Delicious LiveJournal Links for 12-18-2010

[andrewducker]

• Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography
  (tags: infographics design inspiration visualization illustration infographic graphics)
• UK banks only profitable because of government support - and have been for quite a while.
  (tags: banking uk government)
• Living within 300m of a freeway associated with doubling your autism risk.
  (tags: autism pollution)
• Google Body Browser. Very impressive (only works in the latest Chrome Beta though).
  (tags: google body health science visualization anatomy)
• The BBC has a 4 minute 33 second video about the John Cage work. A most unusual experience.
  (tags: silence music bbc video)
• This pretty much sums up my opinion on Predator 2. (I'm the one saying "WHAT?" in the first panel)
  (tags: movies predator comic)
• Ofcom are going to tweak the way that phone numbers work in the UK. Seems like an improvement, especially for mobile users.
  (tags: Telephone phones mobile_phones uk)
• Prisoners serving fewer than four years to get vote
  (tags: law voting)
• Woman With No Fear Intrigues Scientists
  (tags: brain fear research science psychology)
• If you buy a digital file then you're not covered under UK consumer protection legislation.
  (tags: digital music technology)
• Why we need an impact assessment of drugs policy
  (tags: drugs law government uk)
• I hear the past was in Black and White - pairs of photos of the same locations from the past and present. Fascinating.
  (tags: photography scotland history)
• Mobile phone masts correlated with sharp rise in birth rates
  (tags: statistics funny mobile_phones technology science)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Good question!

I assume that back in ye olden days things were broken down more by area code, and bits inside London were assigned 01xx. Not sure how it works now.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Oh I can tell you all about how London codes went. It was a mess.

When I was a kid, it was simple: all of Greater London was (01), followed by 7 digits.
Then around the mid-90s they split it into inner and outer London, and it was 071 and 081. These were shit, and splitting London was stupid because it drove everyone nuts trying to remember whether someone was 071 or 081. They should have back then just gone to 8 digits, which was effectively what they'd done but just stupidly.
Then only a couple of years later the national change to the 1 prefix (ie 0482 to 01482) came in, so it became 0171, 0181.
Then they reunified London to 020 and 8 digits, with the new 8th digit being 7 or 8 accordingly, which was what they should have bloody done in the first place.

But why they needed a whole new code in the 2s rather than find a nice 01x code I don't know. Other than to make London feel special of course.

[andrewducker]

Apparently it's to provide spare capacity. According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Number_Change
some areas were close to exhaustion. There's a nice history of all the chances here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom#Splitting_01_for_London_into_071_and_081

which makes it clear that _all_ of the changes that happened were part of one plan, which was come up with in the 80s. Seems altogether more organised than anything we might do nowadays (IPv6 being a prime example).

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Oh right, they needed the 01 to be freed up.

I still reckon it would have been easier to have London go 8 digit with the first change -- say to 071 for all of London and add the 7/8.