Over seven months since a post! Outrageous. I'll avoid any navel-gazing on the matter (for now!) but I hope to get back on here again soon, if I can remember how to string words together into, um, long make-sense word collections. While breaking silence, can I recommend Sara Maitland's a book of silence? I'm not going to try and explain what's so good about it. The writing just sings.

Anyway: while I'm waiting for inspiration to strike, for now here's some other bits and bobs. There are a couple of posts up at my github blog. It's so beautifully easy to stick a Jekyll website up on github. Two whole posts there currently - one on visualisation, the other looking at the trade flow viz I did for GRIT. There's also a few bits and bobs of code (and the thesis) to pick over on the actual github page. I had a burst of activity and then stopped - there's more code to add, but getting it in a state I'm happy to leave to public view takes a little while.

In other news, I finally have a paper published from the PhD, over two years after initial submission. One incredibly helpful and thorough reviewer, who I've hated at various points, made it into a half-decent paper - but it took two complete re-writes and lot of extra coding. It contains a lot of the kind of figures I talk about in the github blog post on visualisation. On the off-chance anyone's reading this and wants to copy of the paper, I definitely can't send you a copy as that would infringe copyright, so don't email me at danolner at gmail dot com. I've been asked to write a blog article about it, so yeah... one day I'll get that up here too.

I can't escape the thesis though - there are two papers wooing me back in and I just know I'm not going to have closure until they're done. One's about agent modelling - why it's not the year zero it often claims to be, how paying attention to economic history can make it better and why people should stop always trying to build virtual worlds (unless they're doing something like meteorology when, in fact, that's exactly what you should do). The other's the final `transmission belt' model linking production and consumption in a distributed way across distance. It's a different take on the economic problems that distance introduces - but its main use, in my eyes, goes back to showing that adding complications (not complexity) to models hides the important choices you'd otherwise not see. Aaah, read the thesis conclusion...

Then there's GRIT: I came up with a method to see how increasing distance costs for moving goods might affect the UK's industries, as well as which places would be most affected. It was a bugger - data access took six months (of an eighteen month project) and I couldn't use any method I was already familiar with on the secure server. But I did get some interesting results out, which I hope to write up on here soon. There's a vital part of the results to get right first, however: I know in principle how it works but, actually, not exactly why it's producing the answers it is. They're entirely plausible: the least value-dense, heavy goods are affected most by increases in distance cost, as well as utilities and other static industries. But the results are too opaque - they need some digging into before I'd be happy to present anything. I'm a bit queasy about linking to the current half-baked working paper before that's done.

Right, now I've got all that off my chest, perhaps I can string some words together about other things. Here's hoping.