Books + Ideas

Cycling advocates sometimes seem to get themselves into a knot trying to distinguish subjective and objective cycling safety. How can it be safe to cycle, while at the same time improving safety is a key priority?

I see two things that are central to resolving this apparent inconsistency. The first is that there is no dichotomy between safe and unsafe, and that safety profiles vary between people: in particular there is a difference between the people currently cycling and the people who could potentially cycle. The second is that there are longer-term dangers that appear neither to immediate observation nor in accident statistics — in particular, it is critical to take stress into account.

It is quite safe for me to cycle into central Oxford, either by myself or with my seven year old on a tandem. But it would be unsafe (at most times) for me to cycle that same route accompanied by the same seven year old on their own bicycle, or for most twelve year olds to cycle it by themselves. And I can cycle that route without much stress. But for some people, even some fitter and more experienced at cycling than me, that identical route may be really stressful, to the point where repeated, long-term exposure to it would be detrimental to their health. (more…)

Helen was not convinced that the two times table contains the same number of numbers as the seven times table. [A conversation she initiated herself going to bed, out of nowhere.] She understood the idea of using a bijection to show two collections have the same cardinality without counting them - I modelled it (conceptually, not physically) with smarties, buttons and a lot of string - and she could see how 2n <-> 7n works, but (not surprisingly) it just seemed wrong to her. Just wait till she finds out the rationals are countable! (more…)

Being involved with a school provides a good example of scaling problems. A lot of things that seem intuitive or simple at an individual level are difficult or complex at larger scales.

One key number is 30, the approximate number of children in a class (Helen's has ranged from 28 to 31). The other is 450, which is roughly the number of children in her school, a two-form entry primary school with an attached Early Years unit. (more…)

Helen has only done a tiny bit with foreign languages - German and Latin - since my last update on this a year ago. (more…)

Oxfordshire Liveable Streets invited Filip Watteouw, deputy mayor of Ghent, to talk about the circulation plan they implemented in 2017 and how that has worked out. I talked briefly about how that was similar to the Connecting Oxford plans. And there were questions about different aspects of the Ghent scheme. There is a recording of that session.

I'm not going to go over the details of the Ghent circulation plan - as well as our video, for that I also recommend this Streetfilms video and a followup on the politics and pr involved. (more…)

I love visiting streetfront bookshops and buying books there, but sadly that's not possible at the moment. And a lot of the books I want simply aren't available even in well-stocked shops such as the Oxford Blackwells and Waterstones.

If I'm looking to buy a book online, first of all I check Amazon. This will alert me if there are different editions available, and give me some feel for the price, new or secondhand. But it's not often that Amazon has the best price, even if you're not avoiding it for ethical reasons! (more…)

Oxfordshire County Council is running a consultation on its Local Transport and Connectivity Plan. This involves 28 brief topic papers and questions about them, but it is easy to respond to just one or two of those, so I would encourage anyone concerned about any aspect of transport within the county to lodge a response. The deadline has been extended to 17 May 2020. (more…)

It will be some time before reopening schools in England (for all children) is practical. They're just starting to do that in Australia, where infection rates are less than one hundredth of those here (with around 10 new cases a day instead of 5000, despite more aggressive testing). But we can think about how that should be done, once infection rates are much lower and a robust test-and-trace system is in place. (more…)

I'm really conscious of the importance of exercise, especially as I get older — I've read enough of the research on this to know how big the health implications are, and I've even heard Muir Gray talk twice. But I find it really hard to exercise just for the sake of exercise: I can't see myself ever joining a gym, buying household exercise equipment, or anything like that. (more…)

It's important to note that what we and many other parents and carers find themselves doing now is not traditional home schooling. It has been thrust upon us, with little warning, rather than being deliberately chosen, and we are in more or less stringent "lockdown", unable to go on outings or meet up with other families. And our school at least is providing solid remote learning support — home learning plans, videoed storytelling and singing assemblies, links to other resources, and so forth. (more…)

I'm firmly convinced that graph theory is a perfect subject to teach to young (primary school) children. It allows an introduction to core aspects of mathematics - abstraction, generalisation, formalism, proof - in a context where there's a concrete visual representation and without requiring significant prerequisite knowledge. It offers the possibility of building to more difficult material (matchings, Ramsey numbers) and methods and tools (variables, induction, reductio), but also a range of topics which can be introduced independently at a low level of complexity (graph colouring, paths, simple functions). (more…)

Helen complained that she wasn't doing any history. I had to break it to her that reading books on the First and Second World Wars, a historical novel set in Tudor London, and a loosely fictionalised art history survey counted as doing history, and that if she were to study history at Oxford it would actually be described as "reading history" - and probably wouldn't involve re-enactments of the Great Fire of London. (more…)

The last six months have been dominated by a few series and rereading of favourite books, but have also seen Helen tackling her first really solid novels.

