Pages tagged “money”
20 Sep 2020
The Mozz law of pricing
When I were a lad studying science I always dreamed of having a fundamental constant named after me, or maybe a unit or a law. Not that my achievements would even register on the scale: I’m certainly not claiming I’ve ever got near Planck, Newton and other such giants. The name of Gauss (Johann Carl Friedrich, that is) kept coming up during my lectures: he seems to have earned quite some naming rights.
16 Jan 2019
First foray into fintech
Challenger banks are quite the thing these days. I am a big fan of both Monzo and Starling. I wrote a python script (publicly available on github) to help me save some of my day-to-day cash into one of Starling’s “spaces” (their word for savings goals). I’ve punched in how much I want to start each month with, and how much I’d like to leave at the end, as a buffer.
18 Feb 2016
Mondo
I’m enjoying being an alpha tester for a new bank card at the moment. You know how you sometimes spend money on your debit/credit card, then check your balance, but the transaction hasn’t shown up yet and you have to mentally remember to subtract it from the number you see on the screen? Assuming, that is, your bank has a usable app. Another example: “SMS alerts” consisting of a weekly gibberish message at 8am on a Tuesday morning.
28 Nov 2013
A bumpy rise
An eyebrow-raising typo on the BBC News website, where Rory Cellan-Jones is analysing Bitcoin’s rise to over $1,000 USD/BTC. Did he mean to offer investment advice with his final sentence? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25120731
20 Aug 2013
Unsearchableness and homochirality
Is there a word for things whose existence is hard to uncover by keyword search? I’m thinking about concepts, or solutions to problems, that aren’t too tricky to describe in words, but are difficult to find in a computerised system. For example, having an amateur interest in zoology, I find organisms like sea gooseberries interesting. Taxonomically, they branch off high up in the “tree of life” - but they’re pretty common, occurring all round the world in decent numbers.22 Mar 2013
The missing article
Grammar can be important in bank statements. Glancing at the statement for the account I share with Sarah, I saw the following withdrawal, to her personal account: EVENING OUT MONEY -300.00 “Rather an expensive night out,” I blustered. Sarah, in the interest of brevity, had omitted the definite article. I was mistakenly led to believe that the first word of her explanation was part of a compound noun, rather than a present participle.
25 Nov 2012