themindpalacenotes-blog

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Word of the day - Scintillating

Love the way it sounds - scintillating - sparkling or shining brightly.

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London Underground Stations

Apparently, the rails are a bit higher on the stations to slow down the trains approaching to the station and speed them up on departure.

From 5 Live Science (1 June 2017)

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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Infinite Monkey Cage from 9 March 2014

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A cynic is what an idealist call a realist

Humphrey Appleby

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If you can’t prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing.

Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

Or the same with numbers :) 

Dilbert cartoon source 

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He that would keep a secret must keep it secret that he hath a secret to keep

Humphrey Appleby, Yes Minister

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General election turnout

Apparently in 1960s only 13% of voters switched parties. In 2015 the number rose to 40%.

The implications are astonishing! MPs need to campaign more and be more accountable for their actions, as the public won't be forgivable on an election day. I wonder what would be switching numbers for 2017 general election.

Based on BBC’s Analysis podcast from 27 February 2017.

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Planes and CEOs

From a podcast I listened to. Can’t seem to find the reference :(

Apparently, leading CEO death is heart attack or plane crash because they tend to fly on private jets which are 5 times more likely to crash. 

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Dead strawberries and coloured cheese

Was listening earlier to an old episode of BBC’s “The Infinite Monkey Cage” from 26 November 2012. 

A few funny topics were discussed.

“They also levitated drops of water and dead strawberries”. Can we indeed categorise strawberries as dead? :) I’m not sure I’ll ever look as strawberries in the same way ever again.

Apparently, according to a single research, more white people choose white cheese than black people who choose which cheese. So it’s all sorted then! 

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General Election 2017

Britain still deals with the results of the latest general election. These are some fascinating numbers about voting and the diversity of UK parliament after the general election.

Conservatives needed just 97 more votes in 4 constituencies to get a working majority of 322. Which means that 0.00000209% of eligible and registered voters (according to 2015 voting registration data) in a way were responsible for the hung parliament. There must have been a hundred Conservative voters in those 4 constituencies who thought, “I can’t be asked going to a pulling station, it wouldn’t make a difference”!

Extra 794 votes would have gotten Conservatives 326 seats - not a landslide, but still a majority.

44% of elected Conservative MPs went to a private school, compared to 14% of Labour MPs.  

With the Brexit negotiations already here, I find it amazing how just a hundred people potentially affected the process and future of the country. And of course, some will view the result as positive and some - as negative, but it’s the numbers on their own that are fascinating.

Also, the diversity question was raised. There are now 208 female MPs (the highest number ever), but still a long way from 325 or 50% of parliament. The situation is reversed for gay MPs. 1.5% of UK population identify themselves as gay, which would correspond with 10 MPs under proportionate representation. There are currently 55 openly gay MPs elected. 

The data is from “Post-Election Special” of a great BBC podcast More or Less (19 June 2017). 

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One of my favourite marketing cartoons by marketoonist.com. VW anyone?

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Is your blog title invisible to others? How to fix “invisible“ blog title and description when previewing your blog - Oscar Theme Tumblr

As even the main theme account seems to have this issue, I wanted to share the solution I found.

My first day on Tumblr. What’s the first thing to do? Find a beautiful responsive theme to fall in love with. In my case, it’s an amazing @oscar-theme​. I customised the design and chose my favourite colour combo of this season - white text out of blue. 

However, I immediately noticed a problem - when I hovered over my blog name from the dashboard, Tumblr used its own mobile theme to override my background colour which means my blog title and description were invisible. A bit of an issue I think!

Googling proved to be ineffective - I’m not sure how many other themes are affected by this issue, but a solution turned out to be quite simple. 

Tumblr uses the colours chosen in edit theme mode for both your blog design and mobile design. We can use this setting to set up colour for a mobile design version and then override it for our personal blog.

So in my case I made blue my

“Title colour” in theme settings, which means now the blog preview is correct but my blog page is incorrect. 

To fix it, I went to advanced options and added this custom CSS, which changed my blog title colour to white.

#title a { color: #ffffff !important; }

Now, I have my white out of blue on my blog page and blue out of white on my blog preview page!

Hope this helps :)

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Here we go

Let’s try to orginise the things I encounter