The new 12-sided pound coin is in production, and will be introduced from March 2017. And it has 12 sides!

That means that when I said, back when it was announced in March 2014:I confidently predict that one result of this will be that the shape will change, so that it's constant-diameter, like the 50p and 20p pieces. Which I think in turn means ( Read more... )

Last year I bleated ineffectually on here (first here, but then most of the last few entries tagged economics) about how we don't appear to have a sufficiently robust understanding of macroeconomics for economists to agree on apparently simple things like whether raising interest rates will increase or decrease inflation ( Read more... )

This article about Scott and Scurvy is gripping stuff. I knew Scott's expedition had been troubled by scurvy, but I had put that down as yet another of his bad-management decisions. I had totally failed to clock that he was following the best scientific advice available at the time. Which was closer to identifying Vitamin C than ever before ... but ( Read more... )

Except, perhaps, "Wow ( Read more... )

In my life, I have been wrong many times. Just this morning I was quite, quite wrong three times. [Later note: it was wrong in public too. One of them was being wrong about anyone being willing to take
( Read more... )

Yesterday morning, I was wondering about my little solar-powered radio. I listen to it most mornings. In the winter, it's sometimes a struggle to keep it charged, but now, it lights up its little charging LED brightly just about all the time ( Read more... )

Make your own bath bombs ( Read more... )

I was in a conversation recently in Another Place on what it means for a process to be irreversible. Whether God can create a rock so heavy he can't lift it is unclear, undecidable or incoherent. That it is easy to create a cipher that one cannot oneself see how to crack is a cryptographic commonplace ( Read more... )

I'm interested in fallacies and cognitive biases and all that sort of thing. Sometimes I wonder whether knowing about, say, the Fundamental Attribution Error makes it easier to avoid or not. One particular concern is the effect (whose name I've forgotten) where you tell people something, then tell them it's false, then wait a while and ask them ( Read more... )

Pride goes before a fall. We had an excellent birthday party for **TODO at the weekend, with Magic Marcus providing a Magic Show. (He was excellent, totally recommend.)

And I've been feeling all pleased with myself about being the Tooth Fairy for my kids ( Read more... )