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1. My New Coins
   Aug 19, 2005 · original
   Nobody believes me when I tell them this. I don't know why; maybe they don't read the news. But they don't. The Royal Mint has asked the public for ideas for their new range of coins. The reverse side (tails) of all British coins will be changed and there is an open competition to decide the new designs. So I thought I'd have a go. According to The Times, chef Marco Pierre White's suggestion is that the coins should "revert to some of the traditional images used to decorate coins before decimalisation: the thistle, the lion, or Britannia, bearing a sceptre and shield". Which is, of course, the very images on the 5, 10 and 50 pence pieces already. Idiot. According to The Times, sculptor Antony Gormley's suggestion is that the coins should be "certainly not round, and preferably not symmetrical". Nice plan. Let me know how you get on building a vending machine mechanism to take asymmetrica
2. Stupid Formulæ
   Jun 21, 2008 · original
   I get annoyed by the stupid formulæ used by PR companies to generate nonsense ‘news’ reports about their clients’ products. I’ve done a talk about them at a couple of Skeptics in the Pub events, as well as Barcamps and the like. Email me if you’d like me to do the talk for you. (I’m pretty good.) There is a very cut-down and heavily adapted version of that talk here . The Telegraph The Perfect Sitcom $$ quality = (rd+v)f \div a+s $$ Dr Helen Pilcher, a neuroscientist (according to the Telegraph) whored her name to this 'research' which was commissioned by UKTV Gold to promote their endless repeating of that clip of Del Boy falling through the bar: f in the equation means "the amount someone falls over". This is about the level of humour the Telegraph seems to like, because... The Perfect Joke $$ x = \frac{fl + n^o}{p} $$ In this case, $n$ represents "the amount someone falls over", and i
3. Pseudo-Random Musings
   May 1, 2009 · original
   I’ve just read about a thing called the Dice-O-Matic. The gist is that the operator of GamesByEmail.com requires a lot of random numbers between one and six inclusive to feed his collection of online dice-games. And inevitably, people have complained that the numbers he’s used are insufficiently random. And maybe they were, once. Originally, GamesByEmail used the pseudo-random number generator built into whatever the games are written in. Once ‘seeded’ with a starting number, such an algorithm will spit out a string of numbers which will have all the same properties as random numbers, except that if you know the seed, they’re totally reproducible (although still essentially unpredictable, Probably. It has never been proven that π behaves in this way. ). They’re generally seeded from a high-resolution timer, so this should never be a problem. They also repeat if you run it for long enough
4. Art Critic In “Being A Bit Pretentious” Shocker
   Sep 3, 2009 · original
   According to the Guardian, Bristol council have taken to allowing the public to vote on which graffiti gets removed and which is good enough to be left as 'street art' . I think that's pretty excellent. I love art when you least expect it. I think that's exactly where art should be. Seeing it in a gallery makes it a bit clinical for my tastes, like seeing a gorilla in a zoo just sitting there doing nothing. Like it's been put there with an implicit instruction saying 'appreciate this or you're an uncultured pleb'. It's like trying to piss on demand. photo credit: Daquella manera No, I like my art to be out in the wild. I love Slinkachu's tiny figures left in city centres . I love the paving slab outside Leeds Gallery with the phrase 'YOU ARE A ROCK' carved into it for no clear reason. I thoroughly enjoyed the melting writing someone did on one of Manchester University's shoe bins with in
5. Fun with the Mercator Projection
   Sep 2, 2010 · original
   On my brother's wall is a map of Earth with the South Pole at the top. It uses an equal-area projection to show the true relative sizes of, say, Africa and Greenland. It aims to make a point about the more common North-up, Mercator projection. Mercator projection maps enlarge areas near the poles so that shapes are preserved. I like the sentiment but I think switching to an equal area projection and printing it upside-down is a little unimaginative. So I created this: This is a map of Earth created using a Mercator projection, but with the magnified poles moved to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I created it using the Blue Marble map from Wikipedia . The dashed lines are the conventional latitude and longitude lines. You get a much better feel for the shape of Antarctica than normal Mercator maps give you, instead exaggerating Kamchatka. Because, the Mercator projection doesn't need to
