Show me the numbers
December 31, 2012 Leave a comment
A quick Google search seems to suggest that one reason to have staff greeting customers as they enter a shop is to deter shoplifters:
Have your employees greet each customer as they enter the store. A shoplifter is less likely to go through with his crime if they think someone might be able to identify them
Or, go for the scarecrow approach:
Welcome to Denton.
November 6, 2012 1 Comment
I was a guest at the Brazilian embassy in London earlier this year, and had a DNA test done to assess the ancestry of my genes.
The results are now in:
I’m quite European it turns out. Who knew?!
August 5, 2012 Leave a comment
Now we have so much artificial light that after a 1994 earthquake knocked out power, some concerned residents of Los Angeles called the police to report a “giant, silvery cloud” in the sky above them. It was the Milky Way. They had never seen it before.
From an article on how it was once normal to have two sleeps per night:
Before this electrically illuminated age, our ancestors slept in two distinct chunks each night. The so-called first sleep took place not long after the sun went down and lasted until a little after midnight. A person would then wake up for an hour or so before heading back to the so-called second sleep.
June 27, 2012 Leave a comment
Welcome to the blog Mrs Price, a graph for you:
The Source is a paper based upon data collected over the past two centuries on mortality and costs incurred at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).
Broadly speaking one can describe three periods:
Here’s an earlier article looking at health care costs compared to live expectancy which suggest the US health care system is less efficient than that of other countries.
April 23, 2012 Leave a comment
Or, why Mandarin won’t be the language of the future:
The learner needs to know at least 3,000-4,000 characters to make sense of written Chinese, and thousands more to have a real feel for it. Fewer and fewer native speakers learn to produce characters in traditional calligraphy. Instead, they write their language the same way we do—with a computer. And not only that, but they use the Roman alphabet to produce Chinese characters. If the user types in wo shi zhongguo ren, “I am Chinese”, the software detects the meaning and picks the right characters. With less need to recall the characters cold, the Chinese are forgetting them. David Moser asked three native Chinese graduate students at Peking University how to write ‘sneeze’:
“To my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. Can you imagine three phd students at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.”
April 16, 2012 1 Comment
As late as 1971, women were banned from going into Wimpy Bars on their own, after midnight, on the grounds that the only women out on their own at that hour must be prostitutes.
More observations on 1970s life in the UK here.
April 4, 2012 Leave a comment
The blog passes 10,000 page views today, and I thought it might be entertaining to look at how people arrived at the site.
Most people reading the blog regularly do so using an rss feed, or via the automated emailing function, and don’t actually visit the site. Therefore page views are mostly down to people clicking a link, or following a Google search. WordPress collects the search string.
Sadly, a number of lost souls wondered: “why do people get more birthday posts than me on Facebook”. One more solution-orientated individual however, wanted to know “how to be more popular than your friend”.
Perhaps the two people curious about the “going postal % rate in workplace” are the same two interested in the “human melting temperature”. I don’t know what has led Google here for that! But I guess I’ve just gone and strengthened the weighting that Google will give to my site being the source of an answer…
By far the most frequently used search term was “marc gawley”, with my favourite variant being “powerstance marc gawley”. Yeah.
March 30, 2012 Leave a comment
This article from Sweden (hat tip Åsa) describes some research by the Karolinska Institute analysing hospital records from which they calculate that over the two weeks from putting the clocks forward, there is typically an excess of 30 Swedes dying from heart attacks. Conversely, in the Autumn, there are 10 fewer heart attacks in the period following the clocks going back.
Scaling that up, this gives a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation for 1,000 excess fatal heart attacks across the EU27 each year as a direct result of the stresses caused by getting up an hour earlier.
March 19, 2012 2 Comments
Not that I read the BBC news website, because that would not be a good use of time, but a couple of items caught my attention today.
Lifted from an article reporting comments made by the Premier League chairman about FIFA
Premier League chairman Sir Dave Richards has apologised for his comments about Fifa and Uefa.
Speaking at a conference in Qatar he said: “England gave the world football. Then, 50 years later, some guy came along and said, you’re liars, and they actually stole it. It was called Fifa.”
He also warned fans may boycott the Qatar 2022 World Cup unless beer is made freely available.
“In our country and in Germany, we have a culture,” added Richards. “We call it, ‘We would like to go for a pint’, and that pint is a pint of beer.
“You might be better off saying don’t come. But a World Cup without England, Germany, the Dutch, Danes and Scandinavians. It’s unthinkable.”
Richards later hurt his leg when he fell into a water feature.
Genius reporting. And this quote from a Welsh council’s cabinet member for education, worrying about the effects of truancy
“To do so, it is vital that children and young people are given the best education possible. To achieve this, all children need to attend school regularly, with non-attendance being unacceptable.
“Missing a school day a week is the same as losing a quarter of the year’s education.”
Hmm. Perhaps improving the maths curriculum might help in giving Welsh kids the best education possible too.
February 14, 2012 Leave a comment
Saint Valentine, patron saint of lovers. And epilepsy.
