sleepinginmyhead

Price and location

As part of an ongoing study, over the last seven days I've been looking at the price of a standard commodity in my neighbourhood, namely a 500ml PET bottle of Diet Coke. The variations in price are significant, 62% different to be exact. Click the image for a supersized version.

Things of note:

The NW corner of soho charges the highest mean prices, and the SE corner the lowest.

There is a slight correlation between the price of a bottle of diet coke and distance from one of the three tube stations.

The notion of location affecting price is entirely skewed by chainstores. These stores fix a national price, regardless of location, in this case EAT was the most expensive at 150p, but surprisingly a chainstore was also the cheapest, Greggs.

Supermarkets tended to be somewhere in the lower quarter of the price range, although not the lowest. The lowest prices were typically found in independant newsagents. That said, the supermarkets (including Boots), offered multi-deals, with deals such as '2 bottles for £1.80'.

The two high prices near to Oxford Circus were independant street shacks aimed squarely at tourists. No real surprises there, but the big surprise was the Burlington Café, topping out the survey at 175p. (Incidentally their 'eat in' price was 195p).

This will continue. The sample size is a little too small to make any concrete conclusions, but so far it's been interesting. There are some thoughts about crowd sourcing the research, but we'll see.

where can i score some HERON

As I walked to the tube this morning I was surprised by a heron, perched on a wall in suburbia. Not something you see every day. He was looking for fish in a small garden pond, easy pickings. Lovely beast though, and huge up close.

Legacy

The above image is grabbed from BBC coverage of this year's Monaco Grand Prix. The graphics showing the individual driver's times is annoyingly placed around a quarter of the distance from the left side of the screen. When a longer piece of information is posted, it drifts almost to the centre of the image: not ideal. This is due to legacy, that's to say, there are still some viewers who may have an old TV which has a 4:3 screen ratio, as opposed to today's 16:9 widesscreens. The question is: as a broadcaster, when do you switch? Widescreen TV's have been the norm for around a decade now, at least in the UK, so why is the viewing experience impeded by the needs of the laggards? There must be a balance point, where the majority have the sway over the minority. But it needn't be so binary. If manufacturers and broadcasters sorted themselves out, we could have dual broadcasts: a widescreen graphic placement for most, a narrow 4:3 broadcast for the remainder.

More interestingly though, I wonder if there's a strange visual meme settling into our collective conscience. TV news, live broadcasts, weather shows etc all do the same strange visual placements, which we've all become accustomed to, yet when viewed cold, it looks quite odd.

Auction - FAIL

So I didn't win the auction. Watching from my living room in London, I saw the auction values from Bonhams in New York creep towards my maximum bid, and then fly right past. Whilst disappointing, the sport was actually quite addictive, and thoroughly exciting. I was bidding on a beautiful thing, which makes the loss even more upsetting. Lot 236 was a 58x14 inch lunar chart, showing the crew of Apollo 13 which lens to use for the best photographs of the surface of the moon - something particularly poignant given the way things turned out for them. I think the value climbed so high as it was signed by Fred Haise, the pilot of the LEM. I hope it went to a good home, where it will be displayed, rather than into some vast collection, where it will be tucked away in a lightproof room. 

etymology wednesday - album

In classical times, the Pontifex Maximus would register the principal events of the year upon a blank white tablet. The term album is derived from the latin term for 'white' - albus, from where we also get albumen - the white of an egg. In the 16th century the term was revived by German scholars who collected their colleagues signatures in an 'album amicorum', which led to the term being used as a book in which souvenirs were collected.

#TWMR

More eagle-eyed readers will notice a new link on the right of this blog titled 'ten word movie reviews'. Those of you who follow my tweets will know I like to keep my movie critique concise. As such, I've made a separate tumblr blog. You can of course read the reviews on twitter, just look for the hashtag #TWMR.

(note: this doesn't yet cover every film I see, but hopefully now it has a fulltime home, I'll try to post more regularly). 

self doubt

I'm currently bidding in my first auction. This is not ebay, but a ginuwine auction house. I'm not going to tell you what I'm bidding on, but if I'm successful (which I hope I am), then I'll be gushing about it here in a few days. The sale has some incredible things in it, which has attracted a few of my colleagues. As the only person to have gone through the extensive verification process (including passport validation and credit checks) I am the designated bidder. The problem is that we are not able to attend the auction, so we have to place our bids beforehand. We place as much as we think, but then a nagging doubt enters our head, and we increase it slightly. Time will tell what the prices rise to, but Dan just handed me the following Post-it. I expect more.

etymology wednesday - vinegar

A simple word today, first coined around 1300. 'Vin' from the latin vinum means 'wine', which we should all know from French lessons. The second part of the word is a little more interesting however, 'aigre' means 'sour', (which is also where we get the English word 'eager'). Literally then, vinegar means 'wine which has turned sour', about as descriptive a word as you're ever likely to find.