Monday 29 February 2016

let's fill space

3Blue1Brown has some nice animations and insights about the Hilbert space-filling curve.


[via Danny Yee's blog]



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Saturday 27 February 2016

currently unavailable

Searching on Amazon for a plastic stool:



Note how the actual stools don't match all the search terms, but the three tenors do!

Wednesday 24 February 2016

seasons greetings

Winter has arrived at last! ...

... in the form of the winter vomiting bug :-(



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Thursday 18 February 2016

omnipresent advice

I had an annoying voicemail notification “stuck” on my phone (very annoying, as it was the result of a spam call).  I couldn’t get rid of it, so I googled the problem.  The web is wonderful!



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Tuesday 16 February 2016

detritus rules

I am Saturn!



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Sunday 14 February 2016

Neil Gershenfeld keynote

Great talk about physical computing and personal fabrication.



[via BoingBoing]


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Saturday 13 February 2016

#webdesignfails

Just submitted my water meter reading online.

So I log onto my account, and look for “submit reading”.  No luck.  Log off, and google “Yorkshire Water meter reading”.  Find a completely separate web page, where I have to re-enter my details (all things they know from my account details, but, hey).

And when I copy/paste my account number from my bill into this page, it flashes red, and says “please enter a valid account number”.  So I delete the spaces, and then it’s happy. (Hmm.  How much programming effort is it to strip white space from a string, I wonder?)



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Friday 12 February 2016

good job birds are light

Birds can be so nonchalant.  The picture below is almost as cool as the "hanging around" one.





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Wednesday 10 February 2016

chartjunk lives!

What is this I don’t even

I haven’t read the linked article.  I’m just in horrified awe of the graphics.  I thought the perspective pie chart was the epitome of chartjunk.  I was wrong.  The multi-perspective multi-sized pie chart beats it hands down.



[h/t Junk Charts blog]

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Monday 8 February 2016

bias squared

Research indicates STEM gender bias in evaluating research into STEM gender bias.
These results suggest a relative reluctance among men, especially faculty men within STEM, to accept evidence of gender biases in STEM.
(Next up, research indicates STEM gender bias in evaluating this research into STEM gender bias in evaluating research into STEM gender bias?)



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Saturday 6 February 2016

cosmic Higgs

Fun fact I discovered yesterday:
a Higgs boson is produced somewhere in the atmosphere about once every 8 seconds  [by cosmic rays]



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Wednesday 3 February 2016

simulation the CoSMoS way

not this cover, sadly
We are currently writing a book about how to design, build, and use computer simulations “as scientific instruments”, using out CoSMoS (Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation) approach.  This is taking somewhat longer than planned, as other things always seem to have higher priority.

One of those other things is the CellBranch research project, funded by BBSRC, which finished last year.  We’ve just published a technical report describing in detail what we’ve done on the simulation side.

We used the CoSMoS approach, as described in that book in preparation.  The structured approach helped us enormously, particularly in getting to grips with the biological model we were simulating.  The report describes three increments of the simulation, and how to access the software developed.

One process step we invented, which is not part of the official approach in the current draft of the book, was a thing we dubbed the to don’t list.  We built the system incrementally, starting with a very simple version, then systematically adding the needed complexity.  While we were developing each increment, we kept having ideas about what would be needed next.  We wanted to remember these, but we also wanted to make it crystal clear that they were not to be included in the current increment.  So they got added to the to don’t list.

This turned out not to be just a helpful aide-memoire, but had an interesting side effect.  One feature of the CoSMoS approach is listing and justifying the assumptions being made during modelling and development.  Such assumptions are always made, but are often not documented, and so are promptly forgotten.  Making assumptions explicit, and teasing out their consequences, helps communication within a multidisciplinary team (here biologists and software engineers): “oh, that means we won’t be able to do X”.  And it helps enormously in subsequent increments, if one of the earlier, no longer forgotten, assumptions becomes invalidated because of new assumptions.  Nearly everything that went onto the to don’t list could be cast as an assumption: Y on the to don’t list could become “Y isn’t needed this increment, because…”.  This gave us much better insight into what the current increment could actually provide in terms of scientific understanding.

So now the to don’t list is being added to the official approach.  Maybe it’s a good job we hadn’t delivered the book on the original schedule, else we wouldn’t be able to make this valuable addition!  I hope the acquiring editor sees it the same way…

Tuesday 2 February 2016

It's deja vu all over again

Independent newspaper joke based on Sky TV joke:
Radio Times magazine listing, 2 Feb 2016, p90



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Monday 1 February 2016

deceptive politics

Seen in the free “newspaper” Europe and You, Jan/Feb 2106:

[While being in the EU costs each household less than a pound a day,
independent experts estimate the benefits are worth £3,000 a year to
the average household, due to lower prices and more jobs, trade and investment.
Source: CBI, Office for National Statistics]

This is one of “six key facts” picked to encourage people to vote to stay in the EU.  I’m almost certainly going to vote to stay in, yet this statement riled me.

This style of presentation is an example of a blatantly deceptive practice, of not comparing like with like.  Here the cost is given in pounds per day, the benefits in pounds per year. Compare:
  1. Deceptive pro (above): While being in the EU costs each household less than a pound a day, independent experts estimate the benefits are worth £3,000 a year to the average household. 
  2. Deceptive anti: While being in the EU costs each household about £300 a year, independent experts estimate the benefits are worth less than £10 a day to the average household. 
  3. Per day: While being in the EU costs each household less than a pound a day, independent experts estimate the benefits are worth about £10 a day to the average household. 
  4. Per year: While being in the EU costs each household about £300 a year, independent experts estimate the benefits are worth £3,000 a year to the average household. 
(I’ve been approximate with the roundings, as I don’t have the exact numbers to hand.)

I grant that the original statement not as dishonest (or possibly merely innumerate) as those comparisons that say “X has gone up by amount a, whereas Y has increased by b%”, because those give no opportunity to even work out whether a or b% is bigger.  But it’s still deceptive, putting “cost is less than a pound, benefit is £3,000” in the readers’ heads, and forcing them to do the arithmetic before they can compare like with like.

Even with the reworking, I’m not convinced (3) and (4) are even now comparing like with like.  Note the “each household” in the first part, compared to “the average household” in the second part.  What distinction is being drawn here?