I’ve read on quite a few occasions about the practice of putting a failed hard drive into the freezer for a few hours in order to make it spin up and work for long enough to make copies of the most important documents on it. I vaguely understood the logic behind it but never really thought it could work, it was far too simple. After all, hard drives don’t break because of simple mechanical failures; they break because they hate you and want you to suffer. Then, one day, my flatmates 250 Gb external hard drive (a Seagate FreeAgent) failed; suddenly this old trick seemed worth looking into. Here’s what happened.

An introduction to why I think most modern forms of prediction are a lot less useful and reliable than we think they are. Scott disagrees strongly so expect a response shortly.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Fooled By Randomness by Nicholas Taleb (Review coming soon). When I started reading it I was sceptical about the claims that it would ‘change the way I looked at the world’. I was wrong. It has achieved the unthinkable; it has ruined The Apprentice for me.