Tuesday, June 13, 2006

After the rain, cigarette sadness, mathematician

The sound of this morning's heavy shower comes in through our open bedroom window like the rumbling of a heavy duty lorry idling its engine. In the warm sunshine afterwards you can smell oils and resins released into the air by vegetation, and every object is outlined with unfamilar clarity.

Outside the Kent and Sussex Hospital there is a sad scattering of cigarette butts, testimony to a new sort of outcast.

On the gate of a house in Castle Road in Tunbridge Wells, just below Church Road, a new plaque has appeared, which records that Thomas Bayes lived there from 1724 - 1761. Who was Thomas Bayes? He was a non-conformist minister and a mathematician, who only recently was recognised for his work on statisitical theory, in particular with a theory dealing with probability - the origin of much market research and opinion poll techniques, still in use today.

1 comment:

tristan said...

i can't see cigarette butts as sad, but rather grim & despicable testimonies of people's dependency & their selfishness ... too many of my addicted friends are already dead, & smokers seem to think the whole bleeping world is their ash tray