| December 2008 -- June 2009 | Newer posts |
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This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
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. Posted Thursday 7th May 2009 at 9.34pm The IPL in South Africa I've seen a bit of the IPL (Indian Premier League - cricket!) again this year. Mostly the competition is good, but the presentation of the competition - all sponsors, adverts, hyperbole and boorishness - is anything but. There was an exception on Monday, however, with an interview of Makhaya Ntini of the Chennai Super Kings (why Ntini hasn't got a game yet when he's been in such great form for the Proteas beats me but that's a different story). He talked about how attitudes have changed so fast in South Africa in recent years, and it was a pleasure to listen to.  "I am a black player, playing for a team from the south of India, getting paid in US dollars for playing in the Indian Premier League in South Africa." Here's another quote from Andy Zaltzman, on the same subject: While I'm on the subject of cricket, I should also mention how brilliant Phil Tufnell is on TMS. He's the last person you'd expect to make a great commentator ("Tuffers, can I borrow your brain? I'm building an idiot!") but somehow he pulls it off. Posted Wednesday 1st April 2009 at 4.27pm Proof-discovery trees I noticed the Polymath1 project a while ago, and have been thinking about some related things for a while. Tim Gowers has managed to think of many of the things I thought of and suggested answers to them in his latest blog post. Here's the crux: The more interesting part of Gowers' post to me (partly because it's one of the things I hadn't thought about) was his discussion of "proof-discovery trees" - basically organizing proofs into a hierarchical structure with the statement at the root filtering outwards into smaller steps. Although Gowers' purpose for these was to make it easier for more people to get involved in a massive mathematical collaboration, they sound like a good idea even for one-person projects. For example, I'm working on a problem called "Branching Brownian motion: Almost sure growth along scaled paths". (The "unscaled" version of the same problem has already been submitted - see Research - and the "scaled" version is now complete subject to checking for errors and optimizing.) The solution to this problem has been a long time coming, and there have been many ideas for solutions that have come and gone in the meantime. Some of these ideas came from me, some from Simon (my supervisor), and I have separate write-ups of my reasons for abandoning each of them, either in emails to Simon or fully latexed files on my computer. Some will see the light of day in my thesis, but others won't; and if I wasn't a PhD student but rather a "real" mathematician, I would not have a thesis to publish them in anyway. My final solution to the scaled problem looks rather overcomplicated. The ideas are very simple, and I have done my best to make this clear in the final version, but there are various problems that cloud the issue, the most obvious being the almost complete lack of continuity in the processes considered. Anyone reading the paper will be immediately struck by several avenues that seem worth exploring and promise a much simpler proof, and they have no idea that I have in many cases already given long consideration to those approaches (Simon already has this problem on a regular basis). An online "proof-discovery tree", including abandoned attempts as dead branches, would be a much nicer way of publishing the material. It seems to me that printed journals are on their way out; perhaps the new breed of online journals might be best off adopting the hierarchical approach. A tree could be submitted to an online journal to be peer reviewed in exactly the same way as papers are submitted now - the reviewer would have more to read, of course, but might have less wondering to do about what might have been. There are some more interesting thoughts on doing maths online here. Posted Wednesday 1st April 2009 at 12.33pm Joanna Newsom 3rd Album???!!! Happy days. So exciting!!! Posted Thursday 26th March 2009 at 10.19pm Eat like a girl I like this:  I've made it a couple of times now. I found the recipe on the Eat like a girl blog, which has some other nice things too. You can experiment - last time I used lime juice instead of lemon, and chunks of sweet potato instead of celery. Only problem is I always soak too many chickpeas - they look so pathetic when I put them in to soak, but then grow massively. I never learn. Posted Monday 23rd March 2009 at 10.25pm The wanting comes in waves Posted Monday 23rd March 2009 at 10.01pm Clare College 2: The Porters Strike Back MA Weekend was fun.  