From time to time I spend a few minutes "playing", usually in the context of trying out a new idea or technology, or simply to keep my hand in at simple mathematics or programming. On rare occasions this leads to something that may be of wider interest, the links below are to pages concerning such "amusements".
From time to time I'll encounter something in the media (radio, TV or print) which reminds me of just how innumerate some journalists and media-folk can be. A classic example is an advertising campaign for a chain of opticians which suggested we see 25,000,000 images in our lifetime (or some such figure), which with an 80 year life expectancy means one image every 100 seconds.
The most irritating examples tend to relate to the metric vs imperial debate that reappears every so often. Both systems have their strengths and for every day purposes it isn't that hard to move between them. For example 10 miles is roughly 16 kilometres, so we have a natural way of handling large (human-scale) distances as a mix of powers of 2 and 10. One particular radio interview a few years ago drove me to writing this brief rant.