With more deviation than is standard

After catching my first fish species of 2023 on Jan 5th (described here ) I was able to read book #2 of the 2023 fishing and reading challenge. Just as there was no doubt about which species I would fish for first, my second book of 2023 (and first novel) was a straightforward choice: Bournville by Jonathan Coe .  Coe is my favourite living British author and someone had bought me Bournville -- his latest novel -- for Christmas. For me (and most people I suspect), the test of a really good novel is a sense of compulsion: a force formed by a shifting mixture of anticipatory excitement and consummatory pleasure that makes you want to keep reading. Bournville passed that test; it was finished a couple of days later.  Coe and I are almost exact contemporaries: he is 9 days older than me. We went to the same small college at the same university as undergraduates, although never met as far as I recall. I think this close temporal overlap is a big part of the reason I love his novel...

Having finished reading my first book of 2023 (reviewed in detail here ) I was able to set out to catch the first species of the planned target of 25 species for the calendar year. For personal and logistical reasons that I'll explain below, t here was only one species that I would set out to catch first: the zander ( Sander lucioperca ). As will also become clear, having zander as species #1 allowed me a direct way to illustrate some statistical concepts and techniques. So, if you are here for some stats, you will have to read some nonsense about fishing first. Similarly, anyone interested in fishing can skip the long middle section of this post concerning statistical matters. I was a keen angler in my childhood and teenage years but there were limited places to fish in the part of Kent where I grew up in the 1970s. Within biking distance of my home there were just a couple of gravel pits. I could fish these pits because I was a member of the local angling club; but the pickings w...

After reading Adam Rutherford's book about the history of eugenics (see here for  my review ) I found myself motivated to try to understand exactly what Francis Galton (the English polymath and father of eugenics) had contributed to the development of statistics. In my review of the Rutherford book I argued that it is possible to consider someone's scientific contributions without that being any sort of endorsement of, or mitigation for, their social and political views. As we will see, Galton's work in the last quarter of the 19th century was absolutely critical in understanding and formalising the nature and strength of relationships between two variables (what we would now call the  correlation between them). This is such a fundamental aspect of measurement and data analysis in so many areas of science that its conceptual origins are worth revisiting from time to time. As I will argue in a later blog entry, some central and very useful parts of Galton's thinking on t...