Early-Years science: Intro 5 May 2021 Whilst I was on paternity leave, I made up simple science experiments and activities to do at home with K     and E     . I still do now.

What I do is very simple. I usually make up science activities on the spur of the moment, using whatever materials we have around the house. Often ideas for experiments come from questions K     or E     ask me, or things we notice whilst out and about. Very often the experiments don't work first time. Then K     , E     and I discuss together why it didn't work, think about ways to adapt it, and try again.

My intention isn't to "teach them science". Knowing by age 4 that plants needs water and light to grow, or that electricity only flows in circuits, is irrelevant. What I want to introduce them to early is how to look at the world scientifically and how to think like a scientist.

Early-Years Science: Buoyancy and Displacement 1 May 2021

Evil cursor model 18 February 2021 Updated 19 March 2021

I recently got enticed by Vim's text editing model, and began my own personal descent into evil-(mode): the full-featured Vim implementation within Emacs itself.

However, even viewed purely as a text editor, Vim doesn't get everything right in my not-so-humble opinion.

The cursor in a text editor indicates the location where the next editing operation should act, both visually to the user and internally to the text editor. There are two conceptually different ways to model the cursor location. You can consider the cursor to be located in between two consecutive characters. Or you can consider it to be located on top of a particular character. Emacs, like almost every other text editor, uses the first model. If the cursor is at location 3, say, Emacs considers it to be between the 2nd and 3rd character in the text. Typing a character will insert it in between these two characters; deleting backwards will delete character 2; deleting forwards will delete character 3.

Vim also uses this cursor model in insert mode. But in normal mode, it uses the other cursor model: if the cursor is at location 3, in normal mode Vim considers it to be located on top of the 3rd character in the text. There are therefore two insersion commands: i will start inserting text just before the 3rd character (i.e. in between characters 2 and 3); a will start inserting text just after the 3rd character (i.e. in between characters 3 and 4). Similarly, p pastes text before the character under the cursor, whereas P pastes it after that character.

I think Vim got this one wrong. Having to keep two different cursor models in mind adds cognitive burden, for little gain.

Descent into Evil 13 February 2021

I've been using Emacs for over 20 years, ever since a friend at university persuaded me to install Linux and pointed me to Emacs as a text editor. In all that time, I've never used Vim. I was never religiously opposed. More an accidental Emacs zealot, through trying Emacs first and never having any particular reason to remove myself from the category of people who have to look up the most frequently asked stackexchange question of all time when they run crontab -e under a new user without remembering to first set EDITOR.

But a few months ago, on one of those random internet walks where you start off looking up the Artin-Wedderburn theorem and, half an hour of link-following later, find yourself reading an article on worm composting without any idea how you got from one to the other, I found myself reading the Vim manual.

I already knew about the model editing and hjkl keybindings. But Vim's composable commands had completely passed me by. This notion of Vim as a text editing language, composed of "verb" operators and "noun" motions or text objects, intrigued me. Over the following weeks and months, I found myself reading ever more blog posts and articles discussing the philosophy and design of Vim.

However, there was one thing I was never going to do. No matter how elegant the philosophy of Vim's editing commands, swapping Elisp for Vimscript was a Faustian bargain so offputting, I wasn't even tempted to fire up Vim itself out of curiosity. But there's a Goethian Gretchen to Vim's Mephistophiles: evil-mode – an implementation of Vim within Emacs itself.

Thus began my descent into Evil.

Early-Years Science: Floating and Sinking 17 May 2020

Early-Years Science: Cress-Growing 29 April 2020

Lost or corrupted undo-tree history 6 January 2020 Undo-tree is the most popular of the Emacs packages I wrote and maintain, not least because it's used by Evil and Spacemacs. However, for many years, the internet has been awash with reports of undo history being lost or corrupted when using undo-tree-mode. Trouble was, though I do all my text editing in Emacs, and always have global-undo-tree-mode enabled, I'd never encountered these issues myself. And no one had ever been able to send me a recipe for reliably reproducing them. Making it fiendishly difficult to even begin to investigate what might be going on.

This post is about some recent changes to undo-tree that might finally address these issues.

How to include material after the letter in newlfm 25 November 2018

TL;DR: If you want to include additional material after the closing of a newlfm letter, forget the builtin \restletter commands. Add \newcommand\closelfm{\closlfm\let\closlfm\relax} to your letrinfo.tex file, put \closelfm where you want to end the letter (optionally followed by a \newpage), then write the additional material using standard L^aT_eXmarkup.

