Tag: London
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Covid: what do we do now?
(I need to start this by saying I have no medical or epidemiological qualifications and I’m not a statistician, though I do have some knowledge there – so if anyone who is any of these things spots an error, let me know.) Around this time last year I was telling people that I thought Covid-19…
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The missing link and closing schools
London, where I am writing this, is now perhaps the global centre of the covid19 pandemic, thanks to a mutation of the virus that has allowed it to spread more easily. This mutation may not have come into existence in the South East of England but it has certainly taken hold here, and about 2%…
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If you want bad advice, ask a London taxi driver
Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association in London, quoted in the Guardian on the prospect of driverless buses in the capital: “We don’t have a a lot of confidence in anything that comes out of TfL [Transport for London], to be honest, and the fact that they’re suggesting it means it’s…
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Two years in the gym
This morning, running in the regular 5km “Parkrun” in Finsbury Park (just around the corner) I picked up a (rather sore) thigh strain – so it feels like an odd time to write a piece about how great it is to exercise – but I want to write this piece because I feel I have…
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The Art of Scratch, Code Club and the ICT curriculum
Regular readers will know I have something of a small obsession with Conway’s Game of Life – the classic “game for no players” based on cellular automata, and so, naturally enough, when I decided that I really had to write my own Scratch program from, err, scratch to sharpen up my skills for teaching children…
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Raspberry Jam in London
Coming a bit late to this, but if you are a teacher (it seems tickets for 11 – 16 year olds have all gone) and have a Raspberry Pi and can get into London tomorrow (3 January) then this looks interesting… ‘Pizza and Pi’ Raspberry Pi Raspberry Jam meetup for 11-16s in London Thursday, 3…
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Reflections on the riots: part two
In the aftermath of the riots a very dangerous, and very silly, idea, has been endorsed from all sorts of people who should (or perhaps should not) know better: namely that we should “switch off” parts of the internet in moments of such social crisis. How this is to be achieved, short of a nuclear…
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Reflections on the riots: part one
This is a blog about computing (along with some maths and science) – and not about politics, and having disciplined myself to stick to that for the last nine months, I intend to keep it that way, even as I write about the biggest political event of the year. But I will allow myself two…
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Buying a telescope
Astronomy was my first scientific love, sadly neglected since I got my astrophysics degree a quarter of a century ago – but I am seriously considering buying a telescope – especially as they are so cheap. I think I can get a 5″ (I don’t think in metric in these cases) Maksutov for about £400…
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Changes at Foyles
I remember Foyles bookshop in London when, perhaps twenty years ago, it was a warren of books seemingly piled one on top of another and with little order beyond the basic categorisation by subject (that is how it felt anyway). Buying a book was a rigmarole – you got a chit for the book at…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 