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This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Sunday 20th June 2010 at 1.12pm Fantastic This story made me think a bit more about what I said about the England fans before. We used to be known, as far as football went, as a nation of thugs and hooligans. The FA and the police have, over the years, done a great job of turning that around. English football fans now act a lot more like the Barmy Army of cricket fans - they get drunk, and there's a lot of mindless chanting, but it's now usually in the name of fun rather than animosity. The shoe-dancing that I mentioned below is just one example of brilliant spontaneity - I remember Portsmouth fans last season suddenly breaking out into mass star-jumping at Goodison Park. And at the cricket today, after England had hammered Scotland, 6 men dressed as gorillas chased a man dressed as a banana all the way around the ground. That's what live sport should be about - fun. As far as England's world cup performances so far go, from my obviously well-informed position it looks like we should wait and see how we get on against Slovenia. We've been rubbish so far, but thankfully that needn't matter a jot if we beat the Slovenlies by a few goals. Judging from their performance against the US, that's by no means a foregone conclusion - they're not a bad team, and indeed they did what we failed to do and beat Algeria - but their defence is dodgy under pressure. Time for Crouchy? Posted Saturday 19th June 2010 at 1.55pm Fifa Fan Fest There is a big screen here in Paris right by the Eiffel Tower that claims to be showing every game of the World Cup live. I saw the first England game (vs USA) there and it was good - the English fans showed up our monotonous one-chant French counterparts by inventively dancing with their shoes on their heads at the end even though England's performance was far from inspiring. But then I went yesterday to watch England vs Algeria, and the screen was just showing a pink message in French telling us that they would not be showing the game due to events beyond their control. There were a lot of staff standing around chatting to each other, but no attempt to let anyone know what was going on beyond the message on the screen. Obviously things can happen that might prevent them showing the game at the last minute, and no-one can do anything about that, but it might have been nice if there had been either some staff, or even some quickly-made posters, at the nearby metro stations warning people that they should turn around. As it was each of my friends and I wasted £2 on tube journeys and managed to see only the last 35 minutes of the match, and no-one has offered any explanation or apology. And there is no way of finding out whether the same thing is going to happen next week, for the now-crucial England-Slovenia game. Poor show chaps! Posted Saturday 19th June 2010 at 11.01am Complétez ce texte avec la préposition qui convient. Ils étaient venus _______ partout, _______ pied, _______ cheval, _______ voiture _______ rendre un dernier hommage _______ celui _______ lequel ils avaient mis tous leurs espoirs. Videos of the courses from the probability conference in Bath last year, "New random geometries and other recent developments in probability", by Frank den Hollander (Random polymers), Svante Janson (Random networks), Jean-François Le Gall (Random planar maps and continuum trees) and Yuval Peres (Markov chains, rates of escape, and embeddings) are available here. Mergepdf and Stress and Pie are great (in different ways). Posted Monday 7th June 2010 at 9.37pm New office I have a new office! It has walls, and a floor. And even a ceiling. Not much else though. It still confuses me that the French word for "office" is the same as the word for "desk". The secretary at work today said to me "There's the key for your bureau. But you don't have a bureau." (except entirely in French, of course) which, at first, surprised me a bit, until I realised that the first bureau meant office, and the second meant desk. Posted Friday 4th June 2010 at 12.18pm Maths and politics? An amusing blog post from Tim Gowers. I think the first idea is a good one - probably with the alteration proposed by "Ori", that some proportion of votes are randomly exchanged, rather than changed, to avoid altering the total tally of votes. Tim Austin's thesis appeared on the arxiv today. I haven't read it yet but intend to at least make an attempt. Tim was the best mathematician in my year at Cambridge - he was known to us Clare mathmos as "Banach Space Guy" in our first year, as he would disappear from some of our lectures, allegedly to go to Part III lectures on Banach spaces. He has recently been awarded a Clay research fellowship, and was also the Sun newspaper "Mathematician of the year" in 2002! I spoke to him briefly a few times when we were doing Part III, as he was doing pretty much the same courses as me (including Ben Garling's course on operator semigroups, in which there were only three of us, plus Tom Körner and, for one lecture, Tim Gowers). Posted Thursday 3rd June 2010 at 4.18pm In a fist-fight with the fog Phew. Paris -> London -> Nottingham -> Birmingham -> Bristol -> Bath -> London -> Leeds -> Nottingham -> Grantham -> London -> Paris. Last week was pretty hectic. I did also spend some time not on the train or in the car - notably, I had a barbecue at my friend James' house, watched Somerset beat Worcestershire, watched England beat Mexico, passed my viva (thesis defense / soutenance de thèse for those outside the UK), was informed that I was organising the Bath maths postgrad Summer BBQ, played cricket for my old team in Bath, the Venturers, and