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What I’ve watched
I keep a little log.
We recently took delivery of a new immersion water heater, the old one having given up the ghost after less than four years. Two problems arise, one of which I don’t really care about. I seem to remember, long ago in a distant galaxy, frequently getting embroiled over cocoa and crumpets on whether l...
2021-08-06: Ten years on, and while Scoop.it seems to still be going strong, both of us have dropped it, although it was fun while it lasted. Our accounts are still there, but they are “deactivated”. The whole curation thing, of course, is still alive and well.
When Luigi first told me he was...
We are legion, the folks who recognize that the Mac is not a Typewriter, and yet want -- crave, actually -- a blank piece of carbonless copy paper with its vertical lines at 40 and 60 characters on which we honed our skills, such as they are.
So when I read Kevin Lipe’s Guest Post at Forkbombr, M...
Occasionally I try to impart some elements of good science storytelling to people, and one of the points I make (based entirely on Garrett Hardin) is the big difference between literacy and numeracy. Literacy understands full well that the difference between a million and a billion is one letter. And that a billion is bigger than a million. But how much bigger? My example is simple enough. If a million seconds is 11 days (which it is, give or take), how long is a billion seconds?
It's especially worrying when the big numbers refer to big money. US Senator Everett Dirksen was clearly onto something when he said, "a billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon you're talking about real money". 1
Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the iPod listener. Trickier was the way the various guests seemed to skirt around the predestination issue. In answer to the general question of whether, if you knew all the existing preconditions of a coin-toss, you could predict the outcome, the answer seemed to be a less than convincing “Well, you can never really know all the preconditions.”
OK, but ...