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...