Still haven’t finished the videos for HTTLAM. I have laryngitis so can’t do the voiceover.

Anyhow, leaving that aside, David Mitchell (curmudgeon from Peep Show) wrote an excellent attack on the the Government’s replacement for the RAE, the REF. See it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/27/david-mitchell-pointless-studies-survey.

He makes a number of good points, I particularly liked

Research which will obviously make money if it comes off will always find private funding and so should not be prioritised for public money. In fact, it’s the very place that public money should never go – it’d be like spending the Arts Council budget on profit-making pantos instead of opera or pouring the licence fee into Quiz Call rather than BBC Four. 

The videos for HTTLAM were held up a couple of weeks ago. I was ready to start recording but the restaurant near my house had a refrigerator malfunction and so they had a refrigeration unit in their car park. The unit created sufficient noise to be detected on the sound track and so recording had to be abandoned. I hope to shoot next Monday – today my voice is too sore!

Also, corrections have appeared for the book. Only one really bad mistake so far but quite a few little annoying ones!

I’ve started producing solutions for How to Think Like a Mathematician, see my HTTLAM web page. This will be a large task and so I’ve started with the chapters that people have requested so far, i.e., the one on sets and the two chapters on induction.

Have been away at conference in Aarhus and on holiday in Crete and have been working very hard so haven’t kept the blog up-to-date.

How to Think Like a Mathematician

 The book seems to be selling well, it regularly makes the Amazon chart of 100 best-selling mathematics books. I’ve also added a list of corrections to my webpage on the book. 

Videos

I am nearly finished the videos. I’m giving everything a thorough rewrite before shooting starts next week.

The website Bookseer allows you to enter the name and author of a book to give you a recommendation for a related book to read. Of course I entered HTTLAM and got quite a good list. 

The website just uses Amazon and LibraryThing to generate its suggestions. Unfortunately, LibraryThing gives “Nada” as a suggestion for HTTLAM.

Two points of interest this week regarding How To Think Like A Mathematician – I’ve been busy running a conference so I haven’t had time to mention them.

1. Negotiations for a French translation are nearly complete. I hope I’m being too quick to advertise the fact, after all it may fall through.

2. The book has already been pirated. Someone uploaded a version to Scribd (yes, that is how they spell it). I promptly informed the website and they took it down within about six hours. They are keen to respect copyright – they say – but they are not proactive. The person who posted my book has clearly posted other copyrighted material and yet these have not been removed since Scribd say the copyright owners have to make a complaint before anything will be done. It would be a funny world if the police did nothing about an obvious crime until the victim realised and complained. Can you imagine a police officer in court – Yes m’lud, I saw the defendant steal the wallet but as the victim had not noticed I was unable to do anything about it. 

I did a search for other authors and quickly found works such as Marcus du Sautoy’s recent book (I emailed him to let him know) available in their entirety for download. It looks like I shall have to keep a close eye on the web for pirated versions of HTTLAM!

Well, my planned launch for yesterday (Thursday) of How to Think Like a Mathematician videos didn’t quite work out. On Wednesday night I had the first video prepared and uploaded to YouTube all ready to go. My wife sat down with me to watch it. On the first slide she noticed a particularly bad typo, one which rather annoyingly I had noticed the day before but had forgotten to alter. So I had to go back to the video, correct the error and save the movie again. For reasons I don’t understand the saving took over an hour. On Thursday morning I uploaded the video to YouTube. This takes quite a while, first to upload and then it has to be processed. This took hours because the video is in high definition. And guess what, the quality was not high definition. I only got the “Watch in Higher Quality” option from YouTube not the “Watch in High Definition”.

So throughout the day I tried different settings on my Mac to produce a video of the same quality as my original but could not do so until after 6pm. Therefore I abandoned my video launch even though I have a good quality version. The problem now is that the video does not play through smoothly the first time it is played. A user has to let the whole video load and then watch it. I’m looking for a way round this.

My intention is to launch on Thursday 26th March. I’ll be in Valencia giving a talk that day so it seems fitting.

Long time no post! The reasons are simple. I spent a month in Brazil and upon my return to a chilly Leeds I was straight into exams. I finished the marking on Sunday and so decided to have a day off on Monday. That turned out to be a good idea as the country was snowed in!

Anyhow, my book is now published. I received sample hardback and paperback copies this morning. Last week when I checked Amazon they claimed to have only 3 copies left, yesterday it was only one, so I’ve sold at least two copies. Thank you whoever you are!

Plans for this week: Clear the backlog of emails; finish a grant proposal; organize a conference; submit final versions of accepted papers; write some PhD reports. After that (and I’m sure I left some stuff out) I’ll begin the shooting of How To Think Like a Mathematician – The Movie

At the weekend I bought a Canon HG10 camcorder. I believe it’s what people in the know call ‘a lovely piece of kit’. The picture quality is fantastic and the sound is good as far I can tell – I haven’t done a proper test, although I’ve found that the operating buttons are small and fiddly.

Obviously I purchased the camcorder to record all those magical family moment with my new offspring. In addition I’ll be able to make recordings of explanations of the material in by book. How to Think Like a Mathematician: The Movie is born!

I will start by recording some thoughts on writing mathematics as that part is particularly useful for beginners. First I’ll produce a demo version to get feedback.  Stay tuned, don’t touch that dial, etc…

In a previous post I mentioned that I was a little unhappy with the pictures for How to Think Like a Mathematician. This morning I got an email with the new versions with the dreaded words “Unfortunately at this stage we cannot take in any further corrections.” So I opened the pdf of the new versions with trepidation. Thankfully, some were improved. The finger pushing the dominoes now looks like a finger, with a nail bed and joints, rather than an enraged sausage. (It’s end has been shaded in slightly so I’ll probably get people asking Why is the finger dirty?) 

So this is it. There is nothing further I can do to change the book!