Burrell: besmirchable?
Amongst today’s news is the story of Paul Burrell’s complaint against the News of the World being upheld. In response to the breach of the Press Complaints Commission’s code in the News of the World’s article titled Burrell: I had sex with Diana, Burrell claimed that the article had "besmirched" his name.
besmirch: attack the good name and reputation of someone.
Surely in order to be besmirched, one must have a good name to attach. No?
The despicable BlackBerry font
The standard BlackBerry font sits alongside Comic Sans in its effortless ability to grate on my poor eyes.
It’s brash, bulky, fat and utterly despicable.
More than words
My daughter is getting quite verbose in her old age. Below is a smattering of the words that she’s now able to say, six days shy of 20 months old.
ba-bye, bye, cake, daddy, Fifi, go, hello, juice, mama, more, no, no no no, ok, party, Peppa, shoe, tea, tree, whee, wiggle, wiggle wiggle wiggle, wow, yay, yes.
Most are said in context (yes, wiggle wiggle wiggle has a context), some are used to mimic us parents. The big exception being: more. She says more when she actually wants no more. No more food, no more juice, no more TV (rare), no more music, no more being dangled upside down, whatever. It’s really quite funny to watch, her pushing away the juice while insisting more.
Half an hour of spam
22 spam messages made it to my inbox between 7.17pm and 7.46pm this evening.
I decided to check whether my spam box had been similarly inundated. It had: a further 505 messages hit my spam box in the same 30 minute period. That compares to exactly 3,500 messages in the last 30 days (older spam is automatically deleted). That’s an average of 2.43 messages per half-hour period. So 505 was a bit of a surge.
So while I was a bit annoyed to get 22 unwanted emails in my inbox, it’s better than getting 527, and a 95.8% detection rate isn’t so bad.
Thanks, Google.
Signs of appreciation
"You f*cking c*nt. It’s like knowing someone with a superpower. […] I am actually genuinely grateful you small piece of stubborn Yorkshire granite."
Another satisfied spreadsheet customer.
Breaking rank
I was asked yesterday to enhance a spreadsheet to give a table of the top five-ranked items based on number of respondents to a question. With 115 possible respondents, there was a chance that there would be ties for some of the places, and I wanted the spreadsheet to override such ties with a random ordering. So if the most popular three question each attracted 85 responses, order them randomly into slots one, two and three nonetheless.
Excel’s RANK function ranks all of these equal first. To get around this, I added a random, miniscule amount (=RAND()*0.00001) to the total number of responses and used this revised figure to determine the ranking. After creating the random numbers, I copied and pasted values over them to make sure the ordering didn’t keep jumping with every action.
Not pure, but a creative way to solve the business problem, if I may say so.
=(15/17.5)*100
The BBC got it right; the Daily Mail, as you’d expect, got it wrong.
VAT has been cut by 2.5 percentage points, but it has been cut by 14.29%. Prices that previously attracted a 17.5% VAT levy should reduce by 2.13%.
At the end of 2009, VAT will increase by 16.7%, with prices increasing by 2.17%. You do the maths.
Conflating variables: Down’s syndrome
A very interesting BBC article that also highlights the possible issues with drawing conclusions where variables are conflated.
It covers the increasing prevalence of babies born with Down’s syndrome, both in terms of raw numbers of births and the proportion of Down’s births to total births.
With 717 births in 1989 before the pre-natal test was introduced, the number fell to 594 in 2000, but has since risen to 749 in 2006. The percentage of births of which the baby has Down’s syndrome has also increased by 15% since 2000.
One argument cited for the increase in numbers since 2000 is that society has become more accepting of the condition. An alternative argument is the increasing average age of child-bearing women, something that itself increases the propensity for conceiving a foetus with Down’s syndrome.
Identifying the genuine reason for the trend would require more data, specifically the abortion rates over time of foetuses vs. the risk assessments resulting from the triple test performed.
Accuracy with little added value
I ordered a tumble dryer from Co-op Electrical on Sunday to replace the one that’s packed in after eight years’ service. I chose Co-op Electrical for two reasons:
- They were the top-rated Google seller of the machine we’d chosen
- They could deliver quickly.
(My only issue with the order was it taking over a minute to get around to loading the credit card details form.)
Ordering the appliance at 10.38pm last night, I could choose a Tuesday delivery slot, which I was quite impressed by. And further, I received a text and email today confirming an expected delivery slot. Apparently, "it will be between 09:13–11:43", but "times are a guide only".