It's Danny Chan! More photos here. So, I'm now Mr Matthew Roberts MA (Cantab). What they don't tell you with these random free degrees is that you have to figure out how to shoehorn them into your CV. How do you reflect the fact that you've been given a new degree by a university that you left almost three years ago, one that takes the place of the one you graduated for almost four years ago, when on the certificate it says you graduated this year? Beats me. Getting thrown out of the gardens by a rude porter ("a couple of them are ex-students apparently") was a bit disappointing, but I guess it wouldn't have been right not to have had a run-in with a porter. I just wish it had been Ray! Overall it was good to see everyone, and amazing that hardly anyone had changed at all. I was surprised (with no good reason, obviously) to find out that the students who were first years when I left were now fourth years. And that all the PhD students I lived with when I was a fourth year were... still PhD students. The new court isn't as bad as I thought it would be, although the wooden cladding is a bit rubbish. I do quite like the new statue (the blue collapsed ring thingy that's pictured below somewhere) - but I was pretty much the only one that did. Posted Thursday 19th March 2009 at 10.30pm No K5s allowed My fellow Bath PhD probabilist Marcel Ortgiese pointed me in the direction of a little game called Planarity last week. The object is to turn a series of planar graphs into plane graphs. It's fun, at least for half an hour or so (until you get good at it). I also got hooked on a game called Fantastic Contraption (introduced to me courtesy of Nick McCullen, a postdoc here at Bath). The object in this one is to get an object from one place on the screen into a goal area, using a combination of wheels and rods. Luckily there are only 21 levels, so I couldn't waste too much of my life playing it, but it was great while it lasted! You can put all sorts of restrictions on yourself - some people have come up with some incredibly ingenious designs. One of my favourites of my own creation is this massively overcomplicated but (if I may say so myself) elegant solution to Level 7. Google put StreetView on its maps for the first time today (or maybe yesterday). It's very exciting. For example, you can see my school. Unfortunately they don't have coverage of Bath yet, and the pictures of Cambridge are severely limited by the fact that they only go along roads (Cambridge isn't a place that you want to explore by car). Posted Monday 16th March 2009 at 10.25pm Erdös number 5 I've been published! I now have Erdös number 5, via Diaconis, Stroock, Williams and Harris.    .jpg)  The journal managed to confuse my supervisor with one of his former students in one of the references, which is a bit odd - but at least they got my name right! Now I want a Bacon number. If anyone knows of any films I can be in with actors who have been in a film with ... actors who have been in a film with Kevin Bacon, let me know. Any part will do! Also, I bought a new camera (my old one broke). It's an Ixus 860 - not the newest model, but I got it cheap. I had an Ixus 430 back in the day, but it got stolen on the way to Costa Rica.  I'm going back to Cambridge this weekend to get my "fake MA" (everyone who does a BA at Cambridge gets an MA for free* six and a half years after matriculation - they have give us something to make up for giving us Saturday lectures). Hopefully I'll get some nice photos to show off the new camera... *There's actually a £5 admin charge. Posted Monday 9th March 2009 at 8.13pm Boringer and boringer That's the current England v West Indies test series, and not nicknames for Chanderpaul and Nash. I can't really blame the Windies: England let them go 1-0 up with a horrific display of batting in the first Test, series wins for them at the moment are about as frequent as innings without a dropped catch / dozens of byes from Matt Prior, and they can't help it if the third umpire keeps giving them lifelines. These pitches are blander than a bowl of cabbage. In other news, there seems to be a new statue in Clare gardens (my old college):  Without wanting to commit myself without seeing it in the flesh, I quite like it. Much better than Jimmy Watson's DNA thingy and the "Man stuck in a wall" monstrosity they replaced one of the Henry Moores with a while ago. Posted Tuesday 3rd March 2009 at 10.02pm Lil' Wayne is a stupid man's Ludwig van Some guy called Virgil Griffith has used Facebook to draw a tenuous link between musical/literary taste and intelligence. There's one graph for music and one for books - his site is down at the moment but you can see the music graph here. There are some odd results - how did Lifehouse get so high up? - and some clear trends - clever people specify bands not genres, for example - but mostly it's just funny. Pretty incredible how far ahead Beethoven is though. The books graph (with some ticks drawn on, not by me) is here. I'm a bit disappointed that To Kill a Mockingbird isn't further right. And that Emma isn't included, nor Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Posted Saturday 28th February 2009 at 13.04pm Twee to the max Have you seen the ING adverts? The one with the dog and the one with the little girl and the puddle? Well, the music to those adverts is from "Be Gentle With Me", by The Boy Least Likely