It’s my birthday! I’m 30 years old. How did that happen? Time to abandon all ambitions of becoming a rock star, I suppose. It would seem that climbing Everest isn’t technically out of the question yet, though. And apparently I’m still a young adult, which is reassuring.
Upon investigation it turns out that 30 is actually a more interesting number than I thought, being the third primorial, a square pyramidal, “the largest number with the property that all smaller numbers relatively prime to it are prime“, the first sphenic number (I’d never even heard of that one), and the first Guiga number (I’m still too hungover from celebrating last night to even start to think about that sort of thing).
Also, no-one I know will get this but I’m posting it anyway because it’s ace: fantastic birthday drawing of Avatar characters as Futurama characters by my brilliant wife (the Deviant Art links might not work first time, that site still runs like it’s hosted on Commodore 64s full of mashed potato).
4 comments 2007-12-09 12:11 Categories: Animation, Geek Stuff, Personal, Science & Maths
Many of the chapters in Irrationality end with a succinct list of morals
detailing how one should act when attempting to behave rationally. Here are three typical examples:
Think carefully before announcing a decision publicly: you will find it harder to change.
No matter how much time, effort or money you have invested in a project, cut your losses if investing more will not be beneficial.
Don’t take important decisions when under stress or strong emotion.
Stated like this they appear stunningly obvious, yet throughout this splendid book Stuart Sutherland details numerous cases of people and organisations acting directly counter to these sorts of basic rational principles. Each moral is set out as a response to a particular flavour of irrationality demonstrated every single day by supposedly intelligent human beings the world over.
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2 comments 2007-05-23 19:29 Categories: Books, Geek Stuff, Reviews, Science & Maths
In chapter three of Reckoning With Risk, Gigerenzer recites a famous quotation, habitually attributed to H.G. Wells, by way of justification for his book:
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.
Perhaps Wells was being unduly optimistic. That day has not yet arrived: most people (myself included) get away from school without understanding the most basic statistical principles. Gigerenzer is not labouring under any illusion as to our abilities as statistical thinkers, and he expands on themes dealt with in works like John Allen Paulos’s excellent Innumeracy to reveal some worrying areas of general ignorance. (more…)
0 comments 2007-05-19 13:07 Categories: Geek Stuff, Reviews, Science & Maths
Ben Goldacre makes an interesting point in his latest Bad Science column, on the reasons for bias in privately funded pharmaceutical trials:
So science relies on independent replication; but drug trials are so expensive, and state funding of research so miserly, that pharmaceutical research is rarely independently funded. By which, of course, we mean it’s rarely state funded.
I’m totally up for the stuff about the dolphins being good, and big pharma bad. But if only 10% of pharmaceutical research is funded outside the pharmaceutical industry, I’m not convinced that’s entirely the industry’s fault.
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0 comments 2007-04-17 10:12 Categories: Day Job, Science & Maths
I gave up smoking because of Nick Lane’s first book Oxygen: The Molecule That Made The World, so I approached his latest, Power, Sex and Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life with apprehension, fearing that he might induce me to renounce alcohol or chocolate with his command of arcane data and his unrelenting logic. My worries were unfounded; fermentation does indeed get a mention, but only as an alternative to aerobic respiration at a cellular level.
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3 comments 2007-04-11 22:04 Categories: Books, Geek Stuff, Reviews, Science & Maths
This is a pleasing little Google Maps hack.
I remember once arguing heatedly with someone who refused to believe that you’d actually be closer to New Zealand, rather than the canonically accepted Australia, if you dug a hole straight down from the UK. In the pre-intertube dark ages I had no way of proving how utterly wrong this gentleman was, because pointing it out on a globe was insufficiently convincing to the intellectual titan against whom my I had pitted my topographical acumen. But now, thanks to Google and this handy little tool, I am vindicated, and shall no longer heed the sneering disbelief of Craig Thingy from Mr Deakin’s class, the dopy little toerag.
4 comments 2007-03-15 16:14 Categories: Computers, Science & Maths
Take a look at this slide-show about ugly animals, which suggests that people are only motivated to help save cute and fluffy endangered species, and are utterly indifferent to the fate of the slightly peculiar looking ones, citing the Aye-Aye as an example. I disagree. Perhaps I’m abnormal, but I think those chaps are extremely cute, in their own weird way; the same goes for the Slender Loris they mention on the last page, a magnificently odd creature indeed, but in no way unpleasant to look at. They are even more endearing in person. When at London Zoo I always visit the Aye-Aye in his special “Madagascan-time” darkroom house, and I am eagerly awaiting the reinstatement of the various Lorises when the ZSL finishes doing whatever it is they’re doing to make the small-mammals section more habitable.
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1 comment 2007-03-05 19:30 Categories: Rage, Science & Maths
Point 4 in this rather daft article made me swear out loud, specifically this sentence:
Two divided by three makes 0.666 recurring (allegedly - actually it makes 0.6666666667).
What on earth are they teaching in hack school nowadays?
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3 comments 2007-02-23 11:27 Categories: Geek Stuff, Rage, Science & Maths
Hooray! That ghastly old fraud McKeith has been forced to stop using the title “Dr.” in her advertising. It would have been even better if the ASA had forced her to be referred to at all times as “Doctor” with compulsory scare quote finger signs and a heavily sarcastic tone of voice, but that’s probably beyond their remit.
4 comments 2007-02-12 13:22 Categories: Science & Maths
Further to my update the other day, I’ve just received a full reply from my MP regarding my letter about the unscientific codswallop being peddled to kids in UK state school science lessons.
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0 comments 2007-01-09 14:04 Categories: Politics, Rage, Science & Maths