There are 10 types of people in the world

Those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t.

Yes, I read Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, by Alex Bellos, on holiday. That line isn’t in there, but a lot of other good things are. Bellos has a wonderful quotation on p324 from Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, about a change made to the shuffle function on iTunes and the iPod: “We’re making it less random to make it feel more random.” Bellos compares an imaginary sequence of heads and tails with a real one and shows how we expect randomness to be more changeable than it is. Apple had the same problem with people complaining (I’ve done it myself) that shuffle gave them runs of the same artist.

Recent Posts on Eagle Eye - Breaking views from Independent commentators -

• Paul Volcker stands tall against the banking lobby
• "Not growing inequality"
• A defence of competition in health care
• Prime Ministers shopping
• Bill will survive; Andrew will not