World’s shortest-lived Facebook account
Before leaving work today, I helped a friend and colleague set up her Facebook account. We then got into a discussion as to whether other people could find her, either through Google or Facebook, after which she got paranoid and insisted the account was deactivated.
Estimated time of the account’s existence: 1m 43s.
World’s smallest prime
While US mathematicians are busy confirming their finding of the largest known prime, over 13m digits in length, I can proudly reveal that I have discovered the world’s smallest prime.
I’ve been working with over 100 other computer owners over the last seven months. Together we’ve whirred through the numbers checking every one, and have discovered the smallest: 2.
Not only is it the smallest known prime, initial tests suggest that there aren’t any smaller to be found.
I’m surprised to discover that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is not offering a prize for our discovery. Bugger.
S. Palin mistake
I bring you potential future US Vice President Sarah Palin.
Oh my days.
Thanks to Francis for pointing this one out, Katie Couric’s CBS interview.
Circuit breakers
Is it illegal to do a full 360° circuit of a roundabout? If not, why is there a gap in their signs suggesting to drivers that they shouldn’t do a full circuit?
Shit British bank names
Today, we continued to hear the revelation of news of banks’ struggles. Wachovia fell to Citigroup, while the Benelux bank Fortis received a £9bn cash injection from the countries’ taxpayers. And the Bradford & Bingley (originally mis-typed Bungley) was nationalised.
I have to say, Bradford & Bingley is a bit of a rubbish name for a bank, especially compared to the likes of Fortis and Wachovia.
Student claims deadline extended
As I’ve said before, the BBC is hamstrung by the shortness of the surfaced titles of articles. By shortness, I mean minimal length, as opposed to abruptness.
Today’s example, student claims deadline extended, brought to mind the image of a student confirming to the press that his/her dissertation deadline had indeed been extended, after much media speculation. And a much more enjoyable that would have been.
Monologue of the day
Why is a vagina called a box? I can only imagine it’s because you put things in it. But it’s not square; and it doesn’t have hard edges.
The original vagina monologue?
What’s minimum wage again?
I just got off the phone from Ocado’s customer services, trying to figure out when our delivery, scheduled for 20.30–21.30 tonight, will arrive.
This followed a garbled conversation with the driver who threw in keywords like traffic jam, rescue van and might be able to get there in two hours among other, unintelligible ramblings.
The customer services lady has kindly given us £5 credit towards our next shop for the inconvenience. Or £2.50 per hour of me waiting. Current minimum wage is £5.52 per hour.
Poker justice
I played poker last night. Texas hold ‘em, apparently. The hand you bet against is the best five-card hand you can muster from two cards dealt to you and five that are dealt face-up on the table.
You’re dealt two cards each. Then there’s a round of betting. Then three cards are drawn, all face up on the table. Another round of betting. Card four on the table. Betting. Card five. And final betting.
£10 was the initial stake, with unlimited buy-ins before 10pm, after which, you bet until you won or you were eliminated.
Just before midnight, the nine players had been whittled down to two, of which I was lucky enough to be one. The £200-worth of chips (and supplementary hand-written 100-chip notes) were pretty evenly divided between the two of us, so instead of battling through the night we thought it wise to split the pot. £80 up on the night: not bad at all.
The reason for the post, however, is to question one specific feature of the game. If a player runs out of chips during betting, they can still stay in for that round, not being obliged to bet thereafter. If they win the round, then their winnings from each other player are capped at their own bet. So if Alberto has bet his last 25 chips, Balthazar 70 (before folding) and Cecilia 90 (still in), then Alberto winning means that they will take 25 from each of the other two players.
At first glance this seems quite fair. But the scenario has always troubled me, and I’ve just realised why. Let’s assume that the three players’ hands have equal chances of winning, and it is merely the playing styles of the players that are at odds.
If Balthazar and Cecilia get into a bidding war after Alberto has maxed out, Balthazar folding when Cecilia raises that bit too much to justify him continuing, then the increased investment by Balthazar and Cecilia has benefited Alberto, as he now only has to beat one hand rather than two. So Alberto has benefited from the additional investment of Cecilia, through it driving Balthazar out of the game.
Further, continued investment from one of the cash-rich players cannot result in them winning by default—they will always have to beat Alberto to win the round.
The trade-off is that Alberto can win fewer chips than Balthazar or Cecilia. But there is no trade-off for Balthazar or Cecilia.
Google Spreadsheets to Google Maps: soup to nuts
Last week, I described how I’d used a Google API to allow a Google Spreadsheet to drive items appearing on a Google Map. I was proud of the work. Rob was less impressed, instead focusing on the fact that the latitude and longitude had to be looked up and input manually based on the postcode or town being mapped. He’s never impressed, that boy.
In a comment on the original post, Mercedes Car Finder (a person, it seems) suggested a Google formula, as follows:
=ImportData("http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/geo?output=csv&q="&A1)
where A1 contains the item to be looked up—the postcode or placename. Let’s assume the formula is entered into B1.
The CSV file resulting from the URL contains four fields. For "York", the first two numbers are 200 and 4. (I have no idea what these are. Anyone?) The last two (53.957702 and -1.082286) are the latitude and longitude respectively.
