I really ought to write a serious blog post at some point. But until then, here’s something I should show The Beast:

When I left him this morning, he was catching up on his sleep, having had to get up early to remind me that he needed (a) some fussing, and (b) some food. It’s a good job he keeps track.

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Is Madis Uusorg a polygamist?
And why isn’t this in the Olympics?

I had a difficult experience at the start of my PhD. I was about a month into it when I was talking to my supervisor, who I’ll call James, in the lab. Behind him was a sign hanging from the light cord with the legend:

Beware! High stress levels – James working in the lab

This explains why I particularly enjoyed the latest PhD cartoon:

And now I’m a PI, I have established myself in a field without labs. It’s the kindest way for all concerned.

The BBC has a story up about a group at Durham University who have produced a map of Arctic boundaries and areas of dispute. Taking a look at the map, I was surprised to read this in the legend:

Denmark claimed continental shelf beyond 200 nm

Setting aside the grammatical contortions that necessitate reading this like a tabloid headline, claiming an area beyond 2 x 10^-7^ m seems a bit picky.

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A few years ago some American scientists became Concerned. So concerned about political interference were they that formed a union. And called it the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Over at Scienceblogs, there has been a discussion about the relationship between science (and mathematics in particular) and the arts and humanities. This was started by Chad Orzel, and continued elsewhere. John Wilkins has a fairly up to date set of links, as well as some well thought out musings. He’s also the firs to point out that C.P. Snow talked about the same issues in the first part of his 1959 Rede lecture (the whole essay is worth reading: many of his lesser-known points are still relevant today).
This got me thinking about why I, as a scientist, should know about the arts and humanities. After all, they’re on a different campus from us.

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Thomas Mailund got upset about the hoops he had to go through to get a manuscript from a company. The company, being Corporate and Evil, bought him off with a logo, which some here might appreciate:

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Yep, I’m finally back from my wanders. A week in St. Andrews, followed by a week celebrating the 100th anniversary of the t-distribution. Recall that the inventor, “Student” worked for Guinness. You can work out the rest.
Of course, I now have 13 neat ideas I want to try out, and there is lots of new work to read up on. The biggest news is that Håvard Rue thinks we don’t need to use MCMC to fit most Bayesian hierarchical models. Yep, really obscure stuff. It’s why statisticians are worth having around: we keep you from needing to know about Gaussian Markov Random Fields.

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…in case you were wondering what the smell was.

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Oh poor me. I’m going to a couple of meetings over the next couple of weeks (the ISEC in St. Andrews followed by the IBC, to celebrate the invention of the t-distribution). Of course, I can’t take The Beast with me, so and can’t leave him here on his own, so I’ve sent him off to the countryside for a holiday.

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