danced a lot in Leeds. Thanks to everyone who put me up at any point during the week! Then since getting back I've been to watch Joanna Newsom, done the corrections for my thesis, and applied for a job. Joanna Newsom was, again, fantastic. And her band was tight. She played a second encore, which seemed genuinely not to be planned - they turned the stage lights off and the crowd lights on, and turned the background music on. And turned the background music up a bit because it couldn't be heard over the sound of the crowd clapping and banging things. And then turned it up some more, presumably in an attempt to get everyone to leave. Eventually Joanna came back out on her own and played "Sawdust and Diamonds". She did stumble on the words to her first song ('81), although not nearly so disastrously as last time I saw her, at Latitude festival, where she had to abandon "Sawdust and Diamonds" altogether because she couldn't remember the line "doubled over with the hunger of lions". High points were "Ribbon Bows", "Good Intentions Paving Company" (which basically panned into a jazz-style groove-out complete with massive trombone solo), and "Inflammatory Writ". This last one was a surprise for me - it's not one of the stand-outs on her first album, but the band really turned it into a storming pop song. I've just found this link to transcriptions of some JNew songs. Haven't tried them myself yet (the piano ones... I have no intention of trying to play the harp in the near future!) but they look good. Finally, inspired by Andy Zaltzman's "Lies About Cricketers", here are some Lies About Mathematicians taken from my special edition viva-passing parade email:
Posted Thursday 20th May 2010 at 6.18pm They're far more laid-back about their art galleries How prescient! Posted Monday 17th May 2010 at 11.44pm Worth duck-all and Useless What a difference a year makes. In the topsy-turvy world of the ICC, where world cups can turn up twice within 12 months, England managed to lose to the Netherlands in 2009, and then beat Australia (who featured as their strike bowler the man who spearheaded the Dutch attack those few months earlier) to become world champions in 2010. And some victory it was too - England dominated the tournament from the moment they sneaked through their first-round group. It's worth, then, revisiting that group stage and looking again at why England did only just manage to qualify. There was a rained-off game against Ireland, which no-one could do anything about - and for which points and run-rate were shared evenly. But there was also a rain-affected game against the West Indies, which England lost after Chris Gayle's side were set 60 runs to win from 6 overs in reply to England's 191 from 20. That is, West Indies needed a run rate of 10, only marginally above England's 9.55, even though they had to stretch their innings over a much shorter period with their full quota of 10 wickets to play with. "That doesn't seem fair," you might say - and Paul Collingwood agreed. From Cricinfo: "There's a major problem with Duckworth-Lewis [the system used to decide targets after rain delays] in this form of the game," Collingwood said. "I've got no problem with it in one-dayers, and I know it's made me very frustrated tonight because I've come off the losing captain, but it's certainly got to be revised in this form. "Ninety-five percent of the time when you get 191 runs on the board you are going to win the game. Unfortunately Duckworth-Lewis seems to have other ideas and brings the equation completely the other way and makes it very difficult." Actually, Paul, you're wrong. Currently the stats say that 100 percent of the time when you get 191 runs on the board you are going to win the game (or at least they did until the rain had its way in Guyana). But is that enough for Messrs Duckworth and Lewis? No way. Duckworth had this to say: "Remember that there have been a total of about 70 matches decided by Duckworth-Lewis since Twenty20 was invented in 2002, and there's only been two instances where any dissent has been expressed, and both of those were by Paul Collingwood and the England team, as a result of failing to win against West Indies." I'm afraid, Frank, that you're wrong too. In fact, Chris Gayle, the winning captain in Guyana, also had some harsh words for the system. "I think it's something they're going to have to look into. I would support what Collingwood just said. I could have been in the same position as well. It's something that can be addressed so it can be even stevens for both teams in the future. I'm happy but it's just unfortunate for England." Tony Lewis was rather scathing of England's claims too. Asked by the Indian magazine DNA about alternative suggestions, including reducing the number of wickets in hand for the chasing team, he simply said "I don’t think that would work at all. It’s a crude mechanism that would open up a lot of new problems." Burying your head in the sand hasn't been so popular since Duncan Fletcher's stubborn picking of GoJo and Gilo against all the evidence in the 2006/7 Ashes series. "I have always thought, in the modern game, that a spinner should be able to contribute runs down the order," he said. Thanks for that Fletch. Good evidence you backed it up with too. Just like Duckworth and Lewis. They tell us their method works well, but they don't give us any stats to justify their claims. Perhaps we can let Fletcher off on that front, as he had much of his success in other areas by picking on instinct. But for two statisticians it's just poor work and they shouldn't get away with it. Another, more reasonable tactic of Fletcher's was to look most critically at the make-up of the team not after they had