InsectNation

The God Delusion

I’ve recently finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I was pretty determined to not read it when it first came out since a) I object to specifically indulging in writing that I know I’ll agree with — I suspect that searching out compliant opinions leads to foam-mouthed Daily Mail reader behaviour and obstinate old man disease, and b) Herr Dawkins has been on a bit of an ego/PR trip in recent years, in an area which he’s not really all that qualified to talk about. But then, as he points out in the book, it’s not like religious “authorities” are really qualified to say anything meaningful about well… anything, so when Jo got a copy, I decided to steal it and finish it before her ;)

Posted by Andy Buckley on Nov 09, 2008

XML: restraining the knee-jerk reflex

XML is a useful technology, sometimes: that’s about as positive as I can be about it these days. While there was a period when I got quite excited about the idea of a standard syntax for, well, everything, time tempers such enthusiasm. See, 90% of the time, XML is just too damn cumbersome. When what you want to say is

Param1 = 3

or something of that complexity, then having to write

<param name="Param1" value="3"/>

is just a bit hefty. Anyone who’s ever tried using Ant or Maven will surely sympathise with the idea that XML is a pain in the arse way to write make-files. And XSL transforms? Phew, glad I’m not going back into that arse-end of software engineering gone mad. It’s also a pain in the arse to read XMLified data in C++ or Fortran. Hell, even Python and Java make you jump through SAX or DOM-shaped hoops in their lowest common denominator implementations! Frankly, XML is a serious candidate for “no silver bullet”-type debunking: merely wrapping everything in angle brackets actually solves nothing, even if it looks totally SOAP-AJAX-Web 2.0, dude. Much of the time, something simpler is quite enough.

Posted by Administrator on Nov 10, 2008

Burying the hatchet

“Ah, the famous Andy Buckley. Or perhaps infamous, no?”. When a dapper French gent at a statistics conference addresses you this way, I guess it’s normal to feel a bit perturbed, particularly when you’ve devoted a serious chunk of time in the last few years to publicly demonizing their work. Really, I suppose it’s maybe a minor miracle that Rene Brun and I haven’t crossed paths before now — although I guess this is largely to do with me being keen to avoid a fight.

Posted by Andy Buckley on Nov 17, 2008

A week in the land of contradictions

It’s the end of another busy week. Work life has been busy to the point of insanity recently, burrowing its way into every available bit of spare time… if you consider every weekend since mid October to be spare time rather than “essential time”, that is. I’m actually inclined to the latter view: while happy to declare that my work is captivating and inspiring, some downtime is definitely needed. In the last month I’ve been to two week-long conferences in Italy, snatched a week back in Durham and then spent the last week in Chicago. After one more week in Durham, in which to pay some attention to demonstrating and marking Frank’s excellent new computational physics course, I’m off on my travels again, this time to CERN for a week. And then it’s Christmas and skiing; January is looking a bit crazy, and I’m trying not to think about that. Fortunately Jo has been a star and given me some (unearned) slack, but this schedule isn’t really fair on either of us: I think I’ll be imposing a more restricted travel schedule in the New Year and hopefully sending some collaborators out to do the salesman thing instead ;)

Anyway, reflections on the past week: I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed Fermilab. Most people seem to bitch about the “boring site”, the strip malls of West Chicago, the weather and anything else that springs to mind, but I must be a bit funny in the head because I like it all. Okay, not the strip malls — a bit of restriction on the suburban planning process would have been welcome — but here’s a list of hat I’ve been up to, other than giving talks and coding up experimental analyses in Rivet:

Posted by Andy Buckley on Nov 22, 2008