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Marking Time: Longplayer
Yesterday, I went to visit Longplayer, Jem Finer‘s thousand-year composition, for the eleventh anniversary of its first note, played on New Years Day, 1999. Longplayer is currently controlled (performed?) from Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s simultaneously desolate and overbuilt Docklands, covered in newly built flats and offices, with hardly a human in sight. Jem started…
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Bayes in the World II: Million Pound Drop
Embarrassing update: as pointed out by Vladimir Nesov in the comments, all of my quantitative points below are incorrect. To maximize expected winnings, you should bet on whichever alternative you judge to be most likely. If you have a so-called logarithmic utility function — which already has the property of growing faster for small amounts…
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Bayes in the World I: Wikileaks
I’ve come across a couple bits of popular/political culture that give me the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite topics: the uses and abuses of probability theory. The first is piece by Nate Silver of the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, dedicated to trying to crunch the political numbers of polls and other data…
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Beautiful Evidence
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One excuse for not blogging over the last month was a couple of weeks spent in North America, first in and around New York and New Jersey, visiting my family, and then a stop in Montreal for the annual collaboration meeting for the EBEX CMB balloon project, which we expect to launch on its science…
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Good Cause #2: Revenge of the Mekons
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The Mekons are the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. They started in the 70s as a punk band from Leeds but by the mid-1980s had picked up fiddles and mandolins to go with their loud guitars, and learned to love Hank Williams and Gram Parsons as much as they’ve sadly learned to hate the…
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Good Cause #1: Imperial Students Power the Developing World
I try not to ask too much of my readers, but this post and the next are about a couple of worthwhile causes I’ve come across of late. The first project is the BBC World Challenge competition, supporting “social entrepreneurs”, grassroots projects making an impact in the developing world. One of the twelve finalists, e.quinox,…
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Astrostatistics at the Royal Astronomical Society
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This week I’m co-organizing a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, “Novel methods for the exploitation of large astronomical and cosmological data sets“. It’s an unwieldy title, but we’ll be discussing the implication of the huge flood of astronomical data for cosmology and astrophysics. How do we deal with the sheer volume —…
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Light and Gravity
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Yesterday, we at Imperial hosted the latest instalment of the London Cosmology Discussion Meetings (LCDM, which is a cosmology in-joke, of course), with about 40 participants — most of them students — from Imperial, QMUL and UCL. We heard talks about observing clusters of galaxies, different theories of gravity, and the observational repercussions of cosmic…
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Science is Vital
I don’t suppose that there are many readers of this blog who are not aware of the Science Is Vital campaign for the support of UK science, but just in case: in response to the likelihood of continuing cuts to the UK science budget as spun by business secretary Vince Cable, we in the science…
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Epistemology and Ontology Among Friends
A week or so ago, I had an extended “conversation” on Twitter with two very old friends, Erik Davis and Ted Friedman. Erik’s a writer, specializing in “modern esoterica” which ranges from psychedelia and Led Zeppelin to Philip K Dick and Cthulu. Like me, Ted’s an academic, but he’s Professor of Communication at Georgia State…
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