Various Papers

• Glasses placemat: how to avoid confusion at a port tasting
  So you and your lucky guests are to enjoy a port tasting, and you will each have many glasses, one for each port. But it is important to avoid the what-is-in-this-glass confusion, so you need a page that has a clearly labelled spot for each glass. This PostScript program does the work.

• A practical design of a better decanter

• What malformation did El Greco paint?
  In many pictures the Cretan/Italian/Spanish Renaissance artist El Greco painted a head with a particular dysmorphology. Paediatricians are asked to help diagnose the condition.

• Tournament designs
  Twelve teams wish to play each other in an all-play-all format at six venues over eleven rounds. Alternatively, perhaps, in a pairs game, sixteen players wish to partner each other once (and therefore oppose each other twice) over fifteen rounds at four venues?

• NHL scoring: an overtime result should be 1-0 not 2-1
  A letter to the Commissioner of the National Hockey League, proposing an improvement in the scoring system.

• Queens’ Courtiers
  A game of skill for two players, originally invented for Lyon Court, Queens’ College, Cambridge, but that can be played on a board.

• Jet Set Willy II: A Map
  A map of the classic ZX Spectrum platform game.

• How the UK can stop spam without damaging free speech
  An outline of suggested non-extra-territorial legislation for the UK that would stop spam globally.

• Non-farm payrolls: a diary
  A ‘diary’, originally written for but then not wanted by, the London Review of Books, notionally about the US Employment Report (‘non-farm payrolls’), but actually about the history of financial markets.

• ‘Dear Aunty’, and a postscript
  A letter to my Aunt, dated 7th March 1997, explaining why EMU is such a bad idea. The postscript discusses pension savings, and quotes data from the Bank of England.

• Algorithm justifying that the expected value of s_n/n ≈ 0.792953506407…, with C code.
  Toss a coin at least once, stopping whenever, maximising the expected proportion of heads.

• How to find one differently-weighted object from amongst (3^w–3)/2 using only w weighings
  There are 12 objects, identical in all respects except that one of these objects is a different weight, perhaps heavier, perhaps lighter. Determine which is the odd one out, and whether it is heavier or lighter, using only 3 weighings of an old-fashioned scale (which reports either that the left side is heavier, or that the right side is heavier, or that the two sides weigh the same).
  There are 363 objects, …, using only 6 weighings, … .
  There are (3^w–3)/2 objects, …, using only w weighings, … (with w≥3).

• The Union Jack
  How to draw the flag of the United Kingdom — accurately.

• Monopoly Rents
  A table with the prices and various rents of the properties on the Monopoly board.

• The distillery numbers of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society
  A list of the numerical codes used by the SMWS to identify distilleries.

• The colours and letters and futures maturities
  An explanation of the letters and colours used to identify futures maturities.

• ISINs of strippable bonds and their principal strips
  

• Computing the ISIN checksum in Excel
  Given the first eleven characters, this calculates the last character, the checksum.

• HTML character entities
  A list of the named HTML character entities.