Rich of March House

A question asked in a job interview a friend of mine had today:

What digit does 2³⁰ begin with?

A quick poll of people at work suggested this was an unfair question to ask in an interview. Apparently either you are a complete maths nerdy who knows the answer straight away or else you won't know.

Well I don't think that's the case at all. I reckon the interviewers were asking the question to see how well you could think through a problem and come up with workable solutions, rather than testing any sort of mathematical knowledge you might have. Personally I'd have answered it along the lines of "Hmmm good question. I'm not entirely sure but some ideas for finding out include...". So let's have a quick 30 second brainstorm and come up with some suggestions:

• Use a calculator to find out (engineer's reply)
• Let's look at powers of 2 that we can quickly find, see what distribution the initial digit follows and extrapolate from there (statistician's reply)
• Well, 2¹⁰ is 1024 which is close to 1,000 so in all likelihood if you multiply this by itself a few timesto get 2³⁰ this will also begin with 1 (mathematician's reply)
• Benfords law suggests it's most likely to be 1 (clevertrousers reply)
  
  

Bet I'd've got the job.

Piccy taken shortly before a two hour wait at Portsmouth A&E today. The moral of the story is that if you are a six year old don't run along with your hands in your pockets...

Having a small boy of age 6 we receive child benefits, which is nice. 

Is it wrong of me not to be panicked with the media hysteria that has broken out about government incompetence with the loss of 2 disks of 25 million name, address and bank account details? 

I reckon it's all about risk likelihood.  The chances of these disks falling into evil hands must be small.  The chance of me being picked out by someone evil from 25 million addresses must be small.  There was even some fool on the radio yesterday trying to link this in with paedophiles.

The media are relishing in this - they love whipping people up into a seething mass of worry and paranoia.

When people complain about the low broadband download speeds they are getting I wonder how many of them really know what speed they are actually getting. I think I'm paying for a 2 megabit download speed from Virgin Media, though have no idea in reality because I can't remember what I signed up for. I know I pay a relatively small sum per month so it can't be much faster than that.

So to test what speed I am subscribed to I went along to the PCPitstop website and performed their internet speed test here. That was a bit disapointing, because it seems I am only downloading at 1Mb. How rubbish.

So then I tried the InternetFrog speed test here, and my speed shot up to 2Mb. That's great! I can double my download speed simply by changing what tool I use to measure it. But why stop there? Why not find another tool somewhere that'll measure my speed as higher still? So I did.

According to the Channel 5 Gadget Show broadband speed campaign measuring tool here I am running at a blistering 4Mb! I've quadrupled my speed from my initial estimate! Hooray!

To aim higher still what I've done is write my own speed testing website tool thingy. It's top secret but you can find it here. Use this and you too will be ecstatic at the white-hot lightning-fast speeds you can achieve.

92214563780560366130661709445338835634

I wonder how long it'll be before I'm arrested.