While it’s all very well that I have a very precise two-and-a-half hour delivery slot, it adds little value to my life. The delivery can arrive any time between 7am and 8pm and if I’m not in for it, I’ll pick up a £35 surcharge.
So if I pop out for half an hour at 8am and miss the delivery, I’ll pay a surcharge despite it arriving outside the expected delivery slot.
My only option is to stay in until it arrives, something that I would have done anyway with a 7am–8pm slot. Ho hum.
Special Needs Pets
I was flicking through the channels just now, and happened upon a Channel 4 programme titled Special Needs Pets. Its Virgin Media description:
Documentary following animal lovers struggling to come to terms with their beloved pets’ disabilities, from parrots on anti-depressants to paralysed rabbits.
Who on earth said British TV was going to the wall?
Spreadsheets @ 20
I’m currently celebrating 20 years in the spreadsheet business—that’s 57% of my life, according to Excel. Hooray to my Dad for using child labour (me) to help him with his insurance calcuations in Lotus 1-2-3 on his Toshiba T2000 laptop back in 1988.
Pulling the pLog
This post was never meant to be written. Twice now, accidental keystrokes have meant I’ve lost it in its entirety. Third time lucky!
I’m currently negotiating my way through a platform migration for this wee blog. It’s currently sitting on pLog, which was renamed to LifeType about 18 months ago. (Since which, its site and its package seem to have remained stagnant.) That is, of course, unless you’re reading this post-migration, in which case it’s sitting on Wordpress. My aspiration is to move it to, you guessed it, Wordpress.
The primary driver for the move is to provide a more professional front-door to the domain, of which the blog will only be a part. (Admittedly it will be the through lounge–kitchen–diner in comparison to the downstairs toilet represented by the new stuff (in terms of volume only). But there will be more than just a blog.
I’m also keen to exploit some of the additional modules and trinkets that Wordpress has to offer. I have no idea what these are yet, but they’re meant to be really good, and I’m sure I’ll have a business need for at least one of them. Oh, here’s one: I’m fed up of the archives module over to the right lengthening by one each month, to its now-ludicrous 53-entry bohemoth. I think in Wordpress, I can have years that expand upon click using some clever jiggery-pokery.
I’ll be using the migration as an opportunity to revise the look-and-feel, one that’s been in place for almost exactly two years, and one which I want to get rid of for personal reasons.
Thanks to Jeremy for giving a brief endorsement of Wordpress and offering more detail, and thanks and bows to Rob for evangelising, but more importantly for getting stuck into the migration headache which I can’t even begin to fathom.
It’s highly likely that the aggregator-whores amongst you will need to update your feed addresses, but more on that later.
Pulling the pLog
This post was never meant to be written. Twice now, accidental keystrokes have meant I’ve lost it in its entirety. Third time lucky!
I’m currently negotiating my way through a platform migration for this wee blog. It’s currently sitting on pLog, which was renamed to LifeType about 18 months ago. (Since which, its site and its package seem to have remained stagnant.) That is, of course, unless you’re reading this post-migration, in which case it’s sitting on Wordpress. My aspiration is to move it to, you guessed it, Wordpress.
The primary driver for the move is to provide a more professional front-door to the domain, of which the blog will only be a part. (Admittedly it will be the through lounge–kitchen–diner in comparison to the downstairs toilet represented by the new stuff (in terms of volume only). But there will be more than just a blog.
I’m also keen to exploit some of the additional modules and trinkets that Wordpress has to offer. I have no idea what these are yet, but they’re meant to be really good, and I’m sure I’ll have a business need for at least one of them. Oh, here’s one: I’m fed up of the archives module over to the right lengthening by one each month, to its now-ludicrous 53-entry bohemoth. I think in Wordpress, I can have years that expand upon click using some clever jiggery-pokery.
I’ll be using the migration as an opportunity to revise the look-and-feel, one that’s been in place for almost exactly two years, and one which I want to get rid of for personal reasons.
Thanks to Jeremy for giving a brief endorsement of Wordpress and offering more detail, and thanks and bows to Rob for evangelising, but more importantly for getting stuck into the migration headache which I can’t even begin to fathom.
It’s highly likely that the aggregator-whores amongst you will need to update your feed addresses, but more on that later.
Sorry seems to be the hardest word
There has been much coverage over the last few days about which level of authority should shoulder blame for the death of Baby P.
