Month: September 2013
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Saving a computer with Xfce
Regular readers will know of my contempt for Ubuntu Linux‘s standard “Unity” interface. Sadly I could find no simple way to transition to the Mint distro (which keeps Ubuntu’s simplicity but ditches the abomination that is Unity) and so thought I had no choice but to live with it. But, bluntly, Unity was making the […]
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Some questions about group theory
I am trying to read too many books at the moment, and one of them is Keith Devlin’s fascinating, but occasionally infuriating The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible. The book skates through mathematical concepts at a dizzying speed – often pausing only briefly to explain them. It is allowed to do this, it […]
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Building a model
Had a good discussion with my supervisor today – he essentially said, in terms, “expect to produce nonsense for 18 months” (meaning experimental results which seem not so useful). This was helpful as it made me get my worries about the last two weeks of tinkering on the edges of building the first “experiment” – […]
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Mail on Sunday forced to admit its climate change article flawed
The Mail on Sunday has published this “clarification” over last week’s claims about global warming: An original version of this article sought to make the fairest updated comparison with the 0.2C warming rate stated by the IPCC in 2007. It drew on the following sentence in the draft 2013 summary: ‘The rate of warming […]
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“Dreaming in Code” – a review
I did not actually read Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software – I listened to it as I pounded treadmills and pulled cross-trainers and so on in the gym. That ought to be a giveaway that it doesn’t actually contain any code or maths or […]
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Regression to the mean and climate change stupidity
The figure above is from one of the most important and most influential scientific papers ever published: Regression Towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature in volume 15 of “The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland” (in fact JSTOR claims it is copyright to them from 1886, but I am betting that the copyright […]
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Mail on Sunday 92% wrong on climate change
Sadly, I increasingly fear, in future decades our children and their children are likely to look back on this second decade of the twenty-first century as a wasted opportunity to put the findings of science into action. The scientific consensus on climate change is clear and stable. The only “argument” is about just how rapidly […]
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Perl: I still love it
For the first time in a few years I am mucking about with Perl scripts. I know the language is in decline and Perl 6 has become the ultimate in vapourware, but I have to report I still love it.
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Why, oh why, oh why?
I am writing this sitting on the toilet – I will probably be here for some time. Not because of some minor medical emergency, but because the hotel I am staying in requires me to use a ridiculous login system to access its internet service, and while I can get the service (just about) throughout […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 