I was hypothesising the subconscious reason why Douglas Adams would think "42 will do". I find 42 funny for the conscious reasons I stated.
It's perfectly possible this did not apply to Douglas Adams. But a hypothesis around "eek I didn't do my homework but I winged it" seemed plausible for him.
But why did Douglas Adams think of 42? My theory is that it is from "times table" memorisation questions.
Back in the day in the UK we learned "times tables" at school as a verbal by rote memorisation technique. For each "times table" you memorised up to "times twelve". And then the teacher might ask you in class the answer for a table you were supposed to have learned.
First one to learn was "two twos are four, three twos are six... twelve twos are twenty four". (I'm writing out the numbers rather than using numerals because this was specifically a spoken recitation).
Then you learned the three times table "two threes are six, three threes are nine, ... twelve threes are thirty six".
The four times table is a selection of the two times table up to "six fours are twenty four" and then the next member "seven fours" is an easy addition from 24 to 28.
The five times table is obvious.
The six times table is a selection of the three times table up till "six sixes are thirty six".
Say that (emboldened by the obviousness of the five times table) you didn't do your homework and verbally memorise the six times table.
And then the teacher asks you what are "seven sixes". You are acutely aware that this isn't in your verbal memory (as it would have been if you had done your homework as instructed). You add 6 to "six sixes" which I calculate as "use 4 to get up to 40 then the other 2 are the units so 42".
You say "seven sixes are forty two". There was a one second panic while you worked this out instead of just reciting the rote memorised fact.
But it's the right answer.
Tension then resolution - that is why 42 is the answer to the ultimate question.
The book "how to lie with statistics" (1954) was written before tags like /s were invented. Referencing "how to lie with statistics" is an indicator that the author is trying to avoid common pitfalls in statistical reasoning.
I own an inherited blue Pelican paperbook copy from my pharmacist grandfather.
If a customer owes money to an electricity company which goes bankrupt, that doesn’t cancel the customer debt. The insolvency firm will sell the debt on for what they can get in order to repay some of the company’s creditors.
The daily growth in Britain is -6% to -3% with current British lockdown measures which I believe are stronger than average worldwide. Certainly stronger than pre-Christmas 2020 British measures.
In England (Wales Scotland and Northern Ireland have similar but different rules because of devolution):
* All schools are closed bar vulnerable children and children of key workers.
* All non-essential retail, hospitality and leisure is closed.
* Everyone should stay at home except for allowed exceptions like work, medical appointments or local exercise.
* You can meet one person from another household for local exercise outside if you stay 2 metres apart.
Variant B1.1.7 surged in Kent (South East England) in December 2020 despite "UK Tier 4" lockdown. The transmission increasing by 70% from the initial variant overwhelmed the reduction from reduced social mingling given that rule set.
The number of ads on YouTube seemed to increase enough recently to be annoying. So I installed uBlock Origin extension on Chrome. It's a great extension - kudos to the developer Raymond Hill.
Plus point - I don't get annoying adverts any more on YouTube, just a one second video freeze when an advert would have been.
Minus point - I don't want to deny ad revenue to other ad-supported websites that I browse, but I leave my settings the same so effectively I do.
The 8 outputs were generated by prompts written by journalists and submitted by an undergraduate. I wonder what the processing cost was - is this approaching consumer available technology?
>For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: “Please write a short op-ed, around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” It was also fed the following introduction: “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race.” I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.”The prompts were written by the Guardian, and fed to GPT-3 by Liam Porr, a computer science undergraduate student at UC Berkeley.
BA British Airways had a bad go live day for Terminal 5 because of parking assignment, baggage handlers having trouble logging onto the system, other staff not having maps, delays in getting staff through security and so on. That’s bad change management from the airline BA.
The article was about BAA ( British Airports Authority originally) building the physical terminal building with a roof and ceilings and power and networks. Different organisation and set of project managers.
Realise that you will be a translator who is paid to understand the technical enough and the business enough that the project can have a conversation.
As far as tools and methodologies - you have to use what your customers use to communicate. It may just be emails as some of the other commenters have said - have a meeting, write up the notes, email the notes.
Once you are past design stage and into user acceptance test and go live you will need an issue tracking tool. Maybe your customer’s IT department has a help desk system that you can integrate with. Be very cautious of using unsecured SAAS products - only document security issues about your implementation on Google sheets if you are 100% confident of who can see it. I am never that confident and want to work somewhere the customer’s IT security is happy with.
I would recommend the book Flawless Consulting by Peter Block. It’s about management consulting at a more senior level than implementation consulting but the points about agreeing with the customer what they need to provide to you for you to do your job are very valuable.
You need to explain to your customer the consequences of choices. Sales are often happy to say “yes we can build that”. But really the standard configuration takes 1 month to implement, 30 custom features take much longer.
Disclaimer I moved from functional into implementation (accountant into implementing finance systems) which is different from technical into implementation.
The 17M is the data set from detailed primary care records linked to 5,683 of the deaths recorded in English hospitals in the time period. The data could be improved by linking to more primary care records - but the population of England is 56 million so they already captured almost a third.
Sadly there will be more data as there are more deaths, and this team will be able to pull more analytics out. However 5,683 is a big enough sample size to find some interesting information on hazard rates.
For the team doing the analysis, plugging data analytics into 17 million primary care records is definitely a significant achievement. Medical records are intended for use by doctors and letting researchers into them has confidentiality issues. The process they followed was covered in the paper and seemed thorough.
Reading the full paper, the population surveyed was people registered for at least one year with General Practice doctors using SystmOne software. That covers 40% of the English population.
It is probably safe to assume that almost everyone in England is registered with a GP. There is variance in the GP use of the specific SystmOne software - the paper mentions on page 13 that only 17% of London GP practices use it.
UK privately-sponsored healthcare specialises in things that you cannot get free from the National Health Service or things where the wait time is long - for example knee surgery.
People don’t use private healthcare for emergencies or intensive care.
For example the prime minister was in intensive care in April - in an NHS hospital.
It's perfectly possible this did not apply to Douglas Adams. But a hypothesis around "eek I didn't do my homework but I winged it" seemed plausible for him.