You might also like this graphic of population density.

Let’s say that planning the transit to arrive 90 minutes before departure has a 99% success rate, and that reducing this to 60 minutes corresponds to a 95% chance of getting on the flight. I ran some numbers, and at a cost of an incremental 3hrs of waiting time for each missed departure, plus £200 fees, then at 2 trips per week you’re buying back 40 hours per year at £20 per hour. Wouldn’t you take a £800 wage cut (pre-tax) for 1 extra week of holiday per year? Of course, you need to train yourself to be not stressed at the possibility of missing your flight, and accept that you will miss a small number each year.

If you’re a frequent traveller and always make every flight, then consider that you might be getting to the airport too early.

In The Checklist Manifesto, the author discusses the use of checklists to bring about improvements in frequently performed activities. I have a list I use for packing for trips (hardly as important as a pilot’s take-off checklist!) but does mean I pack slightly quicker, don’t have to put much thought in, and don’t forget to take e.g., the iPhone charging cable because it’s plugged out of site under the bed that weekend.

That said, if you are frequently travelling to the same client site then consider buying all of your usual toiletries, electric tooth brushes, razors, training shoes, cables, etc, twice, and keeping one set of all of these at the client site. That’s a lot less to pack and think about. More business travel tips ideas here.

I used to play the Grob (1.g4) and did quite well with it. It’s a trade off, making a slightly less good first move to very quickly get into positions that your opponent has never been in before and needs to use up clock time to consider options from an unusually early stage of the game.

This is a tactic that Kasparov used against IBM’s Deep Blue, reaching a position after 3 moves that had only ever been seen once before at tournament level.

in any long game of chess it’s quite likely that a position is reached that no two players in the history of humanity have encountered before.

More in Nate Silver’s ‘The Signal and the Noise’.

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.

The results are now in:

I’m quite European it turns out. Who knew?!

More here.

Apparently it’s legendary among designers.

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The world record is 1.70 seconds. Mental images of abacuses are the key.

More here.

And then across the road at the Wellcome Trust had a look at a set of books mapping all 23 chromosomes containing the complete human DNA sequence:

There are 3 billion letters in the books, and if you compared your own DNA to the sample in the book you’d find only a few million differences