6. So what if they say it's “chemical free”?
   Nov 19, 2010 · original
   I saw a Twitter exchange today about a Starbucks employee and a homeopath selling their respective brands of instant coffee (just add water) and water (just add medicine) by saying "there were absolutely no chemicals in it". The former predictably led to the skeptic "pointing to everything around him and saying it was all made of chemicals". I think this approach is unhelpful. (I don't think he's a dick.) Sure, to a scientist anything made of atoms (i.e., everything) is either a chemical or a combination of chemicals, but to a layperson a chemical is an artificial substance, especially a harmful one. Correcting errors is laudable, but once a usage has established itself it's futile and counter-productive to insist that it's wrong. In this case, upon hearing that instant coffee contains "absolutely no chemicals", nobody will think it is made of neutronium. The lay-meaning can be problemat
7. Can AV elect a second- or third-placed candidate?
   Apr 23, 2011 · original
   Under First Past The Post (FPTP), everyone picks their favourite option, and the one with most votes wins. Simple, right? Under the Alternative Vote (AV), the one with fewest votes is eliminated, and this process repeats until one candidate has a majority — or until only one candidate is left; it makes no difference. No2AV will tell you that this can hand victory to the second- or third-placed candidate. But what does that mean? The winner is by definition the first-placed candidate -- what they mean is that AV sometimes returns a winner who would not have won under FPTP. The Yes campaign will tell you that that is sort of the point -- if AV always returned the same winner as FPTP, nobody would care which we used. The thing is, elections are so engrained in the public consciousness that it's hard to dislodge the idea that after one there's a very clear "best candidate", and any system th
8. Security Is A Spectrum
   Jan 17, 2012 · original
   Recently, a security hole was found in WhatsApp Messenger’s implementation of the Signal protocol . Signal is the messaging app created by Whisper Systems and it uses a fairly complex system of mostly throwaway encryption keys . If you reinstall the app for any reason, you lose all those keys. Because Signal is built for security above all else, it will warn all your contacts about this — and lock you both out until they confirm that this new installation is still you. WhatsApp uses all the same code as Signal to deliver security, but does not have this warning by default, and will deliver messages without confirming keys. And it's possible for Facebook (who own WhatsApp) to trigger the key rotation without you reinstalling, at which point they can in theory insert themselves as a middleman and the app won't tell you. It also means that if I steal your sim card, I can pose as you on What
9. Why I Support Scottish Independence
   Jan 19, 2012 · original
   With the issue of Scottish independence looming again, the question of the flag has come up. I really like the Union Jack. I think it's an ace flag. But The Sun have mocked-up a version of how it might look without Scotland . I'm not impressed. First of all the airbrushing is clumsy, and secondly the Irish cross should be centred in each quadrant without the white, Scottish one competing for the space. But mostly, I think it lacks imagination. Let's bring Wales into the fold. This would seem an obvious start: I quite like that. But then I discovered that Wales has a back-up flag , so we could have this rather dangerous number: Who's going to mess with the United Kingdom with that flying from our castles? That's a flag you do not fuck with. Better still, Northern Ireland has more flags than a Republican fundraiser , so if the above is considered too intimidating, we could go with this: Wh
10. 1bn Hiroshimas = 1 (Isle of Wight) × 20 (speeding bullets)
    Jul 22, 2012 · original
    I think one of the problems with science journalism is that before a science story can be reported in the news media, someone has to convert everything from metric to journalist units. But some recent work may allow us to do science directly in journalist units, thereby making scientific papers immediately understandable to laypeople. According to a throwaway letter in the Guardian 1 billion Hiroshimas = 1 Isle of Wight × 20 speeding bullets This is based on a G2 article about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs that described the asteroid's mass, energy and speed in those terms. Unfortunately, the equation is wrong, as you can't multiply speed by islands to get explosions. But it's not far off. In fact, kinetic energy K = ½ mv 2 , where m is mass and v is speed — so actually 1 Chicxulub asteroid strike = 10 9 Hiroshimas = ½ Isle of Wight × (20 × speeding bullet) 2 I'll forgive the
