2011/10/30 10:15
The UK government's recent idea to move the UK from GMT/BST to CET/CEST and the Scottish Government's refusal to play along is quite interesting.Let's have a look at various locations in the UK and compare it with a city on the same longitude but further south, Málaga: Equinox (23/09/2011): This is the problematic time. In London, it's probably not a...
2010/10/19 23:33
While sampling some nice beer in Århus earlier this year with my good old friend Thomas Mailund, we had an interesting discussion about how long our genes live on for.I was reminded of this discussion when I managed to find my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on Google. His name was Georg Widmann, and he was born around 1532 in Heiningen in Württemberg.However, as...
2011/11/27 23:05
Once Scotland becomes independent, it would be natural to get its own international calling code instead of the British +44.
My guess is that Scotland would get +424 – it’s similar to +44, it’s available, and it’s in the European block.
There’s of course nothing that would prevent Scotland from stopping there, resulting in phone numbers such as +424 (0)141 639 9718. However, this would be unnecessarily long.
There are only two three-digit area codes in Scotland, (0)141 (Glasgow) and (0)131 (Edinburgh); these could easily be mapped to one-digit codes instead, such as (0)4 and (0)3.
Similarly, the four-digit codes could be mapped to two-digit ones, e.g., (0)24 instead of (0)1224 (Aberdeen). (See all the current area codes here.)
After shortening the area codes, all Scottish phone numbers would effectively have only eight digits in total, so perhaps the area codes could be permanently fused with the phone numbers, just like it happened in Denmark a few decades ago.
A few examples:
| Area |
Current |
1st stage |
2nd stage |
| Glasgow, 0141 |
+44 (0)141 639 9718 |
+424 (0)4 639 9718 |
+424 4639 9718 |
| Edinburgh, 0131 |
+44 (0)131 348 5200 |
+424 (0)3 348 5200 |
+424 3348 5200 |
| Aberdeen, 01224 |
+44 (0)1224 272 000 |
+424 (0)24 272 000 |
+424 2427 2000 |
| Isle of Arran, 01770 |
+44 (0)1770 600 341 |
+424 (0)17 600 341 |
+424 1760 0341 |
2011/10/05 8:00
If metric time had been introduced as I suggested, today would be the beginning of kiloday 80.So Happy New Year (or should that be Happy New Kiloday?)!It's a very special day, of course. The beginning of kiloday 70 took place on the 19th of May 1984, so quite a lot has happened in the past myriaday (metric decade), and I guess the celebrations last night would have rivalled the millennium parties if only this calendar had been adopted already.I actually...
2011/06/30 23:38
π is often given an almost mythical status, so I found it very refreshing when I was made aware of the τ movement that argue that τ = 2π is a much more natural constant.There are lots of good arguments in favour (do follow the link above), and I'm definitely a convert.However, as Stewart Russell pointed out to me on...
2010/08/13 8:16
Marcel, Charlotte and I left Phyllis and the wee ones on the sandy beach in Lyme Regis and walked over to the Jurassic cliffs on Manmouth Beach.We had heard it was a good place to find ammonites, so I was...
2010/02/18 23:20
According to this map (click on it for more information), there are now only two countries in the world that haven't adopted the metric system: Myanmar/Burma and the US.It's a bit strange to see that the UK has been allowed...
Earlier stories »
Comments