Andrew

Braudel's Provocation

Fri, 15 May 2009 06:26:37 GMT

I've just come across a reference to Braudel's Provocation (you need to scroll down a bit). [ The published paper, by P.J.Taylor, is at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(99)00060-8 ].

Apparently Braudel's thesis is that capitalism is inherently anti-market and that capitalism is not about markets but monopolies. This may not be news to all of you, but it sure is a relief to me to be able to be anti-capitalist without being anti-market.

American? healthcare spam

Wed, 06 May 2009 04:59:59 GMT

I get spam.
I get spam offering me a degree without all the tedious business of studying.
I get spam offering medical products - mundane as well as "interesting".
So far I can understand.

I get spam offering me lists of names and addresses of medical professionals.
Odd.

This morning I got a spam email from "Medical Billing Degrees"
with the subject "Jumpstart your career in Medical Billing".

Presumably it leads to a website that hacks your computer in some way,
but some spammer thinks that enough people are interested
in a qualification in sending out doctors bills that this is a hook to
get them to open an email.

uncledirect.com if anyone is interested.

Musings on the economics of snow

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:08:25 GMT

Do we assume that the national management (government, utilities, transport, ...) have calculated that the lost business from a day or two of inconvenient weather is less than the cost of having the facilities and trained staff on standby just in case they should be needed ?

Given the current forecast is snow all week they may have lost the gamble this year, but I'm not sure that is an argument against making it, *if* you think that is the function to optimize.

I don't consider the fact that Sweden and other places can cope with much more snow to be a valid argument -
the difference between 10 and 12, or even 10 and 20 inches of snow is much less than that between 0 and 2, and the phase transition is always going to be more complex and expensive than a shift within a stable state.

Closing schools is probably not a big deal: the kids will learn more by being out in the snow than by sitting in a classroom wishing they were out, the only question is whether they should be out with their parents or their teachers ?

Data Protection - not

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:39:39 GMT

Hidden within the innocuous-sounding "Coroners and Justice Bill" is a proposal which would reverse the intent of the Data Protection Act, requiring holders of personal data to give it to government officials.
Currently the details are on the front page of http://www.no2id.net/

If this bill, which received its first reading last week, goes through the Database State will be a reality.

If I were a coroner I would be very offended that so much of our privacy was being removed in my name.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:21:33 GMT

The saying Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science (attributed to Henri Bergson) in the signature appears in the signature of an email I've just received.

Having thought about it, this is plausibly the right way around, but it seriously challenges my view of at least one of the four.

Meme

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 06:48:12 GMT

List the towns or cities where you spent at least a night away from home during 2008.
Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.

*Kendal
St Martin Belleville
Las Arenas, Picos de Europa
Santa Susanna, Costa Maresme
*Southam

Emotional appeal to reject Big Brother

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:04:51 GMT

I guess most people reading are more swayed by intellectual arguments but http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=v1JqlvnZANA is no2id's latest emotional argument against Big Brother, the database state and ID cards.

I'm not sure it entirely works for me.

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:34:50 GMT

I'm trying to set up another online account:

We'll ask you your security question should you forget your password. So choose an answer that you'll remember but isn't easily guessable by others. Available questions are "Who/what is your favourite ... actor, popstar, sportsman, author, TV show, CD, movie and book".

Surely any favourite that I will actually remember is someone/something that I will share with others, who will thus find it comparatively easy to guess ?

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:07:28 GMT

The alarm-clock/radio roused me with the beginning of John McCain's speech congratulating Barack Obama. I was impressed at the time, and more so as I listened to it again, how gracious he was in defeat. It gave me hope that the right of America may allow Obama to run his country.

Breville Silver Filter Kettle

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:07:50 GMT

miss_t_ide bought a Breville Silver Filter JK120 kettle. Our old one dribbled a lot but this one pours very nicely.

