This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Friday 11th September 2009 at 3.45pm
All my words for sadness
2 months without a post. That's really bad. Well, I've been busy - summer means conferences and cricket. Hopefully I'll get the chance to write another post at the weekend about BBM on a circle. We hosted a UK probability meeting here in Bath this week, where I saw a really good talk by Jeff Steif about circle coverings that I hope will be of help once I've digested it more thoroughly. (There were, of course, plenty of other good talks!)
By the way, in response to the posts below, I didn't have swine flu. I may just have had a small stone in my gland. It seems to be better now anyway.
Finally, a mention for my grandad, who died two weeks ago today. His funeral was yesterday. He was 87, a few days from his 88th birthday when he died.
Posted Sunday 12th July 2009 at 5.13pm
Baked new potatoes with carrot and sweetcorn
One thing about being forced to sit at home all day: it does give you time to cook. So I made this:
Wash the new potatoes, prick each a couple of times with a fork, and roll them in some olive oil and rosemary. Bake with some whole cloves of garlic at 190C until... baked (45 mins? I'm rubbish with times and quantities, I just guess). Put the carrots and a couple of segments of orange with some thyme in a pan of boiling water and simmer till the carrots are how you like them. Then drain, add a knob of butter, some sweetcorn and spring onion and warm through. Peasy. Makes a nice healthy lunch. Must make sure I have some protein for dinner though...
Posted Friday 10th July 2009 at 9.49pm
Maybe I have swine flu
So. I went to Germany at the weekend. In Germany they have an annual "maths football championships" where postgrad teams from universities across the country meet up and play football against each other. We have a German who also happens to be a good footballer in our department in Bath, so we got invited too. It was great fun, the Germans were massively friendly and they loved our Dead Sharks game. But towards the end I got ill - one of my glands swelled up badly, just below my jaw bone on the left side of my face. (Sympathetic housemate's reaction: "Ha! You look like a toad! You been eating too many flies? Ribbit. Ribbit. Ha ha ha.") I don't have any other symptoms, and it's slowly going down, so I guess it's just an infection - I blame the German diet of steak im brotchen ad infinitum for messing up my immune system. But I went to the doctor yesterday to make sure it wasn't anything serious, and she decided that I should stay at home for a while just in case it's mumps or swine flu (wrong gland for mumps and no flu symptoms, but hey).
Staying at home is boring. I don't have anywhere comfortable to do work so I end up doing a bit lying on my bed then falling asleep, or doing a bit on the sofa then watching TV. I've watched a lot of episodes of House. I'd never watched it before a few weeks ago but I like it. Really I ought to watch Delicatessen again, or get some more French films.
Posted Wednesday 1st July 2009 at 12.37pm
Jens Lekman has swine flu
Get well soon Jens!
www.jenslekman.com/records/smalltalk.htm
Posted Friday 19th June 2009 at 10.07am
Guest starring Paul Erdös
Today's xkcd comic is nice. Thanks Rich.
Posted Wednesday 17th June 2009 at 5.20pm
Some pretty pictures
I put some pictures of "branching Brownian motion on a circle" on my research page. These aren't inspired by any of my current work - in fact my growth along paths stuff trivially works exactly the same on the circle as it does on the real line - although I believe there are interesting results that involve this model. I just thought they might look nice.
See the research page for bigger pictures and a small amount of explanation.
One question that springs to mind is: how much white space is there? For example (in either picture), one might imagine each line as a Brownian sausage of radius epsilon; there will then be a finite amount of white space (in the Lebesgue sense) even as t tends to infinity.
(Edit: I should have made it clearer that when I said "white space", I was thinking of time as a spatial dimension: so in the right-hand picture for example, I meant the size of the white subset of the surface area of the cylinder.)
Posted Thursday 11th June 2009 at 1.43pm
Labour's lost
I didn't manage to vote in the local and European elections last week - I was out of the country and didn't remember to send a postal vote till it was too late. There were obviously some pretty horrific results for Labour, and the newspapers have been concentrating on whether or not Gordon will go. The general consensus is that Labour can't win an election under him, which at the moment is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the media decide that it's true, the public follow. Labour also seem to have suffered worst at hands of the "expenses scandal", which is a shame, as it's a sideshow as far as I'm concerned - all the parties have been abusing the system (in fact I'm proud to say that in the last general election I helped to vote in the one Lib Dem MP who hasn't claimed any expenses at all, David Howarth). The government are also suffering because we're in a recession, and it's a recession that's partly their fault.
