Monthly Archives: April, 2019

Cambridge: an early-morning stroll

I was in town unusually early on Sunday morning. This is Rose’s college, St Catharine’s, just before dawn.

The river, just a few streets away, was unusually still.

Silver Street, because of the location of the coach-parking areas, is one of the first things that many tourists see. They don’t often see it looking like this, though!

At King’s College, only one chimney showed any signs of life.

Gradually, as things warmed, a brief mist appeared over the water.

But it soon cleared, as the sun rose a little higher, and started to reach the tops of the trees.

The garden at St Botolph’s was also looking beautiful:

The streets were quiet…

And I crept quietly away as the day was beginning.

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The end of a long day

Montmartre, Paris, March 2019

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The Modern Lab Notebook

I’ve just uploaded my longest YouTube video yet!

Entitled The Modern Lab Notebook: Scientific computing with Jupyter and Python, it’s a two-and-a-quarter hour blockbuster! But you can think of it as three or four tutorial seminars rolled into one: no need to watch it in one sitting, and no need to watch it all! It starts with the basics, and builds up from there.

It’s intended for people who have some Python programming experience, but know little about the libraries that have become so popular recently in numerical analysis and data science. Or for people who may even have used them — pasted some code into a Jupyter notebook as part of a college exercise, say — but not really understood what was going on behind the scenes.

This is for you. I hope you find it useful!

Watch it full-screen, and turn the resolution up 🙂

Also available on Vimeo.

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Shark-wrestling

This morning, Rose, Tilly and I took a very pleasant if somewhat bracing walk along the beach near Weybourne in Norfolk.

Tilly was very brave…

A bit further along, we saw a dead fish, and our thoughts naturally turned to keeping Tilly away from it. 🙂 When we got closer, however, we realised that it actually might be a small shark… and was rather pretty. (As dead fish go.)

Then we noticed… it wasn’t dead… it was still breathing… Just.

It had been a bit mauled by something, but wasn’t in too bad a state… but it was a long way up the beach. So I picked it up, waded into the sea to boot-depth and threw it back into the waves, where I like to think it swam away. It certainly didn’t float away!

It was probably less than two feet long, but it was a wonderful feeling to hold it and feel it breathing, and let’s face it, it’s not every day I wrestle live sharks before coffee time…

My brother, on being sent the picture, identified it as a catshark. They don’t grow to much more than about three feet long, so I feel it’s unlikely to come back and terrorise the beaches of North Norfolk as a result of my actions.

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