To. They've got to be the tweeest band ever. It's just incredible how twee they are. They have a new album coming out soon, and a single - the two videos they've just released (both songs from the single) are pretty fun. A Balloon On A Broken String Every Goliath Has Its David (not such a good song, but the video made me laugh). Posted Saturday 28th February 2009 at 12.55pm The World in 202 Meals Some friends of mine run a website called The World in 202 Meals. The idea is that they visit one restaurant in London for each of the 202 (approx.) countries in the world. They've got off to such a good start that they appeared in Time Out's "London's best food blogs and websites" feature. Posted Sunday 22nd February 2009 at 10.46pm Beware Greeks bearing gifts English cricket was recently embarrassed by its connections with Texan billionaire Allen Stanford. To cut a long story short, the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board - Wales isn't important enough to join the acronym) accepted an offer from Stanford to play a series of games against his "Stanford All Stars" team for massive cash prizes. The first match took place late last year and the All Stars won comfortably. Stanford has since been arrested in the USA and charged with carrying out "a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world" (not involving the ECB, I might add, but still inconvenient for them). The ECB has, unsurprisingly, taken a bit of flak over this. There seems to be barely a British sports journalist yet to admonish Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, for "jumping into bed" with Stanford; in fact nearly every one of them has used that metaphor. Many argue that not enough checks were carried out on Stanford's companies before the contracts were signed. Personally I don't have too much of a problem with the fact that they didn't check Stanford wasn't conning Americans out of billions of dollars. That's not what the ECB is supposed to do. No, the ECB is supposed (I propose) to run English cricket to the best of its ability. It saw that its Indian counterpart, the BCCI, had created an exciting, well-financed, popular new domestic competition, and it said No, we are English (and Welsh), we invented the game, we should have the exciting, well-financed, popular new domestic competition. But we don't have a billion people living in our country, much less hundreds of millions of cricket fans. So, lacking the public money to resist the Indian board's power, the ECB turned to Stanford. My problem with the ECB is that they ever thought they could, or should, compete with the Indian Premier League. They thought the Stanford matches would sate the England team, who, earning half a million quid for one night's work, would turn down several hundred thousand more from the IPL. They became obsessed with trying to prevent their own players joining the Indian competition. (They also forgot that England might lose the Stanford game and end up with nothing.) Never mind that every other country in the world is happy to send its players over to England in our summer and India in their summer, both to earn money and to improve as cricketers. The ECB was arrogant and greedy and jealous, and as a result took millions of pounds from a cheating Texan who doesn't even really like cricket. We should be worried about that rather than their inability to notice a financial crime that the US Securities and Exchange Commission took years to uncover. I once had to deal with the ECB. I found myself trying to facilitate a conversation between one man who was sat in an office without a computer and refused to communicate by any means except telephone, and another man who was sat at home with a computer and refused to communicate by any means except e-mail. The ECB don't need press hacks to think up metaphors for their incompetence, they're quite happy to provide them of their own accord. (Of course, I'm being harsh on the press. This from the wonderful Andy Zaltzman: 'When the news of Stanford's little commercial inconvenience broke on the BBC's Test Match Special, qualified sage Vic Marks floated up a bit of Virgil's Aeneid into the rough - "I fear Greeks bearing gifts," he quoted, warming the hearts of those who believe TMS should still be broadcast entirely in Latin. The original, unexpurgated text of The Aeneid, recently discovered in a secret vault under the Lord's pavilion, continued: "And I fear Greeks even more when they pitch up in a helicopter with 20 million bucks in crisp, non-sequential notes. The big wooden horse is one thing, and I'm not comfortable with it, but really, the chopper-and-cash combo is just vulgar."') Posted Saturday 21st February 2009 at 8.16pm The year in photos The Boston Globe has done a 2008 in photos feature in three parts. It has some incredible photos. I found the link on my friend and isomorphic image Matt Rudy Jacobs' (mostly) film blog.  The photo (below) of the Olympic games opening ceremony in Beijing also reminded me of how amazing that ceremony was. In no way can London ever compete with that in 2012 - I remember someone suggesting that we cut our losses and just hand out sausage rolls and party hats to everyone involved.  