Jean in Cheltenham (by sarah)

Going through the zillions of photos I have taken I found this photo of Jean in Cheltenham - Jean likes Chelt especially the bit with the Bull and Hare statu - It has a conquer tree and she doesn't have to hold hands with an adult and there are flowers!

It also generally means we are off to do something fun!

Eco-tricity (by sarah)

I realised from Alaric's post on heating that I had yet mentioned our new Electricity company Ecotricity. We decided to move to this local company as they sit with our green ethics better than any of the larger companies plus they are just up the road and they sent us stickers!

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!

It’s not a case of Art Verses Science (by sarah)

I am aware that there are funding cuts all around and that some people view the problem as art verses science and argue things like art never took part in war. But a) this is wrong art very much does take part in war - in the form of writing or visual arts - think propaganda and b) the whole concept of there being an art/science dichotomy is blatently wrong. They are not opposites, they are not diametrically apposed things.

Art and science are subdivisions of Creative, they both use similar processes in creation of new things and more over one fuels the other. Now the issue with limited finding is - how much does it cost for paint brushes verses and MRI scanner? In an ideal world there would be no limitations but that is not the case. And the thing about science funding cuts is that is going to cost lives in the short and long term. Now don't get me wrong art does save lives but it is more of an enrichment thing (not that science doesn't enrich lives but you know what I mean!).

Of course I am biased in this due to the fact I chose to study science at university when I could have studied art - the deciding factor was that I could do art anywhere anytime but for science I needed access to machines - expensive machines.

This I suppose does mean the artists have to take more of an initiative in getting themselves going which due to social constraints means it sometimes doesn't happen.

Something else I have been meaning to blog on is how 'normal' people view both artist and scientists and too my suprise it is basically the same - but more on that later!

Rally – Science Is Vital (by sarah)

Today there is a rally where scientist and anyone passionate about science are going to march over the funding cuts to their fields. I can not be there not least because I am on crutches - this probably wouldn't have stopped me normally but baby has to come first!

Information can be found here.

And you can sign the petition here.

If you feel it's too late for today you can still join in the lobbying of our government on the 12th! Info on that is here.

And then there is always the ol' Write To Your MP.