[insert witty title]

http://www.geometricrate.com/blog/

After much consideration I have decided to move this blog on to geometricrate.com. The main reason for this is that I discovered b₂evolution, a blogging platform that allows me to run multiple blogs easily. This means that I now have three blogs:

[iwt] SciBlog -- An actual, honest to god, relatively sensible blog about science
[iwt] NonSciBlog -- Same as ever. All of the posts from this site have been imported in to [iwt]NonSciBlog
[insert witty title] -- [iwt]SciBlog and [iwt]NonSciBlog

My last act as maintainer of this site is to stick large, intrusive adverts everywhere because hey! I don't have to look at them now.


If you are seeing this message via an RSS feed then you need to visit the new version of the site and resubscribe. This feed will not be updated again!


http://www.geometricrate.com/blog/

http://www.geometricrate.com/blog/

http://www.geometricrate.com/blog/

http://www.geometricrate.com/blog/

http://www.geometricrate.com/blog/

LATE EDIT: The only comments I'm getting now are from spammers. Comments completely disabled

Jim2 pointed out to me the list of what items you may and may not take on an aeroplane. The lists of banned items are oddly specific, with the following items definitely disallowed:

Meat Cleavers, Sabers, Swords, Bows and Arrows, Spear Guns (!), Box Cutters.

whereas for whatever reason, the following are allowed:

Screwdrivers (seven inches or less in length), Scissors (metal with pointed tips and blades shorter than four inches), Safety Razors (including disposable razors).

I am pretty sure that a seven inch screwdriver, a blade from a four inch set of sharpened scissors and the razor blade removed from the safety casing are all more deadly than boxcutters.

The list of sporting goods makes a half hearted attempt at being comprehensive by listing all sorts of random stuff:

Baseball Bats, Cricket Bats, Golf Clubs, Hockey Sticks, Lacrosse Sticks, Pool Cues, Ski Poles

What about croquet mallets? Would I be allowed one of those? The list of banned self defence items and explosives is equally redundant:

Billy Clubs, Black Jacks, Brass Knuckles, Kubatons, Martial Arts Weapons, Night Sticks, Nunchakus, Stun Guns, Throwing Stars, Hand Grenades, Plastic Explosives

My version of the same list would read: "No weapons. Don't be a twat about it"

I see horrible images of somebody getting searched, the security guards finding throwing stars, a spear gun and a set of nunchucks in their baggage and them claiming that because these items weren't specifically on the list they should be allowed to take them on board.

Finally whilst we were chatting about this list earlier jps mentioned that a bottle of whisky from the duty free, along with some rags would make a pretty good molotov cocktail. Along with scissor blades and sharpened seven inch screwdrivers somebody could equip themselves with a veritable arsenal of weaponry

The whole list has the feel of being being tacked together, trying to cover all the things that may conceivably be harmful. Am I allowed a tennis racket? badminton racket? hell, if baseball bats are banned I'll just fake a limp and bring in a cane.

Labels: wordlesswednesday

(Thanks to RKM for the idea!)

It sometimes seems that you can't move online for flashing banners promising $$$ EASY ONLINE 24/7 GAMBLING! $$$ and wherever casino adverts are found you can be sure that tagging along somewhere is their counterpart, the 'beat the system' advert. Packed full of crazy testimonials and wild claims about the efficacy of their product they make for some really interesting reading:

" I go now a couple of days a week to Atlantic City and always come back with at least $2000-$3000 grand. Thanks!!!! "

"I'm about to show you how you can make an easy $200 free within the next hour and atleast $200 every day without risking any of your own money. "

" Not many people know how to use the roulette properly. Most of them are certain it is merely a game of luck. In BettingAnalytics we have a whole new division of professional gamblers called BettingAnalytips which specializes in what we like to call, "putting the order back into chaos": Don't count on luck, count on systems!"

"IF YOU ORDER TODAY THE PRICE WILL ONLY BE $47!"

