claims it worked. But then he claims mackerel madras is an acceptable meal too.
I made a really nice curry the other day, with chickpeas and sweet potatoes and mint and lemon juice. And I've made pancakes a couple of times. The first time they weren't great, but I made some just now that were pretty much right on. As I always have problems remembering how much of what to use - and due to my usual approach of not measuring anything, I don't have a measuring jug or scales or anything - I thought I'd put today's recipe up here so that I can refer back to it. A "mug" is the far-from-scientific unit of volume constituting approximately one of these:
Just over half a mug of flour
1 egg
Most of a mug of milk
1/4 of a mug of batter makes 1 pancake!
My second not very interesting piece of news is that I have a new email address - matthew.roberts@upmc.fr - which I'll probably start using soon. My Bath email will expire at some point fairly soon, as Bath are ridiculously and unneccessarily tight on giving anyone anything the instant they've left. And I prefer to keep my gmail account for personal email.
Finally, and briefly: Joanna Newsom's new album is coming soon! 23rd Feb or thereabouts, fantastic news. And the new band from James Mercer (The Shins) and Dangermouse, called Broken Bells, has put their first song online, and it's good - listen here.
Posted Sunday 17th January 2010 at 9.27pm
Ma chambre
I GOT SOME BLU-TACK!!! Oh yeah.
My friend Ah-Lai's boyfriend Blair brought me some from the UK. Special delivery indeed! I now have photos and a map of Paris up on the walls of my room at last. Fantastic. Some pictures of my place:
Bed!
Desk etc.
Souping it up in the kitchen (actually closer to a cupboard than a real kitchen).
The view from my... shower!
That's right, there's no curtain or anything in front of the window in my shower room. I told the secretary guy in charge of my accommodation this, and he laughed and said "oh, no, you don't get a curtain in your bathroom!" I tried to point out that people can see me in there when I'm showering, and he just said "people won't look! If you're really bothered you can stick some sheets of paper to the window or something." (Something like that anyway - it was in French.) Interesting attitude. And part of the problem is that it gets freezing in there - as well as keeping other people out, curtains help to keep warmth in... sheets of paper won't do a very good job there. Hmph.
I've put a new playlist up on 8tracks - one I've been listening to a lot recently.
White winter hymnal - Fleet Foxes
Let's get out of this country - Camera Obscura
Ban marriage - The Hidden Cameras
Red right ankle - The Decemberists
Rough gem - Islands
Rock upon a porch with you - The Boy Least Likely To
7/4 (Shoreline) - Broken Social Scene
Something 4 the weekend - Super Furry Animals
Frontwards - Los Campesinos (originally by Pavement)
Chasing heather crazy - Guided by Voices
Summertime - Girls
Posted Wednesday 13th January 2010 at 8.26pm
Oggie Oggie Oggie! (Oi Oi Oi!)
There's a big game starting tomorrow: England v South Africa, 4th test. England need a draw (unlikely) or a win to take the series. (I had my usual conversation today with the German guy in my office, with him asking whether cricket games actually took "like, 2 days or something" (it's 5).) The game is in Johannesburg, which reminds me of England's win there in 2004/5. Matthew Hoggard took seven wickets in the second innings, and it was probably one of the two best prolonged pieces of bowling I've ever seen from England players. Admittedly I've only been watching cricket since 1994, and England have been pretty poor for most of that time, but hey, you can only beat what's put in front of you!
The series was level, and the track was looking pretty good still - Strauss and (especially) Trescothick had both made brilliant hundreds for us. We only had two sessions to try to bowl SA out and level the series. And our bowling attack was basically dead and buried. A mix of injuries and tiredness at the end of a long series meant that Hoggard, as pretty much the last man standing, would have to bowl most of England's overs. "We'll just have to pull our socks up," he said, in his usual "I just close my eyes and wang 'em down" way. Well, with 18.3-5-61-7 for the innings, and 12 wickets for the match, he wanged 'em good. Let's hope someone can put in a Hoggy-style performance over the next few days!
The other great piece of bowling was Andrew Flintoff at the Oval in 2005. He pulled us a lead (admittedly a microscopic one) from nowhere. I still struggle to believe he managed that. Although he did have a helping hand from - you guessed it - Hoggy. And the best batting I've seen from an England player was Mark Butcher's matchwinning 173 not out in the 2001 Ashes. Superb.
