Posts from 2013

Oct 29, 2013

Going back to College

It’s been a while since my last post. After living in London for a few months and working out of Shoreditch Works, I chose to head back to York with the new academic year - rather a tough choice given my other, international option.

Apr 1, 2013

How probable are 3 consecutive birthdays?

Have you ever wondered what the likelihood is of having three consecutive birthdays in a row? It’s a fun excursion from the classical statisical brain teaser on the birthday problem.

Mar 29, 2013

Steady state community

Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads, a social reading community, has reminded me of the difference between building a community and building a business. Goodreads definitely could be a value add for Amazon and the Kindle, yet unless they treat it with a light touch it could become far more of a Goodkindlereads.

Feb 11, 2013

A first look at Quantum Computers

The computer in front of you is pretty powerful, but it can’t factor a 600-digit number before Earth gets cooked by the Sun. No supercomputer humanity does or could build could do that either, so it seemed a sure bet to base the security of some encryption schemes on factoring being (exponentially) hard.

Feb 7, 2013

Railway Data Revisited

I mentioned Network Rail’s feeds briefly last time but hadn’t yet looked into them much. Thanks to Samuel Littley for letting me know a bit more about them. Sign up and your access will be activated within an hour or so. Given that mine was granted at 3am GMT I suspect it’s automated.

Jan 26, 2013

Trains and East Coast positioning data

Back in 2011 I built TrainTrackr, a rapidly-built iOS app that worked together with a web interface to track train journeys. It seemed a brilliant way to tracing delays to trains and getting accurate data on their speeds along the route.