tambourineman88

Simply put: it’s a very fun sport.

It’s doubles so you only need four people to play. The underarm serve gives it a very shallow learning curve so almost anybody can play. However, there is enough nuance to the game that there’s lots of tactics and skill to learn as you get better.

Also the app (Playtomic) for organising games works great.

We have indoor courts here in the UK where’s there’s not much else to do in the winter. It’s a lot easier to get four people together to play padel for 90 minutes than trying to get 10/12 together for a 5/6-a-side football match.

The opposite of what you’d think when studying machine learning…

95% of the job is data cleaning, joining datasets together and feature engineering. 5% is fitting and testing models.

I subscribe to the London Review of Books. The writing is of the highest quality and the range of topics covered is wonderfully diverse.

Testosterone perhaps?

No. There's been the Common Travel Area since 1923.

The 2nd edition of Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath came out recently and is great. It's a rare thing to want to read a statistics textbook cover to cover but I did with this and enjoyed it. The practice questions are very well designed and I think get the difficulty about right for the target audience (natural and social science post-grad students).

If R isn't your bag then there are many translations of the code examples to other languages available online.

I was born in '88, also in the midlands, and had a very similar experience. I can't recall even encountering a computer until high school and then as you say it was just learning basic word processing and making posters in Publisher etc.

The good news is I have a younger brother born in '98 and his experience was entirely different. They were using computers all through primary school and were taught Python at high school.

It's amazing the difference just ten years can make.