Popular Posts

You can go to the blog home page here. Here are some of the posts that have been most popular:

Final moments of flight AF477

On what was revealed by the cockpit recording of the Air France flight lost in a storm over the Atlantic in 2011.

…none of the pilots will mention it, or acknowledge the possibility that the plane has indeed stalled—even though the computer warning “Stall!” will blare through the cockpit 75 times.

Selective arrests following the UK riots

On the 2011 UK riots, and a particular BBC article about them, plus a look at a selection bias used to stop WW2 aircraft from being shot down.

After building up a statistical model of where the aircraft he inspected had sustained damage, he recommended reinforcing armour in the parts that were generally not damaged

Did the Greek Government bluff its way into the Euro?

On Benford’s Law (a distribution that numbers follow, subject to certain criteria) and the use of it to suggest that Greek financial data submitted when joining the Euro was fraudulent.

…criteria were somewhat irksome, especially for an economy such as Greece, but nevertheless the Greeks seemed to comply…Eventually, it became clear that the Greek numbers did not quite add up.

Galapagos Islands

On Darwin’s observations regarding natural selection and how that compared to what I saw when cruising between the islands.

My attention was first called to this by the Vice-Governor, Mr Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement…

Wikipedia was built in a day

On how many man hours it has taken to create Wikipedia, relative to the Pyramids at Giza.

If 3% of the American population chose not to watch tv today, then the entire content of wikipedia could be written by them during that time

How many words do you know?

On how vocabularly varies with age, with a link to accurately test your vocabularly size in a quick, clever way.

…average speaker of English has a vocabulary with about half again as many words as the average speaker of, say, French or German