Blog

Wordle A Wordle solver: type in the colours you got and it suggests your next guess. InteractiveMaths20221 min Easy to State, Hard to Solve In how many ways can you tile a 3×n grid with dominoes? A worked solution. Maths202110 min Mathsy Shortcuts Small reasoning shortcuts, like seeing the geometric mean as an average of magnitudes. Maths20211 min KPIs - Lag vs Lead Measures Why the measures you can act on matter as much as the results you want. Systems20212 min Strange Attractors Play the chaos game: pick attractor points and watch fractals appear. MathsInteractive20212 min All horses have the same colour A famous false proof by induction. Can you find the mistake? Maths20212 min MasterMind - Game Play MasterMind against the computer with your own alphabet and code length. Interactive20211 min Asset Division An interactive tool for dividing shared items fairly when people value them differently. Interactive20212 min Integrating Factors A short derivation of the integrating factor method for first-order linear differential equations. Maths20212 min Priority setting - should we train guide dogs for the blind? Should we train guide dogs for the blind? Opportunity cost when choosing which causes to fund. MindSystems20205 min Shopping Cart A short text found online on why returning your shopping cart is a test of character. Stories20202 min Pricing Information Using expected opportunity loss to put a price on what more information is worth. MathsSoftware20204 min First Sign of Civilization Margaret Mead's answer, found online, to what marks the start of civilisation. Stories20201 min Perfect Forecasting Notes on combining many people's forecasts into one better view for shared decisions. MathsSystems202013 min The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever Three gods, three yes-or-no questions and a language you don't speak: a worked solution. Maths202017 min Online Mafia Rule book The full rules for playing Mafia over WhatsApp, with every role explained. Personal202031 min Marginal Losses Can markets account for externalities like pollution without special taxes? Systems20191 min Intelligence, Money, Fun A short story found online about a father, a toddler and three choices. Stories20191 min Salem Witch Trials A story found online about a classroom game that shows how fear spreads. StoriesMind20192 min Magnitudes Thinking in orders of magnitude to make sense of millions, billions and trillions. Mind20183 min 上海 Two months teaching in Shanghai, written on the way home. Personal201838 min Echo Chambers How feed algorithms narrow what we read, and what I would ask social networks to change. SystemsMind20189 min The Public Goods Game A thought experiment from Predictably Irrational on why cooperation in a shared pot breaks down. MindSystems20185 min From Surviving to Living Why paying someone twice as much can leave them eight times more to spend. Systems20189 min Long Term Teaching Two ways to teach maxima and minima, and which one actually sticks. Mind201712 min Predicting Product Conversion Rates Estimating a product's true conversion rate when it has had only a few visits and sales. Maths201712 min Scars A short story found on Reddit, set in a world where every lie leaves a scar. Stories20177 min GitLaw What if laws were written and reviewed the way software is with Git? Systems201720 min Nash's Equilibrium How much should you pay to play Rock Paper Scissors against someone who can't play Scissors? Maths20179 min Michellin Paying for tyres by the kilometre: how changing who pays fixes a broken incentive. Systems20174 min Differential Cryptography How differential privacy lets you learn about a population without exposing any individual. MathsSoftware20175 min How to AB Test What AB tests are and how to use them to choose between options with confidence. Maths201711 min The Mythical Man Month The main lessons from Fred Brooks' short book on why adding developers makes late projects later. Mind20177 min Medium The Medium posts that made me swap newspapers for it, from cognitive biases to Bitcoin. Mind20172 min Maths' Ceiling Does everyone reach a point where maths stops making sense? Notes on Math With Bad Drawings' answer. MathsMind20175 min OxfordHack Joining a 24-hour hackathon by accident and building an election project with a new team. Software20165 min Egg A short story found online: a man dies and meets a divine being with an unexpected explanation. Stories20169 min G-Research Competition Trading against other teams on a simulated high-frequency stock exchange. MathsSoftware20154 min Oxford University Elliptic Curves Research Project A research project computing the average rank of millions of elliptic curves in Sage. Personal20151 min Farfetch Internship My summer internship building a machine learning model to flag fraudulent orders. Personal20145 min Delfos Project & Math Olympiads How a weekend maths school I almost skipped became the best part of my olympiad years. Personal201310 min