A business model to die for?

Here's a business model to die for.   A newish mail client for macs that you have to pay money for, called Postbox.

It's based on Thunderbird, which is free.   It competes with Apple Mail, which is free and built in to the OS.  And it doesn't have support for Exchange servers, which is what I need to read my email.

And it costs $39.95.

I'm not buying shares.

Get 55, or any other number, with three 4s.

SPOILER ALERT.   This post contains the solution to this week's  Car Talk puzzler.

The puzzle is construct the number 55 using three 4s and any mathematical symbols you like.  I remembered that somewhere I had come across a general solution to this, maybe from Halmos's book "Problems for Mathematicians Young and Old".

I half remembered it involved logs and square roots, and I managed to reconstruct it.    First of all I did it with 2's.   The first image shows you how to do it (constructed using a lovely tool called LaTeXiT.)   The number of square root symbols in a row is n, if you want to get the number n.   So for car talk it would be 55 square roots.

I was puzzling over how to do it with 4's, and my wife couldn't understand my problem.    Because she didn't realise I didn't realise that every 2 could be replaced with the square root of 4.   So the second image shows that, and so this time there are n+1 square roots, in the car talk puzzle there would be 56.

So my wife is just slightly more intelligent than me, which as we all know is the best kind of wife.     I love her.

A bag in a bag in a bag. An empty bag.

I flew on British Airways to Lisbon and back this last week.     In a vestigial remnant of providing us with food service, they gave us sandwiches.    To make life easy for cleanup they provided a trash bag.

Or put it this way.

They provided a plastic bag in a plastic bag in a plastic bag.   And the (innermost) bag was empty.  

There was a bag with tissue and stuff in it.   The bag was of course plastic.   Inside this bag one of the items was a small plastic bag.  In that, very neatly folded up, was a plastic trash bag.

So yes, they gave me a plastic bag in a plastic bag in a plastic bag.   And the plastic bag was empty.

Subscriber Trunk Dialling

Rang up Sky to cancel the sports package, since the cricket season is over.    The voice asked me to enter my phone number "including STD code."  I can't remember the last time I heard this phrase.   Rather like Wireless was replaced by Radio over the years, STD has been replaced by Area Code or similar.  

The nice chap from Sky also asked if it was ok to call me Ian, which seemed very polite and nice.  I wish more people would do that kind of thing.    It is fine, but it isn't for all people, and some people want to be called by other names like their second name or a nickname.

My parents' wedding in colour

Hubert Gent married Margaret Luke on July 5th, 1948, the very day the NHS was started.  Though I believe there were no calamities on the day that resulted in the new service being used.  The reception was held at the North British Hotel, much later criminally renamed the Balmoral.    Since my grandfather had bought champagne and didn't like the corkage charge at the hotel, a second reception was held at their house (if I've remembered this right.)

Astonishingly for the time, a friend took a colour film of the event.    A gallery of snapshots from the film is on flickr.

Another thing I hate about the Prius.

I suppose that makes three things now.   The third one is that the displayed MPG calculation is always an overestimate.   It seems to be something like 2-5% over.   I can understand it might be difficult to make an accurate estimate, so I am not complaining about the error rate.  I am complaining that it is always an overestimate.   It should be sometimes optimistic and sometimes pessimistic, and then over the lifetime it would be more accurate.

Also, the only option for mpg display is essentially a tank indicator.  All cars should, imho, have a lifetime indicator and a trip indicator of mpg, trip being since you switched the car on I suppose.    A tank measure would be neat but less important.  

Knave's Dial, but it will 40 minutes later!

Well how about that?   I got out a fresh game so this one will count.  

This game that comes out is number 0210843428856.

I'm going to give you more or less complete instructions for getting this one out.   Take every card you can with a few exceptions.   On the original deal, don't take the last Black Queen you can, or the Black 6, and don't take the first ones that come out on the redeal either.   Also, don't take the last Red 5 or Red King on the first deal.    

I did work this out with a lot of undoing, but it might be (I haven't checked) that you could work this all out analytically on the first run through.   After the first deal is complete the game is open, even though it is not played as such.   It may be that the moves I didn't make (after in fact making them and then unmaking them) could have been seen that way the first time round. 

I suspect this game might be get outable more often than I thought.  I had only three failed games after my last success, which was why it took so little time to get it out.    And I didn't play those through, just gave them up quickly.   If it does come out often, it will be by the kind of analysis (or undoing) that I did this time. 

Quite happy about this one.   I feel like I understand the patience a lot better now, and it may not be completely unbearable to play again.