Most of my time is spent tirelessly chipping away at the scientific rock face, probably bogged down fixing a bug in my code or staring at some noisy looking data. Every now and then it all comes together and I want to tell people about it. So I write up my results as best I can, spend hours tinkering with figures, another few hours getting the fonts right on the axes, and after drafts and re-drafts, eventually I’ll send it away to a journal to be published....

All being good it looks like I’ve secured employment for a tiny while longer. Hooray! The place I’m moving to is a big place for synthetic colloids, so it seems like a good time to go through what I know about colloids. If nothing else it’ll be interesting to compare this to what I’ll know in a year’s time! So, here is a theorists perspective on colloid science. I’ll spare the usual introduction about how colloids are ubiquitous in nature, you can go to Wikipedia for that....

I’m finding that I’m becoming increasingly fascinated by shape. It seems such a simple thing yet scratch the surface only a little and the complexity comes pouring out. Take simple tiling problems; I can tile my floor with squares or regular hexagons, but not regular octagons - they’ll always leave annoying gaps. From a statistical mechanics point of view those gaps are very important, little sources of entropy that you can’t get rid of....

Just a quick one. I saw this post, When intuition and math probably look wrong, via Ben Goldacre’s mini blog. The problem is set as follows: I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys? Intuition tells you the answer is 1/2, mathematicians tell you it’s something else. I’ll leave the answer until the end of the post in case you want to run off and solve it first....

I spent ages writing a post about some tricks I use to do quick analysis of data but it got incredibly bloated and started waffling about work flows and so on. Anyway, I woke up from that nightmare so I thought I’d just bash out a couple of my top tips. This is a pretty nerdy post, you may want to back away slowly. Pipes Pipes are, in my opinion, why the command line will reign for many years to come....