Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? How many trees are there on the planet? Why do old men have big ears? David Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions - questions that can only be addressed using statistical science. Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the world for centuries, yet we are all familiar with the way…
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💾 Download this page! What's going on behind the scenes? Here's the code. Note - it doesn't require thousands of imported NPM libraries, a complex Docker set-up, or any AI-on-the-blockchain. <a href="" download="this.html">Download this page</a> HTML 5 introduced a new attribute for the anchor element - download. Rather than having to set your server up with Content Disposition headers - yo…
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Legacy websites are a constant source of vulnerabilities. In a fit of excitement, a team commissions a service and then never bothers updating it. Quite often the original owners leave the business and there's no-one left who remembers that the service exists. So it sits there, vulnerable, for years. The [REDACTED] website had a subdomain which was running KANA's IQ software which was last…
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Two years ago, I gave my first blood donation. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edentVery nearly an armful etc. Didn't hurt. Looking forward to finding out my blood group! pic.x.com/RKpqX9HuEl❤️ 20💬 6🔁 014:51 - Mon 29 July 2019 Due to a combination of moving house, and the whole pandemic thing, I've not been able to donate again until now. It was quick - in and out in 90 minutes.…
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I'm not a big fan of Virtual Reality. I find it claustrophobic and impractical for most uses. There are some areas which it does impress though. Scale. Half-a-dozen years ago - during one of VR's periodic hype-phases - an employer asked me and my team to "do something interesting" with all the expensive VR kit they'd bought on a whim. We looked at virtual store walkthroughs, simulating the…
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This is a slow, and very silly, way to experience an ancient browser. I'm aware that you could spin up a virtual machine, or pay for a browser testing service. But there's something nice about running a browser in a browser. Like wheels within wheels and fires within fires. Using Copy's v86 it's possible to recompile x86 code to browser native WASM. This means you can load up Windows 98 in your …
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Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as man, and was even able to correct the gender on his birth…
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Regular readers know, I'm Creating an "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality" map. I've already had some success using an existing NZ Centric, Equal Earth Map. And I've programmatically created a correctly projected map with R. But is it possible to do this with Satellite imagery? YES! Install gdal For this to work, you'll need GDAL - the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library.…
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(Written mostly to settle a good-natured disagreement.) One of the great advantages of HTML is that it can call on external resources. Your index.html can load a style.css and display a picture.jpg. But... it doesn't have to use external resources. (I know this isn't news to some of you - but everyone has to start somewhere.) Here are three techniques for inlining external assets. Easy Mode …
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Yet more MSc yak-shaving. I'm currently reading Melissa Schilling's book "Strategic management of technological innovation". In a passage talking about customers' resistance to new inventions and the destruction of domain knowledge, it talks about the invention of the Dvorak keyboard. Supposedly better than the QWERTY keyboard - but ignored by the majority of customers. August Dvorak is said…
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10 years ago, I asked an innocent question on Twitter. Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIs there any service which will let me "check in" to a beer? Because this Chocolate Tom I'm drinking is amazing.❤️ 0💬 2🔁 018:55 - Thu 21 July 2011 The answers came in swiftly - Untappd was the app to use. So, a few minutes later: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentI just earned the 'Newbie' badge on @untappd!…
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The Gay Liberation Front dragged homosexuality out of the closet, onto the streets and into the public eye. Its London supporters held the first gay demonstrations, organized the first Pride march and ran the first public gay dances in Britain. The Front contained an alliance of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transsexuals long before ‘queer’ was fashionable, and challenged homophobia before we…
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