Each of these quotes was taken from a random site found by typing 'how to win at roulette' into Google. The information being offered for sale by pretty much every single one of these sites can be classified under one of three headings. Let's take a look at each in turn:

Betting Systems

Every single casino game has a 'house edge'. That is, on any given spin of the wheel, deal of the cards or flip of the coins the probability of you winning is slightly less than 50%. In the long run the casino is therefore guaranteed to take all of your money. In the short term, however, you may experience large positive and negatie bankroll fluctuations.

Betting systems are methods of altering your betting patterns such that (they claim) you are guaranteed to make money from the casino. Well known betting systems include the Martingale and the D'Alembert system. No such strategy can beat the house edge in the long run, and all of them trade off many small wins for a big loss or vice versa.

The Wizard of Odds has performed a most convincing demonstration that no betting system can possibly work, and in addition has a challenge where he offers to give $2,000 to anybody who could prove otherwise. In summary:

No matter what betting system you apply, you lose exactly as much money as would be predicted by simple calculations taking into account the house edge in the game

Casino Bonus Whoring

This one actually works, at least for a short while.

To attract new players, most online casinos will offer bonus money with an initial deposit. For example, if you deposit $100 some places will match you 100% which gives you $100 extra so you’ll have $200 in your casino account to gamble with. To make it so that you don’t just deposit money then cash out and leave the casinos they add a wage requirement (WR). A WR is simply how many times the amount of the deposit and/or the bonus you have wager before you can withdraw. Lets say the casino asks for a 8x WR, if you deposited $100 and they gave you a $100 match bonus, you’d have to gamble $1600 before you can cash out your money.

So you have $200 and you have to gamble $1600, which sounds pretty worthless right? It is, unless you play blackjack. For simplicity’s sake let’s say the odds of blackjack are 49% in your favor and 51% in the houses. Your objective is to break even or close to it. If you play blackjack and bet $1 per hand, statistically, you are going to be a little under from what you started at. So lets say you started with $200, gambled $1600, finished with $175, you’d make $75 profit. Then you’d hit other casinos and do the same thing making more and more money.

There are some very comprehensive guides to casino whoring on the internet, and the ideal strategy tables from the Wizard of Odds ensure that the house edge is kept to an absolute minimum. It is easy to make around $700-1000 from bonus whoring at very low risk to yourself. But beyond that you begin to run out of sites with bonuses on offer.

The 'beat the casino' sites make money either by (a)Selling you an overpriced eBook, or (b)Earning signup bonuses from the casinos.

Blackjack Card Counting

I'm not going to spend long on this one because everybody knows what it is, the Wikipedia article is very informative. In summary card counting is:

1. Bloody hard to learn how to do
2. virtually impossible in a casino because the large number of simultaneous decks in play make it so that statistical deviations in the number of high and low cards in the pile are very small.
3. totally impossible online because the cards are reshuffled by computer after every single hand
4. will get you kicked out of casinos.

In summary: You can't beat the casinos at table games unless you invent some sort of laser roulette ball tracker.

Labels: gambling, statistics

I know this is going to be unpopular with a couple of people but I have elected to put a couple of adverts on this page. I'm hoping that by leaving them there I'll be able to earn just enough to offset the costs of running geometricrate.com and zeiros.net (~$50 per year, not much but it would be nice if I didn't have to pay it!). These two sites host all of the pictures you see on this blog. Without them I would have gone well over the space allowed by blogger for file storage, so they are pretty necessary!

If anybody wants to complain/tell me how disappointed they are in me for selling out like this then they can leave a comment to this post.

Tonight I took a trip to the supermarket. No real reason, there wasn't much to do at home and Gemma was asleep so I took the car out to Tesco and had a wander around.

Whilst poking around the fruit isle I found what is probably the single best item I have ever had the pleasure to purchase: A miniature pineapple!

I'm going to fuck with your sense of perspective just a little bit more by showing the pineapple to scale next to a giant papaya!