Books that Helen has read and reread include Alf Prøysen's Mrs Pepperpot Stories (a chance secondhand dicovery), Pamela Travers' Mary Poppins books, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Number Devil. (more…)

Bicycles have featured a lot in my blog, but the other key to sustainable transport, in Oxford as in much of the world, is the bus. Buses are central to Oxford's existing transport and will need to play an even bigger role in any sustainable future. More generally, such a future requires the world to transition away from private motor vehicles, with perhaps an 80% reduction in car miles in the UK, and the bulk of that transport "hole" will have to be filled by bicycles and buses. (more…)

If your school tells you to cram times-tables or fractions into your child, but they don't want to do that or don't enjoy doing that, don't make them multiply. If they don't enjoy the maths they are doing at school, don't try to force them to do it at home, that's only going to make them dislike it even more. Instead, play games with them, do things with numbers and shapes yourself, show them mathematics unrelated to anything they do in school, and give them fun maths books to read and videos to watch. I realise this is harder for most parents than my previous "don't make your child read" injunction, because fewer parents enjoy mathematics themselves than enjoy reading, but if you are maths-averse yourself think of this as an opportunity to learn something new alongside your children. (more…)

Widespread take up of e-bikes requires broader measures to make cycling accessible. E-bikes are not, by themselves, going to do much to enable most people to cycle.

In the Netherlands, e-bikes help to increase the distances people will cycle and enable people to keep cycling as they get older, but this is dependent on the infrastructure enabling those people to cycle already. In most of the UK, e-bikes will enable people to not cycle 4 mile trips as well as not cycling 3 mile trips, and enable 70 year olds to not cycle at the same rates as 40 year olds don't cycle. (more…)

Helen's school has lost its maths awards and gained a "house" system. One of the reasons I preferred Larkrise to other schools was the absence of anything like that, so I can't say I'm very happy about this. (more…)

I've been reading books published by Archipelago Books for some time, but a few months ago, in a fit of madness, I became a subscribing member, which means I get all their new books, roughly one a month. (more…)

I had to go into London to renew my Australian passport, so I took the opportunity to visit some attractions: the Bank of England Museum and the Guildhall Art Gallery. (more…)

At the Questacon science museum in Canberra there was an exhibition on robotics, which included quizes asking people how they felt robots should behave. One of those, probing the value of different kinds of human lives, asked what the software controlling an autonomous car should do if the brakes failed approaching a pedestrian crossing and the choices were to run over a child or an old person — alternative routes to the sides were shown crashing into brick walls. (more…)

I cycle pretty much past Oxford's Covered Market (down Turl St) daily, on my way home from work, and often want to get fresh vegetables or meat. But I never go there, because there's no bike parking. (more…)

There's a Humanities 2020 campaign with a manifesto that begins:

Primary schools have a duty to equip children for the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the primary school curriculum in England is failing to do this or to fulfil the legal requirement for a balanced and broadly-based curriculum. Literacy and numeracy dominate the curriculum while other vital aspects of learning are often ignored. This is wrong.

We want young children to be literate and numerate, but much more than that. We affirm that every child is entitled to rich, stimulating and engaging learning experiences. We want children to have more opportunities to be creative and to build on their sense of curiosity. We would like to bring more joy and imagination back into the classroom.

This is something I fully endorse. The major concern I have with the campaign is its conception of the humanities as History, Geography, Religious Education, and Citizenship. (more…)

Kenneth Katzner's Languages of the World is being updated and since I'd reviewed the previous edition I'd been asked for comments on that and had my copy lying around. Browsing through it with Helen, she decided that Georgian was the most attractive script, so we transliterated and translated the first word (ღმერთსა / ghmertsa = to God) in the sample text, with the aid of Google Translate and Wikipedia. We're not about to learn Georgian, but I think she understands the difference between transliteration and translation now.

