At the End of the Day

The view from my window

It's amazing that I've avoided posting for three months, thinking I'd have nothing interesting to say, considering how much has happened in this time. This is probably the most appropriate time to break my silence - I'm sitting in a cramped hotel room in London's West End listening to the noises of the city* on the last night of my two week trip to England before coming home for Christmas, and seeing out what has very probably been the most eventful year of my life so far.

I'm here because I was lucky enough to be awarded the Southwood Prize, one of the British Ecological Society's prizes for young scientists publishing in their journals. The very pretty but no less heavy piece of perspex is ensconced in my backpack, along with numerous trinkets, awaiting the trip back home. I've met a lot of wonderful people, and been amazed at just how approachable, friendly and above all human the people occupying the dizzying heights of the academic world are. It's wonderful to know that so many people who, just a few days ago, were strangers in a strange country are now my friends and colleagues.

I've also fallen a little in love with Europe, and England in particular. After a couple of days in London and Paris, I joked about seeing "yet another bloody arch"**, but there's something that never gets old about seeing avenues full of grand old buildings full of character and history everywhere I look. And though while walking around I've seen plenty of homelessness and disenchantment on the streets in Birmingham, London and Paris, I've also experienced a little of the friendly, self-effacing nature of the average Briton***. Staying in Oxford with my friend Steve gave me a taste of a slightly more laid-back, less stressful life that made me wish that I could have discovered more of the UK, particularly the smaller towns in which I feel so much more at home.

And like any good travelling experience, I've learned a little about myself. Mostly I've learned (more than I already knew) that I'm a contrarian, self-contradictory bastard. After a couple of weeks away I long to be home, but at the same time I wish I could stay and explore a little bit more. The most difficult times of the trip have been when I've been alone, wishing I could share the experience with people I care about and for that extra confidence that comes with travelling with others. But when I have had company, I've often been withdrawn and grumpy, and snappy whenever things haven't been done my way (sorry, Steve!). I've chatted confidently for hours with interesting people who have also, helpfully, been very interested in me and what I do - but even now, I'm terrified of being the first to put myself forward and introduce myself (being a prize-winner certainly worked in my favour here!). Possibly most importantly, I've learned once again that I need to let things go and accept my own decisions - maybe I could have seen and done more things, and talked to more people than I did, but at the end of the day I'm richer**** for the experience and life goes on. And tomorrow I'm coming home.

* But hey, at least there's reliable free wi-fi.
** I admit that after seeing the Arc de Triomphe, the Marble Arch looked very small indeed.
*** I'd have learned more about the average Frenchperson if I spoke French.
**** Not so much in the bank account, however.

Launch day!

So, it's finally here - the day where I launch my EP. Part of me feels kind of underwhelmed by the whole affair - after all, I've had plenty of time to get used to doing gigs and at the end of the day, this is just another gig. But the other part - and the part I'm sure will start screaming louder as the day goes on - is quick to remind me that I've intentionally made this particular gig all about me.

Making myself the centre of attention is usually something I actively avoid, but writing an EP demands a launch party, and I'm not going to miss out on an opportunity to party with many of the people who made it possible and supported me through the whole thing. Also, it'd be nice to sell a few copies now it's done!

I've done pretty much everything I've needed to do - putting the CDs together, making posters, drumming up a little bit of publicity, rehearsals, getting audio gear. The Facebook page for the launch is looking pretty healthy as these things go, so hopefully I'll get a decent crowd. But until 7pm tonight - and possibly some time after - I'm going to be terrified that no-one will show up. But at least I can rely on the friends and family who got me here, and even by themselves they make a nice little (but vocal) crowd.

I intentionally didn't put any thanks on my EP itself: mainly because there wasn't much room left. But also because I'd rather do my thanks in person (or... well, in internet). So thank you - everyone who's bought a copy already, asked about it, even considered buying a copy, asked me how things were going along musically (both with the EP and in general), come to (or wanted to come to) my solo gigs or those with the band. If it weren't for all of you, they would have had to drag me out from under the table to get me to perform at all! I said this gig is all about me, but really* it's all about you**.

I'm really looking forward to tonight, and playing a gig that means a lot to me. Even more than that, I'm looking forward to continuing on with music after tonight - planning gigs, writing songs, maybe even recording some. Nearly all of that will be done with my band, The Solution, because - well, because they're awesome, and I find it much more fun and rewarding playing with a band than solo. So look out for us!

For those of you who can't be there tonight (or randomly stumbled upon/were directed to this blog) the EP is now available to download on my bandcamp site for $4, complete with secret bonus tracks! You can listen to all of the tracks live on the bandcamp page and decide for yourself whether I'm worth the price of an overpriced packet of chips ;) Go to http://nickbeeton.bandcamp.com or press some buttons below!