My mind is officially blown, I am also painfully reminded that I tend to shop on impulse and should never go out without a shopping list.

The little sticker on the pineapple claimed that it would make an 'ideal table decoration'. I can't say that I disagree. The pineapple is currently on my dining room table. It adds a touch of class to the house that was otherwise sorely lacking.

I am in the process of sending an email to Tesco right now congratulating them on their wide range of amazingly sized fruits, and suggesting a few more they may wish to carry in the future.

If anybody finds any other amusing fruits and/or vegetables I'd like to hear about them. This could have the makings of a brand new hobby.

It looks like the spammers have finally found this blog (it was a good run while it lasted). I switched on the CAPTCHA word verification thingy yesterday but got another half dozen spam comments this morning.

Probably the most annoying thing is that they seem to have figured out a way to hide the title of the post they are commenting on in the notification emails I recieve. This makes it a real bitch to track them down and delete them.

Comment moderation is now on. How annoying.

News happens faster thatn any one organization can keep up with it, this post is my attempt to take a look at how science news has been reported by ordinary people around the world.

The blogosphere (sweet Jesus that word makes me want to claw my eyes out with a hammer) is a big place, this fact is really driven home if you search technorati for all posts containing the word science. Originally this post was going to be a list of links to notable blog posts about science from the past week, but when Technorati turned up over 25 pages of posts about science for the last 24 hours alone, I decided that I would limit myself to that!

I'll start with this very nice post on monzy.com, which details some of the adventures that Google engineers have on 'science friday'. It seems very similar to the Sunday afternoon science stuff I have on this very blog so gets a thumbs up from me.

Darwiniana has posted text written by note futurist Ray Kurzweil. It starts

Consider that the price-performance of computation has grown at a super-exponential rate for over a century. The doubling time (of computes per dollar) was three years in 1900 and two years in the middle of the 20th century; and price-performance is now doubling each year. This progression has been remarkably smooth and predictable through five paradigms of computing substrate: electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, transistors, and now several decades of Moore’s Law (which is based on shrinking the size of key features on a flat integrated circuit). The sixth paradigm–three-dimensional molecular computing–is already beginning to work and is waiting in the wings. We see similar smooth exponential progressions in every other aspect of information technology, a phenomenon I call the law of accelerating returns.

Where is all this headed?

and only gets more exciting from there!

One of the staple physics undergrad though experiments is Maxwell's Demon. 150 years after being proposed by Maxwell it has been realized by a team at Edinburgh, reports Wired

A post on the LVC forums (a site for luxury vehicles, I have no idea what this post is doing there) discusses the dangers of politicized science with a compelling argument about eugenics.

Slashgear discuss a popular science article on how recent technological innovations may affect our privacy. Welcome to 1984+23.

Don Dodge discusses the recent disappearance of computer scientist Jim Gray at sea, and a distributed computing attempt to find him by harnessing the power of the internet.

Why can't this ever happen to me? Child of Illusion talks about the bribing of scientists by oil companies. As a note for any nefarious astrophysicists out there, I'll gladly sell out and say whatever you want for, say, £10 and a packet of crisps.

Labels: link, science

This video does a really nice job of encapsulating the evolution of the web over the past 17 years or so (from the invention of HTML through to today).



It really is quite beautiful and makes me want to go and do some 'web 2.0 social networking gubbins' right now. Maybe I'll click one of those buttons at the bottom of this post and see what it's actually all about!

Labels: web2.0, youtube

The future will be a turbulent place, just make sure you are prepared:

The Ultimate Home Defence Guide (pdf)

Labels: science

This is possibly the best scientology quote I have ever read (taken from this page)

"Rate of change is this mathematics known as Calculus. Calculus, it's a very interesting thing, is divided into two classes -- there's Differential Calculus and Integral Calculus. The Differential Calculus is in the first part of the textbook on Calculus, and Integral Calculus is in the second part of the textbook on Calculus. As you look through the book, you'll find in the early part of the book on Calculus, "dx" over "dy", a little "dx", and a little "dy" -- and one's above the other on a line -- predominates in the front part of the book, but as you get to the end of the book you find these "dx" and "dy"s preceded by a summation sign, or are equating to a summation sign, and the presence of this shows that we are in the field of Integral Calculus.

