As I was watching an episode of Only Connect the other day, I learned an (almost) interesting fact about London tube stations:
St. John’s Wood is the only tube station not to share any letters with the word mackerel
Someone, for some reason, some time.
This was such a delightfully pointless fact, that my curiosity was instantly piqued. Why this station? That word? Is it unique, or unusual for this to happen? Let’s, dear reader, find out for ourselves.
Continue reading
This post is about me finally getting over a slight irritation that happened nearly a decade ago, one which was almost completely inconsequential. Fortunately, it was related to physics, so is fair game here.
Continue reading
Sitting in traffic in the middle of London gives you a lot of time to think. Here’s a fun problem born entirely of frustration sat waiting to cross the Hammersmith bridge.
Let’s get pedagogical. Often when analysing a system, it is useful to break a component down into pieces, and figure out which are the important ones (if any). There are many techniques for this, here I’ll look at one called ‘singular value decomposition’ in the context of image compression.
Now that we’ve entered the knockout rounds, I thought I’d see how my predictions stacked up against reality, and how this new data changes the prediction of the winner.
The world cup is almost once more amongst us, which means interminable weeks of breathless coverage, punditry, and heartfelt professions that each match will be played at 110%. In an effort to inject some more quantitative rigour to a field which, apparently, could do with some, let’s try and predict how the whole thing will play out.
I was in Rome airport not long ago, and noticed that the reflection of the striped ceiling looked warped and bent due to the non-flatness of the reflecting surface:
As I’m sure will be familiar to any traveller, the excruciating boredom of an airport drives the mind to wander, so here is my derivation of the underlying mirror surface structure from this image.