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The last couple of months have seen an explosion not in the scope of Helen's reading but in the amount of time she spends reading. She'll almost always prefer friends or games, but she can read for an hour at a stretch in the right circumstances. (When I was in Year 1, I used to sit and read in the playground while everyone else ran around. I'm glad Helen is more sociable than that!) (more…)

I snuck into the Oxford Reading Spree, a one-day conference for teachers on books and reading, which I knew about because it was being run at my daughter's school and organised by one of the teachers there. (more…)

The UK polling for the European Elections has largely been national, with separate polling only (that I've seen) for the London region. So it's hard to work out what's going on in my "South East" region. Here's my attempt at an analysis. (more…)

Culling books is a bit like culling memories.

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There's an approach to cycling which my friend Scott Urban calls "urge and merge". The first part of this involves encouraging people to cycle, through providing information, training, and so forth. The second part involves then getting them to "merge" with the motor traffic, to share space with dense traffic flows, perhaps even to "take the lane" and cycle as if they were a vehicle — or in some cases to "merge" with people walking. This is an approach that has dominated thinking about cycling in the UK for decades, despite the fact that it clearly hasn't worked. Things are changing, but these ideas keep being used as an alternative to avoid more effective but harder changes.

Three lists illustrate how how this works, with a focus on Oxford, where decades of "urge and merge" have moved the cycling modal share nowhere. (more…)

Four years ago I mused about possible second languages for Helen and mentioned that I had tried talking to her a bit in German. And German is the language we've progressed most with, though sadly not very far. (more…)

Helen has flat out refused to log on to the Rock Stars Times Tables site her school has provided all students access to, because — going by the demonstration and explanation of it they were given in assembly — she thinks it is about high scores and competition. (more…)

Helen is still going back and rereading them by herself, but we're slowly moving out of picturebook age and I can't see us buying many more. So now seems like a good time to offer up a list of our favourites. These are some of the ones we loved, and which we read and reread and will probably keep. They are in no particular order below, but grouped to make my commentary easier. Most of them are classics, but there are a few lesser known books and authors in there. (I will cover non-fiction in a separate post.)

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Learning to read is not something that ever finishes. I'm still learning new words and improving my understanding of morphology, etymology, syntax, style, and so forth. But Helen can read now, in the sense that the problems she faces reading are mostly the same ones an adult faces, albeit at higher frequency and in a different mix, rather than the basic decoding she was struggling with a year ago. (more…)

I suggest that 1981 was the absolute nadir of utility cycling in Britain. As evidence for that I present, courtesy of Graham Smith, this diagram from the December 5, 1981 issue of the The Economist.

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I'm not trying to reform transport in Oxford for myself. Personally, I find Oxford remarkably easy to get around, and indeed one of its attractions for me has always been that, while it has the "cultural capital" of a city many times its size, it feels like a village because getting around it is so easy. (more…)

I did know, or would at least have guessed, that David Bowie and Prince were singers, and in talking about them I recognised the line "Ground control to Major Tom" and the phrase "The entity formerly known as Prince", but otherwise I knew little about them and the outpouring of emotion at their deaths was rather a mystery to me. More generally, questions such as "name the ten albums that most influenced you as a teenager" aren't really meaningful to me, since my teenage years were largely music-free. (more…)

There are many different metrics for measuring text complexity. The two I find most interesting are Lexiles and ATOS Book Levels, because there are online tools that give these measures for many popular children's books. (The Lexile scheme seems to have better coverage of American books and the ATOS one of British books.)

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While Camilla was doing a choir conducting course, Helen and I went to a fantastic Ashurbanipal exhibition at the British Museum. For a while I was afraid she was going to insist on reading every word on every board and caption. Eventually she got tired and let me read them to her instead, but we were there until the exhibition closed and she must have read almost half the text in it.

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

even in hunting scenes, Ashurbanipal is depicted with a stylus in his belt; he was proud of being able to read and write Akkadian and Sumerian

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Helen learned her first historical date at the end of last year: 1666. Her school teaches its curriculum (except for mathematics) around topics, and the topic for Year 1's first half-term was the Great Fire of London. I suspect she remembers the date largely because one of the activities they did was singing the song "September 1666".