Posted Saturday 9th January 2010 at 7.10pm
I'll cook you, Onions, and I'll eat you.
"In the final South Africa v England game, I want to see England clinch another last-wicket draw. Just to see the look on Graeme Smith's face. Nothing personal, but if Graeme Onions blocks out the last few overs again, I can quite easily envisage Smith charging after him with a knife and fork, screaming, 'Let me win my game. Or I'll eat you. I'll cook you, Onions, and I'll eat you. Devon Malcolm wouldn't have done this kind of thing. Why should you?'"
Andy Zaltzman
Unbelievable stuff.
Anyway, I'm now in Paris! Wooo!!! As usual, when moving to a new place, I didn't bring some stuff that I should have, and I did bring some stuff that I have no need for at all. Especially electrical equipment. "That's good - we can always use some more electrical equipment," said John Darnielle, once, I can't remember when. I think it was on Talahassee. But no. I have wires that I haven't used in 10 years. I have wires that I've never used. I have wires that I don't even know what they're used for. I think I'm addicted to keeping wires. I don't know why. Maybe they'll be useful in some future wire holocaust, when David Cameron decides to kill all the wires. I'll be sat there smugly with my useless wires. No-one will ever suspect that I kept them, because why would I? And then I'll sell them on the black market. They'll be worth millions.
Yet I didn't bring any blu-tack. And blu-tack seems to be very hard to find in Paris. I've been to a huge hypermarket, which has all the little sticky things you could possibly want, except blu-tack. A million different kinds of glue, post-its, double-sided tape, little colourful sticky pad things, but no blu-tack. Bof.
Back to sport, and it turns out Forest are awesome. I can't believe it. It's not the 18 match unbeaten run - unlikely as it may seem, every dog has his day, and some dogs have 18 days in a row. It's the fact that we're playing like we ought to be on an 18 match unbeaten run. We don't look like losing. In fact, we look like winning easily. All the time. Bizarre.
Posted Sunday 20th December 2009 at 8.57pm
12 things
I'm leaving Bath on Tuesday, returning to Nottingham for Christmas before I move to Paris on 4th January. I've had a great time here. Here are twelve things (vaguely in chronological order) that came to mind as some of my favourite moments.
1. Moving into Clarence in 2007, and going through the ridiculous inventory. What should have been one of the most boring nights of my life was actually one of the funniest... the highlights being the worn out mop-pole and the 5 broken vacuum cleaners. I think you had to be there.
2. My first "proper" conference - in Warwick, Easter 2008. Hard work but some inspiring stuff, and I made some friends too.
3. "Oi, you. Yeah, you. I want to show you something," says the huge bald bloke walking down the street towards me. I stop, nervously, and he starts rolling up up his sleeve... to reveal a Forest tattoo. He starts grinning and hugs me. (Forest had been promoted from League 1 earlier that afternoon.)
4. The maths postgrad Christmas party in 2008 - a HUGE game of Indian poker. We were planning on starting a little game with four or five of us, but people just kept joining in. This was the start of our increasingly spectacular postgrad socials.
5. Sitting downstairs in the silent and empty Hobgoblin with Geoff, Jim and Gaz, each at our own table, singing Abba and Elton John songs. Again, you probably had to be there!
6. Beating Winsley in the second game of the 2009 cricket season. It was a scorchingly hot day, a flat pitch, and we were playing against a team that included Terry Duffin, who was Zimbabwe one-day captain not too long ago and has a Test 50 made against an Indian attack comprising Zaheer, Irfan Pathan, Kumble and Harbajhan. It was a really good game, and we won by 10 runs - I also captained the side, and made my first ever 50, although the real heroes were Ian G with 91 and Gregory for bowling Duffin. Apparently Duffin has now returned to Zimbabwe to try to regain his place in their side now the situation there - at least the cricketing sitation - seems, hopefully, to be easing slightly.
