Old Papers (and maths!) (by alaric)

This weekend, I've been going through old papers and dealing with them. This involves sorting them into three categories:

1. To be shredded and turned into logs with our log maker
2. To be filed in the cabinet (with many subcategories corresponding to the files therein), and sorted by date where applicable
3. Demanding some action (which, for now, means putting them into my in-tray, rather than disrupting the activity in progress)

The magnitude and importance of this task is not to be underestimated - when we moved here I had a new baby, a very sick wife, and two jobs to deal with; unpacking and properly setting up my office never really happened, as opposed to setting up a desk and digging through boxes to find the things I needed to get started. So my once-pristine filing system was never quite established, and my "to file" tray grew fat with paperwork I needed to put somewhere. There was slow progress, of course; but then two years later the house flooded, so we had to rush a lot of furniture and stuff from downstairs up into the office, then pack a lot of stuff up and send it into storage while the house was repaired... and we weren't living in the house for nearly a full year, so more often than not I was working on my laptop from wherever I could get an Internet connection. Once again, my paperwork was in disarray.

But, three years on, we're finally catching up. I've gone through my filing cabinet and re-filed the mish-mash therein, then gone through my to-file tray and the various piles of papers dotted around the place, and dealt with them all. "To shred" has been by far the biggest category; as I write, Sarah is sitting feeding sheet after sheet into the shredder. And I've found a bunch of interestings that need further action.

For one of them in particular, the action is to write it up. Many years ago, I bought and read a book on statistics in order to refresh my memory, as I was working on a system for analysing the actions of large numbers of people. Now, I didn't enjoy statistics much when I was doing A-level maths, and reading the book reminded me why: I find the random-variable notation unnecessarily vague and confusing, and the various other notations used in statistics seem inconsistent to me.

I recall reading this book on a long bus journey (the bus from Tottenham Court Road to Gallows Corner in Romford, to be precise), and deciding to take matters into my own hand, and designing m own notation for statistics based on set theory. I like set theory and find it sensible and logical, so this was an obvious choice. I wrote my notation down on a sheet of paper, tucked it into the book, and took it home.

Many years later, I found the sheet of paper inside the book, and put it in my TODO pile, as I needed to take a second look at it and do something with it. This never happened. Until now.

So without further ado, here's the content of the sheet. It still needs more thinking about, but if I write it up into the computer now, this is more likely to happen than waiting for me to encounter this bit of paper again.

Let L be a multiset of real numbers.

• SUM(L) = sum of x, where x is an element of L.
• |L| = the number of elements in L.
• L(n) where 1 <= n <= |L| = nth largest element of L
• MIN(L) = L(1)
• MAX(L) = L(|L|)
• MEDIAN(L) = L(|L| / 2) if |L| is odd, (L(floor(|L| / 2)) + L(ceil(|L| / 2)))/2 otherwise
• SUM^2(L) = sum of x^2, where x is an element of L
• VAR(L) = SUM^2(L) - (SUM(L))^2 etc.
• L ~ D iff L is distributed as per D (D is a distribution as per normal stats notation)
• SRn(L) is a multiset of all possible sets of n random samples from L with replacement
• SWn(L) is a multiset of all possible sets of n random samples from L without replacement

Let L be a multiset of records (named tuples) of real numbers (a,b,c,...)

• La is a multiset of just the as
• Lab is a multiset of the products, a*b
• sigma(L) f(a,b,c) is the sum of f(a,b,c) across all the elements in L
• pi(L) f(a,b,c) is the product
• L ~ (D1, D2, ...) iff. La ~ D1 and Lb ~ D2 and so on
• cov(a,b)(L) = sigma(L) ab - M(La)*M(Lb)

...and there it ends!

National Poetry Day Uk 2010 (by sarah)

Today is National Poetry Day UK and the them is Home. Like last year Jeany has composed a poem - this time it's a bit longer and she wanted to do loads more poems too :/

I like my home
It is great
But my window
Should be a different colour
It should be rainbow

I told the painter
And he didn't paint it
The colours I wanted
It should be
Blue, green, red, purple, yellow, black

I Jean love my home
I love my drinks bottle
And my slinky
It is rainbow coloured
Purple, orange, pink, blue, green, yellow
And it's boingy

I love my dinosaurs
My plastic ones
I'm covered in rainbows

I love my cats
I love Tom he's white and ginger
I love Helium she's white and black
I love Hydrogen she's white and black and pink

I love my toy baby
I love my rabbit
He's the same as Helium
The guinea pigs are daft

My slinky goes round my head a bit

I love my home
I love my computer
Oh no there's cornflakes
All over the floor

The tea cup and everything are good
Except the windows

Kestral (by sarah)

Albert the gardener came to say there was a kestral on the ground and the kittens stalking about and maybe we should catch them and put them inside before it got messy. Unfortunatly Alaric woke me up with this info which in my half asleep state ment that I though a kestral had attacked either Hydrogen or Helium!

