Jessie Oehrlein

English Electric KDF9 (Lyons Electronic Office) computer installation, Bracknell, 1966

English Electric KDF9 (Lyons Electronic Office) computer, Bracknell, 1966

KDF9 computer with line printer prominent in foreground. The Director-General is holding a specimen forecast output

Close up of line printer showing some of the output from a numerical forecast programme. Special stationery preprinted with map outlines is used

Today marks 60 years of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) at the Met Office.

This marked the transition of the Met Office into the world-leader in weather science and forecasting that it is today.

bit.ly/4nOqrH3

My partner has spent the last few weeks designing and building a launcher to make candy fall from the sky with parachute ghosts.

Not a super busy trick-or-treat night in our neighborhood, but the trick-or-treaters who did come by were *delighted*.

Tl;dr: the fact we were dealing with Hurricane Melissa is probably "more climate change than not," but the component of the storm that is the "climate part" of it is non-trivial but not massive, and the event could definitely have happened anyway. That's not how people are talking about it on here!

#MathsToday: delighted by all the student thinking around modeling in ProbStat and logistic regression in Advanced Stats!

#MathsToday: very busy student hours! An advising meeting, students from Applied Stats and ProbStat, a mix of homework attempts and quiz prep and quiz reattempts.

#MathsToday: Lively discussion about modeling choices and discrete probability distributions in ProbStat today! (And a slight sidetracking into roller coasters)

And lots of good thinking about patterns to figure out the Central Limit Theorem in Applied Stats.

#MathsToday: A (more than I realized) deeply needed practice day in Applied Stats.

And lots of good questions as we wrapped up logistic regression in Stat Analysis!

This is my nightmare hurricane. For years I said the two scariest kinds of hurricanes were Harvey (slow soaker that won’t move) and Michael (TS to Cat 5 in like 36 hours). This is BOTH and it’s about to hit Jamaica

so many flights to/from Baku are at times that are not for being awake 🙃

#MathsToday: calculating confidence intervals went shockingly well in Applied Stats today, fingers crossed for that to hold up on HW and in Monday class.

Some good things across classes today, too -- project presentations in Advanced Stats, summarizing discrete distribution families in ProbStat.

now to read 5 year old reviews from the premiere and 3 year old reviews from the NY premiere

(You can argue for a character arc for Chaereas from opening pas to ending pas, but I'm not so sure about that)

Ratmansky's Kallirhoe succeeds at being really dance-y with interesting vocabulary, but it's a very "need to read a summary first" ballet.

I also keep wondering why this story. Lots of it has emotion, but it doesn't have character arcs at all, and it has repeating story elements more than themes.

#MathsToday: taught a few of the math majors some silly math songs after a committee meeting today!

Some useful bumps with the logistic regression activity in Stat Analysis that will help me make it better for a wider audience of students.

#MathsToday: Introducing logistic regression in Advanced Stats went pretty well! Now to adapt that to work in Stat Analysis tomorrow.

Not feeling great about ProbStat and Applied Stats at the moment, though (mostly reacting to vibes and engagement levels)

All we hear about now is LLMs and AI but the most frequently clicked links in the RDM Weekly newsletter are about basic data management (naming files, documentation, organizing code, etc.). So if you feel behind by what you see posted, please don't. These foundational skills still matter.

We are also hiring a tenure-track professor in mathematics, and it seems like we might finally be trying to teach some applied math around here!

uleth.peopleadmin.ca/postings/8742

We are hiring a tenure-track professor in Statistics at the University of Lethbridge:

uleth.peopleadmin.ca/postings/8746

#MathsToday Stat Analysis students asked such good questions from the first day of talking about linear regression, and those questions were a really solid starting point for today!

Absolutely adore this podium (including pewter) #GPFRA

Kaori 😭 every time, I think about how lucky we are to get to watch her skate

Rion that was lovely! Some really floaty jumps and so much fun at the end especially #GPFRA

Begging people across sports to learn to pronounce Nagy.

Trying to grade and class prep and watch #GPFRA

Pretty sure it did *not* look like this; this was the first thing I noticed here!

#MathsToday: Today was extremely not my day, but huge props to ProbStat I and Advanced Stats students for sticking it out through some bumpy, algebra-heavy, surprise-here's-some-weird-calculus kinds of proofs.

ProbStat I did have a brief combinatorial proof rabbit hole, though, which was fun!

#MathsToday: Several good meetings with students, including getting to do as much Bayesian stats as possible in 40 minutes with a student doing a math bio senior capstone!

The CSAS Data Challenge this year is *so cool*. I know I say this every year, but mixed doubles curling is awesome, the power play is fascinating, and I'm excited to see what students figure out.

statds.org/events/csas2...

My soapbox for today is that physical climate scientists need to be exposed to qualitative methods.