andrea&#039;s scrapbook

“Hell is other people’s families. The problem’s squared with a pair of families — four adults locked in close conversation, pretending to be oblivious to the mayhem around them.” —Jon Ronson: Have you spotted any cultural relics like ‘no children’ policies in restaurants recently?

“Most people know in their heart of hearts that sell-by-dates are little more than a supermarket invention to encourage shoppers to buy more and best-before dates are generally a shield against lawsuits from the kind of people who need “warning: contents hot” labels on their takeaway coffee. But there’s something about those digits that can make even the most fearless foodie paranoid - “If I eat that past its sell-by-date yoghurt, killer bacteria is going to sweep through my guts like a pathogenic panzer division.” —Food waste: Has ‘best before’ reached its sell-by date?

“Fast internet was now “an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water”.” —BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC licence fee ‘could be shared’

I went to Paris and I took pictures of logos, designs, menus and signs :(

The National Three Peaks Challenge is a mountain-endurance challenge in Great Britain, with a history of over 40 years, in which participants attempt to climb the highest peaks of each of the island’s three countries. Whilst the challenge has no official rules or time restrictions, many participants try and complete it within 24 hours, or more leisurely over a weekend, using motorised transport to travel between the mountains.

The mountains climbed, in order of elevation, are

Ben Nevis in Western Scotland, 1,344 metres (4,409 ft)
Snowdon in North Wales, 1,085 metres (3,560 ft)
Scafell Pike in North-Western England, 978 metres (3,209 ft).

In all the challenge involves some 42 kilometres (26 mi) of ascent and descent, with total travel approaching 765 kilometres (475 mi).

“Understand also that just because nobody has complained directly to you does not mean that a complaint is not justified, or pending.” —25 And Over

All sorts of terrible things happen to our clothes in hot weather. You forget about it over the winter, when people are all nicely muffled in coats and scarves. And then there’s a flicker of sun and in parks all over the country the unwashed hordes strip to their nuts to reveal meaningless symbols and foreign alphabets carved all over their skin.

Jun 14, 20091 note

“After all, this business of journalism is about pure entertainment, not a search for truth, particularly when it comes to radio and television.” —Fooled By Randomness

Jun 12, 20091 note

“On average, suicide bombings kill four times as many people as other acts of terrorism. Up to 40 percent of these attacks are carried out by women.” —When the Suicide Bomber Is a Woman

Jun 12, 2009

Jun 11, 2009

Jun 11, 20091,524 notes

Jun 11, 2009

Jun 11, 200998 notes

Adolphe Quetelet

He was keenly aware of the overwhelming complexity of social phenomena, and the many variables that needed measurement. His goal was to understand the statistical laws underlying such phenomena as crime rates, marriage rates or suicide rates. He wanted to explain the values of these variables by other social factors. These ideas were rather controversial among other scientists at the time who held that it contradicted a concept of freedom of choice.
He describes his concept of the “average man” (l’homme moyen) who is characterized by the mean values of measured variables that follow a normal distribution. He collected data about many such variables. When Auguste Comte discovered that Quetelet had appropriated the term ‘social physics’, which Comte had originally introduced, Comte found it necessary to invent the term ‘sociologie’ (sociology) because he disagreed with Quetelet’s collection of statistics.
Among his findings were strong relationships between age and crime, as well as gender and crime. Other influential factors he found included climate, poverty, education, and alcohol consumption, with his research findings published in Of the Development of the Propensity to Crime.
Principal among these, in terms of influence over later public health agendas, was Quetelet’s establishment of a simple measure for classifying people’s weight relative to an ideal weight for their height. His proposal, the body mass index (or Quetelet index), has endured with minor variations to the present day,

Adolphe Quetelet

“Capitalism is the revitalisation of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky” —The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassim Taleb

“The rank-dependent expected utility model (originally called anticipated utility) is a generalized expected utility model of choice under uncertainty, designed to explain the behaviour observed in the Allais paradox, as well as for the observation that many people both purchase lottery tickets (implying risk-loving preferences) and insure against losses (implying risk aversion). A natural explanation of these observations is that individuals overweight low-probability events such as winning the lottery, or suffering a disastrous insurable loss. In the Allais paradox, individuals appear to forgo the chance of a very large gain to avoid a one per cent chance of missing out on an otherwise certain large gain, but are less risk averse when offered to chance of reducing an 11 per cent chance of loss to 10 per cent.” —Rank-dependent expected utility

Sydney Opera House - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The story has become known in the English speaking world as the source of the word serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole because of his recollection of the part of the “silly fairy tale” where the three princes by “accidents and sagacity” discern the nature of a lost camel.

Jun 10, 20091 note

“The Opera House was formally completed in 1973, having cost $102 million. The original cost estimate in 1957 was £3,500,000 ($7 million). The original completion date set by the government was 26 January 1963 (Australia Day).” —

Planning failure = meant to open in 1963 and cost $7m but opened 10 years later and cost $104m