The last time I looked at house prices it went pretty well, and I ended up winning a data science competition. There I was only dealing with a million or so records, and a relatively small 120 MB dataset. Then I found out it was possible to download 3.7GB of property sale records for all of England and Wales since 1995, so let’s have another go. Continue reading
This blog has been getting a bit too pop-science for my tastes recently. Card games? Word clouds? Urgh. Let’s do some proper physics. I hope you’re paying attention at the back.
When taking a picture of my new 55″ TV (humblebrag) I noticed a diffraction pattern of the reflection of the camera flash. Fortuitously, I had also recently bought a slightly too-powerful laser pointer from China which is the perfect tool to investigate such problems. Here’s a little write-up of my DIY measurements.
It’s done! After 58,627 words, 233 pages, 369 references, 162 figures and 3 lonely tables I finished my PhD thesis. Weighing in at 161.8MB, it was unceremoniously uploaded and that was that. Here are a few tips and observations I made on the way, which are probably only useful to those of you battling through a long Latex document. Never fear, normal blogging service will resume shortly.
A quick note this time, compiled entirely over a course of a 45 minute train journey, but nevertheless with some cool pictures.
I’ve been a little busy recently for blog posts, what with a pesky thesis to finish and all, but such an occasion as this deserves the highest honour possible – making lots of plots. That’s right, the hallowed HTML files under this domain name have been yanked from a poor WordPress server somewhere over 1 million times now, almost coinciding with the first anniversary of the blog. I think it’s a useful event to prompt some details for those of you interested in the business of blogging – who knows, perhaps you’ll start one of your own?
Holidays are so relaxing. You know the drill: lounge around, eat and drink haphazardly, play card games, simulate several million card games to gain an advantage over your opponents, go for walks, visit the seaside, derive relationships for expected values of card hands, buy chocolates, smash unsuspecting opponents through brute force, send a postcard, etc. etc.
Given a few of my previous posts it’s obvious that I’m a fan of the physics and mathematics that that comes along with the theory of classical optics. To make the number of lens-based posts a nice round three then, here’s a simple Matlab App I made over the last few days which lets you play with lenses interactively, hopefully giving a bit of useful insight into the underlying principles.
Over the last few years I’ve been working towards a PhD in the realm of experimental physics. This, naturally, requires experiments to occur. As good scientists we (ideally) record all the details of the experiments, which makes for a tasty dataset after a few years. Let’s have a look at some details.
A puzzle has been floating round the internet, apparently impossible and assigned to 8-year olds in Vietnam. How impossible is it? Here’s a quick look.
Almost looks like work 