07 August 2005

'S' is for seaside, sea slug and statistics

Everybody needs a hobby, or so my great aunt used to tell me. I'm personally suspicious of the word 'hobby', but perhaps one of mine is the investigation, over a long period and a wide spectrum, of half a dozen little bays around Britain's coast. These bays, whose specifics I have no intention of revealing for selfish fear of rupturing their solitude, are remarkably similar in many ways: tiny, infrequently visited (though half of them are only a short scramble from busy highways), ringed by rocky terrain with varying types and degrees of short tough ground cover. In other ways, and more so as my investigation deepens over the years, they are magically different. For the most part, the function of these bays and their investigation is simply to refresh the sense of wonder that first brought me to statistics. A copy of Insightful's S-Plus 7.0 reached me at a time when there was no upcoming professional project on which it could be put through its paces. I was, on the other hand, in serendipitous possession of a large and as yet unanalysed database of raw readings garnered from the 'sea slugs' that had, for a time, inhabited one of my bays.

My friend, colleague, and partner in oddity, Zeph, derives his enjoyment from building gadgets. Radio triggers, data loggers, miniature microphone arrays, and other transduction devices - if it is small, Zeph enjoys designing it and making it, though he loses interest once it has been demonstrated to work. Since he doesn't share my delight in clambering up cliffs and sitting out rainstorms under stunted trees, we have a nearly perfect symbiotic relationship: he makes the toys; I play with them. If he could be persuaded to make these gadgets last longer than the sealed-in batteries that run them, they would be better still; but any suggestion that his creations might be marketed plunges him into weeks of somnolence. You can't have everything, as my great aunt also used to say. [Read more]

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