The fine art of re-gifting

For christmas this year my pen-friend Genevieve gave me a tiny little painting easel and canvas. I spent a while thinking about what to do with it and then was suddenly inspire to make a painting for her with it for her birthday. Which was today, and she just emailed me to say thanks, so I can post about it. (She doesn't read my lj as a rule but you never know!)



This is what I was so desperate to get white paint for :) This shot shows how tiny the canvas is!

Based on this picture I found by googling 'self portrait'.

I'm quite happy with this, and since Crazy Clarks has tiny easels cheap I might do some more.

Be careful what you wish for

So I may have a Phd in "maths", but it's pure maths, and I am woefully ignorant of statistics, not having studied it beyond a first year level (I've tutored second year stats. That was a challenge :D)

Thus my mind is actually quite easily blown by fairly basic statistics facts presented in an engaging way. See for example I'm not normal, which makes an obvious point I'd never really thought about before: The normal distribution became central to statistics back before computers, and once people get taught it, unless they go on to study more stats it's their only hammer so everything starts to look like a nail. But lots of large samples are NOT normally distributed, and given computing power we generally don't need to smoosh them into a nice distribution at all but can actually look at what the real data is doing.

My mind was also blown by Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin which is pretty much just a basic description of evolution being a bounded random walk (Namely, the mean complexity goes up over time while still leaving 99.9% of life at the same basic level, with anything but the most simple species being as likely to get more simple as less)