back from the dead...
"Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality." — Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values I was contacted today by an undergrad student who has…
The UKRI/STFC crisis rumbles on, through an impressive Select Committee showing by research-community reps and a fairly dismal performance by the STFC Executive Chair at the same . As there has again been no clear sign of appropriate urgency among the council leaderships, who appear keen to kick the consequences of their actions into the long grass, time for a bit of awareness-raising to…
In my last post on the ongoing self-made funding crisis at UKRI and its subsidiary science-funding agencies, I made a final reference to the administrative overheads in modern science, which would obviously have been too much burden for an already overlong piece to bear. So here is a follow-up on that issue, one not specific to the transient effects of the latest disruption, but generally how we…
What goes around comes around, and the start of 2026 has, for particle physicists of my vintage, brought strong feelings of deja vu . These harken back to 2007, when the UK government self-inflicted a funding crisis with the creation of STFC , the UK agency that has since then funded our fundamental science research. For those new to the issues old and/or new, sit back, this is going to take a bit…
I previously wrote about using the inverse-cdf transform not just for its classic application of efficient random sampling, but as an optimal histogramming-binning generator mapping exactly to expected population quantiles. (If you think of the random process that populates the histogram as itself being done via uniform random sampling of the unit cdf interval, mapped back into the coordinate…
One of my favourite tricks in numerical methods is [inverse transform sampling]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_transform_sampling ), which is a supremely elegant way to efficiently sample from a probability distribution. If you know a distribution's cumulative density function (cdf) -- or can approximate it; see the follow-up post -- and the distribution is positive everywhere, as…
I recently did an interview with the David Hume Institute – through a friend – about how (or if) personal financial issues affect my work. I won’t forensically document how that aspect went, except to say it was a fun chat and they are doing good things. But the thing that’s stayed with me is how I involuntarily laughed at the suggestion that my employer would provide any sort of benefits in…
Another week, another row about particle-physics methodology involving the field’s latest engagingly controversialist internal critic – older readers may feel a pang of deja vu from the “Not Even Wrong” years. But this time, the maelstrom has somehow escaped Twitter and been platformed in Guardian Science . I feel a pang of guilt about criticising this article. After all, as scientists we are…
Just sent: Dear <CLP Secretary>, It's with sadness that I write to tell you I have decided to leave the Labour Party. Despite having initially welcomed the arrival of a nominally more socialist national party leader, the Corbyn team have backtracked, vacillated, and failed to deliver any coherent progressive economic message. In their hands, Labour has become an incoherent policy vacuum with…
Having just completed the tortuous process of publishing an ATLAS data analysis , in particular 6 months of back-and-forward text-iteration, I find myself thinking of the excellent guidance on writing in English provided by George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language . This is largely concerned with how banal, obfuscated and characterless English language can act as a cloak for…