Eurovision Live Blog
May 24th, 2008 at 19:59

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Weakest Link on iPlayer
March 3rd, 2008 at 19:45

Well that was exciting. I’ll post more as soon as I’ve put something decent together. If you’re in the UK and you missed it you can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for the next week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009fwx2.shtml

I kept pulling funny facial expressions.

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Final Reminder! Weakest Link Tonight!
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:57

Just in case you haven’t spotted all of the not-so-subtle hints, or the post below, or are genuinely stupid, here’s one last reminder that I’m on the Weakest Link Tonight (that’s Monday 3rd).

That’s on BBC One, at 5.15pm. Just after Newsround. I’ll probably post more about it after the event. Unless I come across badly.

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Important: Date for your diary!
February 22nd, 2008 at 23:55

You might have spotted all of the subtle hints I’ve been placing over the past few months. I mean, if you’re an obsessive compulsive who’s obsession is me. But now I can finally tell you: I’m going to be on the Weakest Link. Yes, the TV game show.

Its going to be broadcast on Monday March 3rd at 5.15pm on BBC One. Tune in and watch me make a fool of myself! (It’ll presumably also be on the iPlayer for the week following.)
I’ll hopefully put some of the “best bits” (assuming there are some) on YouTube afterwards, complete with directors commentary.

So don’t miss it!

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Holy Statistics, Batman! When regular blogging topics collide!
December 8th, 2007 at 16:59

I noticed something peculiar earlier - Facebook network pages have lots of statistics about the people in the network - percentage male and female, a breakdown of political leanings, that sort of the thing, but there is one obvious statistical breakdown they’ve missed though, which strikes me as odd considering they collect the data in a regimented, easily counted way: religion.

I find it slightly perplexing that at a glance I can discover that 8% of my university colleagues define themselves as liberal, and 3% of them are married, but not find out which strand of bullshit most of them believe. I’m actually tempted to play the “political correctness gone mad” card.

So given that I love facebook, pie charts and slagging off religion, I took it upon myself to generate the statistics myself. As I am a man of science, I don’t want to create the impression that this pie-chart is at all accurate, fair, or representative. There’s the usual caveats of this is only made up of the 1126 people who are less feckless than the 5359 other people at my university who have neglected to enter a religion in the religion box on their profile.

This basically means that the people (women) who have it listed that they’re “spiritual” because they occasionally buy scented candles don’t count. Likewise entries like “none” and misspellings haven’t been counted because I’m not willing to count this manually. The benefit of this though is that the people who do count have clearly at least thought about their religious position enough to fill it in with something coherent, so they can probably explain their beliefs (but probably not justify them in the case of the theists… zing).

As you’d expect, the big religions - Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have the largest market share of the theists, with 38%, 14%, and 18% respectively. Excellently though, it appears that there are lots of Atheists and Agnostics (and Pastafarians) - about 29% of people are going to be predisposed towards acting rationally in all situations. This probably isn’t surprising unless like me, you spend your free time on YouTube getting annoyed at creationist videos, though.

What I find slightly surprising is that considering there’s five Jews, which is a sort of proper religion, there’s 5 “Wiccan” people. Or to give them their proper name “attention seekers who used to be goths when they were teenagers”. Similarly, there’s four “pagan” people, which is slightly bewildering, as they can’t even use the theist, cough, “reasoning”, cough, that loads of people believe what they believe, “so it must be true”.

So there you have it - a breakdown of the religions at my university, as derived from some unreliable statistics.

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Picking on people who share names with bastards
November 19th, 2007 at 16:56

I’ve invented a new game. Its called “How many people on Facebook share a name with someone I don’t like?”. I’ve been trying to think of a snappier title, but the best I can come up with has to be read in a Scottish accent: “Guess who many?“.

It turns out that there’s loads of unfortunate people in the world. Here’s a top-13 list of some unlucky people cursed with sharing a name with some truly dreadful people:

1. Nick Griffin - 274
2. David Cameron - 252
3. James Blunt - 171
4. David Mellor - 47
5. Jeffrey Archer - 37
6. Maxine Carr - 12
7. Richard Blackwood - 12
8. Richard Littlejohn - 8
9. Ian Huntley - 5
10. Vernon Kay - 3
11. Lowri Turner - 2
12. Madeleine McCann - 1
13. Adolf Hitler - 0

There are 171 James Blunts in the world. I especially feel sorry for the ugly ones, who have the joke set up for them by their namesake. At least no one named their kids Adolf Hitler, I guess.

