Tweaking Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation
I answered a question on Quora about the consequences of Newton's law of Universal Gravitation being in inverse law and not an inverse square law for 60 seconds. The outcome is not so good, what with all matter acting as a black hole and all. What would happen if the law of gravity becomes ~1/r […]
Straight Edge Razors
As most men, and many women, will know, over the last decade or more the ubiquitous disposable razor head has just kept increasing the blade count. This supposedly produces an excellent close shave but even if that is taken as a given there are a number of problems, for instance the blades are expensive and […]
Aikido and the problem of grabbing, or playing with shopping trolleys
Aikido is a martial art which is famous, or perhaps infamous, for being taught initially by the attacker (uke) grabbing the defender (nage). Really this is artificial; one cannot afford to wait to be grabbed before acting, but it does form a useful start in understanding the interplay of force and energy between the two. […]
Of Wired, Wireless, Sky+ and 5GHz, and the Linksys ea6300 router
This is partly a ramble, partly a product review, and partly a howto, and mainly an aide memoire. It will naturally therefore be unlikely to succeed perfectly at any of those, but if you have questions, place them in a comment. We moved into this house just under two years ago, and when we moved […]
Probability, Top Gear and the Lottery
Top Gear recently got themselves in trouble in Argentina, over an argument about whether one of their registration plates was a reference to the Falklands War. According to the Mirror, and I realise this may not be the strongest start, "But bookies William Hill said the odds of coincidentally buying a car with that reg […]
iPhone connection problems, and how to reset it, so it still won't work
I have two phones, currently a Samsung Galaxy S5 for domestic use, and an iPhone 4S for work. I used to have an iPhone 4 for work but its radio functionality started sporadically not working. Actually it would be better to say it didn't work and would sporadically work. About a week ago, my 4S […]
Upgrading from Serendipity to WordPress on Debian
As you may have noticed, I have upgraded from Serendipity, which was creaking a bit, and seems to no longer be supported by Debian to WordPress. It was a moderately complex task, as I wanted to preserve backwards compatibility and a lot of content with mathematics and code. I installed the Debian package, and tried […]
Chess Boards, Exponential Growth and the Ice Bucket Challenge
Yesterday I was finally nominated for the Ice Bucket Challenge, I had actually thought this inevitable for the reasons in this post, but then it all kind of passed by. As it happens, it was my Daughter Aimee's fault in the end. :-). So I thought I would use the opportunity to bore people about […]