I’m currently involved in a project for a paper I’m writing where I’m trying to find the auto-covariance function of a queue, which involves evaluating modified Bessel functions of the first kind; in essence these are the solutions to a particular form of differential equations which tell you how queues work, and each evaluation takes a relatively ( Read more... )

I’ve been listening to the news today, and every news bulletin has a report, which cites an AA/Populus poll, that motorists are using less petrol; Sky news has a fairly common story here. Now, I’ve been unable to find the original source of the article, but here’s the interpretation.

Basically, the AA said that 16.3 billion litres were used in a ( Read more... )

A bit of a late post, but I recently came across my collection of tickets for this year’s Edinburgh fringe, the world’s largest arts festivel. Now, due to not being well and one thing or the other, I didn’t see nearly as much as I would like to; we must fix that next year.
I’ve also forgotten what else I’ve seen; if anybody who was there can remind ( Read more... )

So here’s my question- and please be gentle as I know very little about economics- is where has all the money gone, and why do we care?

Let me explain; most people I know owe a little money, either on credit cards, or mortgages, or student loans, or whatever. But all the people who they owe this money to (the banks, the government) owe a lot of ( Read more... )

What ho,
As part of my new job I have to get a new computer. The two options are either a PC or a mac. Never having had Mac hardware before, I’m tempted to go for the Mac; I intend to run Linux on it mostly. So, Internet people, is there any reason not to get an apple? The specifications look better for the Mac!

Or am I being seduced by the ( Read more... )

I’m fed up of the news today; we’re having a bit of warm weather, and the temperature today was forecast to be the “hottest September for more than 100 years”. See for example, The Daily Mirror.

But is this  all that unusual? I am assuming that the data being used is the Hadley Central England Temperature data ; I’ve no real interest in weather or ( Read more... )

ALES (The Alumni Light Entertainment Society) is a loose conglomeration of alumni from various light entertainment societies,  predominantly Cambridge University (CULES), Oxford University (OULES), and more recently the University of Sheffield (USLES).

ALES exists to keep in touch with the light entertainment societies, and also to socialise with ( Read more... )

After several months effort, I seem to have solved my wifi problem; my HTC hero isn’t able do to 802.11n. Setting my Netgear wireless router (provided by virgin) to only go up to 54MBps (which I think is 802.11g but it doesn’t say so!) seems to have been an easy fix.

I’m a little bit annoyed by this as I thought the devices should be clever enough ( Read more... )

I have a feeling that this problem is easy if I know what to search for, but have spent some time trying to do it and can’t at the moment.

I am trying to generate a list of n elements, where each of the elements is a label from {1,…,k}. This is easy- there are k^n of them.

However, I want to exclude any lists which are the same if you change the ( Read more... )

I sent a letter today. Perhaps the most useful thing I’ve done in months.

Friday 3 June 2011

To whom it may concern,

Nomination of Brian Blessed for Chancellor of Cambridge University

I hereby nominate actor, author and mountaineer Brian Blessed for the role of Chancellor of Cambridge University.

Brian’s accomplishments are legendary; a ( Read more... )