Thorns

So I was reading ‘Too Asian’? which says The upshot is that race is defining Canadian university campuses in a way it did not 25 years ago. Here's a post about it by angry asian man.

I have encountered anti-Asian attitudes a lot as a maths major and tutor, I think the dynamic here is moderately similar to Canada.

It would be nice if instead of handwringing that Asian kids are getting BETTER GRADES THAN WHITE PEOPLE OMG anyone cared about the fact that rich white kids remain and have always been SIGNIFICANTLY overrepresented at universities in Canada/Australia etc.

I hope I'm not being derailing bringing class into it, but I think it's worth bringing up as part of the same overall imbalance.

I imagined how it would look if it was about rich kids in Australia, since that inequality struck me going to a private school and then uni as a white working class kid. Obviously you could do the same thing with race, but I didn't trust myself to do so myself without going to a weird place. Also rich people are a minority who do not fit in with the values Australia was founded on (as a penal colony)
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It's my theory that on average the number of subscribers a person has is roughly double the number who give them access. Also, I wanted to try out doing a poll (afaict so far you have to do it via the site map, which is just dumb)

Note you have to round down.
So to calculate your answer, go to your userinfo.
Divide "Subscribers" by "Has access to".
Round to the nearest integer, round 0.5 to 0, 1.5 to 1 and so on.

I know that's not quite what the poll title says, I am dumb :)



I'd be curious to see what the results will be like after Open Beta, but I won't have a "paid" account then :) And yes, this is all very unscientific.

Continuing my mystery streak, I just read Devil in a Blue Dress which was very good for what it is (noir), longer review here.

I also read The Lady Tasting Tea, a history of the way statistics has affected society and vice versa. It was an interesting topic not quite as well written about as I would have liked: the author is a statistician, which means he has a personal connection with and understands his story, but it was a bit clunky and unclear in parts. I would have preferred either less wordy explanations or more maths, as it was he gave just enough information that I felt like I should understand what he was saying on a deeper level, but not enough that I actually could (there was not one single equation. Yes, that is a bad thing! To me, anyway :)). I may have to go and read an actual stats textbook now(*).

(*)Further evidence of what a bad influence sanguinity is on me.

So I may have a Phd in "maths", but it's pure maths, and I am woefully ignorant of statistics, not having studied it beyond a first year level (I've tutored second year stats. That was a challenge :D)

Thus my mind is actually quite easily blown by fairly basic statistics facts presented in an engaging way. See for example I'm not normal, which makes an obvious point I'd never really thought about before: The normal distribution became central to statistics back before computers, and once people get taught it, unless they go on to study more stats it's their only hammer so everything starts to look like a nail. But lots of large samples are NOT normally distributed, and given computing power we generally don't need to smoosh them into a nice distribution at all but can actually look at what the real data is doing.

My mind was also blown by Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin which is pretty much just a basic description of evolution being a bounded random walk (Namely, the mean complexity goes up over time while still leaving 99.9% of life at the same basic level, with anything but the most simple species being as likely to get more simple as less)

An explanation of part of my thesis: Black box recognition of sporadic simple groups. Needs some more work but this will do for now. Let me know if it's confusing or there's any mistakes (assuming anyone can be bothered reading it)

Life has been trying really hard to get me to think about maths recently. A guy I met on webcomics (cdave) started talking about this book he read which just happened to be on the same topic as my thesis, which led to me digging it out to give him a reference. And then I went to a supper at my main supervisors house (they were throwing a conference for her birthday) and ended up chatting to two of my old collaborators about how they're going with some of the stuff I was working on (that's right, 2 years after I graduated and it still refuses to work. I'm glad I gave up on that bit :D) And then Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless commented that I never seem to talk about maths any more.

So here you go.

The reason tend not to talk about maths is that I got burned out on learning anything really hard during my thesis, and then got burned out on explaining things at a really low level at Scitech. Also after a while reading stuff like New Scientist started to feel like work and that feeling hasn't worn off yet. The one thing I have felt like doing is explaining my thesis a bit better, but then I'd get sad at the thought that noone would care.

Then I remembered that the whole point of having your own blog/website is not worrying about whether or not people care about what you're saying :D

It really doesn't help that the chronic fatigue has made maths in particular more difficult, so thinking about it is depressing when I am confronted with my own relative stupidity. But I'm coming to terms with that.

I know this is like a zillion years old, but it just came up on "THAT MITCHELL AND WEBB LOOK" (TV show on ABC)

Nuemberwang!

For people who don't speak basic german, the original, Numberwang.

May only really appeal to maths majors with a partial understanding of german(*) :) (Also it was just so surreal in the middle of an english show)

In similar "made just for me" news, I'm reading "The Atrocity Archives" by Charles Stross, about a civil servant who uses their knowledge of computational mathematics to save the world from lovecraftian horrors. (Not quite as good as I might have liked, so far, but still fun)

(*)I have a feeling the german would be painful to anyone who spoke it properly

*puts on science communicator hat*

Have any of you read this ABC article, about how physicists have "debunked" the paranormal? The logic given struck me as incredibly flawed but being the good little ex-Phd student I am I looked up the orginal paper (which despite being quite easy to read was not linked from the ABC article, luckily there aren't many Efthimious on arXiv) and while some of it was just badly paraphrased the vampire example is bad maths pure and simple.

( Don't be scared of the maths. C'mon, vampires! )

This may seem like a lot of effort to go to for a silly theory, but
(a) This kind of bad science plays into the hands of the pro-supernatural, since they can justifiably point to it as proof that science is "out to get them"
(b) This guy (or girl) is trying to encourage university science lecturers to use this kind of discussion to teach physics (this paper looks interesting too), which I think is a great idea in principle but not if the science is wrong.
(c) I'm a big fat nerd. C'mon, maths + fantasy, how could I resist.

Also, today I got paid to play with hexaflexagons. Admittedly, I would rather have had the day off properly (I was home sick from my shift, but this activity stuff needs to be done asap) but it was still fun if draining. Clearly it got my brain ticking over, though :)