She is still very hazy about dates and chronology, however: she might have learned the date of the Great Fire of London, but at the same time she was asking me whether that happened before or after the Second World War. She has a vague feeling for twentieth century chronology, anchored by family history. (more…)

The recent Phil Jones Associates' "Oxford City Centre Movement and Public Realm Strategy", commissioned by the city and county councils, proposes a radical reworking of Oxford's core in favour of public space and active travel. This offers an escape from the transport "swamp" the city is currently stuck in: the alternative is stumbling along, flailing about but sinking deeper into the quagmire. Everyone concerned about air pollution, congestion and barriers to walking and cycling in Oxford should push the councils to take the proposals in this report, give them flesh, and put them into (respectively) their Local Plan and Transport Strategy. (more…)

In this post I examine a "micro" example from East Oxford that illustrates how street design fails people walking or cycling: where the lane from Boundary Brook Rd meets Howard St. (more…)

I never did end up running any kind of pre-school maths circle, and once the children started school there hasn't really been spare time in the week for such a thing. But some of my thoughts about teaching mathematics from two and a half years ago have progressed.

One of my principles is to try to avoid things that will be covered in school. (more…)

If your school tells you your child is supposed to read to you four times a week, but they don't want to do that or don't like doing that, don't make them read. (more…)

I got a new kindle for my birthday, so I deleted everything off the old one except the children's books, renamed it, and voila! Helen now has a kindle. And she read her first book on it - Roald Dahl's The Twits - pretty much in one sitting. (more…)

One of the big advantages of cycling is that, like walking, it has predictable journey times. There are many trips where driving may be faster on average, but in Oxford at least driving times are highly unpredictable. This is a particular problem if one needs to be somewhere at a particular time - for a school drop-off, say, or for work, since one then has to leave earlier to allow for contingencies, obviating any speed advantage. (more…)

Way back in my first year of university one of my computer science tutors, I think it was Chris Bullivant, gave me the somewhat puzzling advice never to mix Lebesgue integration and black magic. (This was before he evicted me and Catherine Playoust from his tutorial because our discussion of Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms was distracting him from teaching the rest of the class what a for loop was.) I'm wondering now if this remark was inspired by Kennan T. Smith's A Primer of Modern Analysis, which as well as explaining Lebesgue integration carries the (unexplained) subtitle Directions for Knowing All Dark Things, Rhind Papyrus, 1800 B.C.. (more…)

The Gilligan report Running out of Road: Investing in cycling in Cambridge, Milton Keynes and Oxford offers an excellent analysis of the potential cycling has to help Oxford fix its transport problems. And its suggestions are on target. But it has some weaknesses, largely the result of considering cycling in isolation from other transport modes. (more…)

There seem to be some common misconceptions about the thermodynamics of fans going around. Running a fan in a room will not cool the room down. In fact it will heat it slightly, as the electrical power going into the fan (on the order of 50-70 watts for a typical standing room fan) will almost all end up as heat. The moving air from a fan will cool people down, by speeding up evaporation from the skin and the cooling associated with that (heat is transferred from your skin into the water as it evaporates), but it makes no sense to run a fan in an empty room. (more…)

Helen's school uses Oxford Reading Tree graded readers, as do apparently 80% of English schools. ("Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.") I mostly ignored these when she brought them home, since she was happy to read them at school and we had more interesting things to read, so I missed the clear "Stage N" on the back covers and it was a while before I realised these were graded into quite narrow bands. (more…)

An update on Helen's reading, following on from reading at five. (more…)

Oxford's transport system is trapped in a local optimum; it has already been heavily optimised for this and there is no way to improve it by making small changes. (more…)

If we moved back to Australia and then came back to the UK in ten years, I don't think any of Helen's friends would remember me. I'm just not that salient a part of their lives. A more interesting question is, would I recognise them after ten years away — what are all these little children going to be like at fifteen? They all seem as distinctive as anything now, but the evidence on personality persistence is limited, and tends to only involve broad features of temperament.

Anyway, whenever I think about planning the future, I try to imagine what Helen will be like at fifty and I realise that I have no clue.