Now I hope you understand this, because I've never been able to make head nor tail of it. It must be some sort of a Black Magic operation, started out by the Luce cult -- some immoral people who are operating up in New York City, Rockefeller Plaza -- been thoroughly condemned by the whole society. Anyway, their rate-of-change theory -- I've never seen any use for that mathematics, by the way -- I love that mathematics, because it -- I asked an engineer, one time, who was in his 6th year of engineering, if he'd ever used Calculus, and he told me yeah, once, once I did, he said. When did you use it? And he said I used it once. Let me see, what did you use it on? Oh yeah. Something on the rate-of-change of steam particles in boilers. And then we went out and tested it and found the answer was wrong.

I just tried to run through and highlight some of the funniest parts but the whole thing is pretty much awesome. Also bear in mind that L Ron Hubbard claimed to have a degree in nuclear physics.

By the end of that passage my face looked a little like this



One day I really want to join a 'religion' where I can just say Hey man! That's far too hard for me to grasp and if I don't understand it must be some sort of conspiracy. Seriously! who really gets all those dy and dx thingies anyway? And don't even get me started on those summation signs. Oh man the integral calculus reaLLY GETS ME MAD.


late edit: I hope zombie-Newton escapes from his grave and destroys Tom Cruise in retaliation for this

Labels: science, skeptic

A little tinfoil boat floats on sulphur hexafluoride, a gas that is significantly more dense than air. I especially like it when they sink the boat with cups of gas.



p.s. you can see other interesting science videos from the blog here

Labels: science, sciencevideo, youtube

Labels: wordlesswednesday

I guess most readers of this blog have figured out by now that I am a big fan of graphs and when I found this website it was like being invited into graph heaven. IT allows you to plot a variety of graphs using statistics about many of the countries in the world.

It's really easy to use, just select what you want on the x and y axes and then what metric you want to use to scale the point size and the machine plots a pretty graph. Just be sure to remember the difference between correlation and causation since here we appear to have proved that the internet makes you infertile


(point size proportional to life expectancy)

and here that carbon dioxide saves lives:


(point size proportional to population)

The really fun things happen when you notice that you can animate these plots through time (the little play button at the bottom right) and watch e.g. the income vs. life expectancy evolve for all of the African nations.

This is really good fun and I'd heartily recommend that everybody has a go. If you make anything cool let me know.

Labels: graphs, statistics

Another set of terrible (or terrific) reviews for you guys. This time courtesy of Mr. Quickly

As per usual click for full size readable ones










The rest of his reviews (linked from the name above) are definitely worth a read.

Labels: terriblereviews

del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Blinklist and Furl are so called 'social bookmarking' sites, and are a popular way in which many people store and categorise their online bookmarks.

By a variety of different methods each of these sites can then show you other links you may find interesting and begin to build communities of likeminded individuals, as well as functioning as an online bookmark repository. I have seen a couple of blogs lately with 'easy-add' buttons on each post to allow single click addition of posts to any of these social bookmarking sites. I think this is a great idea but couldn't find any explicit instructions for Blogger, so here is what I cobbled together

Step 1: Download each of the icons and re-upload them on your own hosting:



Step 2: Edit your Blogger template, paste in the following code where you want the buttons to appear (with [IMAGE_LOCATION] changed to the URL of the place you stored the images):

<center>Save this post<br>
<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&URL=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"><img src="[IMAGE_LOCATION]/digg.gif" alt="Digg it"></a>
<a href="http://blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=<$BlogItemTitle$>&URL=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"><img src="[IMAGE_LOCATION]/blinklist.gif" alt="Blinklist"></a>
<a href="http://furl.net/storeIt.jsp?t=<$BlogItemTitle$>&u=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"><img src="[IMAGE_LOCATION]/furl.gif" alt="Furl">
<a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="[IMAGE_LOCATION]/reddit.gif" alt="Reddit">
<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>"><img src="[IMAGE_LOCATION]/delicious.gif" alt="del.icio.us"></center>

Step 3: That's it!