However, when standing on the base but switched off the kettle is illuminated by a blue light. The manual says:
the illumination of this kettle is achieved by using LED's. The amount of energy used for this is very small, a fraction of what is used by a light bulb.
Maybe, but when I want to illuminate not only the kitchen and the hall, but the wall halfway up the stairs as well
I don't immediately think "Ah, I'll turn the kettle on".

I really want to take this environmentally unfriendly kettle/lamp back but I don't think miss_t_ide would be happy without a kettle that only pours water into the cup.

Why Kyoto failed

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 08:11:07 GMT

While looking for confirmation that the UK government falsified results of Salters' Duck experiments (http://rblanchard.users.btopenworld.com/technologies.htm is the bet I;ve found so far) I came across
http://www.martininstitute.ox.ac.uk/NR/rdonlyres/06C527B7-D0DA-4D57-A38C-EDD6C5863112/0/TheWrongTrousers.pdf which is a long critique of Kyoto and why it failed in its own terms. It takes a long time to get going but there are some interesting bits in it.

Two tier health service

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:54:50 GMT

The news on Radio 2 this morning reminded us that the government doesn't want NHS cancer patients to be able to buy drugs that the government wont pay for (because this would give a better service to people who can pay than those who can't, IIRC).

Are they going to demand that children who get extra coaching or lessons in subjects not taught at school will have to leave state schools ?

Why haven't I heard of Approval Voting ?

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:20:33 GMT

Voting system names aren't particular helpful, with "first-past-the-post", which is "one person, one vote", being called "plurality voting" (I think recognizing the historical novelty of many people having a say in the decision). Even so the idea of Approval Voting is so obviously good that I'd have remembered the idea if not the name. I've looked at various forms of Single Transferable Vote and New Scientist had a feature on alternative voting systems in April, so why did I have to read the house magazine of one of the groups who share our building to hear about Approval Voting ?

What do I as a voter want from an election ? Once I recognize that I can't pick my representative but have to allow the other constituents a say as well and I've seen that first-past-the post doesn't work, what I want to tell the returning officer is which of the candidates are acceptable to me and which are not.

STV systems ask me to put the candidates in order of preference and there are related schemes that allow me to say whether A is six as good as B or merely twice as good as A, but Approval Voting asks me one thing about each candidate, the one thing that really matters: are they good enough ?

Some of my friends know lots about voting systems. Is there some horrible flaw, a case where AV gives a really bad result ?

Of course AV allows us to mark more than one box, so we would have to give up "one person, one vote" - perhaps to become "one person, one ballot paper" ?

The perils of electronic statements

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:16:57 GMT

We want to buy a house and we want to borrow some, but not all, of the money.
The bank offering to give us a mortgage want proof that we have the remainder.
Some of it is in an internet bank account but (for security ?) the online statements don't include either of our names, nor the full bank account number :-(

Fortunately I've been able to go into the branch and get them to print out a statement that does have my name, account number and balance which they then stamped and initialled :-)

I did have a plan B - use PhotoShop (or even an html editor) to add my name and the starred part of the account number, but that would be silly.

We have also had to prove identity and address to solicitors, mortgage brokers and the like recently. A utility bill is a good way of proving address, but as they seem to be pushing towards online accounts they get harder to find too, so we ended up posting valuable documents (passport and driving licence IIRC) - which the postperson returned by dropping through our letterbox even though it was returned recorded delivery :-(

The Big Read Top 100 meme

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:48:29 GMT

According to dadi The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading,
4b) and put asterisks beside things you were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible Not the full Old Testament
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. Gave up - why did this Heathcliffe character keep butting in ?
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott. Like here popular stuff - don't like the stuff she enjoyed writing but had to publish under other names
~~12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy~~. *Mayor of Casterbridge* put me off
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare. Don't know the sonnets, but have seen many/most of the plays
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier Does My Cousin Rachel give me half marks ?
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger **
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Started but completeley didn't get
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy First half
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll Probably only the Martin Gardner annotated edition
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
~~48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood~~
*49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding*
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley. For school didn't actually hate
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
*90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton*
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery Only in English
~~93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks.~~ Started then stopped
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

snapshots and firefox 3

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:49:27 GMT

Liver Journal has "Snap Shots" - a feature which allows you to see links in a pop-up without clicking on them.
I don't like this option, so disabled it in my browsers.