My plans for formal early years teaching all came to nothing. (more…)

It's amazing how fast, once you can read, literacy becomes part of your life, and it becomes almost impossible to stop yourself reading text if its in front of you. (more…)

Helen's school recently had class photos taken. We bought a copy of hers, paying £13.50 to the photography company, without thinking about it much. But there are, on consideration, two major problems with the way this worked. The first is a failure of inclusivity. The second is a market failure, where goods fail to end up in the hands of the people who value them most. (more…)

These book updates now cover the books Helen is reading herself (with a bit of support) as well as the books I am reading to her. (more…)

On Saturday I went on a tour of the Waltham Forest "mini-Holland" project, organised by CyclOx and hosted by the WF branch of London Cycling Campaign (thanks Paul and Dan!). We caught a mini-bus into London, then used Urbo dockless hire bikes to do a 14km loop around the borough, looking at what they've done and are doing. (more…)

A common problem when considering safety is confusing averages and "tail" (rare) events in evaluating risks. This helps explain why driver education is largely useless as a way of making cycling safer, and suggests an explanation for why safety is a bigger concern for women and why teenage boys cycle on the pavement. (more…)

This is an portmanteau post for all the annoying inaccuracies I come across, in books or talks or displays, that are too small to warrant posts of their own. (more…)

Helen got 33 books for Christmas and her birthday: 8 from me, 9 from Camilla, and 16 from friends and family. Helen and I have also given everyone books for Christmas and birthdays (more…)

Here are some comments on the options for transport surveyed in "Movement and the Public Realm in Oxford City Centre". (more…)

We have take-off with the reading! Helen was doing some of the words in the easier books I read her, but a couple of weeks ago there was quite an abrupt shift: now she's reading the books and I'm helping with the harder words, or when she gets stuck. The major constraint now is motivation, and how fast she gets tired - I can almost see her thinking as she puzzles out words. (more…)

This will probably be my last book update before Helen is reading herself, though I expect to be reading to her for a long time as well. (She's at the point where she can, if motivated, puzzle out pretty much anything with sensible orthography, and with the early reader books — Russell Hoban's Frances books are current favourites — I'm now helping her with the hard words rather than getting her to read one or two words.) Here are some of the books we've enjoyed since my last update. (more…)

Helen's school is pretty keen on getting the children reading. (more…)

The use of referenda decide questions of borders and sovereignty is not unreasonable - and I have no strong feelings about Scottish and Catalan independence, to take two topical examples - but the idea that fundamental changes can be made based on a bare majority of (say) a 70% turnout of voters seems insane to me. (more…)

It's interesting comparing the governance of schools in the UK and Australia (or, more precisely, in England and New South Wales). The headline figures are that only 7% of children in England attend private schools whereas more than 30% of children in Australia do so. But examination of the details makes the difference much less: many state schools in England seem closer to me to Australian private schools than to Australian state schools.
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Last night I went to a talk by Eva Heinen titled "Why, where and how people travel" and that got me thinking about the balance between walking and cycling (more…)

I started reading Greek mythology with Helen a few months before we visited Crete and the Cyclades, beginning with the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, which she picked after I read her one story from that and one from the D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths. (more…)

The European Union can't save the United Kingdom from the effects of Brexit. Even if they give us everything we want — or the UK government accepts the ongoing payments, freedom of movement, and so forth necessary to maintain membership of the Customs Union and Single Market — leaving the EU will still be a huge shock for which we are completely unprepared. (more…)

I think the UK needs to consider some serious downsizing.

We should let Shetland and Orkney secede, taking the UK's rights to the North Sea oil with them. That will show Scotland. They can then join Norway, reviving historical links and getting access to the infrastructure needed to manage that oil. (more…)

We're into short novel and chapter book territory now, so I thought I'd give an update on what I've been reading with Helen. The first short novel Helen really got into was Otfried Preussler's The Robber Hotzenplotz, which we started on Boxing Day (it was the Christmas present of one of her cousins) but finished the next day, she was so excited by it. (more…)

The trade situation seems complicated, but the real complexities and dangers of Brexit lie in its effects on services. The agreements here are domain-specific and range across a huge range of areas — nuclear energy, chemicals standards, and so forth — but I've been reading a bit about aviation, something I hadn't originally considered would be affected at all. Here as elsewhere, the Financial Times' coverage is much scarier than that of the Guardian... (more…)

An update on the books I've been reading with Helen. (more…)

I've just had my rear wheel rebuilt — with a new rim as well since that was getting worn, but largely to replace the hub. And this post is mostly about hubs, about whether getting a Shimano Nexus hub serviced is a good idea, and whether a premium "redline" Nexus hub is actually any better. (more…)

Somehow I missed doing a book round-up at three, so here's one at three and a half (more…)

We've started the wreckers knocking down our house - and done enough structural damage to it that it's not repairable - but we haven't got any kind of plan for the new house, let alone started building it. (more…)