* cliched moment warning
** I warned you!

Locked and loaded

At long last, my EP is done and dusted*. All that's left to do now is get ready to show it to people, which means a launch party! I've booked a venue, organised a support act, burned the music onto CDs, printed CD labels, cajoled my friend and co-star Ariel into providing art, sent away to get CD sleeves printed... I've never been much of an organiser, but somehow it's coming together. I won't say putting this thing together took nearly as much work as my PhD did, but it's taken almost as long - and strangely means almost as much, though in a different way. When I first came to Hobart five years ago, doing something like this was no more than a far-flung fantasy - I could barely manage to sing in front of my friends, let alone record something that anyone might happen upon! It's only been through the support and enthusiasm of my family and friends (you all know who you are!) that I've been able to believe that my voice and my words are something that people might want to hear. Even now it amazes me that people are interested in my stuff - but because they are, I wrote it, because I knew that somebody would want to hear it!

The launch party will be on Saturday, 15th September at Brookfield Margate - we'll most likely be kicking things off around 7pm with Vino (consisting of good friends David McEldowney and George Begbie), and then I'll be taking to the stage with The Solution to play songs for you (and hopefully sell some EPs!). Stay tuned for more info as I get it organised!

The EP will be released under a Creative Commons licence - in short, it means that once you've bought it you can distribute it around as much as you like as long as you give me credit, don't sell it, and share it under the same conditions! Of course, I would love it if you bought my EP - and it'll be available online on bandcamp.com after the launch date for those ascetics who don't believe in the whole "physical objects" thing** - but I'll be just as happy if you listen to it on my blog, enjoy it and share it around with your friends*** :)

So, in the spirit of sharing, here's a third track from the EP for you to listen to - it's called The Garden, and it's the closest thing to a love song I've ever written, dedicated to my girlfriend. Aww. Enjoy!




* Also, I changed the name. I'm indecisive >_>
** Except for a computer, of course. Let's not get crazy here!
*** And maybe they'll buy it, seeing as you won't. Stingy bastard. (kidding!)

An abundance of silver

Statistics can be a really useful way to get a feel for when a "strange event" may just be coincidence, and when it is likely to be something more.

For example, sports fans may have noticed that our gold medal tally is less than stellar so far. Another thing that becomes clear when looking at our medal tally (as of 4th August, 9pm) is that though we have a dearth of gold, we have managed to get quite a lot of silver medals! As it stands, we have 16 medals: 1 gold, 10 silver, and 5 bronze. A curious person might wonder whether there's a reason for that - is it just random chance that it happened that way, or is it something else - maybe our Olympians are psyching themselves up too much and falling at the last hurdle to winning gold?

As it happens, there is a way to get an idea of this using statistics! According to legend, in the 1920s a statistician called Fisher wanted to test his friend's boast that she could always tell whether the milk or tea was added to first to the cup. He tested her boast by giving her 8 cups of tea - four with the milk added first, and four with tea. She got every one of these right and Fisher - using a test known to this day as Fisher's exact test - calculated that if she had guessed, she would have had a less than 1 in 70 chance of getting all 8 correct.

We can use Fisher's exact test to work out the probability of getting 10 or more silver medals if there's an equal chance of getting gold, silver, or bronze and we get 16 medals overall. It turns out there are 153 different combinations, and 28 of those involve 10 or more silver medals. Most of these are incredibly unlikely to occur by chance, with the most likely being 3 gold, 10 silver and 3 bronze - this has an 0.4% chance of happening at random!

All together, the chance of getting at least 10 silver medals at random is 1.6%, or about 1 in 60 - almost as unlikely as the lady having a lucky break with her tea drinking! Most scientific literature counts a value of less than 5% as "statistically significant" - meaning that the result is unlikely to have occurred by chance. Of course, this kind of analysis doesn't tell us why it's happening this way, and unfortunately it sheds even less light on how to fix it...

An end to hoop-jumping

Just now, I got the email finally telling me that my thesis has been approved by a meeting of Academic Senate and I can finally graduate. No more hoops! This is the penultimate step in a long series of tiny achievements:

• Write final version of PhD thesis (the longest step!)
• Send thesis to supervisors (then deal with their comments - this can take months)
• Send thesis to School for a final pre-submission check (then deal with those comments)
• Send thesis off for examination by two experienced international researchers (ok, so one of them was from New Zealand - still counts!), wait for several months...
• Deal with those comments, send through to Head of School (along with evidence that I've actually dealt with those comments and not just ignored them)
• Get thesis approved by the Head of School (an important step - it means I never have to edit it again!)
• Make realllly sure that I haven't made any typos or formatting mistakes, then send thesis off to be bound in shiny pretty books
• Get books signed by the necessary people then give them to the Graduate Research Office

and, finally,

• Get my final thesis approved by the Senate and be placed in a graduation schedule.

