Questions Nobody Asked..

Back in February 2009, I created my Twitter account, upon the insistence of my then-girlfriend.

Alright, let's be done with this.

<rant> So it's around 9am, and you're waiting for a train.

Here's a puzzle, tweeted by Aetherling Have a go at it yourself.

So there's four of us at the pub, and we're playing the one word game.

So I started using SleepBot Tracker to track my sleep.

In these times of austerity, one has to be economical with one's wrapping paper.

The run up to Christmas is over, and hopefully everyone has their Christmas shopping done.

One of the common criticisms of Deal or No Deal (DoND) is that it's basically all just luck, and requires no skill.

Leaving it til the last Minute So yesterday was what the tabloids called Panic Saturday - the last Saturday before Christmas (excluding Christmas eve), and the day on which everyone goes batshit crazy 'cause they've just realised, it's a week to Christmas…

The Question As the title suggests - which is the best (least busy) day to go shopping on?

So there are plenty of ways to arrange your DVDs, if indeed you chose to arrange them at all.

So if you have a loyalty card for, say, Costa you will get 5 points for every pound you spend.

What the Puck?

Hangman, for those unfamiliar, is a popular way for primary school teachers to teach spelling in the guise of a fun guessing game, and a way for secondary school teachers to pass the time at the end of term when they can't be bothered with teaching.

Cold Hard Logic Let's be frank, Su Doku solvers are dime a dozen.

"..Don't even blink.

Gentlemen, do you leave to toilet seat up, or courteously put it down after use?

Where were we..

Coherence of Absence So imagine it's Sunday, there's nothing to do, nothing's open, nowhere to go, nothing on TV.

Pre-Ramble The problem with what I've described previously is it's all a bit fuzzy - it's based on flow diagrams and vague descriptions, it was informal, and lacked precision.

Probability is tricky.

If you'll recall, in early February I created a T-shirt calendar - that is, a 'calendar' where each square is coloured according to the colour of the T-shirt I wore on that day.

Where Things Get Interesting Recall in Part 3 (under 'Notes and Improvements'), I mentioned the possibility of creating graphs of how a post spreads - ie who reblogged who.

No SIR So having written the previous posts, I was wondering if this spread could be modeled.

I Didn't Vote For This A short while back, while people still cared about AV versus FPTP voting, I wanted to come up with a voter simulation, so as to get data to compare the merits of the two (and a few other) systems, since real-world data is limited.

I've talked about Tumblr before, and I've talked about using epidemiology models as an analogue for the spread of 'information' on social networks.

A couple years back I got it in my head that I was going to try and write a musical about time travel.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom, and wonder "how much smaller would the toilet roll be if it didn't have that hole in the middle?".

Say you made a thing.

Have cookie.

When the parent's work schedules both coincide with a school day, it's often my displeasure to have to retrieve the small one from school.

Two of my friends recently (independently) wrote blogs on conceptually similar subjects.

First of all, you've probably noticed the new logo.

One of the things that stuck in my mind from the last blog's analysis was 2007 The top two films for RT Score and Audience Score were Juno and No Country for Old Men.

When I was putting together the Life by Numbers blog, I was thinking about other things I could track, without the tracking thing becoming too intrusive.

So I first looked at this here, with a follow up here.

I'm sticking these in a new post, rather than updating the last post (and potentially, nobody seeing them).

Or Chutes and Ladder, if you're American.

What Do Critics Know This is something I looked at briefly last year.

So a model of a petrol station is effectively the same as the café (albeit with different variables), EXCEPT that for the petrol station you queue to pay just before you leave (rather than as soon as you arrive).

I'd be massively exaggerating if I said I had insomnia.

So the model I talked about last time is all well and good, but you might find yourself thinking, "well what good does it do me?"

The Evil That Computers Do In the original Tron, the villain in the virtual world is MCP - Master Control Program - created by a money-hungry business-man, Ed Dillinger.

Reading Simple Complexity gave me the want to create a simple simulation of a real world system.

I've mentioned the SIR model of epidemics before here.

General Age: 21 DOB: 18/01/89 Height: 6ft 2.5 Weight: 11st 10 BMI: 20.8 Lifestyle & Money Average night's sleep: 8hrs 34 Typically asleep between 2:30am and 11am Minimum sleep duration: 5.5hrs Maximum: 11hrs Job interviews: 1 Jobs: 0 Job Seeker's Allowance

Continuing from the previous post on using PageRank to rank stations by 'popularity', and with the help of Gephi - which makes it ridiculously easy to built network graphs and work PageRank out - I built the Virgin Pendolino lines, and they look like this…

So this ultimately turned out to be more an exercise in practicing fitting functions to data.

Template here, in case you fancied making one of your own, Feel free to modify, redistribute, whatever.