festive fun

Well, games. Ok, quizzes.

Obviously no match for board games, but maybe jigsaw puzzles.

• Can you tell arial from helvetica?

• What's your colour IQ?

(i was ok on the first and pretty rubbish on the second)

last.fm/user/iced_scream

not totally feeling the lists thing right at the moment but seems to be end-of-year-appropriate.

Keith Tyson - History Paintings

On the 9th of December, Keith Tyson released 5000 'history paintings'. From word spread by The Guardian Art & Design blog, visitors to his website input their location (village, town or city name), and using this as input to an algorithm to randomly generate values corresponding to the spins of a roulette wheel produced a downloadable .pdf of the results.
Et voilà.

Equation of procrastination

ok, all the usual caveats about models, especially psychological ones, especially cognitive-psychological ones, but at the same time the beautiful thing of formalised representations of slightly abstract phenomena, which I think I'm in love with... this week: Temporal Motivation Theory

U=EV/ID

Desire to complete given task = (expectation of success * value of completion) / (immediacy of task * personal sensitivity to delay)

Telegraph article here, very slightly more in-depth take from Science Daily here... or, if you've really got something else you should totally be doing right now, presentation by Piers Steel (theory author) here (including suggestions for motivation control n' that).

Job application assignment

250 words on how an article you have seen recently had been influenced by statistics

I kinda want to do some kind of cover version of this... ....soon as I figure out some kind of clever/funny/relevant way to do it (ie. I maybe need like an actual Daily Mail article or something that actually goes as far as to almost say something similar...)

Marina Hyde on Muggle Quidditch

"Harry Potter's favourite sport is currently sweeping collegiate America, despite the fact that humans can't fly"

" There are good and rubbish fictional sports - my colleague Steven Wells cited some notables in a blog earlier this year. But the good ones almost without exception make some kind of satirical or philosophical point. Otherwise, well, what's the point? They're just not cricket. Or football. Or baseball, or whatever . . . given the philosophical/satirical qualities of most fictional sports, attempting to recreate them in real life is the equivalent of testing Zeno's paradox of the arrow in flight. When this ancient philosophical point is realised in the form of a real-life sport, you get something known as "archery," which for many is less interesting than the idea that motion is merely illusory "

Nothing to add or contest.