There's hope yet!

This as a semi-retired leftie; old Labour even.

It seems likely that Corbie the Crow will get elected as the leader of the Labour Party. Leaving aside my belief that the Labour Party will never get elected with the Crow at the helm, prompted by a piece in yesterday's Guardian, I do think it quite likely that, in a year or so, both he and the party will wake up to the fact that a leader with prime ministerial potential is needed. The Crow, having successfully swept aside the tainted old guard, will then, being a decent, honourable & unambitious chap, step down, thus opening the way to some bright young thing who might have a chance of winning. If he gets his skates on, in time for the next election.

Before posting, I took a peek at the Crow's entry in wikipedia, which is not inspiring. There is a thin but surprising connection to me through TB through a chap who worked with his weather forecasting brother Piers. Many a pint was quaffed while the chap in question instructed me in some of the mysteries of neural networks. Not sure how respectable his blood line was in that his parents were said to be peace campaigners who met during the Spanish Civil War. Were they in Spain or were they among the gang who hung out for peace for rather too long, along with the otherwise respectable Aldous Huxley? Then, it looks as if he discovered politics in his teens, more or less dropped out of school and then spent his working life as, in succession, a trade union official, a local councillor and (since 1983) an MP. Righties might say that he has never done an stroke of honest work in his life, despite espousing the cause of the workers.

Good record on foreign adventures and nuclear disarmament, but otherwise little of note. Also old, that is to say more or less the same age as me. Is this the sort of chap you want on the bridge of the ship of state? What chance would he have when the heavies of New Labour managed to steer it head on into a gigantic lump of frozen bank, despite being fully paid-up members of the PFI madness (a code word for an originally New Labour project to funnel public money into the hands of bankers).

PS 1: I wonder whether he would back my scheme to flog the Malvinas to the Argies.

PS 2: pleased to read this morning (Friday) that, prompted by a report about world tree loss over the past three millennia, the Crow has pledged that, should he become Prime Minister, he will apologise to the world, on behalf of the three kingdoms, for the destruction of our islands' primeval forests.

Reference 1: http://www.afc.com.au/. I might not be a member of the Labour Party but I did wear the scarf of the crows with pride for some years. Much better than current issue. The picture above is offered by an engaged fan, whatever than might mean.

Bayes 4

The view north by west across the rails of platform 4 on the outward leg of the Bayes day.

Reproduced here for what may be a hop, clambering over the neighbouring trees, previously mentioned on another Wetherspoons day. See reference 1.

Alternatives, to my botanically untutored mind at least, including bryony (a sort of cucumber) and the grape vine. And checking the spelling of bryony, I was reminded how many different plant families include climbers. For example the hydrangea noticed on our last visit to Wisley. See reference 2.

The telephone did not do very well for once, seemingly unable to focus on both the fig tree to the left and the hop, paler and higher, to the right. Not to mention the brambles poking out below. I did move the camera about a bit but in none of the resulting snaps did the telephone focus on the hop. Perhaps a camera buff would know why.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/wetherspoons-library.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/on-tuesday-to-wisley-about-six-weeks.html.

Bayes 3

Otherwise a question offered as a contribution to the compilers of test papers in statistics.

Last Saturday I bought six oranges from Epsom market, of decent size and priced at 6 for £1, a good deal less than we usually pay. A little mixed looking, but I thought worth a punt.

In the event, a very mixed bag, seemingly of various varieties, perhaps the sweepings from the floor of some orange warehouse, lurking somewhere on some industrial estate, lurking somewhere in the Home Counties. Two of the oranges were entirely satisfactory, good even, although in different ways, one was OK and three were thrown away. One black rotten at the navel end, one was bitter, perhaps an escaped marmalade orange (see reference 1) and one was old.

Given that I find it very hard to judge an orange from the outside and that the average customer is going to find a dud orange on his plate at breakfast time rather off-putting, what should the green grocer do?

Suppose he is the sort of green grocer that goes to market at Nine Elms every morning.

Suppose that on this morning he is looking to buy ten ten kilo boxes of oranges. What should he do to test their quality?

