Chris Worfolk's Blog

Farewell to a man who changed the world.

Last month John Fletcher presented a talk entitled “A Skeptical Look at Statistics” at Leeds Skeptics. It was great to see people there who were really interested in stats. It was also the first event we have held at the Hedley Verity and while it isn’t perfect, it is certainly an acceptable backup venue.

Following on from the video I posted yesterday regarding Amazon’s air shipments, Gareth pointed out Waterstones have announced plans to start delivering books by trained owls.

Looks pretty cool. I’m still expecting to find the bit where they say “only joking of course”.

I can’t stop listening to Lady Gaga’s new album. It is excellent.

It is a bit of a departure from her previous albums is that it is almost a rock opera. But that is probably being far too generous as it is nowhere near as polished as say American Idiot. But there is a loose journey that progresses through the album.

It is probably not an album for those that aren’t already Gaga fans. But for those that are, you won’t be disappointed.

It’s difficult to discuss Apple v Android without everyone digging in their heels and becoming self-righteous. Of course we all really know that they have different advantages and disadvantages but it was interesting to see some slides from a recent talk by Benedict Evans talking about the growth of mobile.

When it comes to tablets, iPad make up around 25% of sales. But when it comes to internet traffic, iPad makes up 80%. That is incredible. What it shows is that even though people are buying Android tablets, they aren’t using them.

Based on those figures, you get this breakdown. For every 100 tablets bought:

• 25 are iPads that people use
• 6 are Androids that people use
• 69 are Androids that people do not use

You have to factor in that it doesn’t work exactly like this. iPad users could simply be heavier data users, but even if this is a consistent trend, it doesn’t really change what the above represents – people just don’t use Android tablets. They buy them, then they put them in a drawer and don’t use them. People do use iPads. To me, that suggests the extra cost of buying an iPad is worth the investment.

Leeds based club night The Wendy House basically never change their playlist. It’s comforting. As Hugh points out, you don’t need a watch because you can tell what time it is by which rendition of Sweet Dreams they are currently playing.

The advantage of this is that I’ve been able to make a note of all the songs they played (although we didn’t arrive until 12:30) and published them on a Spotify playlist. It’s shared, you can find it here. Drop me a message with any songs I’ve missed and I’ll add them.

Having somehow won the area contest at the end of September, I headed over to Warrington for the Division E final of the 2013 humorous speech contest. It was held at a Masonic hall.

It was a flying visit as we were out at Wendy House the night before and had to be back in Leeds that evening to host Simon Singh. I had no idea of the result until 8pm when Chanaka texted me – to find out that somehow I had won this one too!

Most of the contest was a bit of a blur, to be honest. Part of my speech requires me to pick up a chair, and during this, I managed to hit myself on the head. I somehow finished my speech but the next thing I really remembered was being sat back down wondering when I joined the Freemasons.

Last month, Simon Singh came to Leeds Skeptics to promote his new book, The Simpsons and their Hidden Mathematical Secrets.

Turn out was excellent, we had 85 people there, topping our previous record of 68. We had to move a lot of the tables out of the room, move extra chairs in and still had people queuing out of both doors.

Simon put on a very entertaining talk and it was a pleasure to host him.

Jacksonville is in Florida, so their cheerleaders probably aren’t used to British temperatures. Indeed, they had to put coats on half way through.