I feel sorry for the Madeleine McCann on there - every day she must glance at the Daily Express front page on the way to work, only to learn that she’s either alive, dead, or whether or not her parents killed her, depending on the editorial slant the paper are taking that day. And every time her location is questioned, it must sound like some sort of sick joke, rather than a genuine enquiry. I hope she’s not planning any trips to Portugal otherwise we could be in for a year of the press saying “Maddy has been found” and then speculation on how she’s managed to age by 20 years.

And the poor other Richard Littlejohns - if they Google for their own name, as people (er, I) sometimes do, they might inadvertently think that I hate them.

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1000 Days, 3281 Happy Memories
November 7th, 2007 at 21:42

If you’re a long time reader - and I mean long time - you might recall that in a bid to give myself an obsessive compulsive disorder, I’ve been tracking the amount of Coke (or more accurately, cola products and derivatives) I’ve been drinking. Not because I’m weird, you understand, but because I liked the idea of generating graphs to show something unnecessary - and the trouble is, once you start logging something, you don’t want to stop as you’ll be breaking the habit. Like chain smoking.

The reason this all began, some two and a half years ago now, was because I went to the dentist and he said I was fucking my teeth up (that’s an Orthodontic term) with the amount of Coke I’ve been consuming. I started the logs on the basis that I’d cut down and then take the graphs to him and say “look how excellent I’ve been”. If you look at the graphs, you’ll understand why I haven’t been back since.

I see it as a great scientific pursuit. After all, all of the great scientists have at one time or another experimented on themselves - I’m hoping that my tracking of my coke intake will allow me to better Marie Curie, who experimented on herself by giving herself radiation poisoning and promptly dying.

So yeah, I’ll just repeat what I’ve been doing, as I guess this revelation could come as something of a shock to the casual observer: I’ve been writing down every day how much Coke I’ve been drinking. And Monday was, somewhat incredibly, day one thousand.

But what does this mean?

What conclusions can I draw from the statistics I’ve generated? Er, not a lot really. In fact, I cannot think of a more pointless and unnecessary thing to log. But lets have a look at the numbers anyway.

In the last 1000 days, I have consumed 3281 Cokes. That averages 3.281 a day. If you break it down by brand of Coke consumed, which I’ve only been logging for a mere 674 days (since January 1st 2006 - it was a New Year’s Resolution) - 54% have been pure-bred Coca-Cola, 7% Diet Coke (a horrifying thought), 13% Coke Zero (yet I still haven’t turned into one of the wankers from the advert), 20% Pepsi (presumably due to my brand loyalty to Scream pubs) and 10% Pepsi Max. This gives Coke an over all James O’Malley-specific market share of 68% to Pepsi’s 31%. Which compared to eleven months ago is something of a fall for Pepsi.

Turning to the graphs now (click the tabs at the bottom on the link) to look at the trends, the Cokes per day average (cpd) is still consistently rising slightly from the all time low back from when I was still in sixth form - although it appears that I’m pushing my threshold for coping with Coke at 3cpd, as things seem to be levelling out slightly.

The sliding average, meanwhile, which is made up of three day averages shows the slow upwards trend to be continuing. What is interesting (I mean, in the loosest possible sense of the word - but you must be slightly captivated to have read this far in) is the massive spikes in Coke intake which have occurred every September on record. The analyst within me would put this down to it being “really warm at that time of year”.

Cumulatively, the trend is predictably upwards. I haven’t been sick in the last three years - in fact, I think the last time I was sick I was about twelve years old - so there’s not been any negative Coke to note. If I were a betting man, I’d say the cumulative Coke intake will probably increase constantly.

But… but… what does it all mean?

Nothing. It means nothing. Which I guess is a bit unfortunate. I reckon I’d make a damn good economist though if I could harness my power of graphs for good, instead of neutral.

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Parking enforcement in “lucrative business” shocker
September 26th, 2007 at 14:44

A few weeks ago I was most annoyed to discover that I had a parking ticket. So annoyed in fact, that I sent in a freedom of information request to try and get some dirt on parking enforcement - I was hoping that it’d turn out that employing traffic wardens makes a massive loss, and so I’d be able to smugly wave my finger at them disapprovingly for wasting money.

Unfortunately, it turns out that employing traffic Nazis makes you loads of money.

If you like wildly extrapolated data based on unverifiable assumptions, you’ll love this.

On January 2nd this year, the council took control of parking enforcement (instead of the police) - they’ve sub-contracted this to a third party company who employ 33 parking attendants. (Autistic level of detail: They want it to rise to 37 pending approval by the council). From the year to date (September? Early September?), how much have the council made from parking enforcement? £1,251,000.