My take on it is that yes, the government have made a lot of mistakes since they've been in power, but we shouldn't vote them out simply for revenge. (Plus, who's to say other parties wouldn't have made the same mistakes? I certainly can't imagine that the Tories would have suddenly put more stringent controls on the banks.) We should look at who we think will do the best job over the next term. Four years ago I thought that was the Lib Dems. At the moment I think it's Labour.
The most sane quote I've seen on the situation comes not from our own press, but from Paul Krugman of the New York Times:
"Mr. Brown’s response to the crisis — a burst of activism to make up for his past passivity — makes sense, whereas that of his opponents does not.
The Brown government has moved aggressively to shore up troubled banks. This has potentially put taxpayers on the hook for large future bills, but the financial situation has stabilized. Mr. Brown has backed the Bank of England, which, like the Federal Reserve, has engaged in unconventional moves to free up credit. And he has shown himself willing to run large budget deficits now, even while scheduling substantial tax increases for the future.
All of this seems to be working. Leading indicators have turned (slightly) positive, suggesting that Britain, whose competitiveness has benefited from the devaluation of the pound, will begin an economic recovery well before the rest of Europe.
Meanwhile, David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has had little to offer other than to raise the red flag of fiscal panic and demand that the British government tighten its belt immediately."
Full article here.
Posted Tuesday 26th May 2009 at 10.05am
More on online publishing
I happened upon a nice article by David Aldous and Jim Pitman today. You can read it here. It'd be nice if their ideas really took off.
Posted Thursday 21st May 2009 at 3.15pm
"Things are a bit tense at the moment"
There's a nice article by Mike Atherton here. It's about whether sport can be a force for good. Sounds like he was a bit lazy with some of his research but at least he knows what he's talking about when it comes to the bit about cricket.
It reminds me of an Art Brut lyric:
That makes Israel and Palestine get along"
Also, Sir Ranulph Fiennes has climbed Everest at the third attempt. What a guy. Full story here.
Posted Tuesday 12th May 2009 at 10.57pm
Chin up Terry
I play cricket for Bath Venturers CC - the university's staff and postgrad team. We played against Winsley, a nearby village, at the weekend. They play in a league on Saturdays, and have a club professional - that is, they pay someone to play for them. His name is Terry Duffin, and he played for Zimbabwe until a couple of years ago. Zimbabwean cricket is in an awful state at the moment, unsurprisingly given the state of the country, and Duffin has his own part in the story: he was sacked as captain of the team three years ago. The reasons aren't clear, besides the fact that there are some evil people running Zimbabwe cricket just like there are some evil people involved in the running of the country. Anyway, he played against us. He shouldn't have really. We're a bunch of academics thrown together more or less at random, several of whom had never played together before Sunday, and who only play friendlies against hopefully similarly-talented local teams. Duffin made 56 on his Test debut, against a bowling attack comprising Zaheer Kahn, Irfan Pathan, Harbajhan Singh and Anil Kumble. We never know if our team will make 56 between us against dibbly-dobblers from Peasedown St John. Duffin was in the top 100 one-day international players in the world. The Venturers are probably not in the top 100 teams in the Bath area. And Duffin is 27, and should be reaching his peak in the next couple of years - so he should be even better now than when he was creaming Zaheer around the park. This was a mismatch like no other (although I must admit the cat in this series of photos also stood no chance).
We won.
It was certainly the best performance I've seen by the Venturers (even Gregory didn't have any tales of mythical games from years past when the Venturers took on Bradman's Invincibles and won, or anything like that) - although admittedly I wasn't there for the legendary win over Bill Owen in Duncan's last game - and the best game of cricket I've been involved in. We put runs on the board - 212 for 3 (40 overs). Duffin set about our bowlers, although they put up a superb battle, and he made 54 from probably around 40 balls. Winsley were cruising. And then Gregory bowled him, out of the blue. For 54. Lower than his score on test debut. Significantly lower than his highest ODI score (88). And we pressured the rest of the order by bowling tightly with runs on the board, with some brilliant fielding backing the bowlers up (three run outs! From direct hits! Unheard of from the Venturers), and eventually bowled them out in the last over of the game for 202. Brilliant.
So, chin up Terry Duffin. You caught us on a good day.
Duffin pulls Irfan Pathan to the boundary.
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