7. The maths postgrad pub crawl to Bathampton. A fantastic day out made all the better by the fantastic weather.
8. Hitting my first ever 6, in a game against Bradford 39ers. We were batting first in a 20-over game and I had opened the batting. It was getting to the end of our innings and I had started to slog. I planted my front foot down the pitch and was going to slog the ball over midwicket, but it was a bit shorter and straighter than I expected, so I adjusted by straightening my bat and attempting to chip the ball back over the bowler's head. But I timed the shot to perfection, and stopped running when I was half-way down the pitch to watch as the ball just kept going and flew into the tree next to the pavilion. The ground at Bradford isn't the biggest but it made me happy!
9. Drinking champagne out of mugs in a student kitchen with David Aldous (part of one of the "Probability at Warwick" summer schools).
10. The maths football trip to Germany - especially the moment when, with nackensteak mit brotchen in my hand, a random German girl shouted "hey English - dead sharks!" and I had to hit the deck and wave my dorsal fin...
11. Geoff's birthday 2009, Team Orange running through the streets, me high fiving a random member of the public - then realizing I knew her.
12. Last parade drinks - sitting in a field in the dark with Geoff, Ray, Fynn, Tom, James and Euan looking down on a beautiful lit-up Bath.
Posted Sunday 13th December 2009 at 9.34pm
A few quick mentions
Today's BBC Sports Personality award was a farce. I thought we were in for a good one - like last year - when Jenson came second (he shouldn't have been anywhere near, formula one shouldn't even be a sport - it's decided more by the car than the driver - but I thought he would win it). But then Giggsy won!?!? The guy's been a great player for 20 years but nowadays he can barely play 90 minutes of football a week and isn't sure of a place in Man U's best team, whereas people like Mark Cavendish and Andrew Strauss and Jessica Ennis have slogged their guts out for weeks on end to get to the pinnacles of their respective sports. Hmmm. Rant over.
The new national rail website is a huge improvement over the old one. You can actually change your search parameters on the fly!
If you want to uninstall linux from your dual-boot computer and go back to just Windows, and want to go back to using the Windows bootloader (so get rid of GRUB), use EasyBCD. A fantastic little piece of software that does exactly what it says on the tin - nothing more, nothing less - with absolutely no fuss at all. Worked perfectly for me to go back to single-boot Vista, and looks like it probably works with other versions of Windows too. Instructions taken word for word from someone called Matt Dwamon on linuxquestions.org:
1. download EasyBCD
2. install it
3. go to 'Manage Bootloader' tab
4. select 'reinstall the vista bootloader' (this may be different)
5. click on 'Write MBR'
6. go to 'Add/Remove entries' tab
7. select Linux tab
(should be something like)
type: grub
name: neosmart grub
drive: (select drive that says something like 'Linux native')
8. Add entry
9. repeat 7 & 8 but the drive should be 'linux swap'
I quite liked linux (I was using Ubuntu) but it kept crashing for no obvious reason. Actually the latest version seemed to be a lot better, it seemed to realize that there was something wrong and saved me from the full crashes, but still all my programs would suddenly close for no apparent reason. Probably a hardware clash from my rubbish Samsung laptop.
Posted Monday 23rd November 2009 at 2.16pm
Maths
I've been writing up my thesis - that's why I haven't written on here for a while. I went from 2 pages (which I wrote months ago) to 100 pages in 8 days - and I was pretty happy that I'd nigh-on finished - and then on Saturday evening I spotted a mistake. It was in the very last bit - the last theorem - and I'd lazily said "well, this proof kind of goes like that last one, but you have to be a bit cleverer, basically do this." And basically doing that didn't work. So I spent Saturday night, and all of yesterday, and this morning (I even did some proper maths on the bus on the way up, which must have looked a bit scary to the other people on the bus) trying to fix the problem. I've managed it, I think. But it's unbelievable how close it is to not working.
Sometimes, working on a problem for a long time, you get to see enough of what's really going on that you understand something that you can't possibly explain in words. This is one of those times for me. I have this theorem that says "something happens for b less than a third, and something else happens when b is bigger than a third", which is fine - but then I had the problem theorem, about when b equals a third. And trying to figure out how to prove this theorem was like wandering around for ages knowing there's a cliff over there somewhere and I just had to find it and point out where it was. And then finding it was like Maths had appeared at last and gone, in a big booming voice, "YES, THERE IS A CLIFF. LET ME SHOW IT TO YOU. LOOK" and walked with me to an enormous precipice with a great big burning pit of lava at the bottom, and threatened to push me off, before pulling me back at the last second, saying "HA HA HA, HAD YOU GOING FOR A WHILE THERE DIDN'T I?!" and walking off laughing, just to show me who's boss.
