Insectnation

Through this summer, I mostly ignored the Jason Arday story as it gathered momentum.

"Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing.

The UKRI/STFC crisis rumbles on, through an impressive Select Committee showing by research-community reps and a fairly dismal performance by the STFC Executive Chair at the same.

In my last post on the ongoing self-made funding crisis at UKRI and its subsidiary science-funding agencies, I made a final reference to the administrative overheads in modern science, which would obviously have been too much burden for an already overlong

What goes around comes around, and the start of 2026 has, for particle physicists of my vintage, brought strong feelings of deja vu.

I previously wrote about using the inverse-cdf transform not just for its classic application of efficient random sampling, but as an optimal histogramming-binning generator mapping exactly to expected population quantiles.

One of my favourite tricks in numerical methods is [inverse transform sampling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_transform_sampling), which is a supremely elegant way to efficiently sample from a probability distribution.

I recently did an interview with the David Hume Institute – through a friend – about how (or if) personal financial issues affect my work.

Another week, another row about particle-physics methodology involving the field’s latest engagingly controversialist internal critic – older readers may feel a pang of deja vu from the “Not Even Wrong” years.

Just sent: Dear <CLP Secretary>, It's with sadness that I write to tell you I have decided to leave the Labour Party.