11. The Domino Computer
    Oct 1, 2012 · original
    As part of the Manchester Science Festival 2012, Matt Parker decided to demonstrate how computers worked by building one out of dominoes. This page will show you how the domino computer was designed — here is the official video from the weekend, but be aware it contains answers to some of the interactive domino puzzles below. The computer comprised about ten thousand dominoes, and could add up any two three-bit numbers to give a four-bit number (although only once). I was part of the team which built it, and helped design the layout. Like (nearly) all computers, ours uses binary. This is much like the decimal numbers you’re used to, except that the largest digit is 1 — so we count 0, 1 as normal, but we can't write a ‘2’, so the next number is 10. Then we go 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, and so on. The aim is to demonstrate how very simple reactions, simple enough that they occur in real
12. “Unicorn” “Layer” “Discovered” in “North Korea”
    Dec 2, 2012 · original
    Today, the Guardian helpfully informed me that a unicorn lair had been discovered in North Korea . Apparently the journalist in question didn't entirely believe this news, since "discovered" was in quotation marks. If it were me, I might have chosen "unicorn" as the word to call into question, but apparently we're assuming unicorns are plausible but discovery is suspect. Okay, whatever. Readers of the Daily Mail , Telegraph and Sun will be familiar with the story. I don't know who broke this inane non-story, but it's probably safe to assume the others copied it, since three of them refer to the unrelated Chinese report that Kim Jong-Un had been voted the world's sexiest man but turned out to be based on an Onion spoof, and two included — verbatim — the sentence "satisfied with his performance, he reportedly immediately declared his retirement from the sport." They're all very keen to poi
13. The Megapixel
    Oct 1, 2016 · original
    As part of the Manchester Science Festival 2016, Katie Steckles decided to build a monitor for the domino computer . Or rather, to demonstrate how a computer monitor builds up an image from red, green and blue pixels by making a giant one from pens. This was the Megapixel project . The final image comprised around eight thousand pixels, each much like these ones that Angie coloured: Dropped into @msimanchester for some therapeutic lunchtime colouring in with @mcrmegapixel #msf16 pic.twitter.com/QUtE6eSkWa — Angie Chan (@angieokchan) October 26, 2016 This came about because Matt Parker , for Festival of the Spoken Nerd ’s Full Frontal Nerdity show, wanted to convert photographs into spreadsheets. He did the first couple himself, longhand, but later asked me to build a tool to automate the process . My PhD had a chapter or two on accurately measuring colours in digital images, and so I was
14. A Christmas Gathering
    Nov 29, 2016 · original
    The hoods came down, as they had the last two thousand times. “Hail,” the gathered creatures said in unison. Ruprecht took the lead, as he had the last two thousand times. A grizzled man, with a cane, a long beard, and a face that had seen much. It had seen everything. “My friends, we are reaching the end-times. We have barely fifty years left before our glorious work is complete. Come, brothers, and recount the deeds you have performed since last we met to bring about the End of Days.” Krampus went first, as he had the last two thousand times. He had red eyes, and a long, pointed face, with greasy, black hair and the horns of a goat. “I have taken the Jackson child,” he said. “She will toil in the mines, and never become the prophesied warrior who could have stopped our plans. Our success is all but guaranteed.” They went around the circle, as they had the last two thousand times. Befan
15. Mastodon Bots
    Dec 1, 2016 · original
    Fish Exist. Fish Exist is a parody of QI’s excellent podcast No Such Thing as a Fish , designed to generate interesting facts instead of researching them. It first pulls Wikipedia’s list of No Such Thing As A Fish episodes , pulls out all the headline facts, and feeds them into my Markov chain implementation . Every few hours, it picks a fact from the real list, and uses the first two words as a seed to generate a sentence. (If it generates one of the original facts verbatim, it rejects it and generates another — although it does sometimes rephrase them.) The source code is on GitHub , and it generates things like: A kangaroo's tail is used as an apartment block. Kaiser Wilhelm II once lost a valuable arms contract for Germany because he was feeling irritable. The Aztecs wore necklaces made out of marzipan and got angry when people ate them. David Frost used to scare woodpeckers. Despera
16. Hacking my Roomba
