As a long-standing social sec of the OPIG research group, the key part of the job is to ensure that the event name includes some kind of pun around OPIG (and then maybe organise something). Notable ones include OPIGmas, the annual Christmas party that I am neglecting to organise at the moment, and O’Punting, our annual punting trip. For the next generation of social secs, I have proposed some new activities with even worse names.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Humour
The Patterns that Escape Us
Part The First: An Outrageous Claim
Reproduced below is the introductory passage from a psycholinguistics paper, published in the mid-nineties. Riveted, as I’m sure you are, having just read that banger opening line to my blog post, humour me and read on; I promise it gets interesting.
Drug Discovery Tools, but they’re olympic sports…
The Olympic Games may have come and gone, but like me, I’m sure you’re all wondering which Olympic sport your favourite drug discovery tool would compete in. Fear not, I have taken it upon myself to answer this pressing question. In this blogpost, we’ll match some of the most popular tools in our field with their Olympic counterparts. Before we begin, let me clarify that I’m using the term ‘tool’ rather loosely here; I’ve included a variety of resources. I don’t claim these to be the most popular, just the ones I thought were most sport like.
RDKit: Athletics. I’m biased, but we must start with the big one. Like track and field events at the heart of the Olympics, RDKit is at the centre of many other tools in our field. It’s versatile, essential, and it’s hard to imagine our work without it. RDKit does it all.
Five-word stories about a world where AI dominates the world
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” ~ Ernest Hemingway??
This is a six-word story famously misattributed to Ernest Hemingway. According to Wikipedia, this story first appeared in 1906, when Hemingway was 7 years old, and later attributed to him in 1991, 30 years after his death. So, no chance it was his.
Regardless of its origin, I found this type of story very creative.
In this blog post, as the title says, I will dare to push the boundary to present 5-word stories on the topic of AI taking over the world, BUT with a humorous spin.
Continue readingLe Tour de Farce v11.0
“They don’t make them like they used to!”
With much experience of all things farcical, it was my delight to have returned just in time for the 2024 edition of OPIG’s Tour de Farce, which took place on 11th July. This year’s route was 8 miles long and encompassed four of the finest establishments Oxford has to offer (nothing “unusually conservative” to see here Eoin).
Continue readingThe War of the Roses: Tea Edition
Picture the following: the year is 1923, and it’s a sunny afternoon at a posh garden party in Cambridge. Among the polite chatter, one Muriel Bristol—a psychologist studying the mechanisms by which algae acquire nutrients—mentions she has a preference for tea poured over milk, as opposed to milk poured over tea. In a classic example of women not being able to express even the most insignificant preference without an opinionated man telling them they’re wrong, Ronald A. Fisher, a local statistician (later turned eugenicist who dismissed the notion of smoking cigarettes being dangerous as ‘propaganda’, mind you) decides to put her claim to the test with an experiment. Bristol is given eight cups of tea and asked to classify them as milk first or tea first. Luckily, she correctly identifies all eight of them, and gets to happily continue about her life (presumably until the next time she dares mention a similarly outrageous and consequential opinion like a preferred toothpaste brand or a favourite method for filing papers). Fisher, on the other hand, is incentivized to develop Fisher’s exact test, a statistical significance test used in the analysis of contingency tables.
Continue readingIn defence of chaos
I commend you on your skepticism, but even the skeptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidæ on our hands.
Douglas Adams
It’s not every day that someone recommends a new whizzbang note-taking software. It’s every second day, or third if you’re lucky. They all have their bells and whistles: Obsidian turns your notes into a funky graph that pulses with information, the web of complexity of your stored knowledge entrapping your attention as you dazzle in its splendour while also the little circles jostle and bounce in decadent harmony. Notion’s aesthetic simplicity belies its comprehensive capabilities, from writing your notes so you don’t need to, to exporting to the web so that the rest of us can read what you didn’t write because you didn’t need to. To pronounce Microsoft OneNote requires only five syllables, efficiently cramming in two extra words while only being one bit slower to say than the mysterious rock competitor. Apple notes can be shared with all the other Apple people who live their happy Apple lives in happy Apple land – and sometimes this even works!
Continue readingHow to make ML your entire personality
In our silly little day-to-day lives in over in stats, we forget how accustomed we all are to AI being used in many of the things we do. Going home for the holidays, though, I was reminded that the majority of people (at least, the majority of my family members) don’t actually make most of their choices according to what a random, free AI tool suggests for them. Unfortunately, though, I do! Here are some of my favourite non-ChatGPT free tools I use to make sure everyone knows that working in ML is, in fact, my entire personality.
Continue readingOPIGmas, 2023
Our annual, end-of-Michaelmas OPIG celebrations took place this at the start of December in the MCR (Middle Common Room) at Lady Margaret Hall.
OPIGmas is a much-anticipated combination of pot luck, Secret Santa, and party games.
Perhaps Jay’s megaphone topped the list of gag gifts…
How to replace bike ball bearings when your steering sounds crunchy
Over the last few months my bicycle steering axle started freezing up, to the point where the first thing I did before getting on my bike in the morning was jerk the handlebars from side to side aggressively to loosen it up. It made atrocious guttural sounds and bangs when I did and navigating Oxford by bike was becoming more treacherous by the day as I swerved from left to right trying to wrestle my front wheel’s fork in the right direction. It was time to undertake some DIY…
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