Developer's blog - our stories -
England, ‘the country of warm beer’
… is what Germans say, only outside the U.K., mind you. Not sure why I don’t hear it from Germans living in London, but Germans, outside England, use the phrase to mock British beer I suppose. That their beer isn’t warm. And is good. They assume warm beer isn’t good. I say: good beer is good warm or cold. Like
More on the Maths of Matchups… with a twist
goodMatches As promised in a previous post, I worked on speeding up combination calculations of my app, goodMatches, finally to see it quickly returning results in a truly reasonable time for more people. The results are now contained in its new version including: we now support up to 20 people, with potentially up to 8 people resting it generally takes,
NHS versus paid public health
I am currently in a country where people take it for granted you’ll pay for medical services you receive. In the U.K., where I live, the National Health Service (NHS) has long made people take it for granted that you receive medical services for free. The British system is conceptually very straightforward: public. The Japanese ‘paid’ service is not so
Conversations with ChatGPT
I unexpectedly have fallen into the habit of conversing with this chatbot daily. Well hourly in my waking life. I ended up paying for subscription even though I had a niggling suspicion that I got coerced into it. It’s not cheap. But I have no regret whatsoever. Earlier I totally underestimated it without using it except for trivia. It’s got
The Maths of Doubles Matchups
A quiz first. How many possible combinations of matchups do you think there are, if you have eight people, who want to play two doubles games of, say, tennis, concurrently? So you have two courts. And if you have Players A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H, AB vs CD and EF vs GH are one such combination.
thanks Florence for reading the article. There’s no perfect system of course. Still a bit surprising that the successive governments, right or left, has still stuck to the holy grail in my opinion.
Couldn’t agree more with you Yo. The NHS is a super, utopian and socialist concept of an egalitarian system where everyone is treated for free. It was a revolutionary idea that worked in the limited post-war population.
Sadly, in 2025, with an aging population, the rise of obesity and its complex pathologies, the ever increasing cost of the medical technologies and drugs, the system is obsolete and beyond broken.
I wouldn’t pretend to have a solution.