As embarrassing as having a conversation in the cloakroom broadcast simultaneously with the words of the leader of the free world might be, am I the only one thinking that things might have been a good deal worse?
The Guardian has a story about how statisticians correctly estimated the production of German Tanks during World War II, despite having only limited intelligence. Can any mathematician shed light on why the formula works? The statisticians had one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured mark V tanks. The statisticians believed [...]
This /. post caught my eye. The story that it was attached to was a load of speculative nonsense, but the comment itself makes a lot of sense. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the copyright deities, I’ll post part of it here: You know, as a programmer, I get really tired of [...]
The online, collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia is an interesting phenomenon. It seems to many that it should not work, and certainly nothing in the basic model guarantees that it will be either accurate or comprehensive. It succeeds because it has ‘mind share’: like social networking sites, news sites and other places where the majority of useful [...]
Eddie Mair is one of my favourite Radio 4 “voices”. He pioneered Broadcasting House (the Sunday morning review of the news, not the building), and his witty approach to the news is hard to beat. Someone has given him a blog, and he has put it to good use: here is a montage, provoked by [...]
Not for the first time in its life, Tom and Jerry is the subject of censorship. In the mid-twentieth-century, the target was violence, and the campaign in America led to those rather strange cartoons in which Tom and Jerry were fond friends. I’m grateful to PD for pointing me in the direction of the latest [...]
Another piece on the feasibility of last week’s terror plot. Those behind the plot should, of course, be prosecuted fully for what they planned to do, but security arrangements should be based on the likelihood of their succeeding.
Rocketboom today has two interesting segments of video. The first is an interview with a junior US Army officer about the role of private contractors in Iraq, who points out that these private mercenary forces, which recruit from ex-servicemen now number more than the entire British troop commitment. The second segment is of a reporter’s [...]
Perhaps because the new security arrangements at Britain’s airports have been life-disruptingly onerous, and because of the high-profile ‘mistakes’ that may or may not have been made by police in other cases, the critical reaction to some of the measures introduced after last week’s alleged explosives plot has been rather swifter than might have been [...]
The lack of dreams
Autism and the Brain; Autistic brains ‘never daydream’.