Viewing profile — xhedley

I was hypothesising the subconscious reason why Douglas Adams would think "42 will do". I find 42 funny for the conscious reasons I stated. It's perfectly possible this did not app…

But why did Douglas Adams think of 42? My theory is that it is from "times table" memorisation questions. Back in the day in the UK we learned "times tables" at school as a verbal …

The book "how to lie with statistics" (1954) was written before tags like /s were invented. Referencing "how to lie with statistics" is an indicator that the author is trying to av…

If a customer owes money to an electricity company which goes bankrupt, that doesn’t cancel the customer debt. The insolvency firm will sell the debt on for what they can get in or…

The daily growth in Britain is -6% to -3% with current British lockdown measures which I believe are stronger than average worldwide. Certainly stronger than pre-Christmas 2020 Bri…

First question posed to data set: when is the best time to post to Hacker News to maximise expected page rank? Given you posted at your calculated time of 11:00 UTC on a Sunday, wi…

The number of ads on YouTube seemed to increase enough recently to be annoying. So I installed uBlock Origin extension on Chrome. It's a great extension - kudos to the developer Ra…

The 8 outputs were generated by prompts written by journalists and submitted by an undergraduate. I wonder what the processing cost was - is this approaching consumer available tec…

BA British Airways had a bad go live day for Terminal 5 because of parking assignment, baggage handlers having trouble logging onto the system, other staff not having maps, delays …

Realise that you will be a translator who is paid to understand the technical enough and the business enough that the project can have a conversation. As far as tools and methodolo…

The 17M is the data set from detailed primary care records linked to 5,683 of the deaths recorded in English hospitals in the time period. The data could be improved by linking to …

Reading the full paper, the population surveyed was people registered for at least one year with General Practice doctors using SystmOne software. That covers 40% of the English po…

UK privately-sponsored healthcare specialises in things that you cannot get free from the National Health Service or things where the wait time is long - for example knee surgery. …

The Verge report says that the Android version was distributed using TestFairy beta testing free version, and that this is limited to 200 users. Assume 25% of the 1600 sites used A…

UK police forces have an option to offer drivers who speed a speed awareness training course. This costs money but less than the fine and insurance rise from the points. A friend o…

The merchant can definitely see whether a card is a debit card or a credit card. The charge structure and chargeback rules are different. A debit card is to spend money you already…

In the case of mobile banking, your smartphone acts as a second factor of authentication. Older style UK banks require you to have a separate authentication card reader for authent…

The frames on these were aluminium alloy - so no rust!

For mindfulness awareness in the moment I would recommend Mindfulness:a practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world by Williams (Oxford University). It takes you through a …

I find this cool as well. I felt (not thought - I’m talking about gut reaction) that the robot was aware just when looking at the video. I suspect the feeling would be magnified wh…

Is Bird suggesting a pledge likely to have any impact on the other players in the sidewalk transport market? I live in London UK. We don’t have Bird because electric scooters are i…

Original post has added London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Rome, Warsaw. Rome (established 753BC per legend, occupied earlier) is close to a circle.

In the UK I believe domestic washer-dryers outnumber standalone washing machines with standalone tumble dryers. I assume this results from smaller property sizes than the US. If yo…