frequency
I’m fed up of starting blog entries with apologies about how I’ve failed to blog in quite some time. Therefore I’m not going to apologise.
What have I been up to recently? Well… I have had a reading week. This consisted of me going to London (for the General Secretaries interview), to Oxford (for general geek antics with Nick), to London (to see Elle and Ruth) then to Sheffield (for a holiday.) This was a lot of fun, although I neglected to do any work. This lead to me having the past few days as a catch up.
This weekend is my last DF Committee meeting (OldNew changeover) and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand I am going to miss DFs but on the other hand I think it will allow me to get more done in St Andrews and for C-Change (which I have neglected so far.) I think it will also be interesting to see who I keep in contact with. I’ve always, in some ways, seen the end of DFs as “the end” but instead I’m now seeing it as an opportunity to work out who out of my friends are going to remain that way and who I will drift away from. Also after the bad experience that was Althing 2006, I will be glad to see the back of DFs in many ways.
So, my plans for the next few weeks: write my “Sampling Theory” report/practical/paper thing (which “conveniently” is related to Distance sampling), then start revising for my first set of finals (out of 4) which is currently scaring me a lot. Elle should be coming up in 12th week, which will be nice.
Well, a blog post from me would not be complete without some links, and I have a lot, see this post for why this was a problem, although with Firefox 2.0 you can recover sessions, which is nice when everything crashes and you loose the 30 tabs you had open…
So, to start with I have a nice article by Ben Goldacre (writer of the Guardian’s “Bad Science” column) on his blog about a
Secondly I came across a Facebook group the other day about an economist called Arthur Pigou. then, when reading The Economist in Sheffield station I noticed that the Facebook group was mentioned, the article Pigou or NoPigou? is, of course, available online. Greg Mankiw’s blog has a better introduction (the example case being introducing Pigovian taxes on gasoline) in his Pigou Club manifesto. The gist of the argument is that government should introduce higher taxes on negative externalities (economics-speak for bad things that happen but don’t effect you in terms of market prices.)
Radar Online have a funny and revealing article about Scientology in the framework of it being better value for money than going to a Broadway show. Although it is meant to be funny, it also comes across as slightly scary.
At this point Firefox crashes but I restart the session and continue seamlessly. This is a Good ThingTM.
Now for some smaller stories and sites that caught my eye: a nice demonstration in Washington where the protesters dressed up at the character “V” from V for Vendetta, a download for the school classic the periodic table song, online lecture videos, cities doing away with traffic signs and finally “the mother of all computer science cheat sheets” which looks pretty useful if you aren’t doing a CS degree.
Finally, my tip for the week was given to me by my “Quantum Mechanics 1″ tutor. One of the joys of Google Books is that they have scanned a lot of books which are all searchable. “So what?” you say, “I knew that!” But, did you think of using that to search instead of using the index? I hadn’t (maybe I’m just stupid) and it’s a really useful way of getting information out of a book that would usually be very hard to find. The only problem that I have found is that the OCR that Google are using is not perfect. This leads to problems like the following. I am searching for the Horvitz-Thompson estimator in “Introduction to Distance Sampling”, now doing a search for “Horvitz-Thompson” yields no results however, when you search for just “Thompson” you get what you want, which is a little frustrating…
Anyway, I hope this satisfies you all for a while…