I don't know if these buttons will ever get any use, but I'll leave them there for a trial period

Labels: digg, furl, howto, technorati, web2.0

Have a bit of spare time so have decided to give the blog a bit of a spring clean, and to take advantage of a few of the newer features floating around on the internet.

So far I have added labels to a few of the more recent posts in order to facilitate easy category building, for example all of the link farm posts are here

Additionally in order to encourage more people to read via RSS feed I have added buttons that allow you to automatically subscribe to the IWT feed via your favourite web based feed-tracker.

Finally I'm just about to add automatic del.icio.us and Technorati bookmarking icons.

Web 2.0? Pah! I'm up to like Web 3.11 for Workgroups

I love the BBC shipping forecast. If I'm near a radio at the correct time I find that its rhythm and calm enunciation never fail to relax me. I also love the fact that the weather forecast for the sea is broadcast four times every single day over one of the country's most popular radio stations, despite the fact that 99% of the people listening have probably only ever been to sea on a cruise liner. Despite this I'm pretty sure there would be rioting in the streets if the shipping forecast were to be removed.

To my ears 90% of the shipping forecast sounds like garbage:

THE GENERAL SYNOPSIS AT MIDDAY HIGH 40 MILES WEST OF SOLE 1041 EXPECTED SOUTH SHANNON 1038 BY MIDDAY TOMORROW. LOW DENMARK STRAIT 992 EXPECTED OSLO 992 BY SAME TIME

THE AREA FORECASTS FOR THE NEXT 24 HOURS

VIKING NORTHWESTERLY 5 OR 6 INCREASING 6 TO GALE 8, PERHAPS SEVERE GALE 9 LATER. ROUGH OR VERY ROUGH. RAIN THEN SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD

NORTH UTSIRE SOUTH UTSIRE WEST OR SOUTHWEST 4 OR 5 VEERING NORTHWEST 5 TO 7, PERHAPS GALE 8 LATER. ROUGH OR VERY ROUGH. RAIN THEN SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD

As per usual I plan on using the internet to strip away any and all mystery from my life. Firstly the sea is split up into different regions:



Dogger is probably the best region name.

The day's forecast begins "And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at xx:xx today."

We then hear the gale warnings (e.g. There are warnings of gales in Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, and Fair Isle), and then the air pressures in various regions are described (e.g. Low, Rockall, 987, deepening rapidly, expected Fair Isle 964 by 0700 tomorrow), then with that massively important data out of the way we do the general area forecasts

Humber, Thames. Southeast veering southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Thundery showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

These take the form of a list of region names followed by a wind direction and then the windspeed (measured on the Beaufort scale). Finally for each region the visibility is stated (Good, Moderate, Poor, Fog).

There are many more tricky details:

*the word force is only used if the wind hits a 12 on the Beaufort scale, so 'gale force 8' is wrong and 'gale 8' must be used

*The last broadcast of the Shipping Forecast at 0048 each day is traditionally preceded by the playing of the musical piece Sailing By, a mellow string arrangement by Ronald Binge

*The forecast has a maximum length of 350 words.

*Change in wind direction is indicated by veering (clockwise change) or backing (anti-clockwise change).

*The shipping forecast should be read at 'diction speed' so listeners can copy the whole thing down if they do so desire

And many, many more little regulations, customs and anachronisms.

I seriously love the shipping forecast.

