Category: POSTS

Turtles, Fields and a Random Walk

In 1927 the Belgian Catholic priest and former engineer Georges Lemaître was the first person to propose that the universe was expanding (1, 2) rather than being in a steady state.  This was grounded in his own mathematical reasoning, derived from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.  Einstein was initially highly dismissive, reportedly saying “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious.”  Nevertheless Lemaître’s idea was indeed confirmed experimentally just two years later by Edwin Hubble through observations made with […]

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Tackling the paradox of gestalt emergent complex adaptive biological behaviour

And the mechanics of Information Theory. Research suggests that the first single-celled organisms formed around 3.8 billion years ago but it was not until about 600 million years ago that, quite suddenly in evolutionary time, the Cambrian explosion occurred, giving rise to multicellular life, diversification and biological complexity1.  And you and me.  So what is a complex system? A simple definition is that it is a system with agent-like objectives and action properties that cannot be predicted from its parts […]

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The Convert Convert

Here is a poem by GK  Chesterton (1874-1936) in celebration of my father, Patrick Simpson Lambert (1924-2008), the most thoughtful man I have ever known, despite his human frailties.    There were many learnings for me through his life that every day still evolve and build and teach. But the most important learning is that of empathy, understanding and stoic acceptance of life’s hard slings; a trait that he himself raged against as he slipped into his own gentle good […]

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A falsely negative false positive

(Two-minute read.  An eternity to apply) A few thoughts on the nature of hypothesis testing. For those who do not know or have forgotten, hypothesis testing is at the foundational core of science and, some would say, ‘truth’.  It is the discipline, the science, the craft, the art, the philosophy of experimental construction and assessment as to whether something is ‘true’ or ‘false’.    Interestingly it is impossible to prove that something is true or false1 in our physical reality; […]

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Rutherford and Shannon, and the art of Public Relations

In 1911 the New Zealand Physicist Ernest Rutherford fired a stream of particles (1) at a gold leaf foil with the aim of better understanding the nature and structure of the atomic nucleus (Figure 1).  The details are unimportant in this context, but one can think of it in abstract terms as kicking a football at a goal with a net full of holes in front of a layer of invisible concrete bollards (2).  To his surprise or maybe not […]

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Hippocrates the neural scientist

The Greeks, or at least some of them, well understood the importance of the brain even if they did not know very much about its inner workings. And the Egyptians before them had a hieroglyph for the brain, the first known recorded reference to the brain being an Egyptian papyrus from the seventeenth century BCE describing a couple of patients who had suffered trauma to the head. The Greek surgeon-philosopher Hippocrates, or at least his translators (1), was a beautiful […]

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Case Study – Tesco, Dunnhumby and the launch of Clubcard

This short case study tells the story of how Tesco and its marketing data analytics consultancy partner Dunnhumby used Big Data to re-engineer the UK Supermarket Sector in the 1990s and 2000s.  Some years before the term ‘Big Data’ first entered popular usage. Timing and background The year is 1993.  Four years after Tim Berners-Lee proposed the concept of ‘the Internet’ and five years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google.  Whilst the enabling technology for the Internet had […]

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