Benign Polyp Gone (by sarah)

Alaric's fleshy lump is gone from his scalp - they used elctro-quatrazitiation which will leave a small scar but hey it's in his hair and even if he lost all his hair it wouldn't really show. there is a black, burn/scab thing there at the moment and there was a line of scabby blood from it yesterday evening which scared poor Jeany :/

But it is smaller than the lump was! It was apparently a benign polyp which my family thinks is haliourous as we call each other polyp (as in colonial organisms re: biology and not swellings and lesions re: medical).

I'm applying eye cream of all things too it as it is the best stuff to stop infection of which there is a bit of a risk as they couldn't put a dressing on it - I assume this is not large though or they'd have shaved him or asked us to shave him again.

It is a big relief 🙂 I think I was more worried about it than him.

Lump Removal (by sarah)

Alaric is going in for his lump removal today - it is only minor surgery so shouldn't be too bad. He is also on the more fierce fungal killing medicine which is making him a little under the weather - still I think he'll feel much better once all of this is over!

Plus strange fleshy lumps on your scalp need to go!

Old Papers (and maths!) (by alaric)

This weekend, I've been going through old papers and dealing with them. This involves sorting them into three categories:

1. To be shredded and turned into logs with our log maker
2. To be filed in the cabinet (with many subcategories corresponding to the files therein), and sorted by date where applicable
3. Demanding some action (which, for now, means putting them into my in-tray, rather than disrupting the activity in progress)

The magnitude and importance of this task is not to be underestimated - when we moved here I had a new baby, a very sick wife, and two jobs to deal with; unpacking and properly setting up my office never really happened, as opposed to setting up a desk and digging through boxes to find the things I needed to get started. So my once-pristine filing system was never quite established, and my "to file" tray grew fat with paperwork I needed to put somewhere. There was slow progress, of course; but then two years later the house flooded, so we had to rush a lot of furniture and stuff from downstairs up into the office, then pack a lot of stuff up and send it into storage while the house was repaired... and we weren't living in the house for nearly a full year, so more often than not I was working on my laptop from wherever I could get an Internet connection. Once again, my paperwork was in disarray.

But, three years on, we're finally catching up. I've gone through my filing cabinet and re-filed the mish-mash therein, then gone through my to-file tray and the various piles of papers dotted around the place, and dealt with them all. "To shred" has been by far the biggest category; as I write, Sarah is sitting feeding sheet after sheet into the shredder. And I've found a bunch of interestings that need further action.

For one of them in particular, the action is to write it up. Many years ago, I bought and read a book on statistics in order to refresh my memory, as I was working on a system for analysing the actions of large numbers of people. Now, I didn't enjoy statistics much when I was doing A-level maths, and reading the book reminded me why: I find the random-variable notation unnecessarily vague and confusing, and the various other notations used in statistics seem inconsistent to me.

I recall reading this book on a long bus journey (the bus from Tottenham Court Road to Gallows Corner in Romford, to be precise), and deciding to take matters into my own hand, and designing m own notation for statistics based on set theory. I like set theory and find it sensible and logical, so this was an obvious choice. I wrote my notation down on a sheet of paper, tucked it into the book, and took it home.

Many years later, I found the sheet of paper inside the book, and put it in my TODO pile, as I needed to take a second look at it and do something with it. This never happened. Until now.

So without further ado, here's the content of the sheet. It still needs more thinking about, but if I write it up into the computer now, this is more likely to happen than waiting for me to encounter this bit of paper again.

Let L be a multiset of real numbers.

• SUM(L) = sum of x, where x is an element of L.
• |L| = the number of elements in L.
• L(n) where 1 <= n <= |L| = nth largest element of L
• MIN(L) = L(1)
• MAX(L) = L(|L|)
• MEDIAN(L) = L(|L| / 2) if |L| is odd, (L(floor(|L| / 2)) + L(ceil(|L| / 2)))/2 otherwise
• SUM^2(L) = sum of x^2, where x is an element of L
• VAR(L) = SUM^2(L) - (SUM(L))^2 etc.
• L ~ D iff L is distributed as per D (D is a distribution as per normal stats notation)
• SRn(L) is a multiset of all possible sets of n random samples from L with replacement
• SWn(L) is a multiset of all possible sets of n random samples from L without replacement

Let L be a multiset of records (named tuples) of real numbers (a,b,c,...)

• La is a multiset of just the as
• Lab is a multiset of the products, a*b
• sigma(L) f(a,b,c) is the sum of f(a,b,c) across all the elements in L
• pi(L) f(a,b,c) is the product
• L ~ (D1, D2, ...) iff. La ~ D1 and Lb ~ D2 and so on
• cov(a,b)(L) = sigma(L) ab - M(La)*M(Lb)

...and there it ends!

Convince Alaric to let the Drs Put him under the Chop (by sarah)

Alaric has a... well nipple on the back of his head, the size of which only became apparent when we chopped off all his hair to try and deal with a dandruff problem. The dandruff problem turned out to be interesting as well but more on that later!

This lump on the back of his head has a distinctive look and I found a couple of smaller ones on him (one of which I had accidently mangled with a razor 🙁 ). The Dr says it's a variation on a wart but isn't that contagous but that it should be removed - doesn't have to be but should be. It will really need a scalpel taken to it as it is too large and fleshy to be frozen off and it simple wouldn't get it all.

Any way - due to the horror on Alaric's face the DR said he could think about it - I think it should be removed - help me convince him

You can’t get the staff these days! (by alaric)

We've got houseguests over, and we left them at home while we went for a walk in the countryside.

However, when I got home, I found they'd decided to go to Tesco many hours previously, and had gone off leaving:

• Jean's rabbit outside in his run
• The shed unlocked
• The front door of the house wide open

When asked why, they said "Oh, Barbara (the next door neighbour, my aunt) was around"...

Had it not occurred to them that Barbara might decide to go out herself, and is not supposed to be responsible for locking up our home? Or that Barbara might not actually take it upon herself to guard our open doors from passing opportunists, and sit watching, but might have her own things to do?

sigh