    Jan 1, 2018 · original
    Like most programmers, I live alone, which means I end up in charge of rather more housework than I am altogether prepared to do. To fix it, I bought a Roomba. Specifically, I bought the cheapest Roomba there is, on the basis that it's a robot that cleans my floor and I didn't entirely understand what the premium version of that product would be. It turns out that the cheap one can't be scheduled to run at a particular time. At least, OK, you could do it using the buttons on top if you buy this tiny internet-enabled robot designed to sit next to buttons and press them when you activate it . . If you take the face-plate off, there's a serial port, and if you send the number 135 into it, the Roomba will clean the floor. Perhaps the normal way of doing this is with an Arduino, but I don't really know how those work. I'm a JavaScript guy, so I did what I knew and bought a Raspberry Pi Zero W
17. Vim must die and Emacs must not take its place
    Jul 1, 2018 · original
    My preferred text editor is Sublime . Atom is pretty good too, and I hear good things about VS Code . They're all proper, modern applications with tabs, menus, and so forth. They're powerful but accessible, making the common things easy and the rare things possible, like all good software should. Sometimes, though, I have to SSH into a remote machine and quickly edit the crontab file. Or I have to plug a keyboard and screen into a Raspberry Pi and edit the Wifi settings file . Or Git is also bad software, at least, in its command-line form. git should be seen as an API to program against, not something humans directly use. and have to enter a commit messge. And in those cases, I need a terminal-based text editor. And they're all awful. Quick sidebar to discuss design. In The Design of Everyday Things , first published in 1988 — a year we’ll come back to — Don Norman talks of affordances
18. Con Medicine
    Dec 15, 2018 · original
    A while back I wrote a thread on a social media website which I no longer use, about this Unicode character, a famously terrible joke, and Christmas. ffi "ffi" is the Latin Small Ffi Ligature . It's a nice way of presenting two Fs and an I (say, in "efficient") without the various dots and ascenders mushing together. Most fonts have it, and you see it every day without noticing it. There are versions for other combinations of too. Depending what font you're using, some, all or none of them may look different to the individual letters ffi f‌f‌i fi f‌i st s‌t Usually they just look nice and get out of the way, but ligatures can cause problems, say when a passage in a book is supposed to look like it's written on a typewriter but the typesetter forgot to turn them off. No typewriter has an "fi" key. And usually they're added in automatically, rather than being encoded in the text, but sometimes (as in
19. Searching Obsidian through Gnome
    Jun 28, 2024 · original
    I recently started using Obsidian as my main notes app, and Linux with Gnome as my main OS. One of my favourite things about Gnome is the unified "search" mode it enters when you hit the "super" key (what Linux calls the Windows key) — from here you can type the names of apps, unicode characters, contacts, or files, you can do calculations, search the web, install new software... just about anything your computer can do, you can do through Gnome search. This is all very nice, except that if I search for something in my Obsidian vault, it opens the note in the Gnome default code editor rather than Obsidian. This isn't bad . In many ways it's great — because Obsidian stores its data just as Markdown files, Gnome can index them and they open just fine in Code. This happens out of the box, and it's fine , and nobody wrote a single line of code to make it happen, it's just the result of every
20. eslint-no-javascript
    Jul 4, 2024 · original
    I recently found an eslint rule called no-plusplus . It's based on the logic that since this code— i ++ j —increments j instead of i , which is confusing, what we're going to do is ban the ++ operator. This logic is completely sound and reasonable, as are all the other eminently sensible rules that eslint enforces by default. If I have one criticism of them, it is that they do not go far enough. And to that end, I have created eslint-no-javascript , which enforces that developers must not use JavaScript. Any code in your source other than whitespace and comments will be rejected, and if you use the --fix option it will be removed. JavaScript is the cause of most accessibility, usability, performance and security issues in modern webapps and its use is discouraged by all reputable experts. This plugin can remove this problem from all of your projects. This is the only eslint plugin you wi

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