Blog
I’m not sure I post things often enough to properly count this as a “blog”, but here are some things I’ve written recently and some old things I’ve rescued from elsewhere; some are mathsy, some are not. For shorter things, I’m @mpaldridge on Twitter or @mpaldridge.bsky.social on Bluesky.
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The geometric distribution starts from 0
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Which election was the closest?
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Painting balls
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Crossover age: an election statistic that annoys me
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How negatively correlated can a collection of random variables be?
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The Hermite distribution (Falling moments III)
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Falling and thinning
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Falling moments
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Perfect second mentions
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Fixing the Guardian's line spacing
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A conversation
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Man with a Movie Camera (Cinematic Orchestra soundtrack)
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Is University Challenge biased towards or against Oxbridge?
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Longest LRB articles (coauthored with ChatGPT)
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Notes from a session on AI and teaching
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ChatGPT takes MATH1710
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Sums of powers II: Faulhaber and Bernoulli
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The union-closed conjecture
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Sums of powers I: with and without replacement
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How to prove the addition rule for unions
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Longest New Yorker articles
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Thoughts on watching the 2021 Chess World Championship
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Automated subtitles try to understand me saying “Cauchy–Schwarz inequality” in my lecture yesterday
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Close tennis matches are long tennis matches
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Universities should mandate the Covid vaccine
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Prediction with positive correlation (and Brexit)
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Of coins and dice (and Infinite Jest)
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Notes on randomness
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Uses of the word “alas” in the House of Commons (1 October–present)
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General wellbeing authorities
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Best of the 2010s
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Things I Liked in 2019
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LIFF 2019
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“This is the one thing that we’ve both tried to build”
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Poissonisation
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Things I Liked in 2018
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Leeds International Film Festival 2018
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Things I Liked in 2017
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Things I Liked in 2016
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9 Clouds That Don't Look Like UK Cabinet Ministers
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A numbered list of numbered lists
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Things I Liked in 2015
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Playing chess with the devil
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Things I Liked in 2014
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Kardashian–Gowers
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Five ideas
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Things I Liked in 2013
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An Attempt to Compile a Complete List of Every Time Gail Collins Has Mentioned That Mitt Romney Once Drove to Canada with the Family Dog Strapped to the Roof of the Car
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Magazine Articles I Liked in 2011
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Magazine Articles I Liked in 2010
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Best of the 2000s
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Magazine Articles I Liked in 2009
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Magazine Articles I Liked in 2008