Notes, essays and experiments from London.https://area.io/https://area.io/blog/2016/11/president-trump/https://area.io/blog/2016/11/president-trump/My grandmother was American. That fact is not something I think about often. My scant memories of her are of a kindly old woman on what I am forced to assume was her death bed. I don't claim to be American because of her in the way that Americans seem to claim to be Irish if they…Wed, 09 Nov 2016 08:05:33 GMThttps://area.io/blog/2015/12/thing-explainer-short-story/https://area.io/blog/2015/12/thing-explainer-short-story/Randall Munroe, the man behind XKCD recently launched a new book, Thing Explainer, where he describes complicated things using only 1000 common english words. Unfortunately, his book tour didn't come to the UK, but to say 'sorry' he created a puzzle for those of us in the UK to…Mon, 07 Dec 2015 11:48:59 GMThttps://area.io/blog/2014/05/musing-on-european-elections/https://area.io/blog/2014/05/musing-on-european-elections/Today is the European Elections in the UK, and (to my mild surprise) a lot of election related hashtags are trending on Twitter. However, a lot of people still seem rather apathetic about voting. This voter apathy is far less justifiable in the European Elections than UK domestic…Thu, 22 May 2014 10:56:00 GMThttps://area.io/blog/2012/12/royal-twins/https://area.io/blog/2012/12/royal-twins/Unless you've been living under a rock recently, you are well aware that Kate Middleton is pregnant and suffering from a severe form of morning sickness called hyperemesis gravidarum. Hereafter, for simplicity, I'm just going to refer to this as HG. This has been widely reported…Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:36:15 GMThttps://area.io/blog/2012/01/dbmillion/https://area.io/blog/2012/01/dbmillion/Note: I wrote this article using up to date data on the Monday evening, shortly before the competition closed on the Tuesday. So, Derren Brown has decided to run a competition where you guess a number between one and a million, and the person with the closest number to the number…Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:16:22 GMThttps://area.io/blog/2011/12/earned/https://area.io/blog/2011/12/earned/This holiday season is the first time I've had some time off since last Easter one way and another, I just never got around to taking time off. This seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, but towards the end of this year it revealed itself to be a terrible mistake. Still, I…Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:26:55 GMThttps://area.io/blog/2009/12/a-brief-respite/https://area.io/blog/2009/12/a-brief-respite/So it's the Christmas holiday unfortunately, it's the shortest holiday that I've had for years: a scant two weeks. The Ph.D. is certainly going, though not necessarily where I originally thought it was. That's not anything out of the ordinary though, so I'm not going to dwell on…Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:32:14 GMT