We all remember Brazil 1 Germany 7 of course, and I expect many of us remember Bolivia 6 Argentina 1, but a margin of 7 is almost unprecedented.
In case you're curious: **Chile 7 Mexico 0** in the quarter finals of the Copa América in June 2016. Mexico was ranked 16th at the time, and Chile was ranked 5th.
In case you missed it ... on Sunday morning there was a nasty incident when a member of Maidenhead Rowing Club in a single scull was involved in a serious collision with a motor cruiser boat on the water. The cruiser then seems to have deliberately tried to ram another boat, which happened to be rowed by GB Olympic rower Jack Beaumont.
The club officials are (properly) being very tight-lipped about it whilst a police investigation is pending. Nobody was seriously hurt, fortunately.
Report in The Times (may require login to free account):
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/olympic-rower-jack-beaumont-river-rage-thames-mzqqjmhp7
Follow-up interview with Jack Beaumont in The Times (ditto):
Video from The Daily Mail:
Bear with me, this is a maths question. A less whimsical way of asking it would be: "How to determine whether a set of points in a 2D plane is randomly distributed?"
So, when I'm out walking in places like the Lake District, I often see fields full of sheep, from elevated viewpoints where I can discern the spatial distribution of the sheep. Like [this one](https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/570884), say.
The other day I got to wondering whether the sheep were randomly distributed. They certainly weren't all flicking together. But you know how, when you ask people to place points randomly in an area, they tend to make them all quite evenly spaced? I wasn't seeing that either. There were a few small groups of sheep, and areas where there were none, and it all looked like it might be genuinely random.
I thought that's quite interesting. You might think that sheep might prefer to be near other sheep, or might prefer not to be near other sheep, but if the distribution is genuinely random it suggests that they're simply indifferent.
Anyway, how to tell?
I can use knowledge of my position and the terrain to morph the photo into what it would look like from a vantage point perpendicularly above the field. I can assign (x,y) coordinates to each sheep and calculate the distances between each pair of sheep, or the distance of each sheep from its nearest neighbour, or anything like that.
But what then? What metric should I use, and how do I test for randomness?
You've got to wonder what on earth the FA and their lawyers were thinking. Their demands were such that, if we'd beaten Argentina, Iceland would have to take down these shows of support in the run-up to the final.
Respect to Iceland for giving them the old Arkell vs Pressdram response though.
Obviously the rules say that the headline has to be click bait (though most England fans will know that the only player with 91 caps is Jordan Pickford}.
But pasting "EXCLUSIVE" at the top and leading with a photo of Thomas Tuchel might well lure the unsuspecting reader to infer that Tuchel is dropping Pickford.
In fact it's just the opinion of a brain-dead no-nothing journalist with a hobby horse to ride, an axe to grind, and a deadline to meet. What a waste of space.
I had a pleasant surprise in Waitrose the other day.
I was buying some wine, and my wine carrier caught the eye of one of the shop's staff who was stacking the shelves. He was amazed to see that I was still using a Waitrose branded plastic bag which we've probably had since 2001. (On the bag it says "European Wine Retailer of the Year - Winner 2000".) He asked if he could photograph it for their marketing team, and he gave me one of the bottles of wine as a freebie to thank me.
At the checkout I learned that the shelf stacker was actually the store's "big boss". Respect.
EDIT: I found an image hosting site to use instead of Imgur. Here's the bag: https://ibb.co/HDsC28X0 - note the logo in the bottom right corner with the date.
Looks like it might have been made of cardboard. There are regulations about that, aren't there?
Quote of the day, from none other than Sir Isaac Newton. If only flerfers could comprehend this, then perhaps they wouldn't be so fixated on the stupid literalism of "the Bible says it's flat".
I've noticed a worrying inconsistency between the way the Android app and the website handle time zones. Can anybody help me handle it?
I'm in the UK, so my time zone is GMT during the winter and GMT+1 during the "summer" (including now).
The Android app sets the time zone for new events correctly; events from now until October will default to "British Summer Time" (GMT+1), and beyond October they'll default to GMT.
However the website sets the time zone for new events to be "British Summer Time" (GMT+1), regardless of when the event is to take place. I just set up an event in January, and the website has set it to GMT+1. I tried to set the time zone to "London time", but iut thinks that's GMT+1, even in January.
Worse, if I set up an event on my phone, and then edit it on the website, the website interprets the time zone incorrectly. For example I've set up an international flight in January. I entered both the departure and arrival times in GMT, but I'd like the arrival time to be in the local time zone, so I switched to the website to do that. (The app doesn't allow different time zones for the start and end.) However the website is interpreting the GMT departure time to be a GMT+1 departure time, and it insists that "London time" in January is GMT+1.
Thsi almost certainl explanis why we nearly missed a flight last winter. We thought the flight was at 18:00 but it was actually at 17:00!
Can anybody help me with a workaround? Thanks.
I have a DC31 Animal handheld vacuum cleaner which has been an absolute workhorse for the past 15 years. But now it won't switch on. And I notice that the light on the wall charger doesn't illuminate.
Unfortunately the model is no longer supported by Dyson so they can't/won't advise me. All the troubleshooting guides I've found online say it "could" be a faulty charger or a faulty battery, but that's not terribly helpful.
Any advice? Or should I just replace the whole thing?
