The US Federal election last week didn't go as a lot of people, or as a lot of pollsters, had planned. Living abroad, it certainly felt as though a Hillary Clinton victory was certain. There was always a bit of uncertainty in the data, which FiveThirtyEight do a great job of discussing. I became a … Continue reading Watching the US Federal Election through Twitter
Disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer. My background is in aerospace engineering and applied physics. Which still makes me arguably more qualified to discuss this issue than Barnaby Joyce. On September 28, 2016, a large storm hit South Australia and ended up causing a state-wide blackout. While the fallen power lines pictured below are … Continue reading Why South Australia had a blackout, and the debate we deserve to have about it.
Recently, a colleague requested a new feature for a package I maintain for the Atom text editor, that gives automatic syntax highlighting to macro files written for Geant4. The Atom text editor is great, and lives up to its reputation of being hackable to the core, but at the same time, sometimes I wish things … Continue reading Custom tooltips in the Atom text editor
After much complaining from my father, who has been waiting for months for me to post something food related, I'm finally ready to deliver on the other half of this website's title: Good Food. Here in Bordeaux, it's starting to get a little chilly. After weeks of 25-35°C, the rains have returned, the clouds are … Continue reading Finally some food: Gnocchi, leek and lardons to bring in autumn
A large part of my thesis work involves making models of DNA in a computer. The idea is that we make a model of DNA, shoot it with a whole bunch of radiation, and see how many times the DNA breaks. And DNA breaks are worth quantifying as they are one of the origins … Continue reading Building DNA for Monte Carlo physics simulations
At the same time as David Cameron announced the UK will not hold a second referendum on exiting the EU, the petition to change the UK referendum rules and in some ways force a second referendum reached 4 million signatures. Yesterday, I posted an analysis of the petition results using data from June 27, but … Continue reading The Brexit petition at 4 million votes
Maybe you, like me, woke up somewhat astonished to discover that the UK had gone and Brexited itself last Friday. Whilst the world is still trying to work out what that means, I've been particularly intrigued by a petition that has close to 4 million signatures on it, asking that the referendum be redone with … Continue reading Brexit, Bregret, and whatever a petition means.
I'm meaning to start a series of posts soon about what I'm researching in my PhD soon, but I got distracted this week thinking about a few algorithms I saw to count the number of bits set to one in a given binary number. I'm developing simulations currently looking at DNA damage and I need … Continue reading More than anyone needs to know about counting bits
I recently wrote a little post about a colour recognition plug-in I wrote for OpenCFU. To better tell the difference between colours, I transformed the RGB values in the image into their corresponding L*a*b* so that I could use a reasonable measure of colour difference. With that metric, this image shows the colours in the … Continue reading Colour Perception and the Mysterious Fourth Cone Pigment
I have a friend who works as a security analyst, and I was telling him the other day how much I love the work that is done by everybody else to get good authentication working, so that I don't have to worry about it. A great example of this is some recent work I was … Continue reading App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Signed URLs.
Good Food. Good Code. 