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Olympics

on August 06, 2012

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Calculating Pi to 8 decimal places using Pythagoras's Theorem

"BORINGNESS WARNING [The following entry is of no interest to anyone who "can't do maths"] I'm pretty bored. It's been raining on and off, but mainly on, for the last week in Shimla. There's nothing to do here when it rains except stay in the hotel and read. Other than computer manuals, I've been reading A Passage to India and also The Joy of Numbers , which I found in the second hand bookshop. The maths book is by someone called Shankuntala Devi who was a celebrity mathematician in India during the 80s. According to the book, Archimedes declared Pi to have a value between 3 1/7 and 3 10/7. Monumentally bored of exam revision, I decided to see if I could calculate Pi myself. Approximating a circle as being composed of 'n' isosceles triangles, I found that: pi=n*sin(180/n) which is very accurate for a large values of n. It occurred to me that if Archimedes tried to derive pi on his own, he probably didn't know how to calculate 'sin'

Kashmir - where is everyone?

I'm in Kashmir at the moment with Nick. It's very interesting and quite cold, being winter. And there's no-one here. At least no westerners, and I'm not sure why. We saw at least 5 or 6 westerners come in on every flight to Eritrea when we were there in the summer, but two days in Srinagar and literally we haven't seen a white tourist anywhere. There are tourists from Asia. We're sharing a houseboat with someone who claims to be a Bangladeshi 'film star', which seems unlikely given his itinerary. Going to Gulmarg tomorrow to ski, which I'll cover on snowlimitz.com. The staff on the boat are extremely hospitable, which is fortunate because I have to keep asking them to light fires and bring more hot tea. Alcohol is legal but very hard to get. Christ it's cold.

Professor Happy launched with Squarespace

I've just built the website https://professorhappy.co.uk for the amazing children's life-skills coach Simona da Silva. The site is pretty simple, basically just brochureware with a form to get in touch with the owner. In the past I might have coded this sort of thing from scratch, but I wanted to try squarespace and it was pretty important that Simona could update the site with articles by herself, so short of doing a Wordpress or other CMS implementation, something like Squarespace or Wix looked like the obvious choice. A few things observations: 1. Whilst it's completely possible to do, it's not actually as easy to build something professional looking as you might expect. There's more usability friction and bugs in squarespace than I was expecting and I had to do quite a lot of fiddling around with spacing, margins and so on, which is something I thought would be seamless. It's much better that Wix was when I tried it a few years ago, but there's still

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