Tim O’Hare
observations, thoughts and useful stuff…Archive for Possibly Funny?
The use of common sense
I was just writing a post about the importance of sleep on another website when I came up with a phrase that I was quite proud of, so I thought I would share it here too:
“The use of common sense would make a lot of sense if only the use of it was more common“
Profound eh?
New Moon?
There was a peculiar letter in the local paper (The Herald – The Voice of Plymouth) last night. If I could provide a link to it I would do, but it’s not online so I’m going to be cheeky and quote it here in full:
“Lately, as there is a renewed interest in the Moon, may I suggest that next time the astronauts pack their picnic in preparation to jet off to the moon, to also pack some tins of silver paint and paint the damn thing”
That’s it – word for word. It’s a worry to think that not only did someone have that idea but that they actually bothered to send it in to the paper. Mind you, it’s even more worrying to think that the newspaper published it (but now I am wondering where that leaves me for quoting it here…)
How to throw away £6.99 in one easy lesson
On my way into work each morning I walk past a branch of a major DVD rental company. Yesterday, a hand-written sign appeared on the door of the branch along the following lines:
“Donate at least £3 to [charity X] and receive a football worth £9.99″
I’ve been puzzling over the idea that lies behind this notice. If it was true, then everytime someone donates £3 and receives a £9.99 ball, the charity is missing out on up to £6.99 that it could have received if the store had sold the football for £9.99 (which, after all is what the ball is worth) and then given the proceeds to the charity. With the way the scheme is set up, the store or whoever is involved buys the football for amount £Y, gives it away for nothing (net loss to store = £Y), receives £3 in exchange (net gain to charity = £3) which comes from the customer (net loss to customer = £3). If the store had sold the ball for its true value and donated the profit to the charity then the net loss to the store = £0, the net gain to the charity = £(9.99-Y) and the net loss to the customer who bought the ball = £9.99. In the latter case the store gains (+£Y), the charity gains (+£9.99 – £Y – £3) and the customer also gains (they’ve given a bigger donation to charity AND, in effect, gained a £9.99 ball for only £6.99). So, given that my idea seems to be a WIN, WIN, WIN situation why doesn’t it occur? Simple, the ball isn’t worth £9.99 so no-one in their right mind would buy it at that price (I suspect that in fact it’s worth almost nothing), and the notice on the store door is untrue…
How touching…
Yesterday evening I was standing waiting for my eldest daughter to return to school after a rounders tournament. Across the road in front of me was a new block of appartments, the ground floor of which had been a surf clothing shop which had rapidly gone bust only to be replaced by a new surf clothing shop (do people ever learn?). Anyway, this new shop isn’t open yet but the owners are clearly getting everything ready because the shop window dummies on which clothes will be displayed were standing in place waiting to be dressed. When I looked carefully I noticed that whoever had positioned these dummies had a sense of humour. I don’t feel that I need to say anymore… rather I will share with you a snap I took of the scene. It’s not a particularly high resolution shot, but I reckon it’s good enough for you to get the picture 
Humans as ultra-mobile worms
Any alert readers of this site (ha, as if there are any readers…) might have noticed that I am gradually working my way thorugh some recent back issues of New Scientist highlighting a few interesting articles along the way. Something that intrigued me from New Scientist Issue 2697 (28 February 2009) was the response to a letter from a parent asking a question on behalf of their daughter (age not given). The daughter wanted to know why humans have evolved to have two systems to excrete waste products (“poo” and “wee”). I’ve never thought about this before, but the responses indicated that in fact we only have one real excretion system, “wee”, as this takes waste products from inside our bodies and ejects them to the outside. It turns out (and this is the good part) that really our bodies can be thought of as having an elongated annular shape, by which I mean that we are a chunk of connected organic matter that surrounds a long tube. We feed by drawing material in through our mouth, squashing it about a bit, squirting acid on it, sucking the good bits into our interior and leaving what is left to drop out of the end of the tube. This is certainly a very different view of things, but clearly it is not wrong. Now I keep thinking of humans as being quite like some ultra-mobile and (presumably) ultra-intelligent worms, roaming through space enveloping food, and leaving a trail of waste behind us… What a great question.
VAT’s a mystery
If I buy a cappuccino from the canteen at work it costs me £1.09. If a student buys a cappuccino from the same canteen is costs them 95p. I believe that the difference (14p) arises because students do not have to pay Value-Added-Tax (VAT) on their food and drink purchases whereas staff do. I can understand this but what I would like to know is does it make a difference i) who drinks the cappuccino? or ii) who’s money is used to buy the cappuccino? or iii) who hands over the money that is used to buy the cappuccino? What would happen in each of the following situations:
- I buy a cappuccino for a student to drink
- A student buys a cappuccino for me to drink
- I use a student’s money to buy a student a cappuccino to drink
- I give my money to a student to buy a cappuccino for me to drink
- I give my money to a student to buy a cappuccino for them to drink
- A student gives me the money for me to buy myself a cappuccino to drink
It seems to me that in cases 1, 3 and 4 the cost of the cappuccino is £1.09 and in cases 2, 5 a 6 the cost is 95p but in cases 2, 4 and 6 I get to do the drinking and in cases 1, 3 and 5 the student does the drinking. Case 4 is the best one for me, so if any of my students are reading this and want to come to some kind of arrangement, feel free to get in touch (there’s the seed of a money-making idea in here somewhere).
