Thomas House
@tah-sci
Professor of Mathematical Sciences, working mainly on epidemiology although partial to a bit of non-commutative algebra, social science and basic biology.
Remembering this Bush-era bag label where the workers felt the need to smuggle the message out to the World, "NOUS SOMMES DESOLES QUE NOTRE PRESIDENT SOIT UN IDIOT NOUS N'AVONS PAS VOTE POUR LUI" (We're sorry our president is an idiot, we didn't vote for him.)
Back to the 20th century aesthetic of dodgy costumes and received pronunciation (but with modern DEI sensibilities obvs.).
I've been quite ill the last few weeks with something respiratory and boy these do clear the sinuses 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Just a simple SVM classifier with RBF kernel trained on 700x15 characters in the "Chinese MNIST" dataset gets around 2/3 accuracy on 300x15 held back training points. With all the interest in deep learning, it's still extraordinary that a single-layer method that takes seconds to train does so well.
This was a very nice evening with @groomb.bsky.social - despite having been here a while now first time at the Portico Library too.
Part of occasional observations that mainstream organisations are quietly dropping their official presence on Musk's X.
Hi I wish all fellow young Gen X / older Millenials a very disturbing realisation that things that happened like literally yesterday, I'm sure that's quite a new thing, right? are now core childhood memories for people old enough to rent cars.
Ain't clickin' on that, but ... good advice for PhD supervision would probably be to be as far from LLM style as possible: Many things we don't know; Even great ideas typically don't work out; Go away and have fun working on that; [Grok special] Nazis are bad actually.
Similarly, various people here thought it was quite fun to have a health secretary who liked to party but that didn't stop her making a really crappy decision on Mpox vaccine procurement. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
What's right for European museums to do with stolen objects may be up for debate, but making them freely available to view and at least acknowledging the theft and ethical obligations that may flow from this has to beat using them as a source of income from "foreign" visitors.
OMG these grifters actually did the bit from "Scrubs" back in the day ...
Fun in high dimensions: not only does a sphere contain a negligible fraction of its bounding hypercube's volume as dimension increases, but so does a "hypersquircle". I.e. in high dimensions, all the volume of a hypercube is in the very tippy ends of its corners.
I don't know why anyone bothers trying to be cool because it's literally impossible to be cooler than these women on the stairs of the Bauhaus from the back of a book I'm reading.
In Bayesian inference we "buy information with assumptions" - preparing teaching for next year, we see how three different Gaussian process priors let us fill in some missing monthly temperature data for Bradford differently.