So the ImportData function brings back all four values, but only stores the first of these (200) in the cell containing the formula, in this case B1. The subsequent three values are accessed through the formulae
- =CONTINUE(B2,1,2)
- =CONTINUE(B2,1,3)
- =CONTINUE(B2,1,4)
Given that the CSV file returned has a single row of data, these formulae bring back the mysterious 4, 53.957702 and -1.082286 respectively.
Unfortunately, Google doesn’t allow you to create latitude in one step through the following syntax:
- =CONTINUE(ImportData("http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/geo?output=csv&q="&A2),1,3)
But nonetheless, if I have a column of postcodes or placenames, all I need is three columns of formulae (the ImportData formula containing the 200, the CONTINUE (3) formula containing the latitude and the CONTINUE (4) formula containing the longitude) to feed the map.
Fabulous. Thanks, Mercedes-selling-person.
Angry Dan
I’m watching a fabulous documentary this evening about anger, being guided through the emotion by Griff Rhys Jones, himself an angry man.
Coincidentally, I got angry at work today. I say coincidentally because I rarely outwardly display my anger.
I got angry with my IT supplier, I got angry with my colleagues, and I got angry with myself. I raised my voice, I got emotional in a meeting (in this case, as has been the case on occasions before, anger displayed itself as passion), and I was unnecessarily terse in my responses to people, both verbally and in emails.
While some of the anger was justifiably directed towards incompetence, some was a direct result of pressure and workload as we head towards a major software release this weekend.
Apologies if I offended anyone unjustifiably.
Flickr vs. Picasa
I don’t know Google’s Picasa. I know of it, but don’t know it. But Kumar yesterday pointed me to it, primarily owing to its recent incorporation of software that identifies people in photos based on other photos of that person. A colleague showed me riya three years ago, similar software, and I was blown away.
This is big. No longer do you have to tag group photos with people’s names. It’s done for you.
It’s a compelling reason for me to leap from Flickr to Picasa, but having just invested $25 for 15 months of Flickr Pro membership, I’m loathe to switch. Adding to that the fact that more and more of my online world is being controlled by Google—Mail, Calendar, DNS, web analytics, search, mapping—means I won’t.
But Yahoo! needs to do two things with its Flickr offering: sort out its information architecture and incorporate face-recognition software. Maybe riya itself?
As for the IA, it’s dreadful. Although for an uploader (or uploadr?), there is a clear concept of the hierarchy into which my photos are uploaded, I don’t this is clear to the viewer. And the concept of adding friends who are already members of Flickr without inviting them to join Flickr by email address seems not to exist—unless I’m missing something.
Someone needs to take a step back from the technology and work out what people are trying to achieve through their photos, both as an uploader and a viewer. Until this happens, the UI will be clunky and unintuitive, and it will continue to lose ground to picasa, and once again, Google will be our default choice.
Giraffe, rhymes with graph. Oh never mind!
In one of my daughter’s bedtime books, I have to rhyme giraffe with scarf. Being a northerner, this troubles me hugely.
Streetcar: is it worth it?
Last week I took a week off work. And hired a Streetcar for the nine day period, at an overall cost of £289.43. That includes petrol, insurance and parking round the corner from our home. It also takes into account a £5.95 reduction for taking it through the car wash, which my daughter loved!
Over the course of the week, I drove 276 miles (444km), averaging £1.05 per mile (65 pence per km). Let’s stay metric from hereon in.
Allowing for a combined fuel consumption of 6.7 litres per 100km travelled and an average petrol cost of £1.15, petrol would have cost me £34.22. My parking would have cost £3.20, and my road tax £4.19, both pro rated from the annual charges of £130 and £170 respectively. confused.com tells me my insurance on a VW Golf 1.6 would be around £750 per year, or £18.49 for the nine day period.
If we say the car cost £15,000 and it depreciated fully over five years, then that would equate to £73.97 in depreciation over the nine day period. Yikes.
So if I owned a car, my costs for the nine days would have totalled £134.07. I’ve not included the cost of any maintenance work, servicing, damage I wouldn’t want to claim on my insurance, car washes or MOTs in this figure.
So I paid £155.36 extra over the nine day period for the luxury of not owning a car, but having access to one whenever I choose, subject to availability.
But that wasn’t my average Streetcar week. Over the last twelve months (including last week), I’ve used a Streetcar on 40 calendar days, travelling 2,573km (1,599 miles) at a cost of £1,591.26. That’s 62 pence per km, or 99.5 pence per mile.
If I’d owned a car, my costs would have been:
- Petrol: £172.41
- Parking permit: £130.00
- Road tax: £170.00
- Insurance: £750.00
- Depreciation: £3,000
A total of £4,222.41, or 165% higher than the Streetcar cost. Even ignoring the depreciation, the cost would have been £1,222.41, or 77% of the Streetcar cost.
Streetcar does prohibit us a little. Occasionally it would be nice to be able to just jump in the car and drive somewhere, without thinking about cars’ availability. But when you look at the relative costs, given the amount of driving we do, owning a car just ain’t worth it.
