Author Archives: Spuggy

Google Search Q&A 4 – A beginner’s guide to set theory

Posted on 9 March 2013 by Spuggy

According to our site stats, almost two thirds of visitors to our site are looking for information on sparrows. Don’t believe me? Here is a graph of the search strings that have found our site, grouped by whether or not … Continue reading →

Posted in Birds, Google Searches, Maths | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Jay.gif!

Posted on 2 March 2013 by Spuggy

For Christmas, we got a bird camera (Brinno BirdWatchCam if you want to know), and we set it up in eager anticipation of lovely bird pictures. Sadly, being the height of winter, we got no photos before a sudden cold … Continue reading →

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Roman sci-fi

Posted on 19 January 2013 by Spuggy

Marcus stepped in off the street into his heated villa. He watched the snow collect on the window sills and smiled. Once, he knew, houses had open windows with nothing more than skins and cloth to keep out the elements, … Continue reading →

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Google Search Q&A 3

Posted on 18 January 2013 by Spuggy

Time to stick my hand into the lucky dip of our incoming Google Searches once more and see what comes to the top… difference between dove and sparrow what is the difference between a dove and a sparrow whats the … Continue reading →

Posted in Birds, Google Searches, Trams, Transport | Tagged | Leave a comment

Maps! Wait, they don’t love you like I love you! Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaps!

Posted on 12 January 2013 by Spuggy

Sadly, my original plan to show the flow of transport around Frankfurt over the course of a day failed due to the extreme lack of availability of timetable data in a halfway reasonable format. So instead, here’s some maps of … Continue reading →

Posted in Germany, Maths, Technology | Leave a comment

Fractal cross-stitch / counted-thread embroidery patterns

Posted on 5 January 2013 by Spuggy

Also, staying on the topic of maths, a little while ago, I put some stitching patterns for a couple of fractals, the Sierpinski triangle and the Pythagoras tree, up on Etsy. They didn’t really sell very well, and rather than … Continue reading →

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Frankfurt Maths 2: A cunning marketing scheme (and/or a way to massively inconvenience the disabled)

Posted on 5 January 2013 by Spuggy

If you’ve spent more than about seventeen seconds in Frankfurt, you’ll have met the Escalator Fairy: the strange malevolent force that ensures that there will always, always, always be at least one broken escalator between you and your destination – … Continue reading →

Posted in Maths | Tagged , | 1 Comment

It keeps happening – Hella Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds

Posted on 5 December 2012 by Spuggy

So, I think the record will show that I like War of the Worlds. A lot. And of course, this love extends to the famous rock opera by Jeff Wayne et al. Sure, it takes some liberties with the book, … Continue reading →

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Google Search Q&A 2

Posted on 31 October 2012 by Spuggy

A few months ago, Dove wrote a post for one poor hapless soul who ended up on our blog after searching for “is sparrow and dove same thing?” Since then, we’ve had people find our site using “is a sparrow … Continue reading →

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“The Female Detective” by Andrew Forrester

Posted on 12 October 2012 by Spuggy

On Wednesday, the British Library brought back into publication a book that has been out of print for almost 150 years – Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective, believed to be the first detective novel to star a woman.* The book … Continue reading →

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