Sons and Daughters

On of the Internet's recurring memes is a world where families have children until they have a son, then stop. There seems to be a fairly common misapprehension that this will lead to some asymmetry of sexes in the next generation.

This short note explores this question: we quickly see that symmetry is preserved, but then spend time exploring what's going on in more detail.Finally we introduce a new element to the model which, on its own, favours neither boys nor girls, but allows social engineering to skew the sex distribution.

Martin Oldfield, 30 Mar 2011

A Toy Language Model

I wanted a toy language model so that I could write software which would identify the language of text.

The motivation for this is simple: given a list of geocaches, which ones have descriptions which I can understand!

Martin Oldfield, 16 Jun 2010