A rather low-key science drinks on this occasion, as the mid-semester break meant a number of people are away (including our Fearless Leader, who is swanning about in Finland right now). Stu and I were joined by Claudia, Gregor and Toby to discuss a diverse set of topics, ranging from where best to set up camp on Mull to why I have just ordered a pint of maggots through the internet. We also managed to talk some science, including a general discussion on the peer review process and how it works, as well as why it sometimes doesn’t. Gregor outlined his plans for his project for the statistics module he’s taking, in which he’s hoping to do some work on random forests – a machine learning technique involving ‘forests’ of decision trees that is useful for ‘small n large p‘ problems (that is, problems that are high-dimensional but have a low sample size). This means that Gregor will – like the best of us – get to spend the vast majority of his time glued to RStudio. Luckily for him, there is a wealth of information out there to help him get started. Even more luckily, it turns out that R users of random forest techniques also like to party.