So now all I have to do is wait for August 11th and graduate! As you can probably see, the main problem with getting a PhD accepted is that there are so many steps that you can never be sure when to go all out and celebrate - in a way, it sucks out a little of the joy because there's no single defined endpoint. Though doing a PhD certainly feels like doing a marathon, the analogy stops at the finishing line because instead of one big ribbon to run through at the end, there are a lot of little finish lines along the way! So I decided a while ago to save the biggest party for graduation day - the day I can finally call myself Doctor.

A day in the life of...

I thought I'd try and give some kind of idea what it is I do every day, without sending everyone to sleep. One of the projects I'm doing right now (hopefully) gives a nice little example!

I'm trying to model how lizards might move through the landscape, in a collaboration with someone who actually knows something about lizards - because there's no point doing modelling if what you're modelling is completely unrealistic!

One current idea I'm working on is the concept that the landscape contains a set number of basking rocks (in this case: 2000, randomly placed in a square kilometre), which every lizard has to have access to in order to survive. So to over-simplify, let's assume that each established lizard has a territory containing one of these basking rocks. Juvenile lizards disperse from their maternal den in order to find their own territory, and we assume that they sprint off in a random direction (they're not very bright), and don't stop until they either find an unoccupied rock or die without a territory. We arbitrarily set the distance they can travel before keeling over to 20 metres. Using this information, we can then generate a map of which rocks are accessible (i.e. within 20 metres) from other rocks, and connect them with lines:

One thing that immediately becomes clear is that there are quite a few rocks that are more than 20 metres away from any other rock - this means that any baby lizard trying to find another territory from there will inevitably die, unless their mother has died (giving up her claim to the maternal territory) and it is the first of its siblings to claim it. Clearly, setting a hard limit for the distance a juvenile can travel has serious implications for survival!

The next problem is to work out how likely a juvenile from a given site is to find another rock (assuming there even are any within 20 metres). As they're not very bright, we assume they'll only stumble across a rock if they travel within one metre of it during their dash to freedom - so we can draw lines that show the range of angles they can travel to find each rock, like below. Though most of them are straightforward to get to, in this example, you can see there is a rock directly behind another rock - so the juvenile will always just choose the first one it reaches. There is also a lot of space between rocks, so a juvenile has to be pretty lucky to be able to establish a territory in the first place!

Things aren't always so straightforward, however. Sometimes a lizard might be lucky and pass one rock just to find another - in the example below, in a couple of places one rock is partially covering the one behind it, but there is a small chance that a lizard will go straight past it and find the rock behind it.

There are more complicated cases again if two rocks are within a metre of each other!

Next time on the mathsy part of the blog, I'm thinking of looking at Snakes and Ladders - and how it gets more complicated when you have to choose between moving multiple tokens - or I could go back to looking at Cribbage like I did a while ago in this post. Any thoughts?

Didn't Know (aka the Duck Song)

Thanks everyone for your support and comments while I tried out this new gimmick to drum up interest! Voting has now closed and the clear winner was Didn't Know, one of my most often-played songs recently!

Didn't Know - 6 votes
Green Eyes - 3 votes
The Garden - 1 vote
Survive You - 1 vote

The very simple riff for this song entered my head in a dream, and persisted after I woke up... I managed to play it on a guitar, and then all I needed to do was add lyrics. I really had trouble with this part of the process, and ended up putting in some placeholder lyrics about an "omnipotent duck" to try and move things along. I fully intended to change them for something more serious later on, but my girlfriend insisted they stay... and so has basically everyone else who's heard the song so far. When recording, I gave Dave completely free rein and told him to add as much messed-up stuff as possible - I think he's done an amazing job of that :)

So here it is - enjoy!


... oh. I guess you want to know who won the free copy of the EP. Well, I used my magical random number generator, and the winner was... Ariel Pascoe (whose fine vocals you'll see featured on the final cut of the EP!). But she's already getting a free copy, so I ran it again and the winner is the first voter, who I happen to know is the infamous IriXx Jorvik! She's planning to write a remix for "the duck song" so I think it's very fitting that she wins the free EP. Congratulations!

More news will be coming up soon, so stay tuned! Who knows, if you're lucky I'll even release another track before the EP launch and give away another copy!