I'm trying out firefox 3 and disabling SnapShots doesn't work.
Has anyone else seen this ?

Odd bridge

Wed, 28 May 2008 12:07:01 GMT

On the way home at the weekend we drove under this
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=52.655105,-1.90158&spn=0.000437,0.001581&t=h&z=20
odd bridge on the M6 toll, between junctions T6 and T5.

It is a full motorway foot bridge but there is nothing at either end. It is near a straight section of the A5 which is marked Watling Street on many maps, and follows what looks like an ancient hedgerow so I speculate that it could be for climbers to follow the original path of Watling Street, or perhaps the predecessor to the Roman road. Can anyone confirm this ?

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:58:00 GMT

This card is produced from beautiful European trees which are hacked down into little pieces by burly Scandinavians with big beards. However, they are followed by the good tree fairy who plants more trees in their place.
Thus ensuring a continued income for the burly Scandinavians of tomorrow.

By Alan Plenderleith, (c) Emotional Rescue Ltd

Free News Scientist week

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:53:52 GMT

Free midday 18 February to midday 25 February 2008
NewScientistTech
Free access to all our subscriber-only content

www.NewScientist.com/tech

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:05:04 GMT

I feel a little uneasy about using one social networking site to discourage people from using a rival, but by encouraging you to read today's anti-Facebook Guardian article I am not trying to encourage you to use LiveJournal instead. For all I know LJ may be just as bad.

Actually since the Russians have taken over it may be much harder to find out how good or bad LJ becomes.

Urgent Climate change petition

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:23:41 GMT

The Bali Climate negotiations are close to agreement, but 3 nations are blocking an agreement on a reduced target for rich nations.
The Avaaz organisation, who are observing the conference have a petition, which says
"We call urgently for the US, Canada and Japan to stop blocking serious 2020 targets for emissions reductions, and for the rest of the world to refuse to accept anything less."

Please consider signing it.

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:24:55 GMT

You Should Have a White Christmas Tree

For you, the holidays represent joy and sprituality.
The true meaning of Christmas is important to you - even if you're not religious.

The holidays are a time of reflection for you.
You like to spend time thinking about what's important in life.

Your white tree would look great with: Bright, bold ornaments

You should spend Christmas Eve watching: The Nativity Story

What you should bake for Santa: Sugar cookies - served up with a tall glass of milk

What Color Christmas Tree Should You Have?

Only in Cambridge ?

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:31:50 GMT

Could this happen anywhere else ? Someone had their bicycle stolen and had a friend with a spare commuting-suitable unicycle ! But it went without saying that the victim was a unicyclist ?

Where to put wedding and honeymoon pictures ?

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:16:16 GMT

I've been reminded that I haven't posted about anything I've been up to lately.
Since that includes paragliding and moving house, not to mention getting married and a fortnight's honeymoon in Switzerland that means that there is a lot waiting to be said. There are a lot of pictures of it all too.

I think I have philosophical problems with the free photo sites, though with this cold I'm struggling to remember what they are. At the same time if I put our photos on a site that belongs to me and identifies the real-world me and link to them from here, I've just identified myself to LJ users who don't know me (OK, my default icon identifies me to anyone who does know me, so maybe I shouldn't worry about that). Plus putting (links to) pictures of other people in my journal makes it possible to identify people who may rather not be know to the world...

I suppose fundamentally I want to make my pictures available to family and friends (LJ and otherwise) and I'd like any random reader to be able to see the pictures, but without anything about the pictures to identify anyone.
I have a picture of miss_t_ide paragliding in front of the Eiger that will go up if/when I can answer this dilemma.

I've just done something I haven't done for nearly twenty years

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:00:24 GMT

... I mowed the lawn.

I used a strimmer - possibly for the first time - and a push-mower.
I think i tried a push mower once before: when i was five !