May 2006
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Front Page Probability
In a bid to combine numeracy with sports coverage, The Observer presents the Poisson distribution as a headline on its front page today. Supposedly, it has something to do with predicting the number of goals a team will score in the World Cup. The Poisson distribution is P(n) = λn e-λ/n! This gives the probability,…
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Also…
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Wine: California beats the French (again). Meanwhile, wine seems to be taking over the net, with podcasts and a a spate of sites for reviewing, ranking and cataloguing your wine, some with all sorts of new Web 2.0 goodies. (More commentary when and if I get to around to actually using them.) Song: go read…
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Spending pounds and bending light (two ways)
I spent the early part of the week in Sheffield at the first meeting of the Institute of Physics Astroparticle Physics Group. There were talks on the search for the Dark Matter, gravitational waves, neutrino astrophysics, gamma-ray astrophsyics, and, of course, cosmology. All of this sometimes goes by the name “non-accelerator particle physics”: trying to…
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Bruce on the Beeb
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BBC4 let us spend a night with my New Jersey homeboy, Bruce Springsteen. Selections from The Seeger Sessions, recorded with a BBC audience at St Luke’s in London, gave us middle-aged Bruce as protest singer, rocking up some folky standards. This may indeed be what the world needs now, but with its whitebread, bespectacled audience,…
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Workers of the World, &c.
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University lecturers’ Unions in the UK (i.e., the equivalent of “college professors” in the USA) are engaged in “action short of a strike” — they are boycotting exams. This is especially damaging in the UK system, in which many final grades are given solely on the basis of exam performance. (Lecturers here at Imperial aren’t…
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Bruce Sterling
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I went to a discussion by author Bruce Sterling last night, sponsored by the weird alliance of independent tech newsletter NTK and political rag The New Statesman (more precisely, their New Media Awards), with some sort of underwriting from organic chocolatiers Green & Black’s (now rather distressingly owned by Cadbury-Schweppes), supplying lovely samples of Maya…
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Inspiration
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The Oakland Tribune has an article about Marc Davis, a professor at Berkeley. When I was doing research there, I was lucky to have Marc in the office next door: a brilliant astrophysicist who has done as much as anyone of his generation to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, he is more recently…
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Looking for a Musical Offering
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OK, this post is a bit different: nothing to do with astrophysics, nothing to do with me. Instead, it’s an opportunity for you to do some good in the world. Sorry, I’ve removed the rest of the information in this post for personal reasons!
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UFOs exist…
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…but not aliens. Or so they would have us believe.
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