He could open up ten oranges, chosen at random, and then both inspect and sample the interior. A proceeding which might take a few minutes and which might, after a few weeks of this, make him very sick of the smell and taste of oranges. What if he has to do this with all the stuff that he buys? Swedes, for example?

What about his prior probalilities?

He might be experienced enough to be able to judge the interior of an orange by inspection, without having to taste. Plus, the way that an orange peels is usually informative - but a lot slower than just cutting the thing in half and getting at the interior that way.

He could trust the chap from whom he buys the oranges to have already done all this, and priced his oranges accordingly. Which he could then pass on in the same way. You get what you pay for, never mind the fact that you might be annoying, perhaps even losing, some of your regular customers, if you pass on duds, whatever the price.

And anyway, this only moves the problem along a bit. What is the wholesaler to do?

Maybe a successful wholesaler does enough oranges to be able to afford to go in for good quality quality control, up to supermarket standards, so that he can be sure that not only are his oranges good, but also that they are reliably good. He can then put his certifying paper seals on his oranges and sell them on in good faith.

And then there is the grower. What balance between costs, land, variety, quality and reliability does he strike? Should he swing with the fashions in these matters, or does he do better with a long game?

Question: write a two page essay on this problem from a statistical point of view. You should include in your essays any assumptions you might make about the probability distributions of oranges. You may assume that you are unlikely to get full marks if you make no such assumptions.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/culinary-affairs.html.

Bayes 2

The Bayes Monument, glimpsed through the railings and the pigeons.

When the light was right - clouds making it variable - one could just about make out 'Bayes' on the face of it. The right hand one of the two available in the illustration.

Bayes 1

Having started off professional life under the guidance of someone who was not very keen on Bayes, a guide who would now be regarded as a-dyed-in the-wool frequentist, I find I am stumbling across the chap quite often, so I thought I ought to pay my respects to his mortal remains at Bunhill Fields.

Off to a good start with a Bullingdon from the first position on the first stand on the ramp at Waterloo. The pole position as it were, despite the stand being called, in TFL speak, Waterloo Station 3. Alighted at Bunhill Row after a reasonably uneventful journey, apart from two encounters with very large, blue, mobile cranes from France, the property of Sarens. I say French as some of the signage on the cranes was in French and they had French plates. Why do we have to import our crane hires from France? Does the answer lie in the huge range which appears when you ask to see the load tables? How do you get the things through the tunnel? And why were there two of them or was it just the one, following me about?

Onto the cemetery which I found in transition to a nature preserve, with access to the Bayes Monument denied. See illustration above. What about pious family members who take regular visits a little more regularly than I do? But I was able to peek over another part of the fence to see what I took to be the Bayes Monument, where he appeared to be mixed up with a lot of Cottons. Maybe if I read the biography offered at reference 2, rather than skimming it, I would learn whether these Cottons are anything to do with the one who collected manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Plenty of pigeons and squirrels running about. Was their lot being improved by the denial of access? What was denial going to do to the trade in food scraps derived from the lunch boxes of salarymen?

From Bayes to a rare visit to Moorgate tube station from where I had myself taken to Tooting Broadway for a visit to the Wetherspoons Library there, quite well stocked on this occasion. I thought about a memoir by on James Pope-Hennessy, but decided against on the grounds that we had quite enough of memoirs of the same sort from Osbert Sitwell. See, for example, reference 3. I then moved onto, and eventually carried off a relic from the depths of psychoanalysis, to wit, the annual survey of psychoanalysis, volume 1, 1950. With the legend saying 'International Universities Press, Inc' being stuck over with a sticker from George Allen & Unwin Ltd, presumably the UK agents. Perhaps some quirk of the then extant copyright laws. Containing the bookplate, a decent but elementary line drawing, probably cut in lino, for Pearl King, a prominent analyst of the time, a mediating figure from the end of the Freud-Klein wars of the war years. See reference 4. Altogether a fitting addition to my shrink library.

She only died in January of this year, not leaving much time for her library, no doubt extensive, to filter down to Tooting, so perhaps most of it had been sold off before then. It also shows that the Wetherspoons buyers are still busy.

