0.905**

Even though I can often relate to Jonathan Miller's description of Edinburgh as a 'prissy tight-arsed city with an ugly soul' there are some days when you just have to accept that it is a damn fine looking place, if you catch it in the right light and from the right angle.

And so it was today, with the early morning, post-downpour sky just getting some light as the cloud cleared a little in the east while the west was still looking dark and ominous. I was planning to walk straight to work rather than hang around in the rain but just as I passed the Scott Monument and came to this wee opening in the trees, there were the houses up on Ramsay Gardens glowing away. I know the whole thing looks a bit picture postcard and stock photography. Let me know and I'll replace it with the main alternative - a photo of the numbers in the title.

What's that about, I hear you wonder to yourself. Well, 0.905 is the Spearman correlation coefficient of two series of numbers and the ** indicates that the probability of this correlation occurring by chance is very close to zero. The importance of that is that one of the series was produced by somebody else using a very complex, expensive and time-consuming method and the second series was produced by me using a very simple, cheap and quick method. I'm modelling data. When I test it on real numbers, what difference do I get between my numbers and the real numbers? Zero.

That's what my day has been about and dreary though it sounds, it is the cleverest thing I've done for a long time. So, a good day. Actually, a very good day. If my granny were here she'd say, "if ye wir chocolate ye'd eat yersel!". Aye.