Plan your alcohol consumption • 27 Apr 2007
I was talking to a doctor friend about cholesterol and stuff and he mentioned some interesting facts about alcohol: drinking up to 2 units of alcohol per day is good for your health. The numbers I find on the New England Journal of Medicine site are somewhat smaller (1 unit per day) but the effect is proven:
Interpersonal Intelligence and Mental Violence • 10 Apr 2007
This is a text by Rauno Lindström that has now disappeared from its original URL. I don’t agree with all points in the text, but I store it here for easy reference. The definition of ‘interpersonal intelligence’ will remind you of “EQ“.
A Sudoku challenge generator • 14 Aug 2006
When on holiday, one can kill time solving Sudoku puzzles. When one has done a dozen of those puzzles and one happens to have a wandering mind like mine, one starts wondering how those Sudoku challenges are created, and if it would be possible to describe an algorithm that can make such a scarcely filled-in 9-by-9 grid. Some sunny hours later one has a system that might work (I haven’t implemented it fully yet). For my future reference: here’s how I would do it. REMARK: this algorithm is quite logical and as such, I seriously doubt I would be the...
Lies, damned lies and Google trends • 16 May 2006
Yesterday I was browsing through my freshly arrived Tufte book “The visual display of quantitative information“. One example of “garbage in, garbage out” that he gives is the London Stock Exchange index (which went way down one year in Dec) and the solar radiation in that same year (which obviously also went down in the winter). Plotting both lines in the same graph gives the impression of correlation (Stock Exchange went down because of lack of sun).
BMI is not perfect • 14 Mar 2006
I’ve written a post on the BMI (Body Mass Index) of the candidates for Germany’s next Top Model and I have been mentally bugged ever since. Not by images of thin girls, but by the formula of BMI: weight(kg) / length(m) ^ 2 = kg/m².
ShockAbsorber: Baywatch and science • 28 Feb 2006
Joey from “Friends“, as we all know, is very interested in bio-mechanics, certainly the topic of female movement on beaches:
Intelligence is the mind’s worst enemy • 10 Oct 2004
If you’re interested in high level conversations on a wide range of topics, check out edge.org. Their motto: To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
There’s fascinating stuff about quantum computing and black swan dynamics, but a piece in the last publication jumped out, a discussion on ‘A self worth having’:
Imperial time units: here come the nunes • 08 Aug 2004
I caught an episode of Top Gear the other day. The rather excellent Jeremy Clarkson was talking about ‘driving very economically’ with a big Audi and mentioned all kinds of mpg (miles per gallon) measurements. For me, as I have lived in the metric system for all my life, conversion from ‘mpg‘ to ‘l/100km’ (liter/100 km) proved to be non-trivial. Some research revealed the following stunning data: