Archive for July, 2010
Can an octopus predict football matches?
July 8th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Sections of the media have become very excited about the fact that apparently an octopus in Germany has correctly predicted the outcome of every World Cup game that Germany has played in South Africa. Typical of the coverage is this piece. A few points are worth noting. First, statistically this is not a big deal. […]
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (2)
You can’t keep everybody happy all of the time
July 6th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
… and I’ve really upset an e-mail correspondent who has just sent me these comments on a section of my web site that normally receives very positive feed-back: I’ve just read your article (titled “HOW TO BE HAPPY”) and boy does it really suck…BIG times I tried to apply it by starting to listen to […]
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (2)
What is time?
July 5th, 2010 by Roger Darlington
This weekend, I attended a one-day course on time at the City Lit in central London. It was a brave attempt to tackle a complex subject from both a scientific and a philosophical point of view with different lecturers for the two perspectives and then a general discussion. The scientific section concentrated on the theory […]
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (1)
The Don Pacifico affair
July 3rd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I was at a dinner party this weekend and met a lovely couple. He was a management consultant and Greek, while she was a lecturer in modern history and Jewish. The odd way that my mind works put this information about them together and came up with a memory of a school history lesson that […]
Posted in History | Comments (0)
What are the tallest buildings in London?
July 2nd, 2010 by Roger Darlington
Until the 1960s, London – although essentially the capital of the world – had no skyscrapers, but the skyline is now changing rapidly and, even for someone like me who lives and works in the city, it’s hard to keep up. This was brought home to me recently when I attended a meeting on the […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
What I love about my iPad
July 1st, 2010 by Roger Darlington
I’ve only had my iPad for a week, but I’m loving it. I took it for its first outing when I attended a meeting of the Ofcom Advisory Committee for England and found that, only a month after the device was launched in the UK, I was one of three colleagues using one at the […]
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (2)