One day in 1990 when I was home from school, I promised my mother that I would do something productive, and not waste the day. I promised her that I would translate a book that she was given when she was a child.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi is the well-loved story of a Swiss orphan girl, written by Johanna Spyri. Her translator (Charles Tritten) wrote several sequels which were translated into English (Heidi Grows Up, Heidi’s Children), but Grandma Heidi (the fourth book) never was.

Growing up, there had been this one mysterious book — written in French — in the household, which…

My first job out of high school was as a pipe organ builder; I was one of the only apprentices to start that year. I’ve lost touch with Peter Jewkes who was my boss and who taught me. But I’ve got a funny cross-over between my first job and my current work today.

I realise that organ music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but would you listen to 30 seconds of something original and interesting?

https://soundcloud.com/greg-baker-574386084/autoregressor-11

And as a composition, it’s not exactly Bach, but it’s believably something you might hear during Mass at a traditional Catholic service or at…

Landfill is an interesting product. The price fluctuates far enough that it can fluctuate from positive to negative and back again. If someone is building a tunnel, you can probably get paid to take landfill. If someone is building an island, you can probably get paid for supplying landfill. There are projects that can only go ahead at certain times: the Hornsby quarry remediation project was only viable because the north connex was being built.

That’s slightly obscure, and there’s not much you can do with landfill other than, well, fill land. …

This has been bothering me for a while, but now that so many of our previously-face-to-face conversations have gone online, it’s really bothering me.

When you meet face-to-face, you can start with “good morning” or “good afternoon”. This can be achieved with a subtle check of your watch, or some convenient clock, or even — and I’ve heard of people doing this — actually looking outside to see where the sun is.

But when it’s a video call (or even a telephone call) where the other person is in a different time zone do you still say “good morning” (because…

I’ve been teaching classes remotely for over a decade now — mostly to adult learners — and so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. Generally I’m teaching using Zoom, but you can use most videoconferencing tools. With a lot of schools and universities having to switch to remote classes, here’s what I can suggest:

• One of the most useful tools is Krisp.AI. (Affiliate link to get one month free: krisp.ai ; link for the free version for students and educators https://krisp.ai/blog/covid19-response/ ) — this automatically removes background noise, so you can be delivering a class in a noisy coffee…

I hear that my friends and colleagues in the USA are having a cold winter. Could we swap? We’ve got enough heat to spare this summer.

I’ve started pining for the cold season — April to September in Sydney.

I remember the “cold season” from my childhood having sport cancelled a little bit more regularly than it is for my children. By the way if anyone else from my soccer team is reading this, do any of you remember us ever scoring a goal or winning a game? Maybe we didn’t practice enough.

Anyway, I don’t remember the droughts being…

Astronomy, sales prediction, subscription signups… what do they have in common?

There are all sorts of situations where we want to get a simple summary of interesting events in data. It’s really useful to say “we had three bursts of sales activity, one just before Mothers’ Day and the other two around the time we started advertising”. If you only have a handful of products, you can just eyeball this but the challenge happens when you have a lot of products to keep track of.

Likewise, when did we get a surprising number of sign-ups? …

TL;DR — it’s getting hotter. No matter which city I look at, if someone has been taking temperature measurements for a few decades, I keep seeing the same trend. One degree of warming every 40–60 years, and a trend towards fewer cool days, and more hot days.

In 2017 I wrote a blog post — http://blog.ifost.org.au/2017/01/farewell-to-cold-winters-and-hello.html — inspired by the heat wave that Sydney was experiencing at the time. Funnily enough, it’s the last day of 2018 and we’re having another heatwave. I’ve updated some of the charts, and created a new Jupyter notebook.

All the examples I’m showing here…