I watched one of the 12-hour coin tossing marathons.
They were sitting with their laptops and pressed a button for every result.
I wonder if human error can explain (at least part of) the deviation from 50/50:
* locations of the buttons they pressed on the laptops (they only pressed once per toss before enter, meaning the button represented same-side or other-side)
* remembering what the coin started out as may be harder (or easier, but probably harder) when the result is other-side
* other??
Need to repeat this amount of tosses but with a higher degree of supervision to be sure of the result.
That's actually not completelly accurate. The study protocol (https://osf.io/hkv8p) describes the procedure in greater detail.
People were pressing one button for heads and another button for heads (which we deemend less error prone and less likely to be subcontiously influenced). The trick was that the next coin flip started the same side-up as the previous landed. Therefore there was no need to record the start (and we randomized the starting position of every 100th flip)
We also did some auditing of the video recordings (trying to decode the outcomes from the videos) and they showed quite consistent degree of bias as the original responses.
The Duke of Wellington's address, Apsley House, was famously:
1, London
Funny story: Back in the 1950s, my father went on a rugby tour to the Soviet Union. One of his team mates wrote a postcard back to his mum with an address of:
Mrs Williams,
Clynderwen
"Clynderwen" being the little village he came from. My dad said, "You can't just put that". He, none too bright, said "Why not? There's only one Clynderwen", and posted it.
6 months later, and about 5 1/2 after the end of the tour, it arrived. All over it were notes saying things like "Unknown in Hong Kong. Try Australia".
> 6 months later, and about 5 1/2 after the end of the tour, it arrived. All over it were notes saying things like "Unknown in Hong Kong. Try Australia".
Man, that's some serious organizational ethic! If only both companies and people were as exact today...
In my case it was an embarrassing success story... my great uncles name was globally, or at least unique in Germany, i misspelled it, got the postcode wrong, forgot street and house number (sent from abroad)... and it arrived a month or so later. Boy got I laughed at. I'd rather wished it had disappeared. Thats was back in the 90's.
Haha, I can imagine some post-master and his workers' eyes glinting with excitement once they find a letter of this sort. "Ooooh, unmarked letter... It's showtime!"
We received a letter from a friend in France, in the 2000s, addressed to Wellington but no country specified. Also present were an nz postmark and "try great Britain".
A routing table being a list pairing an address to a location. Same with addresses. You need to know where London is or the next post hub where to send the letter.
Also in Sweden, before the invention of postal codes the shortest address was "Bo i Bo". There was a person named Bo living in a village named Bo, and "i" is Swedish for "in".
I mentioned in the other thread about Costa Rican addresses that I met the Vatican priest/Latin grammarian/Latin magazine editor Cleto Pavanetto (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto) around 2008 at a spoken Latin event. (Latin was the only language we had in common!)
He told me that he could get successfully receive mail addressed to
I spent the first couple years of my life in a small town in Ireland. Small enough that the houses had names, not numbers — my parents were Tolkien fans, and ours became "Lorien".
I'm told that letters were addressed simply, "Lorien, [town name]"
I’d often send postcards to “Grandma, 14130 [Village name]”. Based on my signature, the mailman would know which grandma to distribute it too. That’s what belonging to a land is like. Our kids probably won’t be able to say which country we are from.
For her whole life, my grandma would receive any mail sent to her full name and zip code. Since it was a small town and everyone at the post office knew her.
My wife grew up in a small town. I met her in university and before the summer break I asked for her address to write to her (this was in the 90s and although I had email by then, she didn't). She assured me that her first name and the town was enough, since all the mail for the town went to the shop across the road from her house and everyone knew her.
KTH's official address is just KTH, 100 44 Stockholm. But since the '10' prefix already implies Stockholm [1], you could feasibly shorten it to just '100 44'.
Actually, it looks like Chalmers is the same way - the address in the footer of their website is just "Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg" (with the '41' prefix already implying Gothenburg).
Not that I send many paper letters any more, but long ago I took to simply writing my return address as my (unique) last name and zip code which has worked a few times (not that I’d know of any failure cases).