So I rushed outside with towels and what what not and got annoyed at dad for stopping to put cheese away before going out with the teatowels I'd thrown at him. Anyway it turned out to be a juvinile (I assume from the family roosting in the trees along the stream.) And Hydrogen had chased it into Barbara's garage :/ We flushed the cat out and caught the kestral which didn't appear to have anything wrong with it - Alaric had thought its wing was broken but after a lot of faffing and three adults chasing it. Alaric threw a towl over it and I scooped it up!

I then took it up to the top of the paddock as Dad and Al rounded up all cats and put them inside so they couldn't follow. I put it down gently and because I was wearing chunky monkey gloves I had a little look at it. It seemed fine just scared and the painter had said to me he thought it had flown into something.

So we are assuming it is dazed and scared - it's hidden itself in the gazebo/summer house so I left the door open and continued my calls to it (Al kept informing me that they only respond when trained but it definatly responded when I made noises like they do when they fly. On to of that it came out and sat on the grow bag and looked at me - then I called again and one of it's parents answered.

We have left the door open in the hope that it was dazed with collision and then chased by cat and humans and then bundled in a towel :/ It's mother is calling it and hopefully it will be able to fly up and join her.

If not it will probably still be in the gazebo when we check later - at which point we will catch it again and take it too the vets 🙁 I know we probably should have taken it straight to the vets but if we do that and its only dazed then we've sperated it from it's family.

However one issue came up with all of this - the towel got hooked up on some splintering old boards in the garage which Alaric says are asbestos 🙁 So me and the towels ect... where covered in asbestos dust. I stripped and showered and Al put everything in the washing machine. I am hacked off though as I've already paid for one lot of asbestos to be removed from this place and the whole lot could have all gone at one >:( And I asked if there was anymore!

Electricity bills and heating (by alaric)

We changed electricity supplier recently, which is great, but the downside is that I've just noticed a bounced direct debit from NPower (the old one) for £661 on our joint account, to clear our remaining balance 🙁

We were paying a regular direct debit of £130 a month, which we tried to keep to by not being wasteful with the hot water (electrically heated) and by rationing the use of the fan heater (which at 3kW costs just under 50p an hour to run, which at the planned four hours a day comes out to £60 a month, the rest being our normal 'summer' power consumption)

I've no idea how we've gone £661 over in the past year 🙁 I can't find my old workings, but I know my estimate of our summer power consumption involved a lot of guesswork, and I was uncertain as to how many months of the year we'd run the heater for... but it looks like we won't be able to afford to run the fan heater at all this winter; thankfully, we've managed to plug a lot of the draughts in the house, and I'm going to try and arrange secondary double glazing (be it nice sheets of plastic mounted properly... or bubble wrap pinned to the window frames), so hopefully we'll be able to get by with the coal fire downstairs, which normally gets through something like £5 worth of coal a day.

I'll be more frugal with the gas heater in my office, too - last winter, it was used to great effect (especially once we'd managed to close the warped window properly so there wasn't a huge draught), but the office is a high-ceilinged room so a lot of empty space has to be filled with warm air before I feel much of it. I budgeted for one £15 cylinder a month, but we ended up using one about every ten days, from memory.

By comparison, Sarah's electric blanket only uses a sixty or so watts, and keeps her toasty warm all night! Which just goes to show how much of the heat from a room heater goes to heating the walls and air, rather than heating us. I need to get some time to refit Sarah's heated jacket with a cable to plug into a plugtop PSU so she can be kept warm without needing to get through batteries like they grow on trees...

A Five Year Old Monster :( (by sarah)

Yesterday Jean went back to school and was taken by one of the other parents to their younger child's birthday party. Jean was returned before the end of the party under the claim of being tired (having apparently almost fallen asleep in assembly). But then I am told she has been told off by some of the other parents at the party for being naughty and aggressive to the other children :/

I asked Jean about this and she said she had tried being nice but the younger kids had been naughty to her. I gave her a speech about younger children and told her to go to her room and think about her behaviour especially as she had not been that well behaved with Al's cousins kid who came to visit the day before. She mantains she wants the younger kids to come and play but as far as I can see is being awful to them. 🙁

Her behaviour has been bad the last few weeks - I thought part of it was excitement over the party and part boredom of being at home with adults and no kids. Now I am ashamed and embarrassed 🙁

A situation not helped by the fact that Barbara then shouted at the mum for not turning around in the right place in our garden. How are we supposed to have friendships if she does that? The less people who visit the worse I feel Jean's behaviour comes :/

I know she has basically only mixed with boys over the summer when she has mixed at all but really that and tiredness is not an excuess - especially when the tiredness is her own fault for refusing to go to sleep :/