Making mince pies and MVD

Every year, in December, I embark on an epic quest to find mince pies. I have an addiction to these pastries, but also a particular dietary requirement which is not explicitly provided for by suppliers. I usually find a supply (and promptly buy a full gross before they can get away), but in the process I encounter the effects of what is, in the scheme of things, a trivial aspect of statistics in manufacturing to which I shall return below. When I last wrote^[1] about this topic in Scientific Computing World, I was mostly concerned with the central rôle of data analysis in quality control. It plays a much wider and more diverse range of parts than that, however.

The fashion industry, for instance, is driven by statistical compromise. A dress maker uses over thirty metric descriptors, from height or waist circumference to the distance from neck to shoulder or armpit to hip. Most dresses, on the other hand, are bought on the basis of a single descriptor: a size, which in theory will always mean the same thing but in practice varies widely. In making this data reduction, a manufacturer needs to ensure that the best possible balance is struck between different customer shapes and perceptions. Most customers are going to find that a dress fits in one place, is too loose in another, and too tight in a third, but will only accept this within certain limits. Moving to a larger or smaller size will alleviate one problem while exacerbating another, and will also carry a psychological message about body shape. Getting the compromise wrong for a particular market will result in an exodus of customers to another manufacturer who has made shrewder decisions. These choices are heavily influenced by intuition and experience, but modelling on the basis of data analysis plays a large part, too. I know of one high street fashion supplier who regularly rents consulting time from a university department which maintains dedicated analytic software for the purpose. There are others which use in house statisticians running desktop software... [more]

The artichoke is dead...

Forty five years after Roland Bathes wrote The death of the author, thirty five years after the isolated singularity of the artefact tacitly became an integral part of the mainstream critical consensus, the author's remains continue to be dug up again on a daily basis.

So it is today; I wouldn't bother to mention it, except that it prompted a humorously perfect (and at the same time usefully constructive) response from Unreal Nature's Julie Heyward which I feel deserves wider notice than just the forum thread in which it appeared.

The question was framed as “It is often said that "a picture should stand on its own"...”, to which Julie's response was:

“I don't think it's that an image "should" stand on its own: I think an image does stand or fall on its own. [... ... ...]

An analogy (that's got a lot of holes, but oh well). Eating artichokes. You like them? You don't like them? The artichoke experience should/does stand or fall on its own artichokiness.

However, where you are eating them, how they are prepared, who prepared them, who you're eating them with, your history of artichoke eating, stories about artichoke eating, growing, tragedies and triumphs, artichoke breeders who improved this noble vegetable -- all can enrich and develop the artichoke experience. Yet, I would still claim that the particular artichoke you are eating/experiencing stands or falls on your tongue-ish experience.”

---

• Jonathan Charles et al, "The story behind the image – helpful or not?" in The philosophy of photography forum. 2012-02-17 (0133 et seq), Photo.net.

Today

Never mind the label, feel the wonder

Jim Putnam, towards the end of his second Let's try again post a couple of days ago, commented that “People don't have to be religious to be inspiring.” From my own, atheist point of view, the reverse is also true; being religious doesn't stop people being inspiring. As I commented to Jim, it's a pity that religious and nonreligious people so often find each others' existence an affront rather than a cause for celebration.

I differ from many people on my side of the fence (including the admirable and inspiring Dr C) in finding Richard Dawkins an embarrassing millstone around the neck of not just atheism but also humanism and secularism (about both of which I am passionate) ... though he can be brilliant in many ways, his arguments against religion are too often straw man fallacies. Nevertheless, I have just quoted in a lecture the following (from the opening paragraphs of The God delusion, about which I otherwise have little good to say). It is a wonderful statement of the human capacity for wonder which all of us, religious or otherwise, theist or otherwise, secular or otherwise, share.

“The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details at the time – of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down my throat.

In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer.”

[Correction, four days later: Oops ... thanks to Ray Girvan for a proof reading correction. Dawkins does refer to Ursa Major (as now corrected) and not, as my inadequately OCR had it, “that most incontinent star” (Ray's words) Urea Major.]

Not directly connected to my starting point, but thematically related (in a steam of consciousness sort of way) and also quoted in the same lecture, here is another favourite passage – lifted, this time, from Vincent van Gogh.

“Study Japanese art and you find an unquestionably wise, philosophic and intelligent man who spends his time how? In study of the distance from earth to moon – no. In study of Bismarck's policy – no. He studies a single blade of grass.