If we assume that to be until the start of September, call it nine months, that means that on average, each attendant has bought in £37,909 in that time- and this is presumably (key word there) after the expense of actually running the thing, as that’ll be handled by the third party company. This is a lot of money.

Lets look at it another way - the standard fine if you pay within 14 days is £30. If we assume that most people paid that, then approximately 41,700 parking fines were issued to make the one and a quarter million pound profit for the council. In the 242 days between the council taking control of parking and September, That works out at just over 172 parking violations a day. Which, er, is probably about reasonable for a big city.

So what’s the lesson in all this? Remember to check if you need to pay and display before leaving your car? You can’t be like Mark Thomas exposing governmental lies and hypocrisy if they’re actually running a reasonable operation? No, of course not. The lesson here is that if you want to make money, start your own council and start fining people for parking.

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Adam Hart Davis is brilliant
August 24th, 2007 at 20:03

As you might know, I’m doing a BA at the moment, so as you might imagine, science isn’t my strong point - and isn’t the strong point of the other people on my course either. There’s one guy on my course, who I think it is fair to say I have a pretty “combative” “relationship” with, who once claimed that the Moon is approximately half way between the Earth and the Sun.

I was discussing this the other day with my friend Michael, and we were wildly speculating about the possible implications if the universe really were like that. I speculated that if it were the case, then the Moon would have to be massive in order to appear the same size in the night’s sky - and that it probably wouldn’t be orbiting us, it’d probably be orbiting the Sun. Maybe we’d have a binary star system… but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. We both didn’t really know enough about cosmology (surprise, surprise) to commentate.

So we thought, who would know about something like this? Then it struck us: who has been recently on TV with an excellently informative yet accessible TV series about the Cosmos? Adam Hart Davis, of course. I’d already pestered him with stupid questions via e-mail before, so we tried it again. Confirming his place as the best celebrity, he sent this excellent response:

“Hi there,

What a simple question, and what a complicated answer. If the Moon were 46 million miles away, instead of a quarter of a million, there would be many consequences.

First, we would scarcely be able to see it, since it would look about 200 times smaller than it does now. Second, it would probably take much longer to orbit the Earth - so out months would become many times longer.

Third, at that distance it would be closer to the Sun, in part of its orbit, than Venus; so it might well get captured by Venus, by Mercury, or by the Sun; in which case we would lose it altogether.

Fourth, the Earth’s tilt and magnetic field are probably stabilized by the Moon; if we lost the Moon we might wobble and waver, and our seasons might become chaotic or disappear completely.

There is more information in my book The cosmos - a beginner’s guide.

Good luck,

Adam”

I don’t know what I like more: the fact that a celebrity took the time to send a fairly detailed response to an obscure question, or the fact that his answer more than disproves the “hypothesis” that the Moon is half way between the Earth and the Sun. Maybe he just wanted to plug his book.

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Ska Wars
August 22nd, 2007 at 23:12

You, yes, you at the back, have you been paying attention? For the past month I’ve been attempting to learn the trumpet for a silly bet. Long story short, my friend Fundar (its a nickname), who plays the trumpet, bet me that I couldn’t play the Last Post better than him within a month. I’ve been recording videos every day to chart my progress. Click here to have a look.

The plan was that we’d have a big Last Post-Off some time this week to determine who is the best at playing the Last Post. Unfortunately though, despite my month of practising, Fundar is doing the most dishonourable thing possible: trying to welch on the bet.

I linked him to the latest video yesterday, which if I say so myself, is pretty good for a beginner. I can pretty much play the whole thing now, but not yet string it all together into one tune.

Unfortunately, Fundar messaged me back doing (blog commentator in-joke alert!) a very French thing and capitulating without even putting up much of a fight. In what I’m sure is a complete and utter coincidence and in no way related to the surprisingly decent trumpeting in the video, he told me that “the trumpet-off is off”, making up a vague excuse about being busy. This wouldn’t be so bad if I had time to talk him into confronting his trumpet rival: he’s going up north back to university at the weekend.

So in summary: I’ve won, but it’s a horrible victory, as there’s no stupid video to post on the internet at the end of it - which really, is what this whole thing is about. I wanted to make a Rocky-esque training montage and be the underdog everyone loves, but alas, no.

Fundar is clearly a chicken, and his eggs are made of deceit. He should probably sell the eggs too, as he now owes me a tenner.

I’m still going to keep playing the trumpet though - at least for the two more months I have it rented, in order to get some value for money. Anyone want to join a ska band?

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