Cambridge Folk Festival

For some reason the organisers thought it would be a good idea to assign one day (yesterday) to female performers. It was so annoying. All the voices were high and harmonising. We were quite disappointed with the line up. We enjoyed the day anyway. When I go to the Cambridge Folk Fest I think - "Here are my people". They are getting to be rather elderly - were they always?  those who look quite relaxed and into the liberal arts. People who like camping and reading and music. Men in shorts and T-shirts and leather hats.

I saw someone I used to know, who now has a little boy, a lovely bright-looking little boy. How strange to see someone when you never expected to! and feel ashamed and embarrassed, and what a sad business to have that history that makes you feel ashamed of yourself, like me. But it is all in the past now. And on the top deck of the bus, too, there he was. How very strange. It was always like that, with he and I.

Sir David Mackay - what a brilliant guy

This is a most tenuous connection - this Cambridge scientist's death was reported on the radio - and I caught the detail that he played Ultimate Frisbee in Cambridge, as did my friend Susie, before she married and moved to the Netherlands. So I asked her about him.

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.

Oxford vs Cambridge

I have never really thought about what distinguishes one from the other - they are both very fine universities. But Virginia Woolf is quite sure that Cambridge "men" (as they generally were in her day) were better, more purely intellectual - poor scholars. She describes "An Oxford young man, inclines to smartness, dress and culture. His soul is uneasy in Cambridge company. He squirms a little visibly."