Placcy bags
I’d like to know the ratio of environmentally-unfriendly plastic that supermarkets’ plastic bags account for vs. environmentally-unfriendly plastic from the packaging of the products therein. A random survey of 100 shoppers all of whom have bagged up their shopping in the shop-issued plastic bags will be just fine. Can someone please arrange this?
The post was inspired by a recent trip to Sainsbury’s, Vauxhall. I queued up after a self-righteous lady, who was proud and loud in her refusal to take any plastic bags being offered to her by the lady at the checkout, instead choosing to pack her shopping into her rucksack.
My conservative, uninformed estimate is a ratio of 1:5. For every kilogram of plastic generated from plastic bags, there will be five kilograms from the packaging of the products. Which would suggest that supermarkets’ efforts to get us to move to their branded hemp bags and the like, miss the point somewhat. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a bad thing. It’s just not the best use of their enviably-strong position. Surely they should be pressurising the suppliers to use environmentally-friendly packaging; or else the government should be applying the pressure, as per SLATFATF’s suggestion.
A cry for help
Whenever my daughter reaches up and tries to press keys on my laptop, she always seems to hit F1 first. Maybe it’s just a cry for help.
Geographical status updates
I was recently asked whether it was possible to develop a graphical reporting tool, one that allowed you to flag a number of locations across the UK and for each to hold and present data about its location.
As is becoming more and more common nowadays, my first instinct was to turn to Google. And I never turned back, although I stumbled a little along the way.
First of all, I tried creating a personal map in the “My Maps” section of Google Maps. This allowed me to plonk markers on the map, but the data within each could not be updated other than in the map view itself. What was needed was a spreadsheet that drove the map data, both in terms of the locations’ coordinates and the data therein.
I found a Google Maps API that allowed the data presented by a Google Map to be driven from a Google Spreadsheet. Fabulous. As soon as the spreadsheet is updated, the URL dedicated to the map will display the new data. Any new rows’ locations will be displayed as new markers on the map, and the data that appears when you click on a marker will also be up-to-date.
The only missing link is the automated lookup of a location’s postcode to determine its latitude and longitude position—few people know their locations’ geo-coordinates. I’ve found this site which is great at returning the coordinates of a single postcode, but I’m yet to find a similar one that can return the coordinates of a whole bunch of postcodes.
Now all I need is a place to host the map. Google Sites couldn’t help, as the code uses tags that are deemed “untrusted”. Ha!
Premier League predictions
If at the start of the season you were to predict the finishing positions of the 20 Premier League teams and then compare your predictions with their actual finishing positions, if you had no previous knowledge of teams’ performance, what would be your expected margin of error? The measure here is the sum of the absolute differences between teams’ predicted and actual positions. So if every team was out by one (either over- or under-predicted), then it would be 20.
I’m not sure whether it’s easy to create a formula for n teams, but a random Excel trial of 26,126 such prediction sets yielded a minimum difference of 56 (an average discrepancy of 2.8 positions per team), a maximum of 192 (9.6 positions per team) and an average of 131 (6.6).
My brother’s performance in his work competition based on the teams’ current positions is 80, 0.4% of my random trials bettering this. Is 80 good? And where will he be in May?
Dim and dimmer
I went to the cinema this evening to see The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas. An absolutely wrenching, harrowing film, one which helps you appreciate the value of life and goodness.
Whenever I go to the cinema—rarely nowadays; the previous time was to see Sideways at the Regal on North End Avenue, Battery Park City in 2005—I always think they’re dimming the lights when they’re not. A good few seconds can elapse between my thinking they’re dimming and my realising that they’re not. I guess it’s not just me.
From the ridiculous to the sublime
I received a couple of comments tonight, which are both worthy of a mention.
First, at 17:15, a comment came through from metaphor on my post of January 2007 entitled ‘H’ from Steps is gay. Below in italics is a transcript of his/her comment.
So what?do you have problem if Ian H. Watkins is a GAY?Its none of your business you all "idiot".mind your own problem if Ian H. Watkins don’t have problem with his sexuality…that is his choice.if you have problem with that then you must be one of those PEA BRAIN paparazzi.ITS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.do you understand…SUCKER!
I’ve left the grammatical heathenry in place for your, and indeed my, enjoyment.
My original post was intended to be tongue-in-cheek and jovial, Metaphor. (I feel like the time in the Friends episode (The One After Joey and Rachel Kiss) when Phoebe meets Mike’s ex-girlfriend Precious, but insists on calling her Suzie, as she can’t bring herself to call her Precious. For the sake of progress, let’s call you metaphor.) I have no issue with his sexuality. I merely expressed surprise at the fact that this was not already common knowledge.
Next to a comment at 20:47 from Raymond about my March 2006 review of Pellicci’s, the fabulous cafe on Bethnal Green High Street:
its us the finnertys your cafe is 5/5
Of course it is, and thank you Raymond Finnerty for sharing. You are indeed correct in your top-drawer assessment.
For some reason, I put the grammatical error in the latter comment down to haste (I love the correct pluralisation of the surname, btw), but that in the former down to heathenry.