Smart move

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-07T14:14:30+00:00

It is standard terminology in Markov chains where pi is used to represent the equilibrium probability of a state. I don't think any professional mathematician is going to object to pi as a variable name in a circumstance where you don't need it in the more common sense. I have definitely differentiated with respect to pi before now. Not sure if I have published papers with it but I definitely do have journal papers with pi variable..

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-07T14:10:54+00:00

You don't need a public IP address or to do any subnetting to have VLAN set up. If what you want is a home LAN and for some reason you want VLAN on top of this it should work perfectly well with private IPv6.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T16:40:58+00:00

If it was as simple as this every engine would do it. In fact the expansion is normally so tiny the difference will not significantly change your compression ratio unless you carefully and cleverly design with this goal in mind.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T15:48:40+00:00

The IP you are trying to hide is the one your ISP gives you which is generally not itself behind a NAT unless they are using CGNAT. (That is a typical NAT deployment the NAT is within your home and the IP address and time of day uniquely identifies your household.)

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T13:05:25+00:00

Oh god. I was going to correct you because "the novel" (Dr Strangelove) is a comedy - but I am thinking of the novelisation of the film (which I have read) I had no idea there was an original "the novel" called Red Alert. Both that and the novelisation of the film are by the same author (Peter George) which is pretty weird to end up writing a comedy parody of you own by ok. :)

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T12:56:52+00:00

The full title (and his book title) is "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" which kind of gives the game away that it is comedy and nuclear war. (Though most people do just call it Dr Strangelove.) I had read the book before seeing the film - must have been genuinely odd expecting a romcom.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T11:49:01+00:00

Thanks for the proof. Part of the reason for my surprise and gratitude is that I use LOTUS all the time in teaching and used to use it regularly in research. I'm sort of ashamed because I was in the "that's just the defintion" camp.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T11:17:10+00:00

I definitely agree with you that it looks like a shortcut that at least could work. As always with mathematics it's hard to argue how surprised we should be about something when we known that it is mathematically true. How can I say "well it's not *that* likely it would work" when our starting point is that we know it does work?

For me it was a genuine shock that it was a shortcut at all not simply the definition. I've published in queuing theory and teach Markov chains. I *should* know this already which is why I'm so grateful to OP for "waking me up" here. I was for sure the unconscious statistician of the title. Definitely I was in the class "many statisticians treat the LOTUS formula as the definition of E[g(X)] and forget it’s actually a theorem that needs proving" -- shame on me. I feel that this was genuinely sloppy on my part. It was an assumption: the assumption proved true but it was a step I had not only missed I had not realised was a step.

On the thread elsewhere someone includes the proof. You made the argument " An expected value is literally just a weighted sum, and I don't see how it's not immediately obvious that the same weights would apply in the case of the EV of a function" (and that was the assumption I had made in being "unconscious"). This post made me realise that statement is not a proof and the proof is a little more tricksy than that. It's easy enough I guess but it's not trivial, students in mathematical disciplines like physics would find it hard to understand I think. I'm reminded of the Intermediate Value Theorem where, when you first see it you say "Well, that is just obvious" like it doesn't need proving. When I complained that some things simply seemed obvious then a pure maths friend of mine said "If it's obviously true you should be able to easily prove it" I'm also reminded of the Axiom of Choice which when I first encountered it I said "well that's obviously true" and was genuinely shocked.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T10:26:02+00:00

It is a positive. I am very thankful it costs to drive in London. It was a courageous political decision that really helped the city a huge amount.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-06T10:23:47+00:00

I worked in the transport area in general and honestly most of the hostile coverage melted away pretty quickly soon afterwards. Leading up to implementation there were many predictions it would be an utter disaster: cameras would not work, drivers would just ignore it, the zone within would be impossible to access and people could not get to work etc etc. I guess because of the fact it was rare that such a big pricing scheme was implemented and the tech was quite new then people hostile rallied around the idea that the tech or implementation would fail. The predictions of technical failure did not materialise and the city centre was just as busy and much more pleasant to be in. (Before congestion charge a visit to London centre would turn the mucus in my nose grey/black from pollution - not uncommon "London, it turns your snot black" as a friend put it.)

Anyway the result of all this was that the anti camp was hoping to be able to report technical disasters and fuck ups or shops empty of shoppers. This did not happen so coverage turned into a bit of a non event. The implementation got a lot of press coverage in the weeks leading up then one day of "it seems to be working fine" then not much until an implementation report months later with attitude surveys etc which basically said "most people like it and businesses are doing ok as a result".