Back through Earlsfield, where there was a fair bit of low, heavy cloud, but quite a few aeroplanes. A good spread of flight paths and some considerable variation in height, with one aeroplane being surprisingly low for this part of  London. I managed one two.

One fancy bike on the train, with caliper brakes, which I am told are back in fashion again, that for cantilevers having passed over. Oddly, the owner was wearing regular trainers despite the pedals on his cycle being intended for the sort of cycling shoes which have a metal fitting nailed onto the bottoms of their soles.

PS: wikipedia tells me that some agitate to have the Lindisfarne Gospels moved to the north on the grounds that that is where they were made. This, it seems to me, shows scant disregard for the property rights on which our national wealth was built. In a nutshell, no property rights, no enterprise. Cotton bought the Gospels fair and square and they are the inalienable property of his heirs, that is to say the British Library at Kings Cross. The northerners have no case, any more than the Greeks do over marbles. Such return might be a matter for ex gratia courtesy, but certainly not for legal coercion.

Reference 1: http://www.sarens.com/en.aspx.

Reference 2: http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/bayesbiog.pdf.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/osbert.html.

Reference 4: http://www.bpc.org.uk/news/pearl-king.

Qur'an

I was very struck by a picture of a page from a very old Qur'an in a recent TLS, otherwise a bit thin on content of much interest to me. Struck mostly by the fine script, presumably easily legible to those familiar with such, old enough in this case for the scribe not to have bothered much with vowels.

And old enough that the parchment involved may have been manufactured from a goat which was alive during the life of the Prophet, and so some time before the codification of the Qur'an by committee, around 650 on our calendar - and with reading about this committee reminding me of King James' rather similar committee some thousand years later.

So meat and drink for those scholars who like to probe the origins, and who, it seems, get the same sort of mixed press from Muslims at large as the German scholars who poked around in the origins of our Bible in the nineteenth century - with some Christians preferring to leave their origins in decent obscurity.

Perhaps they have a point. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-garden-of-eden.html.

Chimes at midnight

It being roughly fifty years since the film was made, a recent DT Saturday supplement prompted BH who them prompted me to touch up Amazon for a copy of 'Chimes at midnight'.

A film of which BH had some prior knowledge as part of her English A level, but of which I had none, despite the parental enthusiasm for most matters bardic. It may have been something that my mother took one of her classes at LVC (see reference 1) to, but I have no recollection of such a thing. She did take them to Stratford, in its glory days as I have since learned.

In any event, Amazon produced the goods in its usual day or so and then the thing sat on the shelf for some weeks, waiting for us to be in the mood for an ancient film, with the moment finally coming a few days ago. We have now finished a first viewing, taking two takes over it. Very good it was too, wearing very well for such an old film.

A bit clowned up, but at least not camped up as such a thing probably would be now. Lots of wholesome girls from the lower orders romping about. All good clean fun - which was probably not how it was, at least most of the time, and a film made now would probably feel the need to rub the facts of life, as they were, in our faces.

Lots of good actors and actresses strutting their stuff. With Miss. Marple doing rather well as Mistress Quickly. Film rather good at old altogether, not least Gielgud, only 60 or so at the time the film was made, but already around fifteen years older than Henry IV when he died. Wikipedia also tells me that Henry may have suffered from psoriasis, although it is hard to be sure at this distance in time.

Lots of very striking shots. Either Welles or his cameraman had a very good eye. Perhaps a touch too keen on forests of spears.

Spanish settings - castles, barns and such - did very well, despite being rather improbable. Little problem in suspending disbelief.

Next stop, need to run down the next performance of part I or part II, both justly popular plays. Preferably not the Globe, who do not, to my mind, do very well at kings or queens and who really do lay on the clowning with a shovel.

PS: but to be fair, at least the Globe are there. Not quite the only show in town, but getting on that way.

Reference 1: http://www.lvc.org/pages/index.php. I think their web designer must be a fan of Windows 8. Tiles everywhere. There is also a zoo in the vicinity.

Reference 2: Henry IV, Part II, Act III, Scene 2, Line 210.