Hazy Cosmic Jive
I'm Daniel, and I'm a gravitational astrophysics research student at the University of Glasgow. I sometimes write about astronomy, programming, statistics, or random thoughts and happenings. You can also find me at my academic site.
Rugby Statistics
I started to try to use Bayesian Inference techniques to predict the outcomes of rugby matches. It didn't always work very well, but sometimes it did. You can read more about it here.
Week One
I’ve been in Louisiana for almost a week now, and I’m slowly getting over the jet-lag and the change in climate from Glasgow, though I have fallen asleep over my dinner at least twice this week, so maybe I’m not handling it all that well…
The Inspiral
In which I travel from Glasgow, Scotland, to Scotlandville, Louisiana, in a lot of planes.Getting Ready to Go
Chances are at some point in the last year you’ve heard me mentioning that I was heading off to America at some point in my PhD. You might well have heard me complaining about filling out forms to get a visa, about the uncertainty about which part of the USA I was going to, or even about how worried I was that I wouldn’t be able to get about while I was there (through not having a driving license).
Rounds 10 and 13 in Europe
Round 10 of the Pro 12 and Aviva Premiership competitions, and Round 13 of the Top 14 are now complete, and we’re running into a two week hiatus while we make the switch to the European Champions and Challenge Cup games for December. It seems like a good time to take stock of how each of the teams are performing compared to how the numbers would suggest they ought to be doing.
Rugby Stats Update
The predictions from round 5 were rather successful, with a 100% success rate compared to the results of the games, although the winning margins were a little off.
Pro12: Who will win Round 5?
I’ve been playing around with a large dataset which I scraped off Wikipedia recently: the details of the various fixtures from the Pro12, a European rugby league with teams from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Italy.
Rugby Data (updated, again)
This is a little continuation of the work I did on the data from the Pro12, extended to show the last two seasons of the English Premiership. The graphs are now animated and update to show each team in each season and league.
Hopping about Islands
It's been a while since I got around to posting on here, and part of the reason for that is that I've been on holiday; I took a trip which I started planning five years ago after I first visited Skye, and then never quite got around to doing, because it always seemed to complicated to actually do.The wave that stole Christmas
Just shy of six months ago I was at my parents’ house in rural Northern Ireland, nursing a very full stomach, and admiring a large pile of chocolates, and taking a break from Christmas festivities. In fact, it was slightly worse than that; I was starting to make plots for the Burst “companion paper”,now published in PRD!, so I really hadn’t given myself very much time to relax.
Finding a way to Space
Today’s another big day in the world of gravitational waves. ESA are expected to announce the results of their LISA Pathfinder mission in just over an hour. I’m going to attempt to write this blog post in at least two parts: one part (now) before the announcement, and one part during.
