4 posts tagged “geek”
Interesting article from the BBC about Maths, I quote "The UK remains one of the few advanced nations where it is socially
acceptable, fashionable even, to profess an inability to cope with
maths,"
I can't say Maths was my favourite subject, but I do study and do A-levels maths. I sit in the middle, which leads me to some interesting maths subject in an effort to discard the dull image of maths.
Say your back at school, what is the probability that in your class of say 23 people, two people have the same birthday. Ignoring leap years that's 365 days a year. What is the answer ? Less than 10 % ? How many people would you need to guarantee two people have the same birthday ?
According to the Birthday paradox , you have a fifty fifty chance that two people in a group of 23 will share the same birthday, assuming you have a uniform distribution. Only a group of around 57 people are needed to guarantee a 99% chance two people will have the same birthday.
Back at school I knew some people who shared the same birthday, they
used to hand out sweets & candy on the day. I also know some people
who share the same birthday.
A while back I wrote something about adding Google analytics to your Vox blog to track the ammount of web hits. Well if you want to know how many visitors you get you don't need to add any statistic tracking code yourself. There is even an easier way !
Quantcast ranks web pages by the traffic they receive and unlike Alexa tracks visitors without having them install a toolbar, instead they use a code embedded in the web page, it seems that blogs from wordpress, xanga, typepad and vox have the quantcast code embedded (no idea how they track websites without their code). So all you need to do is enter your blog url into quantcast to get statistics on your visitors. They are not as detailed as Google analytics or statcounter but you can compare various websites against each other and it gives you a pseudo ranking and a fancy chart you can embed.
I had my old e-mail archive kicking around my hard drive. It's from the horribly buggy Netscape communicator days. I couldn't manage any way to get them into a readable format until today ! I found a tool called cleanmbox which is for garbled netscape mail boxes like mine. I ran the tool and better still uploaded everything to gmail, having 778 mails in my inbox. Reading some of the mails was funny and scary in way, it's like a part of my old life, tucked away and searchable in my inbox. The other thing that struck me was how many people I still contact in those old mails. In 9 out of ten cases it's always they who stop sending e-mail to me!
