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 […]
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 […]
Maths is full of cool theorems. The Pigeonhole Principle is one of my favourites because of the fact that it is so powerful and quite tricky to prove, yet so intuitive and easy to understand. Before I can talk about it though, I need to introduce you to the world of mathematical functions. Functions In maths, a function is a ‘mapping’ from one ‘space’ to another. The ones that people are used to seeing are things like f(x) = x2 […]
In high school, I remember thinking how our grading system was a total farce. We weren’t graded on ‘results’, allegedly. Instead, our teachers gave us a grading based on our ‘effort’. There were 5 grades in total: C – Commendable G – Good S – Satisfactory D – Disappointing U – Unsatisfactory To me this was complete nonsense, because effort is not observable! What the teachers did was to look at the end product, and use that to infer some […]
Yum. Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day. And hopefully, you should all know by now that skipping it is not a good idea. Breakfast cereals are big business – other than toast, cereals are by far the most common way to start the day. But how nutritious are these cereals? I decided to find out. I managed to collect nutritional information for 117 of the major branded cereals in the UK. After whacking them into a great big […]