As we head off for a couple of weeks away from home, catsitting for a dear friend, I thought I would get a jump on my usual tardiness and try to get my laptop in order and fully functional. As this would also be the first time using this laptop to do a bit of coding — at least that’s the plan — I also had to install all that stuff. Luckily, I had made a note of Chris Amico’s guide which, along with the bits I have learned about environments, made the whole thing a lot less stressful than it might have been.

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Appalling. Over halfway through this month before summarising last month, and I was sorely tempted to just abandon a report for May.¹ I know what that would do to me, eventually. In any case, I have excuses, two week-long trips, one in May, and one the first week in June.

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In response to a fascinating article about Charles Babbage and the plantation management techniques that informed his calculating engines, Kevin Marks pointed to an earlier article about how eugenics shaped statistics that was every bit as interesting. I was familiar with some of the background to Galton, Pearson and Fisher but had not taken on board the extent to which “statistical significance” started life as a way of examining the homogeneity of human populations. Does that history negate its usefulness entirely?

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Getting close now to the end of the component cleanup phase on the old bike.

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Took the Brompton out for a little spin yesterday, telling myself it would let me check more places for a black spray paint for cars, needed to get on with the Raleigh restoration. On the way I got some rust converter and snagged a couple of slices of pizza at one of the best local places, unchanged...

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