Author: Matthew

Neglect of this blog is, obviously, nothing new. WT has been ticking over for the best part of a decade at a frequency so low that any actual entries you see around here are basically a rounding error. But it is a measure of just how remiss I’ve been that I haven’t posted one of these before:

Uncle Keith is more than 2½ years old, having arrived a couple of months before lockdown and the ensuing puppy bubble. Nephew Justin is nearly 1½. Both are, of course, adorable.

Having dogs has been transformative in a variety of predictable and unexpected ways. Mostly for the better, even. I’m not sure I can even remember what life was like without them, although that may also be mixed up with the overwhelming brain fog of the plague years. And the idea that they one day won’t be around is too horrible to contemplate — though Border Terriers are a long-lived breed, and I’m no spring chicken myself, so maybe I won’t have to worry about that.

My only plan for tonight is to get fucked up beyond all recognition.

If you feel like following along at home, the lectures and exercises for COMP0088 – which is basically all the actual content – can be found on the module GitHub.

(I’m not sure whether the lectures are accessible without a UCL login. In the vanishingly unlikely case that anyone wants to watch and is unable, let me know and I’ll poke at the permissions.)

Update: UCL’s media hosting proved unreliable, so all lectures are now available on the COMP0088 YouTube channel.

A man and a woman walk into a bar. (The man is not really a man and the woman is not really a woman, but the ways in which each of them is not what they seem are radically different.) We can call them Adam and Eve — though those are not, obviously, their real names.

The bar is busy, at least by pandemic standards. The clientele mostly male — this is the City, after all. Sexual liberation is a wonderful thing, no question, and the ladies have progressed in leaps and bounds. But there is a natural order here — here, of all places — that isn’t so casually to be tossed aside. The financial services game is fundamentally hormonal.

At some random table — the place is table service only, these days — a man named Harry sits with friends. Colleagues, really — he’s happy to drink with them, but he wouldn’t donate a kidney. They talk about work. One of them is going through a messy divorce, but who wants to hear about that? The other is plagued by dreams in which he pulls out his own teeth, agonisingly, blood pouring down his chin, night after night. They talk about the football.

Unlike Adam and Eve, Harry is exactly what he appears. Thomas Pink shirt, almost but not quite adventurous Paul Smith tie. Weak sardonic smile that’s more of a smirk. Somewhere in there is a personality he doesn’t dare to acknowledge, so he wears quirky Muppet socks instead, barely visible between trouser cuffs and brogues.

Adam strides over, purposefully. (He is always purposeful, but his purposes are obscure to the point of contradiction.) Fixes Harry with a piercing gaze. Beckons Eve.

“This one! Harry, isn’t it?” Harry, having never seen either of these people before in his life, is nonplussed. “He’s handsome, see? I think so. Don’t you think he’s handsome?” Eve looks sceptical, though it is unclear to Harry whether that’s directed at him or her companion; safest to assume both, he decides foggily.

“I think you should take him.”

Later, when the police ask — quite insistently — neither divorce friend nor dental nightmare friend can give a coherent description of the visitants. Or the events surrounding them. Indeed, they’re not quite clear whether Harry came to the bar that night or not.

Or, come to think of it, whether they ever knew anyone of that name.

This is a first pass at the first part of the first lecture of the Introduction to Machine Learning module I’ll be teaching in the autumn. The course will use a “blended” format (ie, a combination of online & on campus elements), and the current plan is for all the “lectures” to be pre-recorded like this. So there’ll be 1.5-2 hours a week of this sort of video material, probably broken down into chunks of about this length. But how much the final product resembles this first faltering attempt remains to be seen.