vmilner

I am with you on this.

That (betting pattern analysis) certainly happens in snooker betting and snooker has only around 100 to 200 pro players.

I remember watching a video of Adele recording a song (“When we were young”) at the Church Studios in London in a room that’s obviously part of a church without noticeable anechoic protection, and thinking “How on earth do you keep London noise out”.

Thankfully when I mentioned some topics from a Gardner book when at school in the 80s my maths teacher was encouraging and didn’t squash me for “reading ahead”. Also the Uk libraries near me at the time seemed to have enlightened people putting Gardner books in them.

Evolution of enough intelligence to use stone as a club, or make an edge on flint for cutting?

Hipgnosis did original hitchhikers novel cover: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_...

Possibly because I’m not from the US, but the first thing I think of when hearing of the Federalist Papers is Mosteller’s work on deciding the disputed authorship using Bayesian techniques rather than the constitutional significance.

It must be tough to be the brother who hates maths and just wants to play football.

I remember a conversation with some using an in-house file transfer system “Oh you won’t be able to send more than X GBytes, at that point the chances that the base64 encoding contains a banned rude word become too high, and the transfer will fail”

Originally described here:

http://www.monochrom.at/turingtrainterminal/Chalcraft.pdf

From the Cambridge University maths magazine:

https://archim.org.uk/eureka/archive/Eureka-53.pdf

There are two editions of the book, but I believe each book covers the whole course.

I remember visiting Lincoln Cathedral and realising that when it was built in 1311 it was the first new tallest building for 3900 years... (160m as opposed to the 147m of the great pyramid) though the spire collapsed 238 years later.

Is it worth putting a link to the “lectures on computation” and “lectures on gravitation” books on the site? Unless I’ve missed it they don’t seem to get a mention.

I assumed that was to help get a reasonably long sound level check for the recording.

I think the audio recordings were added more recently than the text. I used to have to listen to my commercial CDs of the lectures while reading the online text.

I really like the extra audio bits before and after the lectures proper - they were removed on the commercial CDs. (“Why don’t they turn up on time!”)

It took me a surprising amount of time to work out where (Ciren) they were talking about after moving to glow-sester-shire...

Very basic words in english (eg water, man, milk, drink) tend to have Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) roots whereas newer more abstract words tend to have come in after the 1066 Norman Conquest, with French words eclipsing their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, as the Norman aristocracy supplanted the Anglo-Saxon rulers.

‘I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s: "Have you noticed how the word 'intellectual' is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me. It does seem rather odd, don't y'know?".’

  - C. P. Snow

It makes sense if Google believe the Eu appetite for fines is greater than the UK’s.

I noticed today that in the Uk a cheeseburger at Five Guys (nothing else) costs roughly the same as working for an hour as standard crew at Five Guys.

Child: “Is 100 million the biggest number?”

Teacher: “Well, there’s 100 million and one”

Child: “I was pretty close then!”

I’d really love to have a Proper Uk ordnance survey map of Sodor - I’d thought about doing it myself but unsure if the required “toolkits” are available for imaginary locations.

What’s the current best guess for when access to IA (or at least the contested parts) will disappear?

April fool?

I remember in the uk that Babylon 5 was available on VHS around 1994 for about 12 pounds (about 20 dollars) for two episodes...

I’m not a big Git/GitHub user but presumably distributed version control is still superior to Systems like Subversion that don’t provide a full clone of the repo, as you can still work during GitHub downtime and then use the good branch merging tools to merge back after the outage?

Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...

Author interview:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lbbQdwu1djc