I realised the other day that it’s been a whole year since I went through the rather stressful experience of PhD interviews (and the even more stressful experience of filling out the forms to apply for the positions). I’ve noticed a few other people around the internet have been recounting their experiences, and since mine are still quite fresh in my memory I thought I would too.
I’m a couple of months into postgraduate research, and I’ve decided early on that I should probably write a blog about what I’m doing.
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.
I’ve taken a bit of time recently to write a simple parser in Python which can read in the Wikipedia format in which rugby match results are presented, which has allowed me to attempt to do some analysis on the data. There’s plenty of information there, but this is a nice, and visually appealing summary of the data. It shows the (aggregate home and away) scores of every team as won off every other team in the Pro 12 (the domestic professional league in Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) in the 2014/15 season. For example, a chord from Glasgow to Connacht is scaled to show the total number of points Glasgow won off Connacht at the Glasgow end, and vice versa at the Connacht end (if we’re being technical, it’s a representation of the directed graph of the league results… fun.)
I’m sitting on a train which has just left Manchester Oxford Road; I’m tired, shaking a little from an unhealthy dose of caffeine, and just a little bit sad, because CAPS 2015 is over. It’s been a great weekend filled with science, coffee, meeting lots of new people, and even more coffee.
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So, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably discovered that I’ve made yet another change to my website. This one’s quite a big change, certainly in terms of how it’s implemented. In the past I’ve relied on large programs, such as MediaWiki and Wordpress to manage my website. Whilst those are great pieces of software, and good at what they do, they’ve always seemed like overkill for managing a personal website; after all, I doubt very many people ever need to search my blog (and even if they did they’d probably just use Google), so I’ve decided it’s time to move to something simpler.
It’s not every day that you start to wonder if a Lovecraftian novella might be writing itself around you. Today I returned to my flat to find, as usual, a bundle of post lying just inside the door. Amongst the Tesco Clubcard Statements, and the usual advertising letter from Virgin Media was a small, rather intriguing brown envelope. It was a bit heavy for a letter, and, perhaps more oddly, was addressed to “Daniel Williams, …, Glasgow, Reino Unido”. Sure enough, the post mark declared its origin as being “Espana”. Well, by this stage I was very intrigued, and so I opened it, braving the threat of possible anthrax infection.