Books + Ideas

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.)

These metrics are largely based on vocabulary and simple measures like sentence length, and don't take into account the age appropriateness of the content or the length of the book, though the ATOS rater gives a separate "Reading Interest" age range and a wordcount, and Lexiles include markers such as AD (usually read by adults to children), NC (complex but aimed at younger children) and HL (simple but aimed at older children). (more…)

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. (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."

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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…)

Last week Camilla and I went into London with two of her colleagues, to listen to Hans Rosling deliver the 2011 Pumphandle talk of the John Snow Society, "Epidemiology for the Bottom Billion - where there is not even a pump handle to remove!". (more…)

I went along last Wednesday to an Oxford Skeptics in the Pub meeting, held in the COPA bar on George St. John Bradshaw gave a talk "A sheep in wolf's clothing?", which basically summarised his book In Defense of Dogs (published in the US as Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet). (more…)

Camilla and I, joined by Camilla's colleagues Rosalind and Madeleine, drove to Kent to visit Charles Darwin's home, Down House. (more…)

My web site dannyreviews.com has ranked well in Google searches for more than a decade, but in the last few months Google has taken a dislike to it. This appears to be a result of the search algorithm change called "Panda". (more…)

Following a decision to take more advantage of living in a university town, in May I went to thirty odd lectures and seminars. (more…)

Today's talks were by James Hegarty - "Telling the World: Exploring the Cultural and Intellectual Agenda of the Sanskrit Mahabharata " (blurb) - and Benny Morris - "Israel and Palestine - Is it too late for the Two States Solution?". (more…)

I went to two talks today, one a small Earth Sciences seminar and the other a big "annual special lecture" of the Faculty of History. (more…)

At lunch yesterday I went to a reception at Rhodes House for the Australian Governor-General, Quentin Bryce (presumably in the UK for some minor ceremony or other). This was quite fun once some people I knew turned up, though as always I felt like an impostor when wearing a suit and tie. (more…)

On Saturday Camilla and I went a series of five lectures on "Neanderthals and Modern Humans". This was hosted by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit and after the lectures we were given a tour of their lab and got to see the accelerator. (more…)

Between Oxford University, the museums, and an assortment of other research institutions, there's an excellent range of talks, lectures and seminars on in Oxford. (more…)

This documentary about the global financial crisis fitted a surprising amount in - it was high on information and low on dramatisation and special effects - while maintaining some kind of a story line and narrative drive. (more…)

A few weeks ago Camilla and I went to a screening of Race to Nowhere, a documentary about the United States school system and the insane pressure it places on students to get into college. (more…)

On May 5th the UK will be voting on (among other things) a referendum to use "Alternative Vote" instead of "First Past the Post" in electing members of Parliament. (more…)

I've just read my first ever ebook, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, using a borrowed Kindle 3 (thanks Sophia!). (more…)

On Thursday Camilla and Jenny and I went to a performance of a theatre adaptation of Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in Mansfield College chapel. This was an amateur production - the actors, director and production team are all students - but I thought it was rather good. (more…)

On Tuesday I went to two seminars. The first was on microsimulation of traffic flows, in the e-Research centre. This was interesting, but pretty superficial - it felt more like a sales pitch than any kind of academic presentation. (more…)

I ran a poll on what my most obscure book review was. The results were: (more…)

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Following my survey of Oxford bookshops, I'm starting a survey of bookshops outside Oxford but nearby. (more…)

Most of the magazines and journals I've subscribed to have been general science publications. (more…)

Here's a list of some of my reading highlights from the last year. (more…)

What were the first adult books you read? (more…)

My friend Cosma came to Oxford to give a talk, so I spent Sunday afternoon showing him around town. (more…)

Despite doing three years of mathematics at university, as well as most of the course work for an honours year and a few graduate courses, I never did a single statistics course. (more…)

We spent a weekend on the Welsh border, staying two nights in Ewyas Harold (pronounced "Yewass") in the Old Rectory B&B. (more…)

The Economist's global house price comparison suggests that UK residential property is 34% overpriced and Australian property 61% overpriced. (more…)

Being in Oxford has made me think about one of the turning points in my life, which came when I finished my undergraduate degree. (more…)

The British media really only cover Australia when there are major political events, disasters, or "man bites kangaroo" stories. (more…)

On Saturday our friends Val and Paul took us to see Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, at the National Theatre in London. (more…)

I went to two very different but fascinating events today. (more…)