This is a bit of an oddity - it was given to me on the assumption that it is a mystery so I would like it, and there is a mystery element, but the main focus (and certainly the best part) involves an 87-year-old woman looking back over her life. Florence Butterfield is a woman from an ordinary background, but who has an extraordinary life, which is dipped into through her memories in a non-linear fashion. Susan Fletcher is clearly adept at this kind of writing, handling it well and giving Florrie some remarkable events to remember, through to the point when due to an unlikely accident with mulled wine she ends up losing a leg, in a wheelchair and moving into the assisted living part of a care home, where the key event of the mystery takes place at midsummer. The manager of the home, Renate, plummets from her third floor window with Florrie as the only witness. The manager's life is on a thread in a coma, and the assumption is made that it was a suicide attempt. But Florrie is not s
This is the final post on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method, following ' Generating random numbers .' We have seen in previous posts why the method is named Monte Carlo, how it was first used and the difficulties of obtaining a stream of truly random numbers. This approach is now used across the sciences, as well in engineering, economics, AI and more. It's an technique that comes in useful when there is a complex mathematical problem solve, where taking repeated random samples of weighted possible outcomes will give a better understanding of a real world situation. There are far too many applications to go into detail here (you can find a length set of possibilities in the Wikipedia entry ). To see a simple one in action, take a look at this Monte Carlo-based pi generator . But I just want to pick out another application that I'm particularly familiar with from using it to help understand queues in an airport terminal. I've always thought th