In other maths-related matters, this page about the number 1729 is quite scary.
I also had quite a nice moment on Saturday (before I found the mistake). I was trying to clear up another lazy point in my thesis where I'd said "it can be shown that..." - in this case, let X be a Poisson random variable with mean 2cT, where c is some positive constant. I claimed that "P( X < cT ) is exponentially small in T as T gets big" - that is, there exists k>0 such that P(X < cT) < exp(-kT) for large T. Presumably this seemed fairly obvious to me when I wrote it originally, and indeed after playing about for a bit one can convince oneself that it's true. But proving it was looking tricky - it was looking like I was going to have to do some complicated approximation of sums with factorials and stuff. Then, after a few minutes of thinking about it, I spotted a nice way. Let 1(A) be the indicator function of the event A. Then (just as in the standard proof of Markov's inequality)
1{ X < cT } = 1{ exp(cT) > exp(X) } < exp(cT)/exp(X)
where the last inequality holds because if exp(cT)>exp(X) then the left hand side is 1 and the right hand side is bigger than 1, and if exp(cT)<=exp(X) then the LHS is 0 and the RHS is bigger than 0. Taking expectations,
P(X < cT) < exp(cT)*E[exp(-X)].
Look up the moment generating function of a Poisson random variable, fill it in and you get:
P(X < cT) < exp(cT)*exp(2cT*(exp(-1)-1))
and 2*(exp(-1)-1) is less than -1 (in fact it's about -1.26) so we're done.
Of course there might be a nicer way than this that I didn't spot - or this way might be a standard trick that I just don't remember seeing - but either way, I liked this little "backwards Markov" inequality.
Posted Saturday 7th November 2009 at 11.56am
Judy
Two more cricket articles - one horrible, one really good. This one by Mike Atherton shows us one of the many things wrong with the game. Atherton is arguing the status quo - that we must stick to the current fixture list in international cricket, because it's agreed until 2011 and "about to be ratified until 2016". But why is it about to be ratified until 2016? It stinks! Everyone knows it's rubbish! The suggested World Test Championship, come up with by Martin Crowe ("among the brightest, most innovative minds in the game"), is to give teams 4 points for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss, and take the average number of points at the end of two years to see who wins. How did he ever come up with that? Giving people points for a win, fewer points for a draw, nothing for a loss! And - here's the clever bit, that would have flummoxed all but Crowe - the teams play different numbers of games, so we'll take an average! Genius!
This article by Peter Roebuck (again) is far better. Slightly pompous and one-eyed, as Roebuck often is, but it's full of good points and I especially like the line "In some places, admittedly, cricket depends on its migrant population (England and Canada spring to mind). Elsewhere the locals are taking to it."
I also love this picture. Whether or not it's a fake I don't know, but I can imagine it's not, as I remember doing these piss-easy reading tests as a child and I wish I had had the temerity to object like this - I love the idea that there's a 7-year-old kid somewhere running around not giving a damn about what reading age the government thinks it's important to have, and not afraid to tell her teacher that in the funniest way possible!
Posted Thursday 5th November 2009 at 12.26pm
The Stark truth
John Stark (another Bath PhD maths student) posted this nicely written note on facebook the other day. I have recommended that my first year tutees read it. Every year I try to explain to first years that mathematicians aren't machines, and that they should write in sentences rather than using endless strings of symbols that don't make any sense to any real person, and it always takes them about 3 months to realize that I'm not joking. In the meantime I have to try to mark their endless strings of symbols, which invloves hours of writing the same comments - "Don't start with what you want to prove", "This doesn't make sense", "??", "What is n?", etc. I figure John explains it better than me, and also if they see two people telling them the same thing they might be more likely to believe us! Any budding young mathematicians (i.e. A-level or early undergrads) could do worse than to read it.
Another well-written piece about an obvious (to me at least) truth is this article by Peter Roebuck. Roebuck is one of the most highly regarded cricket journalists around - I'm not his biggest fan, occasionally he's an idiot and writes complete crap or tries to show off, but this time he's struck home nicely.
This xkcd comic is fantastic.
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