Posts by Jon

Triangular sense areas are all that matters?!

@Hywel Thomas, David Edwards:

The point of this layout is that people will aim for the top centre of the key. Therefore, if they miss slightly, they are much more likely to hit "dead space" than the next-door key.

A triangular sense area with a square graphic wouldn't be very useful - people would aim at the absolute centre of the key, where they are much more likely to miss and hit "dead space".

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Overall, it looks like a pretty good idea. Hope he gets his patent!

Re: Where the hell... (@Steve Sutton)

"Where the hell do a bank get information on the smoking habits of 370000 people? What purpose do that have being in possession of this information? Holy shit, what is privacy and data protection coming to?"

I work for a reinsurance company, so perhaps I can answer this.

HSBC sell life insurance[1] to their customers. It may not be their major product but it still brings in a pretty huge amount of revenue. However, there is risk attached to this, in particular the risk that claims may vary wildly year-on-year - a company doesn't like this because it makes their balance sheets look bad. So they offload part of the risk to a reinsurer, for a price which is set by the reinsurer.

The insurance company wants the best possible price, so they ask several reinsurers to quote rates. In order for the reinsurers to quote the best possible rates, they need the best possible data on all policies and all claims. In particular, we need sum insured, date of birth, date of policy start, date of policy end (if it has a fixed term), sex and smoker status.[2]

So, HSBC had the data because they were given it on life insurance application forms. They had to send it to the reinsurers because they wanted a good price[3]. But sending it via Royal Mail is inexcusable.

[1] This explanation also applies to all sorts of other insurance policies (eg. Critical Illness) but, for the sake of simplicity, I'll only talk about life insurance.

[2] Yes, these are the only factors we look at when setting rates - any medical conditions you might have are dealt with separately and in a much simpler way.

[3] OK, there are a number of other possibilities - for example, that they already have a reinsurance arrangement in place with this reinsurer and were just sending a quarterly update - but they all start from this basic scenario.

[Title]

@Joe: "The length of a metre is no longer defined by a piece of French metal. Instead, it is taken to be the distanced travelled by light in a vacumm in 1/299,792,458 s.

You're thinking of the international standard kilogram, which IS still a piece of French metal whose mass appears to be diverging from its official copies stored elsewhere around the world."

The second is definied in terms of specific properties of a Caesium atom*. The metre is defined in terms of the second, as above. 1 gram = 1cm^3 of pure water.

All the SI units link back to measurable and reproducible natural quantities - I thought that was the point! I cannot believe the kilogram is still defined as a mass of metal... Then again, the French always like to think they're better than the rest of us...

@GrahamT: "(Of course frequency is based on time being constant, whereas time can be bent, so nothing is 100% accurate.)"

As an object travels closer to the speed of light, to an outside observer their time appears to run slower, their mass appears to increase, etc, etc. However, within said object, no increase in mass or change in time is perceived and all the normal physical rules hold. The definition of "second", "kilogram", etc should be constant as long as you are stationary with respect to your test apparatus. Or, at least, not moving at a significant fraction of light speed with respect to it.

Though, if you were, I imagine it would be quite hard to read the output anyway...

* Second, the SI base unit of time, is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom ( 133 Cs). (http://www.ktf-split.hr/periodni/it/abc/s.html)

@Anon

Sure, maybe the person sitting next to your theoretical suicide bomber might be a bit deaf in one ear after that... but I can't see it doing much real damage, can you?

I guess it might give people nearby a bruise or two. Or maybe, if a fragment hit someone's eye, it might cause blindness. There's just not enough power there to do anything more.