Here’s a fun question – let’s consider, purely in the abstract, the notion of quickly putting on a lot of weight. If, hypothetically, one were to weigh themselves every day and, conceptually, throw away all of the results which showed an increase in weight, what, in a strictly Platonic sense, are the odds that actually they’re just a fat shit not actually losing any weight?
Continue reading
Once again, the world is facing the emergence of a nasty disease. I was last prompted to investigate the dynamics of infection in 2014 during the Ebola outbreak. Here I thought I’d examine a slightly different model to see what, if anything, can be learned.
Continue reading
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 recently tried my hand at throwing axes at a wall, courtesy of Whistle Punks in London. While this was a fun and satisfyingly macho activity, I noticed that the attendants were careful to position people at various distances from the target to increase their chances of success. This piqued my curiosity, so here I’ll have a look at why that might be.
Intriguing title, no? These are the first eleven words of Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves, which set up the remaining 600 pages as an extended treatise on the future of humanity as it copes with certain annihilation. I thoroughly recommend it, as long as you can deal with hundreds of pages of orbital mechanics. In this post I will numerically explore this post-lunar age, to verify for myself if it would be as deadly as described.
This blog has been getting a bit too pop-science for my tastes recently. Card games? Word clouds? Urgh. Let’s do some proper physics. I hope you’re paying attention at the back.
Holidays are so relaxing. You know the drill: lounge around, eat and drink haphazardly, play card games, simulate several million card games to gain an advantage over your opponents, go for walks, visit the seaside, derive relationships for expected values of card hands, buy chocolates, smash unsuspecting opponents through brute force, send a postcard, etc. etc.
Almost looks like work 