On the music front, I've been listening to Beirut's new double EP, March of the Zapotec / Holland. Zapotec features a Mexican brass band, and sounds similar to the brilliant The Flying Club Cup but with more brass, especially in the lower registers, and less varied instrumentation. There are a couple of instrumentals, and in general the emotion of the songs is provided by the instruments rather than Zach Condon's vocals. Holland is more electronic and returns Condon to centre stage, which I thought might be a bit of a drastic change, but actually the two halves fit together well - helped by Condon's voice and the band's distinctive marching rhythms. I don't think the songs are as strong as those on The Flying Club Cup overall, but it's a really nice stopgap before Beirut's next album. Posted Wednesday 18th February 2009 at 11.40pm Booooooo to the Brits Oh dear. Kings of Leon won both Best International Album and Best International Group at the Brit Awards. Now, I don't pay any heed to these things - but this one really confuses me. My sister got the Kings of Leon album (Only by the Night) for Christmas, so I heard a fair bit of it. "Sex on Fire" is ok as a single, I don't mind that (although Michael McIntyre makes a good point), but the rest of the album is completely insipid. It's like Athlete's second album, but with more songs about sex. If the National all had their fingers chopped off and replaced Matt Berninger with Russell Brand, they might make something like Only by the Night. Except they'd be more exciting. Maybe if Brand had a lobotomy too. And wrote all the songs on his own. If, for example, MGMT had won, I could understand. Oracular Spectacular is catchy as hell despite its basic / nonsense (Black gold in clawfoot tubs unchanging / I am fire, where's my form? / Whisper crimson I intrude) lyrics. But Kings of Leon? Come on. Unfortunately I don't listen to anywhere near enough British music to be able to give many better alternatives. Los Campesinos' second album is the best British one I've heard this year by about a million miles. Internationally I haven't been that impressed either - Fleet Foxes have some great songs, Vampire Weekend's album is really good (although why they left their best song off it I have no idea), and Bon Iver's debut is nice - especially on cold morning walks up the hill to campus. Posted Wednesday 18th February 2009 at 11.53am Not quite spelunking, but close And, with a sigh, She allowed the burden of belly to drop like an apron full of boulders If you could hold up her threadbare Coat to the light where it's worn translucent in places You'd see spots where Almost every night of the year Bear had been mending suspending that baseness Now her coat drags through the water Bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows; In the magnetic embrace Balletic and glacial of Bear's insatiable shadow Posted Sunday 15th February 2009 at 10.15pm Nice catch Adam Voges (who happens to be Notts' overseas player at the moment) took a great catch in today's Twenty20 game between Australia and New Zealand. He took the ball just inside the boundary but didn't have it under control as he began to topple over the rope. So he quickly threw the ball back into the air, fell over the rope, got back up, jumped back onto the field and completed the catch before the ball hit the ground. The commentators justifiably went pretty crazy, saying they'd never seen anything like it before. I have seen something similar before though. I went to see Cambridge University play Lashings (a club side that are bankrolled by some guy who pays for former and current international stars to play for them) on the day my Part III exams finished. Chris Cairns (a former Notts overseas player) hammered a ball towards long off, where I was sitting just beyond the boundary. One of the Cambridge players ran back, jumped into the air, caught the ball, threw it back up again while still in the air, landed over the boundary - almost landing on my can of lager - then running back inside to catch the ball before it hit the ground. It was even more impressive than Voges' (although admittedly not with the pressure of 48,000 people watching live and a hundred million or so watching on TV). Posted Saturday 7th February 2009 at 2.10pm Heyzap! A friend of mine, Immad Akhund, has set up a website called Heyzap. It's basically an online games widget that anyone can embed into their own website to let visitors play the games. It seems to be doing incredibly well at the moment, a week or so after launch - they were even featured in the Telegraph business section yesterday. Posted Saturday 7th February 2009 at 2.01pm Wales Photos               Posted Thursday 5th February 2009 at 8.51pm Igloo!       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 Chris Hoy is BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Awesome! 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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