Labels: bbc, radio4, shippingforecast

In the last episode of Wikicounting I investigated how Wikipeia treated history, by calculating the size (in characters) of the Wikipedia entries for each individual year. The results were very interesting. In the comments of that post PEB mentioned that it would be fun to see how the size of the Wikipedia article for a specific year is correlated with the number of links that Google turns up.

Here is what you find if you plot the number of links turned up by Google against the number of characters on the wikipedia page:



I used google search queries of the form "year XXXX" (with the quotes), which should ensure that most of the results we return are relevant to the given year. There is a really good correlation (the odd points at the lower end of each spectrum are mainly years around the 1500s).

It's interesting to note that there are only two points with over ten million google links, they are 2000 and 2005 (the graph stops at 2005). In the year 2000 every single blog, news site and poorly designed geocities webpage was ranting about the y2k bug and so that point got boosted massively above the others around it. Just look at the numbers

(year, number of google links)
1998 1,520,000
1999 1,550,000
2000 15,600,000 <-- !!!!
2001 2,760,000
2002 4,480,000
2003 5,890,000
2004 8,100,000
2005 15,400,000
2006 37,500,000
2007 23,200,000 (and we're still in January!)

It looks like post-2000 number of links is almost doubling every single year, some may say that Google is growing at a geometric rate!

next time: We learn which deity is preferred by the people of the internet!

Also give me more ideas please

Labels: google, wikicounting, wikipedia

Don to Earth is the journal of a 93 year old blogger. Don writes with a great wit and charm about life, history and science and the blog contains many great posts and touching moments, including probably the best post I've yet read about Time's Person of the Year, and a brief discussion of gravity

I'll just leave you with a little quote from one of the more reflective posts, titled 'It bothers me that I have to go'

There are many reasons. For too long I have behaved as if I could postpone going indefinitely, and thus have so many things that I must do first. I don't want my successors to find out how much I could have done that isn't done, not by a long shot. There are numerous notes and letters I must write. There are places I've wanted to travel, but never had the chance. Actually, each of you can, if you think yourself into my age, fill out the list. At least you can try to understand why I say that I hate to go.

Labels: blog, link

After introducing my wiki wordcount script in this post I solicited for ideas of things to count. One great suggestion from Abbie was to do 'years'.

Here it is.



Here we have plotted year against 'number of characters in the wikipedia entry'. There are a couple of lines marked on the graph (I gave them fancy names because that's just the way I roll).

The dark, horizontal line is the 'Base Historical Interest' (BHI). Beyond a certain point (around 1850) 'normal people' stop being interested in what happened on a month by month basis in a certain year and so the articles are written by and for a vast minority (historians? those with family connections to a certain event?). The BHI level represents the amount of work that Wikipedians put into an average, uninteresting year. Most of the letters are actually in the form of the sidebar and headers, which my script does not yet automatically remove.

The light, diagonal line is the 'Linear Interest Growth' (LIG) trend. As we get closer and closer to the present day people become more involved with the subject and there is a corresponding increase in the amount of words that get written.

I find it really interesting that when something historically significant happens, the trend lifts itself from the LIG and we see an increase in wikipedia interest. I have labelled a few LIG-excess events here:



The mystery peak of 1903 is due to somebody having messed up the formatting on the 1903 wikipedia page so all the tags get counted in the wordcounter. Naturally after wikipedia was introduced (2001) the number of entries on the year page exploded as people began to add things in real-time.

late edit: I just ran the script all the way back to 1500. The results are here. With this extra data I'm beginning to think that an exponential may make for a better fit.

The point is moot really, as just like trying to observe an uncertain-electron, the act of using wikipedia as a measure of history has been affected by the existence of wikipedia itself, and any and all trends will have been smashed by 2001

late edit 2: Give me more ideas for things to count

Labels: history, wikicounting, wikipedia

Labels: wordlesswednesday

OK internet I need your help. I found this picture via a random Google search:



It never fails to make me laugh and looking at it feels like you have just walked into a bar and bumped into your best friend. Who painted it? What is it called?

