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Right, that's my train booked for Cambridge. I'll be arriving at some time after 4pm on the Saturday, and leaving shortly after 9 on the Monday. I'd love to stay for longer, but I have Stuff To Do in the Weej which makes those times about the best I can do. Well, I suppose I could technically have got an overnight train down on the Friday night, but I'm getting too old for such things.
Recall, in case you'd forgotten, just how far South everything in England is when you live up here.
A while ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
azrelle told me about this juggling video, which was apparently a bit of an internet meme for a while. It's a three-ball routine done by standup comic Chris Bliss. The juggling's not particularly technically difficult, but the performance is great. But it prompted something of an adverse reaction among jugglers, many of whom said "What? That's all easy stuff! There's nothing difficult there!". Jason "World Juggling Federation" Garfield then took this further, and did this five-ball version of the routine. The contrast between the two is, I think, instructive: Chris Bliss' routine is a great example of how to build a good routine out of technically simple juggling*, whereas Jason's is an example of how technically incredible juggling can get boring. I'm not one of those jugglers who patronisingly claim that civilians can't appreciate difficult stuff (I've seen a guy do seven balls in street performance, and the crowd went WILD), but I think it goes to show that technical juggling on its own is not enough. If there's no technical ability there, then showmanship gets pretty thin, but if there's no showmanship then the best juggling in the world is pretty unpalatable.
In maths (and juggling, kinda) news, we've had Persi Diaconis giving a series of lectures for the last week, on the theme of "harnessing chance". Some of this was about randomness in everyday life - how random is a coin toss, really? (there's actually about a 51% chance it will come up on the side it started) And how many times do you need to shuffle a pack of cards before it's close to being uniformly random? (7-8 with an imperfect riffle shuffle, or about 250 with a naive shuffle :-) ). The rest was about probabilistic algorithms, and in particular the Metropolis algorithm. It was really interesting, and inspiring to see someone with such a wide range of research interests (he also lectured on group representation theory while he was here, and constantly mentioned other areas of mathematics, physics and CS that he was involved with). And he's a really nice bloke. And a magician and juggler :-)
* Edit: mostly simple, anyway. I don't think anyone would claim that three in one hand is easy :-)
Recall, in case you'd forgotten, just how far South everything in England is when you live up here.
A while ago,
azrelle told me about this juggling video, which was apparently a bit of an internet meme for a while. It's a three-ball routine done by standup comic Chris Bliss. The juggling's not particularly technically difficult, but the performance is great. But it prompted something of an adverse reaction among jugglers, many of whom said "What? That's all easy stuff! There's nothing difficult there!". Jason "World Juggling Federation" Garfield then took this further, and did this five-ball version of the routine. The contrast between the two is, I think, instructive: Chris Bliss' routine is a great example of how to build a good routine out of technically simple juggling*, whereas Jason's is an example of how technically incredible juggling can get boring. I'm not one of those jugglers who patronisingly claim that civilians can't appreciate difficult stuff (I've seen a guy do seven balls in street performance, and the crowd went WILD), but I think it goes to show that technical juggling on its own is not enough. If there's no technical ability there, then showmanship gets pretty thin, but if there's no showmanship then the best juggling in the world is pretty unpalatable.In maths (and juggling, kinda) news, we've had Persi Diaconis giving a series of lectures for the last week, on the theme of "harnessing chance". Some of this was about randomness in everyday life - how random is a coin toss, really? (there's actually about a 51% chance it will come up on the side it started) And how many times do you need to shuffle a pack of cards before it's close to being uniformly random? (7-8 with an imperfect riffle shuffle, or about 250 with a naive shuffle :-) ). The rest was about probabilistic algorithms, and in particular the Metropolis algorithm. It was really interesting, and inspiring to see someone with such a wide range of research interests (he also lectured on group representation theory while he was here, and constantly mentioned other areas of mathematics, physics and CS that he was involved with). And he's a really nice bloke. And a magician and juggler :-)
* Edit: mostly simple, anyway. I don't think anyone would claim that three in one hand is easy :-)
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