I use the newlfm L^aT_eXpackage for all letters I write, personal and professional. It has some nice advantages over the standard letter document class: you can have a database of different sender and recipient addresses, signatures and letterheads; it's easy to create custom letterheads that include images; you can have the correct letterhead and signature selected automatically based on sender or recipient. And many other features I don't make use of.

I have a love-hate relationship with this package, though. It has some quirks/bugs, especially to do with page layout and spacing. And whilst the documentation is extensive, it's not always the clearest. Whenever I need to do anything slightly different to what I've done before with newlfm, getting it to do what I want typically involves hours of effort and frustration the first time around, and I often ending up resorting to ugly kludges to get the letter written without wasting too much time. (This probably says more about my limitations, than those of the package.) Nonetheless, once you have a letter layout configured just the way you want, writing new letters with the same layout with newlfm is a breeze.

I was recently writing a cover letter to accompany the revisions I was submitting to one of my research papers. I wanted to attach the detailed response to the referees' comments after the letter (which contained a lot of maths so was best written in L^aT_eXtoo). The easy thing would have been to write the cover letter using newlfm, write the review response as a separate L^aT_eXdocument using some other document class, and stitch the two PDFs together using the pdftk command-line tool (or similar). But having to write these as two separate documents bugged me. I was already writing the cover letter in L^aT_eX. Why not just write the detailed referee response in the same L^aT_eXdocument?

Toby's ten commandments of being scooped 25 July 2018

[To be read in alongside Luc's ten commandments of authorship.]

Rule 1

Never consult a list of rules regarding being scooped.

Rule 2

Be happy: it implies \(\geq 1\) other person is interested in the problem you solved.

Rule 3

You hear about the other author's paper before it's posted on the arXiv, and are on friendly terms with them. Politely ask if they'd be willing to post to the arXiv simultaneously. This is a win-win: both papers will look more important and get more attention. If they don't agree, go to Rule 6. In either case, cite the other paper and be generous in crediting them.

Rule 4

You agree to post simultaneously, but then they ask for more time. Be generous and give them plenty of extra time. You will feel good. When you post yours, cite the other paper and be generous in crediting them.

Rule 5

You agree to post simultaneously, but then you need more time. Go home, have a beer, tell them you're not going to make the agreed date and let them post first. When you post yours, cite the other paper and be generous in crediting them.

Rule 6

The other results appear on the arXiv before yours, but you can post your results soon enough that it's clearly independent work. Go ahead and post them. You'll still get credit for the work. Cite the other paper and be generous in crediting them.

Rule 7

You're not ready to post soon without stressing about it, but the differences in your results are interesting and you're motivated to work on them. Work on those, post your paper when you have interesting new results. Be happy, smile. You've advanced science a few more steps. Cite the other paper and be generous in crediting them.

Rule 8

Your results are very similar, and the differences aren't interesting enough to you. Get your mind off it—crying, sex, indulging, smoking, hallucinating, and swimming in the North Sea may help. After doing \(\geq 1\) of those activities, look at the differences with fresh eyes. If they look interesting now, go back to Rule 7. If not, let this one go. There are infinitely many new and interesting problems to work on: go and work on one of those.

Rule 9

It happens - do not get stressed about it.

Paternity leave: reflections 19 April 2018

When K     was still at the theory stage, S     and I spent inordinate amounts of time discussing how we wanted to organise things once she arrived. One of the few things we spent almost no time discussing was what to do about parental leave. It just seemed obvious that we'd split it 50/50, and each take 6 months. It didn't occur to us we were doing anything unusual. If we thought about it at all, I guess it just seemed fair to give each of us an equal share of time with K     , and also to try to share any career impact it might have.

Once I started my six months leave, I didn't need to look up the statistics to quickly realise how few men were taking any parental leave at all. It was a rare baby singing, music, swimming or soft-play class where I wasn't the only man present. I never found that an issue. To their credit, all the mothers I met made me feel as accepted and welcome as any other parent of a young baby, and I made some really good friends. There's honour among thieves…and solidarity amongst sleep-deprived parents of any gender!

So how do I feel about it having done it? Two things struck me particularly forcefully over the six months.

Truths about proofs and groups 9 February 2018

A while back, a PhD student in our group asked me whether the sum over all elements of a stabilizer is a projector. If you know what this means, you're probably (a) a quantum information theorist (in which case, stop reading here) and (b) already know the answer and how to prove it (unlike me, who'd forgotten both).