lost, but after they had won. This England team's performances over the tournament have had few flaws. They were the best team by some distance. The only game they lost was the one in which they made their highest score - a score no international team has ever successfully chased down. I hope someone on the England management team remembers that - because the best time to complain about unfair treatment is now. By all means let's sing while we're winning - we don't often get the chance! - but let's make sure we have a bit of a moan too. Posted Sunday 16th May 2010 at 4.42pm Colly & Flower Just been playing frisbee in the park. At one point I had to attempt to explain to a small French girl (probably about 2 years old) who tried to join in that the reason she wasn't very good at throwing the frisbee was because it was bigger than her arm. She didn't seem to care and kept trying anyway. Now about to head off to the pub to watch England in the Twenty20 World Cup final. BARMY ARMY!!!  Also, I realised last night (not sure what brought this thought on) that I know pretty much all the words to S Club 7's "Bring it all back". Naa naa na-na-na-na na naa naa na-na-na-na naa naa na-na-na na-na. Posted Friday 14th May 2010 at 8.57pm ConDemNation Woooooooooo it's another politics post! They'll stop soon... I promise. I said a while back that Johann Hari is great. Well I don't agree with much of his latest article. The title ("This is not what the British people voted for") isn't far off right, but he doesn't offer any solutions to solving the problem of us not really voting for anything. His point is that only 39% of the vote was "right-wing" (i.e. Tory or UKIP). But he goes on to point out that "Lib Dem voters identified as 'left-wing' over 'right-wing' by a ratio of 4:1" - well, Lib Dems got 23% of the vote, and a fifth of that is roughly 5% - so the total right-wing vote was actually 44%, which he conveniently fails to notice. (I'll let him off ignoring the BNP - more people should.) OK, so 44% is still some distance off half, and if we had proportional representation this would make a rainbow coalition (Labour and Lib Dems with help from the Scots, Welsh and smaller parties like the Greens) plausible. But we don't - we have first past the post, and the "progressive majority" didn't get enough seats to stand a real chance of forming a government. Arguing that it would have been different if we had proportional representation is assumptuous (is that a word?) - perhaps if we had proportional representation, more Tories would have turned out in (what are currently) Tory safe constituencies. Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have seen a rainbow coalition, and I would love something much closer to proportional representation (precisely what form is up for debate - AV+ would be a nice start). But just saying "this isn't what we voted for" and walking off in a huff doesn't do anybody any good. It's closer to what we voted for than anything else is. Personally I'll give them a chance. Tories + Lib Dems >>>>>>>> Tories. Especially Tories with a small majority, where the crazy climate change deniers, Europhobes and tax-haters have to be pandered to. The cabinet is a bit disappointing - George Osborne, for example, makes me feel sick every time I look at him. Having a representative for equality who has regularly voted against improvements in gay rights is another problem. But at least Osborne has a couple of Libbers to keep his wings clipped. And the one really positive thing is that we have Chris Huhne as Environment Secretary (or whatever it's called) - how much success he'll get winning the Tories round is unclear (I'm still not convinced many of them have admitted France exists yet, let alone global warming) but at least we can be sure he'll do his best. Maybe it will end up being a "radical reforming Tory government with Lib Dem backing vocals" - I certainly don't fully trust the Tories not to renege on their promise of a referendum on AV which, by the way, EVERYONE SHOULD VOTE YES TO!!!!! But there's no point moaning about it before it happens (hypocrite! I hear you cry). Elections are for judging them on what we think they'll do, but the election has been and gone. They're here now - let's let them get on with the job and judge them on what they actually do. Posted Tuesday 11th May 2010 at 11.36pm Let's march So. Gordo has resigned. Dave is PM. As I said to someone yesterday, "given that the choice was between Tory majority and no Tory majority, I will take this situation over the alternative!" And as someone else said to me today, "My mum only ever gave me one bit of political advice. It was when going to the polling station always remember to wear clean underwear, because you never know when the Tories will ... " (end of quote removed for reasons of public decency!) Brown was - still is, I hope - a good politician. He wasn't out of his depth as PM, he was just in the wrong pool. He's clearly no good at the public stuff. But he cares! Watch the speech below - if you can't spare the full 10 minutes, just watch the last minute. He's so into it he forgets what words are and starts talking nonsense at several points. But when his neck clicks into place and he says "That's what we've all got to march for," it makes me smile. As they say (I hope) across the pond, Stephen A. Douglas was a great debator, but Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. I don't really mean to compare Gordo to Abe, but I hope we haven't put the wrong men in charge. Also: I wish Forest would learn not to self-destruct in play-off semi-finals. Posted Friday 7th May 2010 at 9.52pm The aftermath I actually stayed up till 5.15am - and got up again at 6.30am to