The painting is now the background on my mobile phone, and it makes me feel like I have a friend wherever I go ^_^

It is a sad reality of life that my usual routine of 'doing shit on the internet' has been disrupted by 'doing work' and as such the update rate on the blog has dropped.

I thought that today I would share something I have been doing in my spare time for the past couple of days: Wordcounting Wikipedia. I put together a little script that takes a list of words, finds the corresponding wikipedia page for each word and counts the size of it. Here is an example (click for full size), it contains the size of the wikipedia entry for every country with a name starting in the range A-K (clicky for massive version).



Cool, Eh? I have had far too much fun just seeing who the big winners and losers are in the world of internet. I'll finish off the graph soon, but I'm feeling lazy right now. Here are a few facts I've learnt about the world (A through K inclusive)

• Argentina has a freakishly long wiki entry, I have no idea why
• It took me three attempts to spell Kyrgyzstan correctly
• There are no countries that start with the letter X, an only one that starts with Q,O and Y
• The peoples of Brunei do not enjoy writing on wikipedia

What about digging deeper into the data, using new and powerful statistics to let us view the world in a whole new way. The statistic I'm going to introduce now is probably as powerful as the legendary MEPP. It is called the WDQ or Wiki Drama Quotient. Every page on wikipedia has an associated 'Talk' page, where beardy internet people can argue about what gets put in the article itself. I would contend that the ratio of the length of a discussion page to its article gives a measure of how much drama a particular term carries with it. For example lets take a look at the age old battle between Tea and Coffee:

Coffee, 29027
Talk:Coffee, 64620
Tea, 43991
Talk:Tea, 35143

Although Tea has a longer article, its WDQ is much lower than that of coffee (0.79 vs. 2.23) suggesting that in the internet world tea is more popular than coffee, but it has a calmer history and there is not much in the way of disagreement about it (although on the talk pages there are a few sharp exchanges about the merits of different shapes of teabag).

What about figuring out what the best colour is?



Blue. Obviously. Anybody that disagrees is fooling themselves.

The main point of this blog post is that I need ideas for things to investigate: places? football teams? branches of the physical sciences? Using this stunning technique we can, once and for all, settle a lot of arguments

p.s. also could somebody write a guest post for me, I'll buy you a beer. You can even be anonymous if you wish.

Labels: statistics, wikicounting, wikipedia

I found a time machine today, it contained an article from some sort of future science magazine. I'll see if I can get the machine to deliver more soon:

June 15th 2018 - "Network Addicts 'Socially Impaired'"

'Network junkies' show a decreased ability for empathy and social reasoning, according to a new study published this week.

Psychologists at New York Metatechnic have shown that when cut off from the Network those identified as 'heavy users' -- defined as using The Network interactively for over seven hours per day -- perform less well in social situations than their peers.

Although this statistic is worrying, the situation has the potential to explode. "Ever since the creation of the global ubiquitous Network connection and the advent of affordable wearable computers many people never disconnect" says Ken Norris at the University of Reading in the UK. "For those in vulnerable and difficult situations interacting with the Network can become an escape from the unpleasantries of real life to the point that some people can barely function in the real world."

Although global information exchange has allowed many to increase their social boundaries and revolutionised the way that society as a whole thinks about information it takes on a more unhealthy tone for others. According to Stanford University professor Ken Liebnitz "Some of these people [heavy users] begin to build up online social groups based around niche hobbies, and as positive reinforcement acts within these small communities it leads to behavioural patterns outside of those accepted by the mainstream".

Interacting with such homogeneous groups has been found by previous studies to decrease conflict mediation and social reasoning skills and has been linked to a two point drop on the social competence scale

As a greater fraction of the population becomes reliant on The Network for not only their informational, but also social needs, the medical and psychiatric professions will be faced with a whole new set of challenges. Will they be able to adapt?