It was the sound of Seagulls outside (what sound do seagulls make? [link]) Well House Manor that go me wondering yesterday "why have we got so many seagulls around here, when we're so far inland". And as I was teaching a "learning to program in PHP" day, I did a bit of research to find out something about seagull populations and population growth, and wrote a program to extrapolate forwards.

Being PHP, the results are presented as a web page - you can look [here] to find out how many years it will be, at reported rates of growth, before there are more seagulls than people in Bristol. And you can look [here] if you want to see the program and web page that I wrote.

As the text in my sample page says, it's dangerous to extrapolate too far - especially as factors are changing; steps are being taken (as the article referred to in the page points out) to control seagull numbers - money is being spent on this control rather than buying biscuits for internal meetings, it seems. And as populations grow at extreme rates (as been happening with seagulls), there gets to be a point where other factors start to click in.

When I woke on Sunday morning, I didn't know much about the seagull population (nor whether it's safe to eat them raw), but now I do. I marvel at facts learned every day, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to learn.


Illustration - Seagulls in Melksham on one of the greens in the Heather Close / Dorset Crescent area
(written 2010-08-09, updated 2010-08-10)

 H104 - PHP - Control Statements
  [3397] Does a for loop evaluate its end condition once, or on every iteration? - (2011-08-18)
  [3200] How a for loop works Java, Perl and other languages - (2011-03-12)
  [2304] Extracting real data from an exported file in PHP or Perl - (2009-07-25)
  [1825] Question Mark - Colon operator (Perl and PHP) - (2008-10-08)
  [1696] Saying NOT in Perl, PHP, Python, Lua ... - (2008-07-04)
  [1477] Decisions - small ones, or big ones? - (2007-12-18)
  [1220] for loop - how it works (Perl, PHP, Java, C, etc) - (2007-06-06)
  [1199] Testing for one of a list of values. - (2007-05-22)
  [1191] Smart English Output - via PHP and Perl ? : operator - (2007-05-18)
  [962] Breaking a loop - Ruby and other languages - (2006-12-03)
  [863] Double and Triple equals operator in PHP - (2006-09-12)
  [657] The ternary operator in Python - (2006-03-25)
  [421] Don't repeat code - use loops or functions - (2005-08-21)
  [406] Assignment, equality and identity in PHP - (2005-08-08)
  [353] Wimbledon Neck - (2005-06-20)
  [340] Code and code maintainance efficiency - (2005-06-08)

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Testing the robustness of our hotel and training systems - holiday and sickness times
Looking up a value by key - associative arrays / Hashes / Dictionaries
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Six languages in one file - an HTML++ web page
Predictions for the seagull population
Feeding the Grockles
Robust - testing the system
Be gentle rather than macho ... regular expression techniques
How Green is my train?
Dartmouth, Kingswear and Torbay