Aaron McDaid

Credit Crash Britain on the BBC on 2008-11-14 had the predictable conversation with somehow in Britain who wants to buy a house.

"Renting is throwing your money away. I want to feel that I'm putting my money into something"

Throwing money away you say?! Look up you fool. That's a roof over your head! Go sleep on the streets if you think that accomodation is such a worthless commodity. Next you'll be pointing out that food expenditure is throwing your money away on something that doesn't last.

This is both funny and unfuriating to those of us who know a thing or two about maths. It's old news now, from 2006, but I only just came across MarkCC's attack on it at his 'Good Math, Bad Math'. It's a claim to solve an old problem, namely that of how to deal with 0/0 (zero divided by zero) and 0^0 (zero to the power of zero) by just defining them to be equal to φ, which Doctor Anderson calls 'nullity'. φ is the Greek letter called 'phi', by the way.

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Economics is fascinating. I've only just scratched the surface, but I'm eager to learn more. The mess we're in now (2008) is both very simple, and very complicated, at the same time. Economics seems to be a mixture of mathematics, common sense and a manageable amount of non-rationality.

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The final race of the 2008 season was very exciting. I hadn't watched Formula 1 for the last few years, but I think I'm hooked again now. Lewis Hamilton won it on the last corner.

I had been fairly neutral but was happy to see Hamilton win. I wanted the race to be exciting and it was. The rain at the start meant the track was a little wet and every car would slip a little. So even though Hamilton only had to finish fifth to win the championship, it seemed possible he wouldn't. And Hamilton had to use the same engine as he had in the previous race, because an engine needs to be used for two races before it may be replaced, meaning that reliability was a concern.

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Today I visited the Great Britain, one of the world's most famous ships. The musuem and the ship itself is quite interesting and well worth a visit if you're anywhere near Bristol. One ticket gets you admission for a full year, and I'll be back again soon. I was there for just two hours this morning, and would have stayed much longer, but I left to watch the final Formula 1 race of the season.

Just returned from the gathering of all my dad's dad's dad's dad's descendents, mentioned previously.

Please help to update the Family tree. You can do so directly, or send any details to me by commenting on this blog post.

In particular, I believe James McDaid (the speaker) and the other organizers may have access to the movie and to an electronic copy of the printed tree. I would be happy to make them available online if they could be emailed to me at: aaronmcdaid gmail.com

On Aug 29th August 2008 I decided to become a teacher. Now, less than two weeks later, I'm settled into a PGCE course at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol, England. It's a pretty big and sudden decision but I feel like it's the right thing and everything so far has gone well. Like of lot of office drones, I had been considering teaching quite often over the years.

Update 2008-09-06. Nothing too exciting happening tonight after all. Just 3 of us going out for a drink.

NOTE: I won't be back in Dublin on Saturday until at least 6pm - contact me if you're coming from afar

Party in Dublin on Saturday - I'm leaving for Bristol for a year to
train to be a teacher (at the UWE)!

It'll be at 11 Glenayr Road, Rathgar, Dublin 6

The Red Queen by Matt Ridley discusses sexual reproduction and is much better than I thought it would be. There is often debate as to why organisms don't simply clone themselves and reproduce asexually, and as with any big debate there is a fair share of woolly thinking. Prior to reading this book, which was recommended by a friend whose research includes genetics, I thought the book would be only about how sexual reproduction came to be; my only major gripe is that the book spends too little time on this.

My parents run Larkfield Bed and Breakfast and I'm trying to update their site a little. It's hosted on something called 'Little Ireland' and their syntax is a bit strange.

For example, I need to enter something like .head1Larkfield Bed and Breakfast.endhead1 to get a H1. I can't enter HTML in because it htmlencodes it. Any ideas on how I might encode links - maybe something like .link ?