Archive: 2006-07-01
Coincidence is a fine thing
I wrote earlier about my 666 coincidence at school. (To summarise, I correctly predicted my next throw of three dice as being 6-6-6.) It seems freakish, but it’s not that unlikely when you consider the odds (a generous 216 to 1). Furthermore, there’s Littlewood’s law to back it up: if a human being experiences an event every second, they experience about one million events in a thirty-five-day period. Therefore, each person can expect a ‘miraculous’ one-in-a-million event about once a month.
In praise of granny bikes
For some reason, mountain bikes have become commoditised and ubiquitous in the UK. It doesn’t really make sense, because they aren’t especially well suited to any task except off-road cycling—and that’s something that, I am sure, only a minority of owners actually do. Most of the time, they are ridden on the road, where their knobbly tyres make pedalling much harder, while the lack of mudguards and chain protection sartorially endanger the rider. And who would ever need 21 gears?! Two or three is surely more than enough considering the versatility of human legs.