check how it was going. It couldn't really be more hung. I just wrote an email to a friend with some predictions. Here it is. Ha ha... well, I wouldn't hold your breath. My guess is it'll be Monday at the earliest before we know for definite what's going on. My prediction is: LD & Con to fail to reach an agreement; LD & Labour to fail to reach an agreement; Brown to resign on Monday; Cameron to run a minority government with the help of the Northern Irish parties, and sweeten up his econoic policies to get a few stray LD MPs on his side (and maybe even some disenchanted Labour ones); Harman/Johnson/D Miliband to run for Labour leadership; Miliband to win; another election in the autumn (or next May at the latest, but I can't see Dave risking leaving it that long - once his economic policies kick in he's going to be one unpopular fellow). I just hope we manage to get proper voting reform somewhere along the way, but I can't see it unless Clegg swallows his pride and makes a coalition with Labour, trading short-to-medium-term popularity for the chance to be a Lib Dem hero in years to come as the man who finally got proportional representation! Posted Thursday 6th May 2010 at 9.15pm Election night What happened to the pictures of prospective prime ministers playing football or tennis with inner-city kids this campaign? I haven't even seen many baby-kissing photos. To be fair, I guess you'd have to be pretty weird to let Brown or Cameron near your baby. I have nothing to do until 11pm (French time) when the BBC's election coverage starts, and the word is that we'll have a slight Tory majority. I plan on staying up till maybe 3am, by which time I'll have more of an idea whether or not that rumour is true. I feel fairly resigned now. The Tories are back. They're going to be running my country. And it is my country - despite my post a few months ago, I am proud of Britain. There are a million little things that I love about it. The Mirror ran a front page today featuring the now-famous picture of David Cameron in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. I've just been reading a column by some guy who says he hates Tories. I was hoping for something funny but actually he mostly lists reasons why he doesn't hate Tories. He doesn't hate the Tories because Cameron went to Eton. Apparently Cameron didn't have a choice. Does this guy really know that much about Dave? Watch out, there's a "this is what happened to me" story on the way. I remember when I was 10 or 11, my parents were trying to decide what school I should go to. In Nottingham, there's one big private school, called the High School. You have to pass an exam to get in, and around that time (if I remember correctly) they charged about £1000 per term. My parents, I think, would have liked me to go there. They thought about entering me for the entrance exam, and hoping that I would get some kind of scholarship for doing really well in it. But they were worried, partly because if I went - even if I did get a scholarship - then they would be honour-bound to send my brother and sister there too. Of course, they could also get scholarships, but what if they didn't? My parents would be stuck paying £6000+ a year, and they didn't think they could afford that. So they asked me what I thought about it. As far as I remember, I said I didn't mind either way. Actually I used to say I didn't mind about most things (and I still do). But I remember actually not minding. I'd been to an open day at the High School and it was kids with bunsen burners and lab coats burning magnesium and looking cool. Like most other secondary school open days I guess. Anyway I went to Arnold Hill instead. It was tough, but I guess that's what secondary school is like, especially for a lanky ginger-haired kid with braces on his teeth who's good at maths. I've met lots of people from private schools since, and many of them are good friends of mine. But things like seeing Cameron up there make me wonder - does it really make that much difference? If I'd been to the High School, would I have mixed with different people at Cambridge? Would I be an investment banker now, in a plush flat in London? Or would I be a better mathematician? Would I be voting Tory? I just wrote "I doubt that last one very much!" - and then deleted it. My parents have always voted Labour. I remember once, when I was a kid, asking them why, and them telling me it was because we were working class. At the time I didn't really know what working class was (or rather, I didn't know that any other way existed - except maybe that the Queen was different), but I accepted that as a reason. I remember being happy waking up on that morning in May 1997 - me and my brother and sister were staying at my old childminder's house, and she'd made pancakes for breakfast, and there was that guy on the TV with the big pendulum thing and there was a lot of red. I remember thinking that was good. But now I have my own views, and I like to think that my dad telling me that we voted Labour because we were working class has little to do with why I would have voted Labour in this election (had I actually received my vote). So it stands to reason that if I'd been schooled in a different environment, my views might well have been different by now. Who knows? One of my old housemates in Bath recently changed his facebook status to "I wish the politicians would stop saying it's "fair" to tax rich people more. It's not fair in the slightest....it is necessary." This caught me a bit by surprise, as (although I know he prides himself on being right-wing) I had always assumed it was fair to tax rich people more. This update forced me to consider my views. But - and maybe it's just me