Popped down to London on Sunday to catch some of London Open House weekend: an annual event when all kinds of buildings and structures - public / private, domestic / industrial, old / new - are open to the nosy, guide-clutching hordes. I had a fun afternoon in a very nice bit of London, walking from South Kensington to Notting Hill, through ( Read more... )

Aliens! Mai-tais! Musical madness!

Anyone seen it? Anyone going?

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Saturday night was epic. In association with the Cambridge Film Festival, there was an outdoor screening of 2001, in full 70mm glory, at the Institute of Astronomy. They got special permission from the Kubrick estate, apparently. We picknicked. There were hot pastries. There was beer. There were (real) stars. And a ginormous inflatable screen - ( Read more... )

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Visited the Fitzwilliam Museum a couple of lunchtimes ago, feeling in need of some visual inspiration and refreshment.

The Shiba Room is the part of the museum I like best. As its name suggests, it was endowed by Japanese philanthropists, and is a small room designed for the exhibiting of works on paper. The atmosphere is always quiet and dim, with ( Read more... )

Via Music for Grownups - some intriguing-sounding programming on BBC 6 (continuing the musical theme across my flist):

Wed 13 August
2400 I Wanna Be Adored - The Stone Roses Story (1/2) - 6 Music

Thurs 14 August
2330 John Cale, BBC Four Sessions - BBC Four
2400 I Wanna Be Adored - The Stone Roses Story (2/2) - 6 Music

A few random travel notes:

• Sweden is astonishingly clean and litter-free. And Swedish street-sweepers are frighteningly efficient, making use of a sort of external rotating arm with extra cleaning brush.
  
• Besides being clean, the Stockholm tunnelbana (metro system) is light, bright, modern, and, yes, designed to within an inch of its life. Many ( Read more... )

An appropriate find, after an evening last night spent browsing in the Whipple Museum of Science (which has a brilliant collection of historic scientific instruments: Darwin's microscope, compendia, kaleidoscopes, armillary spheres...).

I'm picturing
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Reading Andrew W. Moore (CMU) on decision trees and data mining. I liked slide 21 of this presentation:

( 'Fun' with contingency tables. )