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.

Comments(0)

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.

Comments(1)

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.

Comments(0)

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?

Comments(2)

Natural History Museum
August 10th, 2007 at 23:17

Comments(132)

Wa-wa-waaaaaaaah
August 10th, 2007 at 01:11

As you might know, I’ve been attempting to learn to play the trumpet recently. As you might imagine, this involves a certain degree of practicing – even on warm days when the windows are open.

I went out this evening, and as I was getting into the car I heard what sounded like someone doing an impression of playing the trumpet, making trumpet noises with his mouth. And he was playing the trumpet badly.

It was the kid next door taking the piss out of me and my piss-poor trumpeting! The little bastard!

After this, I heard his mum telling him to stop it.

Still, he might be laughing now, but he won’t be when I’m a world class trumpet virtuoso.

Comments(1)

Ska Trek
July 25th, 2007 at 02:01

I have recently entered into a bet with my friend Fundar. He has played the trumpet for a number of years and back when we used to go to school, it was him who played The Last Post every year in the Remembrance Day assemblies.

It became a running joke between us that he couldn’t actually play the Last Post very well, and so he has finally challenged me to a bet. He bet that I couldn’t play the Last Post better than he could.

As I’m the sort of idiot who takes a stupid conversation in the pub too seriously, I’ve accepted his challenge, and so intend to learn the trumpet. So I don’t clog up this blog with stuff about trumpets, I’ve started a blog to track my progress. Assuming I don’t give up tomorrow (likely) it should be pretty good – and I’ll have plenty of video footage from which to make a training montage.

Hopefully, towards the end of August, we’ll be having a big Last Post Off, in which we will go head to head in the trumpet equivalent of a rap battle, in order to determine who is the better player. This contest will be judged by our friend JD.

Click here for my special trumpet blog!

Comments(1)

GodTube
March 10th, 2007 at 00:03

If you’re savvy enough to be reading a blog, chances are you’ve seen the Internet’s number one newcomer this week: GodTube. It’s basically a Christian version of YouTube, featuring sickening videos like this one. Or this one. Basically I could link you to practically any video on the website and have it outrage you like it outraged me. So I’ve decided to have some fun instead.

Does anyone remember Peter Florida? Turns out that he’s a nutty Christian and has been posting video blogs to GodTube.

In this first video, “Peter” discusses the Bible. Click the link to see it on GodTube, I’ve posted the video below on Revver too, just in case they remove it.

Incredibly, it wasn’t deleted after being posted, and has now been online for around 48 hours. It must have been too realistic. So “Peter” made another video to see if that would get deleted. It discusses a controversial topic for the church: homosexuality.

These two actually got some comments from real people commending Peter’s religious beliefs, although they’ve mysteriously been deleted since. I thought it was getting a bit ridiculous – as of right now, they both still haven’t been deleted despite obviously being the work of some smart-arsed atheist blogging twat.

I…, er, Peter thought he should up the ante and really show his devotion to God by complaining about scientists:

This has now been on GodTube for a couple of hours and is being viewed by real members of the Christian Taliban. Can the limits of GodTube be pushed any further? Just how absurd can one go in the name of God before being rumbled? Tune in next week.

UPDATED 10/03 00:51. I’ve been found out and they’ve banned me. The funny thing is that because my ISP uses a proxy, presumably everyone in the county is now banned from GodTube too. Whoops.

Comments(12)

The Train Ticket Game: An Update
March 5th, 2007 at 00:58

It’s been over a year since I last updated you on the train game. What is the train game? Allow me to explain.

I always buy a ticket when I go on the train, because I’m a good citizen and all that. I do however, take exception that I’m made to feel like a criminal whenever the Stasi (Midland Mainline staff) demand to see my tickets. So I play a game. I try and avoid getting my ticket checked. Your ability to win at the game varies: it all depends on how obvious you make yourself. It’s easiest when you’ve got headphones in and a book to read, as you’re rarely disturbed. It also depends though, on how much of a jobsworth the ticket inspector is. Some will wave their hand in front of your eyes to catch your attention when they think you’re not paying attention, others will go so far as to physically poke you.

There’s been some interesting developments in recent weeks. They’ve put up some London Underground style ticket barriers at Leicester station, meaning that you need a ticket in order to get past them, and the other day as I was leaving the station an undercover ticket inspector tried to persecute me as I left the station. It’s a good job I’m not a Brazilian electrician, or I might not be here today telling you this story.

I initially ignored me as he said “hang on mate”, but he persisted, flipping down his wallet displaying his ticket inspector credentials. “Sorry”, I said, “I thought you were one of those people who harass you for money”, implying that he looked like a vagrant who tries to scrounge drug money off of commuters. “I’ll harass you for money if you don’t have your rail card“, he said to me in quite an aggressive tone. Was it a threat? Either way, he looked pretty miffed when I produced my rail card and a valid ticket – I could tell he was dying to go all Jack Bauer on me despite being nothing more than a ticket cunt (industry term).

But anyway, this game. How can I tell if I’m winning? To do that I’d have to have a spreadsheet detailing whether tickets have been checked or not going back a number of years… and you’d have to be mad or appear to be trying to make yourself autistic to have something like that.

Well, actually…

In the last 150 days of train journeys (some single, some return), I have spent £736.25 on train tickets, using a rail card 102 times – that’s 68% of the time. More importantly, I’ve had 135 tickets checked, and managed to ‘win’ and not get checked 86 times. That means I’m only being checked 61% of the time. I could have saved £198.65 if I’d had not bought tickets on days I’d not been checked travelling both OUT and RTN, and thus have justifiably spent £537.60.

This is a massive improvement by the staff at Midland Mainline, who before were only checking around 24% of my tickets. This is however, devastating for me, as it means I am doing less well. I attribute this change to my hair and beard growth, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Midland Mainline head office pushed their staff to harass more innocents to try and rape some more profit out of us.

Comments(0)

Not hugging a hoodie
February 25th, 2007 at 01:55

David Cameron has been pictured recently with a delinquent teenager who made a gun gesture towards him. There’s been some tutting on news programmes like the Daily Politics about this – after all, what sort of terrible upbringing must a teenager have had to want to point his fingers like a gun at a prominent politician?

Comments(1)