trying to warp the world to fit around my views, rather than the other way round, but this is how I see it - I still think it is fair. I see the counterargument. There are a lot of people in crap jobs earning crap wages because they didn't try hard enough at school, or at college, or at uni. Why should they pay less tax than people in good jobs, who worked hard to get those jobs? Well, reason one is because there are also a lot of people in crap jobs earning crap wages who did try their best, and circumstance or illness or lack of ability left them where they are. How can we draw a line between these people and the skivers? And reason two is: don't we forgive the people who didn't try hard? Isn't it cruel - unfair - to keep punishing them for mistakes they made when they were kids? They'll never earn as much as the people who did try hard, and they know it. It can be hard to imagine that feeling - of knowing that you'll be sticking sachets of shampoo into leaflets for the next 45 years. Of knowing that you're going to freeze for the next three weeks because you can't afford the gas bill. Of knowing that you're not going to be able to give your kids Christmas presents. And knowing that it's all because you didn't try hard enough when you were 16. That's why I think taxing the rich more is fair. There are punishments already built into being poor. And that's also why I think Labour has been, overall, a real force for good in our country in the last 13 years. Labour did some terrible things, most of all the messed-up wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it did some great things. The minimum wage, foreign aid, child tax credits, hospitals, gay rights, schools. So, after what has been probably been my most rambling blog post ever, I think what I want to say is a big thank you to Labour for the good stuff, an "I hope you regret the bad stuff as much as you should" for the bad stuff, and an "I hope you guys aren't half as bad as I think you're going to be" for the Tories. Chin up Matt. They can't be that bad, can they? Posted Sunday 2nd May 2010 at 1.46pm Cool runnings If you thought the Jamaican bobsleigh team was unlikely - what about this?  Posted Thursday 29th April 2010 at 6.41pm What I want to see tonight Politics again! Only a week to go and I'll probably be back to talking about cricket and stuff. Tonight is the third live debate between the three "big party" leaders. Here are a few things I want to see happen. 1. Gordon Brown to come out straight from the off and hit us with "Come on, she was a bigot!" 2. Either Gordon or Nick (or, even better, both of them in unison) to say "What's that you say Dave, some company bosses don't want us to raise national insurance? What a shocker, I didn't see that coming! Got any more petitions? Are teenagers against our increase in alcohol duty? Lorry drivers against fuel duty? Do millionaires want us to abolish inheritance tax? Oh hang on..." That seems to me to be a perfectly acceptable, simple response to Cameron's petition. 3. Everyone present to insist on calling Dave Chris, at least until Dave calls national insurance national insurance instead of "the jobs tax". Dave, I know you think it should be called "the jobs tax" but it's not; I think you should be called "chief Tory wanker" but I call you Dave because that's your name. 4. The audience to break free of their shackles. Applaud! Laugh! Boo if you really have to. If you get thrown out, who cares? At least you've gone down in a blaze of glory. I know they told you not to do it, but hey! Get with the programme! It's live! (And the people with the questions should be leading the revolution. The BBC can't really throw them out, or David Dimbleby will have to make up new questions on the spot. And nobody wants that.) As a final treat, here is a spot the difference competition featuring one of the candidates I could vote for next week. Anyone able to spot 10 differences wins a prize. Entries on a postcard to the usual address: Gedling Conservative Association Office, 222 Carlton Hill, Carlton, Nottinghamshire NG4 1FY.  Posted Sunday 25th April 2010 at 11.22pm Common people I'm glad I posted when I did yesterday, otherwise you might have thought I was copying David Mitchell. Posted Saturday 24th April 2010 at 10.14pm Dave Cameron is my hero I got up early this morning to do some shopping before I headed to Versailles with some friends. The shorts and flip-flops came out for the first time this year: the sun was out, the sky was a magnificent blue, until you looked north towards the city and it faded into a kind of dull grey as it met the horizon; but still, the weather was fantastic, and it was one of those mornings when anything seems possible. And I got to thinking, what with it being election season and all, about how anything really is possible on 6th May. The Tories could get in. Labour could get in. The Lib Dems could get in. OK, so two of these are very unlikely, but they're a hell of a lot more likely than they were two weeks ago, and we could certainly end up with a Lab-Lib coalition, or a Tory-Lib coalition, or just a plain old hung parliament. Anyway, whichever of those things happens, the best thing about them is that we could actually get electoral reform. Everybody wants it, except the Tory party and some of the Labour party. We're using a stupid old system for no reason other than that it suits both parties whenever only two parties have even a slight chance of winning. Now that we suddenly have the Lib Dems carving out around the same proportion of the vote as the other two, the system just becomes bizarre. Labour could get the third-biggest share of the vote, but the most seats in Parliament by some distance. Even the