The Poles are not healthy
The staff canteen at work has a number of TV screens on the walls that are invariably tuned to BBC News 24 or Sky News. Fortunately the volume is turned down to zero but the screens display the instant subtitles that can accompany the news feeds. I always find it interesting to read these subtitles when I am waiting for colleagues to join me at lunchtime etc. It is amusing to observe how badly the spoken words are translated into subtitles and there are often great mis-translations that entirely alter the meaning. One such gem occurred today in a political report. The reporter must have been talking about the current level of support for the Government in the latest opinion polls but the translation came out as “The Poles are not healthy”. So there you have it, the hard-of-hearing across the country will now be thinking that the Polish people are suffering from ill-health. It’ll be down to eating too many meat dumplings, too much fermented cabbage and that dreaded extra slice of poppy-seed cake I’ll wager (information on Polish cuisine courtesy of Wikipedia).
The most fun you can have with 31 small pieces of paper?
Every week this term I am taking a couple of one hour sessions with first year students that are designed to improve their understanding of basic statistical concepts – you might know this already because you might be one of those students (or you might be saying to yourself “so that’s what it’s all about”). This week’s session (Number 5 in a series of 9) is all about exploring the difference between population statistics (i.e. statistics obtained when the whole population has been measured – such as the mean height of all students at the university) and sample statistics (statistics obtained when it is only possible or practical to measure a subset of the whole population – such as the mean height of 100 randomly chosen students at the university). Usually it is only possible to measure sample statistics but what we really want to know are the corresponding population statistics.
So, the session involved taking an entire population of measurements (the 31 maximum daily August temperatures in Plymouth in 2003 as it happens) and calculating the mean and standard deviation for this population. Then small samples of varying size (2, 4, 8 and 16 values) were selected randomly from the population and the sample mean and standard deviation for the sample were calculated in each case. When you do this lots of times you find that the statistics obtained with the small sample sizes vary a lot and can be a long way off the population statistics but when the sample sizes are larger there is less variation and the values are close to the population values (which is a fairly obvious result but still a nice one to demonstrate). Anyway, the fun part revolved around how the students obtained their random samples from the population. To do this I gave small groups of students a strip of printed numbers (1 through to 31) which they ripped up into 31 small pieces of paper (each with one number on) then folded (to obscure the numbers) and then randomly picked however many numbers they needed. It is such a simple process but at the end of a busy day (for them) it was a joy to watch them all merrily ripping up their paper strips, mixing up the numbers, drawing them out and then doing the calculations. They were smiling and laughing and joking when they messed things up and I was instantly struck by the thought that this must undoubtedly be the most fun you can have with 31 small pieces of paper. Unless that is, you know otherwise…
Mamma Mia! What an experience…
I think I should start this entry by making the statement that I am a 43 year old man with an all female family – one wife and two daughters – it’s quite important that I get this point straight at the outset.
On Christmas Day our family acquired DVDs of various films. Since then, we have been working our way through the titles and, so far, we have watched four titles together. This probably sounds innocuous enough, but let me tell you the titles of the films first before you make a judgement – in watched order:
- Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging
- Wild Child
- Mamma Mia!
- The Bee Movie
The first two titles were the selections of my daughters who had seen both films in the cinema with my wife a few months ago. They were adamant that I would hate them because they are basically films about teenage girls having crushes on teenage boys or running wild at boarding school. Consequently, there was much merriment at home as we settled down to watch the films and there were lots of sideways glances at me to try to gauge my reaction. The third title was a big favourite of my wife when it came out in the cinema and had been viewed at least once by everyone else in the family on the big screen but which I had somehow avoided at the time. Still, as the fastest selling DVD of all time (apparently) it is obviously a much loved viewing experience for many people. I was told that the film “would make me want to go on holiday to Greece” (where it is set), “would bring a smile to my face”, “would make me feel good” etc. The fourth title is an animation based around the premise that bees are being ripped off by humans, with the latter taking the bee-manufactured resource (honey) without compensating the bees for their hard-work. The main bee character talks, and falls in love with, to a human woman and leads a successful legal case against the major honey companies but the result is that the bees are then all put out of work, there is no pollination of plants and flowers and everything starts to die. Fortunately, it is realised just in time what is happening and the bess fly to the rescue and save the world. Wow.
So what did I think. Well, The Bee Movie was good in an “another clever animated film even it is rather contrived” kind of way but I have to say that apart from “Soccer Dog”, “Mamma Mia” was probably the worst film I have ever seen. My words at the end when asked what I thought were ” It was an experience” (with an accompanying muttered “dreadful” and private and prolonged shake of the head). Actually “Soccer Dog” (which is about a dog belonging to an american boy that joins a boy’s football team in Scotland and helps them beat an all-star team of professionals in a specially arranged match) was rather good fun because it was so bad that it was good (you can see the string that controls the ball in some of the action shots…). But “Mamma Mia”…? Truly dreadful, with almost no redeeming features. Even “Wild Child” had its merits – a plot and some dialogue for example. Better than either of the these two though, and actually quite good, was “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging”, a film which made Eastbourne look like the sort of place it would be nice to live. The one real negative point of “A, T and P S” though, was that it gave a glimpse of what it might be like to live in a house with teenage daughters, something which will begin to happen in less than one month’s time. Save me.