For US post office boxes you can just write the full 9-digit zip code.
Ah Mr Cormack, good to hear you chiming in here... Reminds me of the time I successfully received a letter in Cambridge, addressed with only nine characters: my initials, the initials of my college, plus CB2 was enough to get it there.
Many buildings in London actually have multiple postcodes. In general UK postcodes are granular enough that almost any combination of a name and code should make it, save for situations like several people with identical names living in flats that are fewer than N floors apart.
Postcodes are designed to facilitate sorting and last mile delivery so no surprise if large buildings have multiple codes. DVLA in Swansea has several, probably because they get a lot of post in a few distinct categories.
I'll bet "Rishi Sunak" would get to 10 Downing Street.
I wonder if random mail sent to top level politicians actually gets to them. The intention is clear, yes, but there's probably layers of security that will prevent it from getting to its intended address...
Almost all paper mail received by politicians in Canada is read by their staffers. You'll get a form reply, at a minimum. Some actually do read a lot of it. Whether curated by staffers, or a random selection, or both. I imagine it depends on the individual politician. Some do reply.
R B Bennett, Canadian PM from 1930 - 1935, was an eager correspondent with random people across the country. He read and wrote tens of thousands of letters throughout his career. During the Depression he would include cash from his personal wealth in the envelopes if people described hardships. I wonder if that would be seen as vote-buying today but it was probably genuine charity.
I don't believe that basic tendency has really changed. Some politicians do genuinely want to be close to the people and random conversations and letters with ordinary people are one way to do that. And seeming approachable is useful politically, if nothing else. Some want nothing to do with the filthy masses, of course.
For mail to the U.S. president, it goes to a facility near the White House where it’s screened, sorted, replies are sent (usually selected from a set of pre-generated forms) and (depending on the incumbent) a handful are brought to the president’s personal attention.
If it's a reasonable letter, I doubt the way it's addressed makes any difference.
Members of Parliament have a duty to listen and respond to their constituents, which in Sunak's case is the people of Richmond, North Yorkshire. I don't live there, but I have lived in a senior government minister's constituency in the past. I wrote one letter, and I did get a reply — I doubt my letter was directly read by the minister, but it was probably tallied up by an assistant "15 letters supporting this so far, 8 against".
The difficulty these days is the volume. Rory Stewart (an ex-MP) mentioned on his podcast recently that one of his predecessors in his seat in IIRC the 1950s got about 5 letters a week to deal with; when Rory was an MP in the 2010s he was getting over 20,000 emails a year. It's much easier to have a personal touch in correspondence at 5 a week!
That's about 55 per day, or a little over 100 per working day. Perhaps too many for a detailed personal response for each, but certainly enough to read. Categorising well for future action, response, ongoing follow-up, a part of a staff member's job.
Perhaps, but how much time do we want MPs to devote to reading correspondence versus all the other aspects of their job, such as holding constituency surgeries, reading up on legislation, doing ministerial jobs (which Stewart was at this time), and so on? Especially when a significant fraction of the incoming emails will be the result of some campaign group or another having encouraged its supporters "write to your MP" with a template letter with set of suggested arguments...
I love qutebrowser and use it daily (and donate to the compiler), mostly on Linux but also on Windows.
Here are some of my headaches that force me to use Chrome/Firefox anyway sometimes, if anyone has answers to these I am very interested to hear them.
* Can't save passwords / autofill (for accounts I don't particularly care about)
* UI scaling in Windows (for high-res screens) is bad. The web page contents do not scale automatically.
* Does not resolve Teams "secure links" (workaround is to right click teams links instead and copy them, then paste in qutebrowser)
* Twitter videos don't work
* On linux (somehow this works on windows), "accept all cookies" sometimes does not get rid of that prompt. Stack overflow is an example where this happens. Another example is redhat where the prompt does not load for a while [0]
* Clicking something that spawns a box where text can be inserted does not bring me into insert mode. Example [1] (the searchglass). This causes me to close the tab by mistake sometimes by typing 'd'.