Sharon Shoesmith, chair of Haringey’s Local Safeguarding Children Board, refused to say sorry the other day, while Ed Balls yesterday said sorry, weakening that apology immediately by speculating that everyone in Haringey and everyone across the country was sorry.
People often do everything they can to avoid the S word in such situations because of the legal responsibility that goes with it. (Just as I’ve heard that apologies given immediately after a car accident can weaken one’s position during any ensuing litigation.)
So should, and indeed can, the legal implications of the S word be removed to allow people to apologise sincerely without affecting any legal position thereafter? Or would the removal of this link itself devalue the apology?
Testiculation
I learnt of a new "word" today:
testiculate: to talk bollocks.
I like it, and it has much use in my line of work.
Prime buses
I wondered this lunchtime while aboard the Number 3 bus how far you could travel in London by travelling solely on prime numbered buses. Here are the (my) rules:
- The number of every bus boarded must be prime
- You cannot board the same numbered bus twice
- Having alighted one bus, you must catch the next bus from exactly the same bus stop
- No night buses.
Here’s your list of buses. And here are your London bus map.
Ayes to the left
Of the twelve post-war American presidents, including the current president elect, six were left-handed, Barack included.
Given that an estimated 8.5% of the population is left-handed, the probability that six or more of twelve people selected at random will be left-handed is 0.022178%, or 1 in 4,509. (The probability that all twelve are left-handed is 0.000000000014%, or 1 in 7,030,284,356,250. That’s roughly the same odds of selecting a dollar bill at random from the US national debt and getting the right one. The probability of a dozen right-handers is 34%.)
Is left-handedness really random?
An hour here, an hour there
I’ve used Streetcar twice recently for an hour at a time: once last Thursday to pick up some boxes to allow us to package up our kitchenware to make way for a post-builder clean; and once tonight to pick up 21 boxes of wall tiles from Homebase.
Last week I took the car through a carwash on the way back, a service which gives you an hour’s free driving, thus cancelling out the rental cost. Tonight I didn’t, so spent £6 to make the collection.
I can’t say enough good things about Streetcar. If you’re thinking of joining, drop me a comment and I’ll give you my details to save both you and me a little cash.
The future’s bright. Or is it?
I was made aware of the following disclaimer the other day. It’s real, and can be found on this page. And it’s fabulous.
Caution Concerning Forward-looking Statements
This document may contain "forward-looking statements" as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995—that is, statements related to future—not past—events, plans, and prospects. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as “guidance,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “seek,” “should,” “will,” “would,” or similar words. You should read statements that contain these words carefully because they discuss our future expectations, contain projections of our future results of operations or of our financial position, or state other forward-looking information, and are subject to factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. For ICF, particular uncertainties that could adversely or positively affect the Company’s future results include but are not limited to: risks related to the government contracting industry, including the timely approval of government budgets, changes in client spending priorities, and the results of government audits and investigations; risks related to our business, including our dependence on contracts with U.S. Federal Government agencies and departments and the State of Louisiana; continued good relations with these and other customers; success in competitive bidding on recompete and new contracts; performance by ICF and its subcontractors under our contract with the State of Louisiana, Office of Community Development, including but not limited to the risks of failure to achieve certain levels of program activities, termination, or material modification of the contract, and political uncertainties relating to The Road Home program; uncertainties as to whether revenues corresponding to the Company’s contract backlog will actually be received; the future of the energy sector of the global economy; our ability to attract and retain management and staff; strategic actions, including attempts to expand our service offerings and client base, the ability to make acquisitions, and the performance and future integration of acquired businesses; risks associated with operations outside the United States, including but not limited to international, regional, and national economic conditions, including the effects of terrorist activities, war, and currency fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These uncertainties may cause ICF’s actual future results to be materially different than those expressed in the Company’s forward-looking statements. ICF does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements.
University Challenge/Family Fortunes
University Challenge is a time of much competition in our house. My wife and I will try and outwit one another answering the ludicrously difficult questions.
I’ll have a go at most questions Paxman asks of me, the vast majority of which I’ll get wrong. My wife is more selective with her answering, but gets most of her attempts right. All in all, I’d say we average out with a similar number of correct answers, although rarely do our areas of expertise overlap—my occasional successes in maths and geography counter her prowess in politics and popular culture.
During tonight’s edition, the question was posed: what is the English meaning of the Italian phrase terra cotta. In my eager attempt at getting an answer out tout de suite, I bleated out "land of cheese." I was, of course, wrong, the correct answer being "baked earth." Much merriment was had, predominantly, nay exclusively, at my expense.