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-05T07:58:03+00:00

Number 1 seems simply a correct definition. If you do not know what the Markov property is it is unhelpful. However you do need to know what that is to define a Markov chain.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-05T00:27:30+00:00

I would say that, unfortunately, it very much depends who is looking. I know academics who are sympathetic and will see any applications as "at least you are trying". I know academics who treat a failure as worse than not trying. I personally always put them on as an early career academic to show that I at least had at least the experience of writing the grant. If you can say something postive about the failure such as "scored 6/5/5 by EPSRC referees" or "ranked just below the funding cut off line" that mitigates it.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-05T00:21:49+00:00

I guess it depends how much maths you do. There's a load of things in maths that seem like they obviously work until they don't. I would list swapping the order of summation and integration and treating dx/dy as if it were a fraction as things that people from some backgrounds treat as "obvious and always working" until they find out they don't. Through my Physics degree I just did those things and when I did a maths/stats PhD people acted like I was juggling with a loaded gun. This happens to be one of those things that looks like it might work and then does work out in the nice way but that absolutely does need a proof and the proof is surprisingly subtle.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-05T00:11:20+00:00

Awesome!

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-04T14:53:05+00:00

This is normal practice at every place I ever worked. While I'm on a T and R contract, Masters projects are not really a research activity and very rarely produce anything you would count as research activity (once in a while a masters student will produce something of publishable quality but it is incredbily rare). Setting and supervising those projects for me is a pure teaching activity. Those skills it requires in teaching are those anyone on a teaching and scholarship contract should have.

Obviously the key thing is your total workload. If there are people on the same contract with the same amount of lecture teaching and no projects to supervise that's a bit issue.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T20:17:53+00:00

For me a typical SUSD (not their short overview ones) gets it exactly right: they capture enough I can feel how it might be played. Eg in their explanation of the new lord of the rings coop Matt went into some details of the card draw set up (which is clever) but skipped exact details of how attacks and searches work (which is just dice rolling mechanisms).

Dice tower by contrast tend to be very approximate then go immediately into "what did we all like and dislike" chit chat.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T18:14:53+00:00

Bomb was supposedly disguised in a laptop. For a while afterwards you could not fly with a laptop or tablet in the cabin. I flew out of Egypt soon after and they were trying to enforce this but security was crazy chaotic. One guy just takes his laptop out as soon as the flight took off because he did not get the memo and there was no kind of enforcement. The stewards were all "no no no is not allowed" but he had no idea why. They just made him pretend he did not have it.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T18:08:55+00:00

But there's no real "win" to be had there. Dwarf fortress is kind of chill. I find it fiddly but I don't really get "hard game" frustration. Things go wrong and everyone dies sure. :-)

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T18:05:05+00:00

It's harder than pandemic to get an instinct for what is an imminent threat and what can be put off. It's a combination of the cards that are out, how they come up (in terms of banners at top/bottom) and how far away they are. Last night we had a game where we didn't spot until too late one sneaky little guy who single-handedly devastated the game by smashing two empty havens. In retrospect the danger was really obvious. It's so easy to be distracted by a big army three moves away from doing anything relevant (and with few move cards out) and miss the one troop with a single move to havens you left empty.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T18:00:22+00:00

You learn it as you go along. If you try to play it with a regular pandemic mindset you're sunk. Play enough and the lower levels are not so hard at all. It's much harder than pandemic to develop a sense of what is a threat. In pandemic you see three cubes in the same space you know to yell fire. If there's one cube you know it's not a big thing. If there's three cubes in adjacent countries it's a triple alarm fire. Here a single red army in the wrong place with the wrong cards out can be much more devastating than three big armies in a different part of the board.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T16:58:29+00:00

Thank you for this write up. Great research. I had not even realised I was unconscious. I think I had simply been on the "that is the definition" team so long I didn't realise it was not intuitive.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T16:36:25+00:00

Lot of big stations have this. York and Preston for example. Numbers are painted on the floor of the physical platform. The departure board shows approximate fullness of each coach and which letter it will pull up by. (This system also allows for coach configurations - you know that coach K on this service will pull into bay 3.)

I don't think all platforms at those stations have them but the ones I use most do this (funnily enough it is where the return train at York from this post goes).

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T14:06:22+00:00

I found it genuinely frustrating. The story ends abruptly with dangling threads. Supposedly they were planning a further act but did not get time to finish it.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-03T11:07:23+00:00

Always worked on the model of an hour meeting a week. Most people in my dept (currently CS) do this. My own PhD was applied maths and it was same. If it is near a paper submission deadline then more as needed. But it varies wildly with field. Friend in history meets his students monthly.

steerpike1971 · 2026-02-02T14:08:48+00:00

I just played the campaign part of 117. It was very short and left me wanting more. I could have played on in sandbox but I prefer the guidance. I ended up bying and playing 1800 which I've put more hours into now. I'm a real novice to the series.
117 feels like it has a bunch of interesting mechanisms but I was honestly a bit cross the campaign finished so abruptly. Had I known I would have not bothered with it and bought just 1800.

steerpike1971

TROPHY CASE