Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), that debilitating melancholy that so many people report as autumn draws in is very real, according to Linda Geddes of the Guardian. [1]. It’s not just Linda’s article itself that intrigues, although it’s full of good facts and useful advice. Because the approach her scientists have taken illustrates one of the most exciting and hopeful trends in human learning since the Renaissance: the use of giant data sets combined with powerful IT tools to handle them.
The SAD researchers at the University of Edinburgh., led by the redoubtable Dr Cathy Wyse analysed four years of data, comprising records of 500 000 people from the UK Biobank,[2] a vast compendium of learning on all things medical in these islands To paste Linda’s killer quote
Large-scale resources such as the UK Biobank have transformed this area of research, allowing scientists to track seasonal patterns across hundreds of thousands of people over many years – something that was previously impossible.
It wasn’t long, gentle readers, before we found how this whole new area of learning, depending on whole new technologies such as AI, Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing is transforming our understanding in many areas such as medicine, biotechnology, meteorology, epidemiology…. remember our own praises for Deep Mind and its generation of the alpha fold proteins? (LSS passim). It is revolutionising human sciences like economics and can even help us understand more about the authorship of old texts such as The Bible and Greek Masters like Homer. Because only by looking at really huge data sets can you see patterns, meaningful patterns, which the close view of the human mind alone could never have detected.
Being the curious little monkeys we are, we couldn’t resist asking how this all works. It was like lifting the bonnet on a Rolls Royce when you don’t know what a variable valve timing system is-or anything else. For we were in an arcane mathematical world of Combinatories, Probabilities, Big O numbers, floating point approximations, Complexity, Catastrophe, and countless other recondite concepts which t will always remain beyond our comprehension. You try a few and see how far you get! But our admiration for the people who can handle such stuff, and use their computers to make all our lives richer, like the great Dr Wyse, grew even more limitless. Nevertheless, we will leave you with one fact hitherto unknown to us. If you shuffle one standard pack of 52 cards, there are 52! possible permutations: that’s 8.07x 1027. More than all the atoms in the solar system. Good job no one has tried it with two packs, we say: or they would have to move the Smaller Magellanic Cloud out of the way to make room for all the possibilities.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/02/how-to-beat-the-winter-blues-seasonal-affective-disorder
[2]https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/
#SAD #health #psychology #mathematics #computing #complexity #HPC #big data #medicine
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