Tories will have trouble explaining that one away. They'll try though no doubt, because getting rid of this system could mean that we never have to have a (lone, i.e. non-coalition) Tory government again. Ever. The great irony of all this is that Dave Cameron made it all possible. Without the live TV debates, the Lib Dems would have been stuck on 20-ish per cent as usual, the Tories would probably have won, or maybe Labour could just about have forced a hung parliament, but without enough seats to really do anything but hang on till the inevitable quickfire next election. And without Cameron, the TV debates wouldn't have been possible. He thought he could smarm the TV audiences with his rosy cheeks and his shiny chin, and he went for it. He didn't need to! He was winning! The winning party never agrees to these things, because why would they? But he went for it. Gordon, of course, knew he was up against it in these things, but he had nothing to lose, so he went for it too. And then the Lib Dems snuck in, and Gordon and Dave didn't really like it, but they couldn't really do too much about it and anyway, it was only the Lib Dems. So, let's hope we manage it. Let's hope we get reform. Let's hope we never have to put up with the Tories again. And if so, let's raise a glass to Dave and his shiny chin, because they made it possible. Dave - you might just be my hero. 
 Versailles, by the way, was fantastic. It's probably the prettiest man-made place I've ever seen. The gardens of the palace - and the Domaine de Marie-Antoinette - were just stunning. The weather helped, of course. And in case you're wondering, I am still planning on voting Labour in the election. I think I wrote something about my reasons a while back. I feel like they ought to be punished in some way for some of what they've done, especially the Iraq war. But that's not what I'm here for - I'm here to vote for the party that I think would do the best job over the next five years, and that happens to be Labour. Finally, Johann Hari is great. Posted Wednesday 7th April 2010 at 9.35pm Mango and green bean curry Another recipe for my archives. This is by no means perfect, it could do with something extra - maybe some squash or something - but it was nice and I'd like to make it again. As usual, I didn't actually measure anything so the amounts are all approximate. 1 tsp turmeric 1 tsp mustard seeds 1/2 tsp chilli powder 1/2 tsp curry powder 1/2 tsp black pepper 1/2 tsp paprika 1/2 tsp garam masala 2 medium onions, finely chopped 1 large clove garlic, finely chopped 1 tablespoon plain flour Tomatoes 1/2 green mango, cut into 1cm pieces Some green beans Some sultanas Heat some oil in a saucepan, add the spices and fry for around a minute. Add the onions and garlic, stir and fry until the onions are cooked - add a splash of water or more fat if the spices start to stick or burn. Take off the heat, leave to cool for a minute, then add the flour. Stir it in well. Add the tomatoes (I usually use sieved tomatoes, and I guess I put in around two thirds of a mug's worth today). Put back on a reduced heat, stir everything together well, and then keep adding water a bit at a time and stirring for a while until it's the right consistency... maybe halfway between curry and soup. Then add the mango, beans and sultanas, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. If it's not thick enough at this stage remove the lid from the pan for a while. Makes about 2 portions. Posted Friday 2nd April 2010 at 9.40pm Dropbox I'm generally a bit slow getting into cool new web-based stuff nowadays, unlike when I was at school. But one thing I do use is Dropbox. It's brilliant. You register and you get your own little bit of space "on the cloud". You then download their program to each of your computers, and it creates a folder on each computer which contains exactly the same stuff. When you change a file on one computer, it automatically changes on each of the other computers. It also gets backed up, on the cloud, every time you change it. So, for example, I have one computer at home, and one at work. Often I want to do work at home too, and previously I would have had to put my work files onto a USB stick, or email them to myself, or put them online. Back in the day (only 4 or 5 years ago) I used to actually carry a floppy disk around with me. But now I just keep my work in my dropbox folder, and it's magically on both my PCs, and always exactly the same, and always backed up several times over. It just works. I've just been listening to Broken Social Scene's "7/4 (Shoreline)". I saw BSS live once and they were fantastic, but I've never been a huge fan of their records. This song, though, is awesome. I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but my earphones just don't do it justice. Listening to it on proper speakers is a different experience altogether! Posted Sunday 21st March 2010 at 10.10pm An impossible question Est-ce qu'il faut qu'on utilise le subjonctif lorsqu'on pose un question (comme celui-ci)? (Excuse my French.) Posted Saturday 13th March 2010 at 4.23pm New som Yes! Like George Foreman circa 1988, only without the 11-year break, I'm back. And only to say: I've been listening to the new Joanna Newsom album, and it's long. And it's good, I think, except it's so long that I still haven't had time to digest it properly yet. It's really long. Really, really long. I've been listening to it for the last hundred and one minutes. Honestly! A hundred and one individual minutes, all lined up in a row. And I've still got 22 more of them to go. That's enough minutes, in total, to watch an entire football match, including half time. It's four power naps. It's probably enough time for Usain Bolt