My World

We went to see Mozart's Marriage of Figaro on Saturday at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen. This was the first time that either of us had seen an opera, so it was certainly an interesting experience. The production was put on by Opera North. The music and the singing were excellent, and the costumes and sets were sufficient for their purpose.

On the downside, the seating (in the Balcony) was incredibly uncomfortable, primarily due to the negative leg room. The most noticeable differences between Opera and the musicals I have seen, is that none of the songs seem to have stuck in my head, and because I couldn't pick out every word (particularly when multiple characters were singing simultaneously) I was less able to appreciate the passion/emotion, and felt much less moved than with, say, Les Miserables.

Rating: 3/5

The most common question I've had showing my thesis to lay people is: "How many words is it?"

The answer is of course "Depends how you count them", but is something like 48,000. There are (very) approximately 4900 different words, meaning that on average each word comes up just under 10 times. (It's hard to count accurately count unique words because things like equations (and LaTeX markup) throw in a lot of junk that can't really be considered words).

In fact some words come up a lot more often than that:

3829:   the
2149:   of
1324:   a
1274:   and
1160:   to
1038:   is
866:    in
595:    for
453:    fire
391:    be
375:    this
350:    as
316:    mist
306:    with
306:    model
304:    are
295:    by
292:    was
281:    that
255:    on

In other words 25% of my thesis is made up of just eight words, and none of those words are specific to the topic!

The longest (unhyphenated word) is "indistinguishable" (17 letters) followed by "parameterisation" and "destratification" (16 letters). The median length is just 3.9 letters. The distribution of word length is:

1: 1885
2: 7926
3: 8518
4: 6740
5: 4453
6: 3488
7: 3384
8: 3170
9: 2221
10: 1827
11: 1304
12: 638
13: 311
14: 152
15: 40
16: 9
17: 1

(equations boost the 1-letter count considerably)

After 4 years, 11 months and 7 days it's finally complete (well almost - I still need to burn the CD to go in the back cover). It's fantastic to see it all bound up with the title "Numerical Modelling of Tunnel FIres and Water Mist Suppression" emblazoned in gold across the cover.

For anybody interested here's a pdf (20MB).

Woo!! Doing a google search for Chupa Chop brings up my web page!!!

This is due to my blog entry about the joy of unrolling the paper stick after sucking the loly.

Update

It's been pointed out that part of the reason for this is that the correct spelling is "Chupa Chup". I guess that answers my original question, and sets me a challenge to make my site interesting enough to be first google hit for a real term. I'm not even top hit for "Robert Hart Phd"

I had a go at cooking the Kedgeree recipe out of the book Sally gave me for my birthday. I used Haddock instead of Salmon fillet, because a) it's slightly cheaper, and b) it has the words "Don't Panic" printed on the cover in friendly letters... Oops! I mean b) it's more authentic to what I think of as Kedgeree.

I think it's the first time I've ever cooked fish (not counting prawns or fish fingers) so I was a bit nervous, but the recipe was surprisingly easy, and the most exotic ingredient was fish stock cubes - which I can cope with because I don't need to think up a way to use the remainder.

Rating: 9/10 (according to Chanch, who is never wrong)