Thoughts of a first-time peer reviewer

Most of my time is spent tirelessly chipping away at the scientific rock face, probably bogged down fixing a bug in my code or staring at some noisy looking data. Every now and then it all comes together and I want to tell people about it. So I write up my results as best I can, spend hours tinkering with figures, another few hours getting the fonts right on the axes, and after drafts and re-drafts, eventually I’ll send it away to a journal to be published....

March 10, 2011 · 5 min · Douglas Ashton

Colloids are just right

All being good it looks like I’ve secured employment for a tiny while longer. Hooray! The place I’m moving to is a big place for synthetic colloids, so it seems like a good time to go through what I know about colloids. If nothing else it’ll be interesting to compare this to what I’ll know in a year’s time! So, here is a theorists perspective on colloid science. I’ll spare the usual introduction about how colloids are ubiquitous in nature, you can go to Wikipedia for that....

February 3, 2011 · 6 min · Douglas Ashton

Statistical mechanics of tetris

I’m finding that I’m becoming increasingly fascinated by shape. It seems such a simple thing yet scratch the surface only a little and the complexity comes pouring out. Take simple tiling problems; I can tile my floor with squares or regular hexagons, but not regular octagons - they’ll always leave annoying gaps. From a statistical mechanics point of view those gaps are very important, little sources of entropy that you can’t get rid of....

July 25, 2010 · 3 min · Douglas Ashton

Tree diagrams solve everything

Just a quick one. I saw this post, When intuition and math probably look wrong, via Ben Goldacre’s mini blog. The problem is set as follows: I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys? Intuition tells you the answer is 1/2, mathematicians tell you it’s something else. I’ll leave the answer until the end of the post in case you want to run off and solve it first....

July 1, 2010 · 3 min · Douglas Ashton

Pipes and Python

I spent ages writing a post about some tricks I use to do quick analysis of data but it got incredibly bloated and started waffling about work flows and so on. Anyway, I woke up from that nightmare so I thought I’d just bash out a couple of my top tips. This is a pretty nerdy post, you may want to back away slowly. Pipes Pipes are, in my opinion, why the command line will reign for many years to come....

April 21, 2010 · 3 min · Douglas Ashton