I wrote this blog post because I saw a woman throw a banana at Russell Brand. Bear with me on this one.
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Author: jasmcole
Extractor attractor
Recently the extractor fan in my bathroom has started malfunctioning, occasionally grinding and stalling. The infuriating thing is that the grinding noise isn’t perfectly periodic – it is approximately so, but there are occasionally long gaps and the short gaps vary slightly. This lack of predictability makes the noise incredibly annoying, and hard to tune out. Before getting it fixed, I decided to investigate it a bit further.
Transaction analysis web app
As a poor student, I always tried to keep a close eye on what I spent. This usually amounted to skimming statements and manually keeping track of what went where, a decidedly sub-optimal solution.
Thanks to an initiative called MiData, you are now able to download transaction histories from your current account in CSV format, which is ripe for analysis. I built a small tool for myself, which I put online here for your enjoyment. I should note this is the first slightly complex thing I’ve written in Javascript, so if it breaks in unexpected ways feel free to get in touch and let me know.
A geometry puzzle
Here’s a fun problem I came across when trying to analyse some data, which I thought I’d write up to illustrate the kind of interesting puzzles I get paid to solve as a physicist. Perhaps have a go yourselves and let me know if there are more intuitive solutions.
The Optimal London Pub Crawl
In this third of a trinity of posts involving the travelling salesman problem, we finally use the sophisticated algorithms at our disposal as they were intended: drinking with peak efficiency.
With the aid of a well-placed Christmas present detailing the best pubs in London, I found the optimal route around a reasonable subset of them.
The Travelling Artist Problem
This is the second in a series of posts involving the travelling salesman problem, somehow even more frivolous than the first. This is no coincidence, as I have recently been reading the excellent book ‘In Pursuit of the Travelling Salesman‘, which goes into great detail on the history of the problem and algorithmic techniques for tackling it. The topic which caught my eye was decidedly less technical, as we shall see below.
Christmas Kinematics
In the finest traditions of christmas, how about a timely blog post meant to cynically cash in on a blogosphere craving seasonal articles about nothing much in particular (see previous, sadly failed, attempt). What are the implications of Santa flying around the UK in a single night?
A probability puzzle
I saw a ‘simple’ puzzle on the internet which I thought I’d have a crack at in an evening. Several furious scribblings on the bus and the sofa later, I finally have an answer. I’m so relieved I can’t help but share the joy.
Stochastic geometry and the London underground
Way back when I was analysing London house price data for the Summer Data Challenge, I made a histogram of the distances from a random point in London to the nearest tube station. I noted that it peaked around half a kilometre, but ignored the shape of the distribution itself. This is an unfortunate faux pas for the accomplished procrastinator, so let’s right that wrong with the help of some stochastic geometry.
Regularisation
Here’s a post which combines my favourite bits of writing a blog – fairly mathematical, not too simple or difficult to implement, mostly based around pictures, not covered in my undergraduate education, and pretty damn useful in my job. Excited? You should be.
Almost looks like work 