I am not yet a British citizen, but as an Australian resident in the country I get to vote in the forthcoming referendum on EU membership. (Unlike European citizens resident in the UK, or British citizens who have been abroad for too long.) So I take the liberty of using "we" in what follows. (more…)

I've seen some surveys where mathematics ranks as the favourite subject of a plurality of primary school children, ahead even of art, and I'm starting to see how that could be. (more…)

I was planning a rant about the dangers of formal assessment of mathematics in primary schools, the insanity of streaming maths classes based on knowledge of times tables at age nine, and suchlike. But there are more than enough depressing stories about the UK education system at the moment, so I've tried to make this a more positive piece, about some of the things I think children should learn about mathematics in primary school, along with a random collection of ideas for actual teaching. (more…)

I've tried speaking in German to Helen a few times in the last week and she's really fascinated by it. If I stop she says "say something" and wants me to keep going, and this morning she requested some German quite spontaneously. And Camilla and I have started thinking about the options for her to learn a second language. (more…)

Southern England's transport networks are radially focused on London, leaving poor public transport options for many trips that seem like they should be quite simple. (more…)

There are many areas in which becoming a father has had surprisingly little effect on me, but caring for Helen has clearly changed my social behaviour and probably my neurochemistry (more…)

It's early days yet, even for the UK where children start formal schooling between 4 and 5 years old, but we've already started thinking about schooling for Helen, and as part of that we visited two primary schools. The first was our local state school, the one we're actually in the catchment for and (since it's just around the corner) could be relatively confident of getting a place in (due to a baby boom, there's such pressure on schools that even being in the catchment is now no longer a guarantee of a place). The second was the prep school for a prestigious private Oxford girls high school. (more…)

I've noticed over the last few days that Helen is defaulting her pronouns to feminine. Even "daddy koala bear" is her/she. (more…)

An illustration of how deeply the concept of fractals has entered into popular culture is that it makes an appearance in the song "Let it go" from the film Frozen, in the line "My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around". So Helen was trying to sing the word at two! (more…)

A friend tagged me on Facebook with one of those "list ten books that had an impact on you" memes. This has turned into more of a "books that were influential in my life" list, ordered chronologically; it verges on being an intellectual history and probably has way too much detail for most people, if indeed it's of any interest at all.

Short list: The Lord of the Rings, Latin in Three Months, Life: Cells, Organisms, Populations, an unknown year 9 maths textbook, Tactics of Mistake, The Peloponnesian War, Shardik, Community, Anarchy and Liberty, Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura. (more…)

Following on from the previous post on baby/toddler books, some of Helen's favourite books - the ones that have been read dozens of times - at two years and two months (more…)

I was an active civil liberties campaigner in Australia: I led two protest marches through the streets of Sydney in the 1990s and was a board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia for twelve years. Here in Oxford I've become involved with cycling advocacy instead. (more…)

The lullaby I use most regularly with Helen is the song "Donna, Donna, Donna, Donna", one of the few songs I remember from my own childhood. (more…)

Oxford draws some great visiting speakers and last week I made it to two lectures by Herbert Gintis, who I knew from his recent book with Sam Bowles, A Cooperative Species. The first talk was a look at General Equilibrium in economics, arguing for an approach with private prices and adaptive expectations and presenting the results from some agent-based modelling. The second was a salvo in the debate about how all-embracing inclusive fitness theory is in explaining evolutionary adaptation. (more…)

In the UK, the averages suggest that you are slightly less likely to be killed cycling two miles to the shops than you are making the same trip on foot, but slightly more likely to be seriously injured. (more…)

I spent the weekend at a conference "The Meaning of 1914", organised by the New York Review of Books to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, but held at St Antony's College here in Oxford. (more…)

I have just finished reading my first full-length book in German, a bundled pair of short crime novels (around 130 pages each) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Der Richter und sein Henker and Der Verdacht. (more…)

the pink magnet pair is "mummy",
the orange one "daddy",
and the blue one "helen"
(I don't know why)

It's just over two weeks since my last post on language development, but in that time Helen has:

• produced her first two word phrases: "more cherry" and "daddy book". (more…)

There's supposed to be a spurt in language acquisition around 18 months, and Helen is doing that pretty much right on schedule. (more…)