to run 37 miles, assuming he's super-human, which I'm pretty sure he is. It's half a Lord of the Rings movie, extended edition. It's a long time. It's a good job it's good, really. "No Provenance" isn't good though. The album roars out of the blocks with more hooks in the first 4 songs than on the whole of Ys. Ok, so Ys only had 5 songs, and not many hooks. I have more hair than my microwave. But as I was saying - then "No Provenance" comes along and starts dragging single syllables over about 17 not-very-interesting notes. I hope the lyrics are good - all I've noticed so far is something about my arms. My arms. My arms. Other than that though, I recommend it. I guess out of 18 mostly very long songs, one was bound to be grating. I just wish I could get the "faultlessly etiolated fishbelly-face" line out of my head. Posted Monday 8th March 2010 at 3.00pm The lottery of life What does it mean to be British? Don't worry, I haven't turned into Gordon Brown. I couldn't care less whether Britain has a national day to congratulate itself on being generally awesome. Well, I could care less. Who's going to complain about an extra day's holiday? Maybe that's why Gordy went for it. Easy points. But talking of points, that's not the point. This article is kind of the point. I was going to use it as the inspiration to write some kind of thrilling tour of what's good and bad and getting better and getting worse about Britain. But then I realised that I'm not very good at that kind of thing, so I wrote this instead. What is special about Britain nowadays? The BBC is one thing. David Mitchell knows it. Test cricket is another. Everyone sensible (aka everyone except Chris Gayle) knows that Test cricket is the best kind of cricket (best kind of sport if you ask me), but the British are the only people masochistic enough to actually turn up to watch it. Even if it does have to involve dressing up as the pink panther, or worshipping a Jimmy Saville lookalike as some kind of long-nosed cricketing deity, or chanting BARMY ARMY for the full last hour of every day. But really, now the Wars are fading from living memory (and being betrayed by stupid new wars), what do we have to be really proud of? Can we really be proud of our language? We invented our language like Newton invented gravity - that is, we didn't have much choice, it was thrust upon us. We just wrote the best explanations of it. It is a bit strange being an Englishman in France (probably anywhere foreign) - when people realise you don't speak French very well, they speak English to you. And then often they ask you where you're from, and you say, erm, England, because to you it's like "er, why were you speaking to me in English if you didn't know I was from England - or possibly the USA or Wales or something - anyway?", but actually they were speaking to you in English because that's the language everyone knows, and now they're looking at you like you really achieved something because you speak English better than them. In fact you were just born in England, it kind of just happened. Like I said, can we really be proud of that? It is difficult adapting to a smaller place in the Big Scheme of Things. I guess it is a bit tough for politicians, having to keep up this pretence that really we're still quite important and should be sticking our noses in other people's business. But why bother pretending? We're British. We know the truth and we can handle it. We won't grumble. We'll carry on. Posted Monday 8th March 2010 at 11.11pm Rusted metal heart I've just read that Mark Linkous committed suicide last weekend. Rest in peace, Sparklehorse. Posted Sunday 21st February 2010 at 10.05am Did you guess what it was yet? I put a new paper up on the arxiv, called "Almost sure asymptotics for the random binary search tree" (the link won't work till tomorrow night without a password). Arxiv seemed to be playing up (well, I say that, but it was almost certainly my fault - I just don't see what I was doing wrong!), and in the end the best I could do was get a pdf version working. The images (see post on 26th Jan) are quite big in eps form, but arxiv didn't tell me they were a problem - it just refused to mention the ps file at all, and failed to make the pdf version. So I had to redo it with jpegs to at least get the pdf going. Even when I just uploaded a tex file with the images commented out it refused to make a postscript version. Bizarre. So if you hate Adobe or something like that - sorry. Posted Tuesday 16th February 2010 at 2.28pm CCATSL with Crimson Editor I mentioned a few posts ago that I still use CCATSL for programming work. CCATSL - which I think stands for "Cambridge CATAM Software Library", where CATAM means "Computer-aided teaching of all mathematics" is just C with some nice graphical and mathematical libraries, and is put together to make it easy for second and third year mathematicians to do computer projects in Cambridge. Unfortunately it's not really made for very hardcore stuff and so the graphics output is very easy to use but not hugely customisable. I'm working on getting something better working but I'm not very good with proper computer stuff, and the people who write guides for these things seem to assume you know what you're doing before you get started. So, for now, it's CCATSL. The catch is that the people who maintain CCATSL have the job of teaching 150 people (ish) a year how to program, and thus just set up everything so that one can download the windows installer, tell it to go, and start immediately. But this assumes that you want to use their favourite text editor - emacs. And I don't. They do include a makefile, but given that you have to dig that out and send it the right arguments, you