This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 at 10.41pm
Gwlad beirdd a chantorion enwogion o fri
I spent this weekend in Wales with some friends. We stayed in a youth hostel in Brecon, and went walking in the Beacons. I was impressed with the variety of the landscape - the Brecon Beacons don't get much publicity compared to Snowdonia or the Lakes, but we went on two great hikes. The first, on Saturday, saw us climbing toward Fan y Big beside a waterfall, following the impressively bleak escarpment round in freezing winds (there were icicles hanging from frozen peat overhangs, and even my scarf froze at one stage) whilst men in army garb with giant replica guns passed us in the opposite direction at regular intervals, then descending cross-country through some boggy long grass to a reservoir sheltered by Scots pines, then through a forest and back to the car. The youth hostel was pretty good, and they had a piece of paper stuck to the wall in the hall saying "Weather warning: severe gales and wind chill". Nice to know we weren't just being wusses!
Sgwd Gwladus - image copyright Toby Speight under Creative Commons
On Sunday we set off from Pontneddfechan, walking up the Neddfechan river past countless waterfalls, across farmland, down to another river, behind another waterfall (Sgwd y Eira I think it was called), up and around a cliff (scary - apparently there have been several fatalities there recently, and I'm scared of heights!), through some woodland, past an old gunpowder factory and back to the village. The sun even came out for a while - some of the views were stunning, and it looked like it would be even better in the summer, with some great swimming spots under the waterfalls. Unfortunately my camera is out of action at the moment but one of my friends managed to get some photos so hopefully he'll send me them and I can post some later this week.
In other news, it snowed in Bath today, but not as much as in most of the rest of the country. London pretty much shut down for the day. We don't seem to be very good at coping with anything even approaching extreme weather in Britain - I wonder how much it's just that people like to take the excuse for a day off for sledging, snowball fights and snowmen?
Posted Friday 30th January 2009 at 4.57pm
The Bearded Wonder
Goodbye to Bill Frindall.
Posted Wednesday 28th January 2009 at 9.44pm
UK Probability Workshop in Bath, 7th-11th September 2009
The second annual UK Probability meeting will be taking place in Bath in September. Here's the description from the organisers:
UK Probability Workshop
University of Bath, 7-11 September 2009
"New random geometries and other recent developments in probability"
We hope this workshop will attract wide interest within the UK probability community, providing exposure to some exciting research areas as well as an opportunity to get together for interaction. The workshop will be based around four series of expository research lectures planned to be given by:
Frank den Hollander (Leiden) on "Random polymers"
Svante Janson (Uppsala) on "Random networks"
Jean-François Le Gall (Orsay) on "Random planar maps and continuum trees"
Yuval Peres (Microsoft, Redmond) on "Mixing of Markov chains"
In addition we plan sixteen invited 40 minute talks by leading UK and European researchers in these areas, chosen so as to maximise possibilities for interaction both within and between the areas. There will be time and space allocated for informal discussions and initiation of projects, and there will be a dedicated space for poster presentations.
For more details, please see: http://www.bath.ac.uk/math-sci/events/prob2009/
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Simon Harris (S.C.Harris@bath.ac.uk)
Prof. Andreas Kyprianou (ak257@bath.ac.uk)
Prof. Peter Mörters (maspm@bath.ac.uk)
Posted Wednesday 28th January 2009 at 9.42pm
MA20011 solutions
It seems my site has been getting some traffic from people googling "MA20011 solutions" or similar. If that's how you found it... stop wasting your time looking for answers and do the work yourself! Or ask your tutor for help...
Posted Saturday 24th January 2009 at 9.28pm
This made me laugh
From the Economist:
"Some booed the outgoing president, but their anger was blunted by the knowledge that they would not have to put up with him any more. After the ceremony, Mr Bush flew off in a helicopter. The crowds did not know which helicopter he was in, so they waved and shouted 'Bye-bye, George' at any chopper that passed over them. On Monday, not far from the Mall, someone erected a big blow-up Bush with a Pinocchio nose. Revellers threw shoes at it."
Posted Thursday 22nd January 2009 at 10.10pm
Keep up! The chaiwalah knows more than you.
I went to see Slumdog Millionaire last night, and really enjoyed it. It was a lot cornier than I expected (the only other Danny Boyle film I've seen is Trainspotting) but good entertainment. Before anyone jumps on my back, I know it's not giving me a realistic impression of modern India. In fact, it's probably about as accurate a portrait of India as Love Actually is of Britain. Yeah, it took liberties, and I can't see it winning too many Oscars - but it looked great (I'm not exactly an expert) and it was fun.
Something I've been messing about with recently is trying a few "muxtape alternatives", websites that let you create a mixtape that's stored online. Muxtape did this really well (although I didn't like the 10 song limit, 15ish would have been great) but it got shut down for ignoring licensing laws. As far as I can tell that's the music industry shooting itself in the foot again, as muxtape had no search mechanism at all, let alone a search for specific songs. You could only access someone's mix by direct link. Obviously there were ways you could end up with people taking liberties - for example, people could upload full albums, and someone might host a searchable list of links to those albums. But you have to think the people going to that much trouble would just download the files illegally themselves anyway. Really it was just a nice way of sharing music that probably did more good for the industry (introducing people to new music via their friends' mixes) than bad.