The answer is no doubt well-known to anyone who works on quantum stabilizer codes, and we could have just googled for the result. It seemed like a nice, self-contained mathematical question, though. So rather than googling, we tried to figure it out for ourselves at the blackboard.

If you just want to see the simple final answer, skip to the end. But then you'll miss all the fun and the main point of this post. The way we came up with the solution makes for a nice toy example of the convoluted, messy and inelegant process by which mathematical results are really proven. Before they get polished up into the simple, elegant, pristine proofs "from The Book" that are all you ever get to see in textbooks and research papers. The unspoken (or at least unpublished) reality is that elegant proofs invariably emerge after following numerous blind alleys, unjustified intuitive leaps, and inelegant, round-the-houses arguments. All of which get simplified away in time for publication. (Or maybe that's just my proofs!)

Instead of just explaining the elegant final answer, I'm going to explain the inelegant process we went through to reach it.

Dear Diane 27 January 2017

[Letter sent to my local MP, Diane Abbott. Do the same! Keep up the pressure on MPs to represent your views.]

Dear Diane,

When I first moved to Hackney, I was proud to tell people I had you as my MP. As one of the few voices on the Labour backbenches consistently voting according to conscience, defying the party whip when it was at odds with your principles and your constituents' interests, you stood out from the crowd of political apparatchiks toting the party line. On issues ranging from the Iraq war, to defending the NHS from privatisation, to resisting the incoming tide of government mass surveillance, your voting record aligned even more closely with my views than the overall Labour party line. Though I've been a lifelong Labour voter, I was even happier to be a Diane Abbot voter.

You campaigned for remaining in the EU. Your constituents voted overwhelmingly remain, the joint-second highest remain vote (with Lambeth) after Gibraltar. You know that opposing a hard Brexit and fighting to keep the UK in the common market is in the best interests of your constituents, not just economically but also socially. You know that, for 40 years, the strongest bulwark against dismantling of social protections, civil liberties, and workers' rights in the UK has been European legislation. You know that fighting to retain as much of that as possible is fighting to prevent Theresa May's race to the very bottom in pandering to Trump, legitimising corporate tax evasion, liberating corporations to exploit employees, and dismantling and privatising the services that provide a safety net to so many in the UK.

Paternity leave: statistics 21 June 2016

Paternity leave: reactions 27 May 2016 I've been on paternity leave since January, taking care of K     full time. The reactions I've had from people when they discover I'm on paternity leave for half a year have been entirely positive. But some of the comments I've had in response have been interesting. I've collected the ones that stuck in my mind, together with my thoughts on them.

(If you know me personally, and think you recognise something you've said, you don't! These aren't direct quotes. I've paraphrased things that have been said to me multiple times by many different people.)

Why I (used to) use TMDA 16 July 2005 Mine is a sad and familiar story. I was drowning in a deluge of spam (a.k.a. junk email), and it had become such a problem that email was fast becoming useless for me. Having to sort through and delete hundreds of spam emails per day was bad enough. Worse was the increasing frequency with which I was accidentally deleting legitimate email along with the spam.

There are various ways to fight this deluge of spam. The most common is to use a filter that tries to recognise and delete the spam (or, more usually, move it to a spam box for later perusal). This is quite effective. A small amount of spam will not be recognised as such (false-negatives), and will end up in your inbox anyway. But the amount of spam will usually be cut down to a manageable amount, rendering email usable again.

The problem with the filtering approach is the false-positives: legitimate mail that gets mis-identified as spam. Even if it's moved to a spam box rather than deleted, when you're searching through hundreds of spam emails you're almost certain to miss the one or two legitimate mails hiding amongst them, and you'll delete them along with the spam. (At least, that's what I found myself doing.)

A second approach is to use techniques such as domain blocking, real-time blacklists, and other methods of blocking whole groups of addresses known to send spam. But this is really just a variation on filtering (filters usually take the sender's address into account when deciding whether an email is spam or not, as well as the body).

I didn't want to run the risk of someone sending me an email, me deleting it accidentally, and them never knowing that I didn't received it. So I chose to use a third approach: white-list plus challenge/response (plus a number of other features of the impressive TMDA system).

Research interests

Emailing me

Publications You can also find most of my papers on the arXiv (which is sometimes more up-to-date than this list).

Toby 'qubit' Cubitt