But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and all the seasons, the broads aspects of the countryside, then animals, and the human figure. Thus he passes his life, and life is too short to do it all.”

---

• Richard Dawkins, The God delusion. 2007, London: Black Swan, 2007. 9780552773317 or 055277331X (pbk) [first publication 2006, London: Bantam Press. 9780593055489 or 0593055489 (hbk.)]
• Vincent Van Gogh [but my own dodgy translation], in a letter to his brother Theo, from Aries, 23 September 1888. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, inventory numbers b586 a-b V/1962. Original language:
  “Si on etudie l’art japonais alors on voit un homme incontestablement sage et philosophe et intelligent qui passe son temps – à quoi – à étudier la distance de la terre à la lune – non, à étudier la politique de Bismarck – non, il etudie un seul brin d’herbe.
  Mais ce brin d’herbe lui porte à dessiner toutes les plantes – ensuite les saisons, les grands aspects des paysages, enfin les animaux, puis la figure humaine. Il passe ainsi sa vie, et la vie est trop courte, à faire le tout.”

Do I trust myself?

A pet hate about Windows 7: the frequency with which it tells me that I don't have the necessary privileges to view one of my own documents and then invites me to give myself those access privileges before continuing...

Bizarre.

Easy does it

Having recently had a big crash, I've been gradually reinstalling programs as I need them. The day before yesterday, it was Easy Thumbnails from Fookes Software.

Which had me thinking that we really ought (or, at least, I really ought) to more often give public credit to those utilities which other people freely provide to make my life easier.

Easy Thumbnails is, for me, about far more than thumbnail images: it's an essential part of my life. When I reinstalled it the day before yesterday, for instance, I was preparing a slide show. I wanted to reduce several dozen images to a maximum of 1024 pixels wide or 768 high, whichever was smaller, to match the resolution of the digital projector in use. I could, of course, do it easily enough in a paint package ... but Easy Thumbnails does the whole lot for me, without fuss, after six mouse clicks, while I get on with something else.

There are other utilities which perform equally valuable service ... I must mention them, in time ... but today it's Easy Thumbnails' turn.

Of course, Fookes offer free utilities to attract you in to their (excellent) paid products ... but they don't make a big deal of it, and you are perfectly free to walk away with the freebies under no obligation.

So ... this, by way of belated (I've been using Easy Thumbnails for years) thank you, is a recognition of a wonderful and free essential utility which I unreservedly recommend.

Jus' browsin'

I don't know how it is in the wider world, but here in the Growleryverse there is a continuing trend for Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer, to lose ground while Firefox gains it.

Forty three browsers are currently in use amongst my visitors, from Android and Blackberry to Wii and Yeti, with one person (I am delighted to see) still using Blazer on a Handspring device.

Five of those browsers clock in at more than one percent of usage, and their proportions are:

Firefox: 46%
IE: 33%
Safari: 11%
Chrome: 5.3%
Opera: 1.2%

I'm sorry to see Opera so low on the table ... it's a good browser which deserves to be more widely recognised.

Of the Safari users, the vast majority of visits are, unsurprisingly, by Macintoshes. Just under 1% are from an iPhone or similar Apple portable device. One and a half percent of them, however, are from Windows platforms and there is a lone Linux user running it as well.

Little things...

You learn something new every day.

Today I discovered that, when preparing a PowerPoint slide show and checking whether the transition between slides 83 and 84 works correctly, it's not necessary to click through the whole file frame by frame.

Press Ctrl-S in slide show mode (I did it accidentally, absent mindedly trying to save the file ... which is not possible without exiting slide show mode first) and up comes a "Go To" box where you can go straight to slide 83 and ... bingo.

Isn't life sweet, sometimes, when you suddenly realise that for years you have been doing something the hard way and no longer need do so?

Like banging your head against a wall, as they say.

Nice when it stops.

Where art, science and squeeze box meet

To how many natural scientists can you write at 6:45pm on a Sunday evening for advice on a point of critical theory, and get an almost instant yet perfectly formed reply despite the fact that they are “just off to an accordion gig”?

Ray Girvan: take a bow.

The return of the North Carolinian

A big welcome back to the netwaves for Jim Putnam, whose Thinking through my fingers closed fourteen months back but who has just returned with Let's try again – which joins the "Other voices" blog roll on the left