Anyway, there are a few alternatives nowadays. One of the best I've found is 8tracks, which does basically the same thing as muxtape except any person (well, computer) can only listen to the mix in order once - then it shuffles. (This means it counts as online radio apparently.) That's a bit annoying, but I'm yet to see anything else that works really well - there are a few that might get there eventually.
Here's what I'm listening to at the moment: Winter mix (remember, it's only in order once!)
Maths time: I spent most of today trying to write a nice, simple, modern proof of a proposition that's basically an upgrade of the upper bound in Schilder's large deviations theorem for Brownian motion. I've come to the conclusion that the proof in Varadhan's book is actually prettier than anything I can come up with (his point of view, looking at what the BM has done directly rather than using measure changes to cover all the possibilities, saves on most of the messing about with dressed up compactness arguments) and I should just upgrade it directly. So a bit of a waste of time, but I've learnt something, which is always good.
Posted Tuesday 20th January 2009 at 5.30pm
Long time no write
Excuses: I was on holiday - I went home for two weeks - and I've been ill. I've had four colds in a row! I got over the last one finally on Thursday last week - I woke up with that wonderful feeling that you get when you've been ill, and suddenly you realise you're not ill any more. Fantastic. I always try to drag that out as long as possible, that appreciation of full health. I'm still going with it at the moment. It makes me wonder about the stories you hear about miracles where (for example) a man has splitting headaches for as long as he can remember and they find a nail embedded in his head and take it out and he's fine again, or a child has been deaf for years and then it turns out she just had a cotton bud stuck inside her ear that's fallen out and she can hear again. What a feeling that must be. Just waking up and hearing stuff! Definitely underrated.
I'll try to write some catch-up about stuff from the last few weeks soon. But I'm off to Bristol now to see friends. For now, check out the "Swanny Super Over" chant in last week's BBC Sport Quotes of the Week. The Barmy Army have outdone themselves. Best chant ever?
Posted Sunday 14th December 2008 at 23.03pm
SPotY
I thought it was going to be Lewis Hamilton, but - no offence meant to him - I'm glad it wasn't. Hoy deserves it more. Hamilton had a great year obviously, he's world champion already at 23. I don't know much about Formula 1 - clearly he must be a fantastic driver, but he took the title by scraping over the line in fifth in his final race thanks to a decision made by his team that payed off (just) on the last corner. Equally I don't know much about cycling - but I know that Chris Hoy absolutely destroyed everyone else that he came up against in the Olympics. No-one else stood a chance. He dominated his sport in a way that very few Britons have ever done. And he's the first Briton to win three medals in one Olympics since 1908 when we were pretty much the only country that entered.
He's also come up with some of the best quotes I've heard recently:
"I didn't take up cycling to become rich or famous. I just feel fortunate to do a job I genuinely enjoy. Not too many people can get out of bed in the morning and say the same."
"I knew I could not have worked any harder. If somebody was going to beat me they were going to have to do something pretty special. And if they had I would have shaken their hand knowing I had given everything."
And what does Chris Hoy think of Chris Hoy?
"Chris Hoy thinks that the day Chris Hoy refers to Chris Hoy in the third person is the day that Chris Hoy disappears up his own arse."
Take that, Michael Vaughan.
Congratulations Chris Hoy!
Posted Thursday 4th December 2008 at 1.47pm
DVI inverse search and forward search with Crimson Editor
This is a bit of a boring first post, but I decided I needed to write something about this for my own benefit. I use a really nice little program called Crimson Editor to write all my latex, C, html files etc. It's hugely customizable and fits on a floppy disk. But Simon, my supervisor, pointed out to me last week that I should use WinEdt, because it has features called "inverse search" and "forward search": when you compile a latex file into DVI, Yap will know where you are in the latex document and shoot you straight there; and if you double click somewhere in the DVI file in Yap, then WinEdt takes you straight to the corresponding point in the latex file. This is extremely useful.
So, I decided to try to get the same features working in Crimson Editor. It took some fiddling about, but I got there in the end. Here are the instructions, partly so that I can do the same on my other computers, and partly so that I don't forget how it works in the future.
1. Download and unzip the two batch files from here. Remember where you put them.
2. Right-click on the yapper.bat file you just unzipped, and click Edit. Change "C:\texmf\miktex\bin\latex.exe" to wherever your latex.exe is. Save the file.
3. Right-click on the invcrim.bat file you just unzipped, and click Edit. Change "C:\Program Files\Crimson Editor\cedt.exe" to wherever your copy of Crimson Editor is. Save the file.
4. In Crimson Editor, go to Tools > Configure user tools. Choose an empty spot, and put in some menu text of your choice (eg "Compile and view DVI file"). In the Command box, put the location of the "yapper.bat" file you just unzipped (eg C:\Work\yapper.bat). In the Argument box, put $(FileName), $(FileTitle), $(LineNum) (with the commas and spaces in between). In the initial directory box, put $(FileDir) . Then I check Close on exit and Save before execute, but they're up to you. Click OK; now running this user tool on a tex file should open Yap in the correct place.
5. Now, in Yap, go to View > Options > Inverse DVI Search (or similar, depending on what verison of Yap you have). Create a new entry, give it a name (eg "Crimson Editor"), in the Specify the program box put the location of the "invcrim.bat" file you unzipped (eg C:\Work\invcrim.bat), and in the arguments box put %l, "%f" (with the comma and space in between). Click OK and OK again; double clicking somewhere in the DVI file should now take you to the corresponding place in the Latex file in Crimson editor.
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