A little while ago I gave a talk at Ru3y Manor about randomness. I put the slides in a random order before the talk, as a bit of a gimmick. Watching it back, it just about worked even though I had no idea what slides are coming next. It felt very different doing it, but [...]

Another month, another inflation figure release and another bit of adding-upsey maths. If I’ve got it wrong, please correct me. The BBC states: From January 2007 to January 2011, the RPI went up by 15%, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Wages though, as measured by average weekly earnings, rose by just 7.6% [...]

Inflation screws up all our thinking about prices, but if we’re careful to avoid meaningless numbers, it’s easier to reason about. I’m somewhat obsessed with inflation. It’s hard to reason about increases/decreases in prices, market sizes, and so on when a 1994 pound is to all extents a different unit to a 2011 pound. And [...]

I’ve been playing with Chrome browser extensions this week. My latest creation is an inflation ready-reckoner. It puts a button in your toolbar, click the button and it finds all the pound currency amounts on the page you’re viewing, adding a small button to each of them that pops up a table so that you [...]

Another repackaged hack, this time, one I did at a Rewired State event. I’ve been a big fan of the Behind the Headlines (BtH) blog that the NHS produce. They do something seemingly beyond our media organisations’ abilities. Namely, they link to science, evaluate it and avoid making shit up for the sake of a [...]

A week ago I bought a bike – a folding Brompton, the commuting man’s Transformer – and have been cycling to and from work – a 10km trip from Greenwich to Shoreditch. It’s been a lot of fun so far and I’m still alive. In fact, I’d say it’s been a fount of joy for [...]

You should be voting YES in the referendum on Thursday. There are definite arguments to made against AV. Let’s go through them. The strongest argument against is that it’s a step on the way to proportional representation(PR). It seems silly not to concede that it is, even though we’ll be voting on AV and not [...]

The hack-day used to be my favourite kind of event. But I’ve not really enjoyed the last couple I’ve been to. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m just getting old. Specific things have niggled me though – and I thought them worth sharing. Maybe others are feeling the same about these events. Maybe I’m alone [...]

This is a write-up of the hacking I did at the excellent history hackday, organised by the mighty @fidothe. This story is about my great-uncle, David William Griffiths. He died returning from a bombing raid over Bremen in 1941. He was 21 years old. I wanted to put his death in context, and in doing [...]