Earlier in the summer, I decided to visit the Science Museum in London – one of my favourite destinations as a kid, but one that I had not been to in some time. I’ve always been curious about the world and the universe, and so the museum serves as a fix for my addiction. Apart from taking in information served to me by curators, I also began to observe the demographics of the other museum-goers around me. It didn’t take […]
I’ve seen this question asked a fair bit around the internet. Whilst there are many explanations to the reason why this is, I thought I’d offer my own flavour in the hope that it will help a few more people understand the issue. The scenario is this: you’ve just bought some external or internal storage for your computer, whether it be a hard drive, flash storage or an SSD. You check the hard drive on your computer and shock horror […]
As I write this, I am also in the process of ripping all my DVDs to hard drive. They are pretty much the only form of digital media I have remaining in my possession (with the exception of console games) that doesn’t already reside on hard disk space. Most people have already embraced this philosophy with music – indeed even if you don’t exclusively buy digital copies of songs, chances are you’d be ripping your CDs in order to listen […]
I wanted to make a quick point about the current trend in console gaming. This generation of consoles (i.e. the PS3 and Xbox 360) have all touted ‘High-Definition’ as their key selling point and progression point over the previous generation. Both of these consoles are capable of outputting at 1080p resolutions. As this generation seems to be nearing the end of its lifespan, there are a couple of things that I’ve noticed. Resolution It seems that the vast majority of […]
If you ever encounter some data in your life, you’re likely to come across a scatter diagram, which plots two variables against each other. You’re also quite likely to see a ‘line of best fit’ going through those points, which describes the apparent trend or correlation between the two variables, as suggested by the data points you’ve observed. It’s quite possible that in your early school days, you had to draw a line of best fit through some data by […]
My favourite bits of maths are related to pure number theory. It’s the stuff that we owe the Ancient Greeks a whole lot to. A lot of the things they came up with form the cornerstone of mathematical theory today. The Greeks were obsessed with the beauty of numbers. They liked everything to work out nice and neat, and this meant that their proofs and theorems were very elegant on the outside (though they incorporated a lot of imaginative and […]
It seems that Apple have all but killed off their iLife website creation application iWeb. The last ‘real’ version was to be found in iLife ’09 about 3 years ago. Although there was an iWeb ’11, the actual application was practically the same version as the one they released two years prior to it. With the announcement of iCloud and the simultaneous death of Apple’s online storage and hosting platform MobileMe (something which even Steve Jobs admitted was a bit […]
Being able to pull off a really fast piece of proficient playing on a musical instrument is something almost everyone would like to be able to do. How we go about doing this is surprisingly simple and quite well known. You practice something you want to be able to play fast at a slow tempo. Then, gradually, you crank up the tempo using a metronome (or something similar) and after some time, you should be able to reach the tempo […]
Once upon a time, the great country of Englonia was ruled by the benevolent leader Neelios. He was famed for his mathematical methods of problem solving, and peasants and landowners alike would come to Neelios for justice and fairness to be calculated for them. Of course, his success was, in part, due to the strong support he received from his five noble and wise aides. Drove ‘the Car’ was in charge of healthcare and had almost supernatural healing powers for […]
I’d noticed recently that a few people had mentioned the expensive cost of housing in relation to the average salary in their area. So I was interested to find out which places were particularly bad in the grand scheme of things. To do this, I picked some major cities from around the (reasonably developed) world. I used payscale.com to get data for the median salaries for these cities, and predominantly numbeo.com for data on housing. Methodology Initially, I thought I’d […]
Playing cards and number theory go together like young boys and bishops. Here’s an interesting application of mathematical cycles that involves card shuffling. The type of shuffle in the photo above is called a ‘riffle shuffle’. I’m sure you’ve all seen it before. You split the deck into two parts and interlock the parts together by using a fanning motion. The way most people do it in general is quite randomly and haphazardly, which is fair enough because the idea […]