This is by no means comprehensive, but I thought I'd write a bit about some of the books we and Helen have enjoyed most over the last year or so. Some of these have been given to us or recommended to us by friends and family, some of them I found reading online reviews and lists. (more…)

I occasionally play at teaching Helen the cardinal numbers one to five, not in any organised fashion but every so often when she seems alert and curious and there are no more obviously interesting things for her to play with (more…)

On Friday I made my first visit to the Mathematical Institute's shiny new Andrew Wiles building (on the old Radcliffe Infirmary site). The occasion was a talk by Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the IPCC AR5 Working Group 1, presenting an overview of their recently published report (that's the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's The Physical Science Basis). (more…)

The lyrics of any children's song can be improved by changing a key word to "walrus". (more…)

Due to flooding in the music faculty, my (Javanese) gamelan group wasn't able to rehearse last week. So we met at our leader Pete's place instead, where it turns out he keeps an entire Balinese gamelan anklung in the loft. And this week my sister took me to the opera as a birthday present, to a production of Donizetti's Anna Bolena by the Welsh National Opera. (more…)

The National Childbirth Trust runs ante-natal classes for prospective parents, which midwives and friends all recommended to us, and we dutifully signed up for one. The classes themselves were vaguely useful, though I only made it to two of the five since Helen arrived early, but the big attraction is not the formal instruction but the chance to get to know a group of new parents with babies of the same age, living in the same area. (more…)

When you spend five hours in A+E (Accident and Emergency) to get something looked at, or have to wait two hours after a scheduled appointment for an ultrasound, it's easy to get frustrated with the National Health Service (NHS). But one of the other sides of that is having access to an obstetrician and assistants, an anaesthetist, paediatricians, and assorted midwives for the delivery of a premature baby. (more…)

Three weeks ago I went to a lecture by Gary Kasparov, one-time world chess champion, on "Reviving the Spirit of Innovation". (more…)

A decade ago, M.A. Orthofer at the Complete Review found that only 13% of his reviews were of books by women. Some sampling of my reviews suggests that my fraction is a bit better than that, but not much - still under 20%. (more…)

If you ask parents they almost universally say they're much happier being parents, that children are the best thing that happened to them, and so forth, but there's clearly some reporting bias here. At least among my friends, the ones who understand retrospective and sunk cost biases and base rate neglect are the least gushing about the wonders of parenthood... (more…)

The Mountain Giants is a complex play, further complicated by having been left unfinished by Luigi Pirandello. (more…)

We saw two plays last week, both of them rather non-traditional. The Odyssey was an aleatoric reworking of The Odyssey, while The Story of the Four Minute Mile was told as the audience walked around the racetrack where Roger Bannister ran the first four minute mile in 1954. (more…)

"Drive-by regression" is my phrase - I think an original coinage - for describing what economists (or statisticians or physicists) do when they pick some other field, grab some convenient data, take it out of its context and perform some statistical analysis on it, preferably finding some kind of counter-intuitive result, and then depart, leaving the locals to deal with the resulting mess. (more…)

I've taken up learning German, again. (more…)

I had a brief conversation the other day with an investment advisor from my bank here in the UK. As soon as he found out that I knew what an index fund was and owned shares directly, he told me bluntly he didn't think he could help me. (more…)

I got a Kindle for my birthday. (more…)

For a long time, possibly over a decade, I have had a disclaimer at the bottom of the "medieval history" category of my book reviews which says:

"I realise the inclusion of works on areas outside Europe and West Asia in a 'medieval history' category is problematic."

(more…)

For me, one of the big benefits of working at a university was access to its library and in particular to its online journal subscriptions. I had hoped that by the time I retired everything I might want would be open access. But then we moved to the UK and I gave up my job... (more…)

Further adventures with the Bodleian Library system have gone well. (more…)

On Friday Camilla and I went to see the "Oxford Greek Play" Clytemnestra (actually Aeschylus' The Libation-bearers, or Choephoroi). (more…)

Some friends have been debating what Keynes thought of Marx and wanted to get hold of a letter he wrote to Bernard Shaw about this. (more…)

I joined the Oxford Council library soon after arrival in Oxford, but never found much to get excited by in their holdings, since they have neither academic books nor much in the way of world literature.

It wasn't till recently that I got around to getting a Bodleian readers card. This was very easy - I just turned up with the forms and paid my money - with the only unusual feature being that they made me speak the oath out loud! (more…)