It turns out that he played a key role in her relationship with C - Susie and her friend J asked David if they could "borrow" his holiday home in Wales, and he said Yes, if he could come too, and Susie and J asked that nice Dutch frisbee player C to come along too - and the holiday did not go quite as planned, as it became clear that C and Susie were quickly becoming close.
So this was ages ago, and since then David Mackay worked incredibly hard on computer things that are beyond me, and wrote books on climate change and statistics that are free to download, and got married and had small children and got cancer and was awarded a knighthood, and died. Even during his last days while he was lying in bed he was trying to figure out how to make Cambridge's roads safer for cyclists, and you can see his findings in his excellent Blog which is here
The best way to read it is to go to the first entry which is in 2008 and read it all the way through. Don't worry! He was too busy to write often - about 1 entry per year at first - and you can skip all the bits about computer programming unless they are relevant to you. It's his interested approach to his cancer which is striking.
Read the obituary in the Telegraph for an estimate of his contribution to our understanding of climate change.
MacKay was, he claimed, “absolutely not anti-renewables. I love renewables... but I’m also pro-arithmetic.”
MacKay went on to point out that electricity generation accounts for only one-fifth of our total emissions. So even if we managed to convert 80 per cent of our electricity to renewables (as some environmentalists say we should), Britain’s total CO2 emissions would be cut by only 16 per cent. The majority of emissions are created by transport, heating and food production.
It was here that the consumer could make a difference: “ 'Turn your thermostat down’ is, by my reckoning, the single best piece of advice you can give someone," he told an interviewer. "So is 'fly less’ and 'drive less’. But hybrid cars and home windmills are just greenwash.”
From the Telegraph Obituary:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/04/15/professor-sir-david-mackay-physicist--obituary/
MacKay earned an international reputation in the field of machine learning, information theory and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software tool for disabled users which allows them to write text as fast as normal handwriting using a single finger or head-mounted pointer. He also introduced more efficient types of error-correcting code that are now used in satellite communications, digital broadcasting and magnetic recording. His book, Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, was published in 2003.
Away from the laboratory, MacKay also helped in the successful campaign to free Sally Clark, the solicitor wrongly convicted in 1999 of murdering her two baby sons. Although he did not know her, he volunteered to set up and maintain her campaign website free of charge and helped to use mathematical arguments of probability to demonstrate the unsoundness of the original conviction.
As well as serving as chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change from 2009 to 2014, MacKay was a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.
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