might as well start from scratch. It's a bit of a palava. And I got a new laptop the other day (Acer Timeline 1810tz - liking it so far), so had to go through the palava again. So for future reference, here's my guide to setting up CCATSL with Crimson Editor in Windows - and I guess it works the same with other text editors too. Download the CCATSL installer (google will find it), note what version it is (currently 2.3b), run it. It may tell you to restart - if so, restart. If you're running Vista or Windows 7 you may have to download a different startup.bat file from the same page. Right-click the link, save target as, and put it in the folder you just installed CCATSL to - it should replace the old startup.bat. Run startup.bat, follow the instructions up until you've compiled intro.c. Now change the word "main" to "MainCL" in intro.c. Compile it again, and you should get a message telling you that you're trying to compile a windows program in dos program mode, or something like that - and asking if you want to change to windows program mode. Tell it that you do. Once you've compiled you should see a long message starting with "gcc" and inluding words like "/library/winmain.o" and -DCCATSL2D. These (well, after "gcc") are (if you take out the line break symbols) the arguments that we want to use in Crimson. Open Crimson Editor. Go to Tools > Conf. User Tools. Menu text can be anything you like (I use "CCATSL"). Command should be something like: C:\CCATSL2.3\cygwin\bin\gcc.exe Argument should be something like: "$(FileTitle).c" /library/winmain.o /library/catres.o -o "$(FileTitle).exe" -Wl,--stack,8000000 -DCCATSL2D -DCCATSLWIN -mwindows -I/include -Wl,--strip-all -L/library -lccatsl2.3b -lcomctl32 but you may have to change this - look at the message you got in emacs when you compiled intro.c in windows program mode and try to change the above to make it like what emacs said - for example, you might have to change -lccatsl2.3b by changing the version number 2.3b to whatever your version is. Initial directory, as usual, should be $(FileDir) and I usually have save before execute and capture output checked. Now, the final important step. You can try it and see if it works, but it probably won't. Close crimson, close emacs. RESTART YOUR COMPUTER!!! I didn't do this yesterday and I could not for the life of me work out why things weren't working. I tried loads of different changes to the arguments. Gave up and went to bed. Woke up this morning, tried again, and it worked fine. Gah, stupid forgetting the oldest trick in the book - restarting! I'm back in England this week. My gran is very ill. She has Alzheimer's, and has had virtually no cognitive function for several years (wow, that sounds cold put like that! I can't think of a better way to describe it). She seems to recognise people vaguely but she can't speak so we don't know if she actually knows who everyone is. She still reacts to things - one of her catch phrases used to be saying "cold hands, warm heart" whenever anyone touched her with cold hands, and that's about the only thing that's left of her old self now - she doesn't say it, but she reacts like she knows she's supposed to say something, and sometimes starts murmuring some gobbledegook. Or at least she did, till yesterday. Yesterday she stopped reacting even to that. I heard a horrible cover of REM's Everybody Hurts yesterday in the car. I know that song was written for different circumstances - about a young girl committing suicide - but there's a line that goes "When you feel you've had enough of this life / Well hang on", and I thought, well, no. Well, yeah, if you're a healthy teenager, sure. But if you're an 80-plus-year old woman who doesn't know who she is - if you feel you've had enough, then maybe it's time. Update, Saturday 20th Feb: She died today, after putting up a valiant battle over the last week. Bye, Grandma. Posted Sunday 7th February 2010 at 5.22pm Sad Sack  So, you're a servant at what seems to be a very important feast. I mean, look, that guy in the middle has some kind of halo! And you've been given the task of pouring wine from a big heavy stone vat into a lightweight, lop-sided, narrow-based metal jug. Do you: a) get someone to hold the jug for you; b) take it out to the kitchen where it's a bit less crowded and pour very carefully; c) hey, what's the worst that could happen? Just balance it right on the corner of a raised section of floor, within easy reach of a menagerie of small animals, and put your back into it. That guy with the halo is probably Jesus anyway - if you spill it all, he can just miracle it back into the vat, right? I went to the Louvre today. This picture is on the wall opposite the Mona Lisa. It gets a lot less attention, despite being a lot bigger and more interesting. But you've got to wonder what that guy's doing in the bottom right. He really didn't think it through, did he? This guy is my favourite. Strange man with giant eyes, made out of sackcloth and dogs' teeth. What's not to like?  PS The Louvre is big. Posted Sunday 31st January 2010 at 9.43pm 2010!!! I must remember that it is no longer 2009. I must remember that it is no longer 2009. 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I must remember that it is no longer 2009. I must remember that it is no longer 2009. I must remember that it is no longer 2009. I must remember that it is no longer 2009. I must remember that it is no longer 2009. I must remember that it is no longer 2009. On my CV and all my blog posts. Wow. Posted Saturday 30th January 2010 at 10.11pm The sweetly sleeping sweeping of the Seine 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.
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