Isn’t it interesting how large firms get so caught up in their own rhetoric some times that they totally fail to appreciate how they look to the outside world. Recently we had the BA cross matryr, but the one that interests me most is the case of the Goldman Sachs cleaners. The point is not [...]
The Olympics are hugely over budget already and we still have 6 years to go? Quelle suprise…
…or at least its transport infra- structure is. After a week of com- muting around this city, I am astonished the locals tolerate the traffic, pollution, and squalor: far too many people drive, and as a consequence neither buses nor taxis are worth taking, at least between 7am and 10am or 5pm and 8 or [...]
Seeing a recent Boing Boing post on a talk by Mandelbrot, it occurred to me to blog about a worry I have had for a while about probability… It’s like this. The classical formulation of probability theory due to Kolmogorov is based on the idea of repeated identical experiments. We take many copies of a [...]
In the last little while I have been lucky enough to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Prado in Madrid. Due to rebuilding, there is not much by volume on show in Amsterdam: just ten or so rooms. But most of the famous Dutch paintings are there: the Rembrandts, Vermeers and Franz Hals. (Blog [...]
…at least in direct sunlight. This was taken in the grounds of the Sue Ryder home in Cheltenham, where my mother is currently being looked after. It’s a sad time, but at least she is surrounded by caring people and the beauty of the countryside. The black hole at the heart of the sun seems [...]
Aren’t the mid-terms fascinating? The polls indicate a democratic landslide, and yet… And yet. We know people lie to the polls. There is a natural human tendency to tell people what we think they want to hear, or what casts us in a positive light. The more moral opprobrium we perceive there is associated with [...]
