Really Bad Science: BBC announces laws of physics no longer valid
10 Nov 2007 3:16pm GMT I’ve recently enriched my Google Reader subscription list with a bunch of feeds which I tag as “skeptical news”. The blog that introduced me to this was Bad Science by Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre. His last column talks about the recent BBC coverage of another ridiculous free energy device. Go read it, it’s very good. Here’s [...]
Anti-spam services: Defensio vs Akismet
8 Nov 2007 12:28pm GMT I’ve decided to try out Defensio, to see if it beats Akismet as an anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Akismet is a nice simple “set and forget” solution but the odd false negative does slip through occasionally. The setup process for Defensio is almost identical to Akismet but the management interface looks better and they have [...]
Facebook and the birthday paradox
27 Sep 2007 12:50pm GMT This is one for math geeks with a Facebook account. I recently heard of an interesting probability problem called the Birthday Paradox. I think it was on the excellent Five Numbers series on BBC Radio 4 (or one of the 2 follow-up series). Anyway, the problem states that if you put 23 (or more) randomly [...]
Attack of the d2e Zombie Copy
15 Mar 2007 11:20am GMT The title of this post was inspired by the excellent A List Apart article by Erin Kissane (published on October 24, 2005). As Erin puts it: “You’ve seen them around the web, these zombie sentences. They’re not hard to recognize: syntax slack and drooling, clauses empty of everything but a terrible hunger for human brains.” The following [...]
xkcd on random numbers
9 Feb 2007 10:04am GMT Another gem from xkcd today: If you haven’t subscribed to xkcd yet, do it now, damn it!