Maximum re-use
Our local pizza take-out, Oregano, closed down a few months ago. Before its demise, the O of the big Oregano sign above the door fell off, never to be replaced.
Its premises remained activity-free until a few weeks ago, when some new occupants strated sprucing the place up, ready to open as… Wait for it… A pizza take-out.
I saw a couple of the workers at the new place a couple of days ago. And they were sporting t-shirts printed Regano. Ten out of ten for re-use.
Tweetabus
I’ve wondered about hashtags in Twitter for a while now. I’ve not subscribed to them, but maybe I’ll start. Not in Twitter itself, because I don’t think it’s suited to dealing with them in a user-friendly way; but in Google Reader, where you can add a hashtag’s search URL as a feed.
Thinking about useful such feeds, it would be nice if people adopted hashtags to report issues with London buses (#tfl26 is my proposed hashtag for the 26 bus). I would certainly subscribe to the hashtags of bus routes that affect me, checking in whenever I’m ready to embark upon a journey.
Thoughts?
Newcastle relegated, I think
For whatever reason, BBC Sport chose the last day of the Premier League season to re-arrange its live updates page. Its main new feature is that instead of appearing at the top of the main content area, the latest scores appear in the right-hand column.
While it looks fine and dandy on the web, the page has a fundamental flaw when viewed on a mobile: the right-hand modules, including these live scores, are nowhere to be seen. So you have to follow each and every textual update in an attempt to figure out what the latest scores are.
Thankfully, the fact that Newcastle lost meant that I only had one score to concentrate on.
Please sort it out for next season, BBC.
Are you guilty? Yes/No?
I used simultaneous equations for what I think was the first time in my career last week, having learnt them as a teenager. It was to figure out a base cost c and the variable cost m where I knew three equations that should rightfully have satisfied the equation y=mx+c, x and y known in each of the scenarios. Although rusty, my knowledge didn’t fail me.
And I resorted this week to a statistical technique that I remember learning back in 1992–3 while at university in Newcastle. The technique aims to estimate percentages of people who share an attribute where the people sampled aren’t necessarily up for answering the question truthfully.
The question to which I wanted to know the answer was “Of those people accused of terrorism who walk free, what percentage were actually guilty?”
If you ask the freed suspects outside the Old Bailey “Did you do it?”, you’re unlikely to get a considered response, particularly from those that did. Why not instead give them a die and ask them to roll it in secret. If they get a six, they should answer the question dishonestly; if they get anything other than a six, they should be honest in their response.
If 70% (y) of respondents said they were guilty, then the estimated percentage of people that were guilty would actually be 80% (x). Here’s the math(s).
0.8*(5/6) + 0.2*(1/6) = 0.7. Or (5/6)x + (1/6)(1-x) = y
And here’s the English. The estimated proportion of people saying they were guilty is:
The proportion of guilty people answering truthfully * the odds of them answering truthfully
plus
The proportion of innocent people answering dishonestly * the odds of them answering dishonestly
But having conducted the experiment with a sufficiently large set of people, you know the y, so re-arranging and simplifying, the estimated proportion of guilty people is:
(y-(1/6))*1.5
It’s quite a nice little solution. If, of course, you can trust people to act honestly based on their rolling of the die.
For travel advice, call your colleague
The other day, my bus into work sat idly in a queue of traffic, occasionally stopping and starting where usually it would usually whizz down the bus lane, laughing at the queuing cars interrupted only by the odd twatting cyclist. (The twatting cyclists are the ones that disobey all rules of the road. Unfortunately, a seemingly law-abiding one on that very morning ploughed straight into a van that was cutting up the traffic, through no fault of the cyclist. He was OK. But still.)
The bus was standing room only, which made the snail-like pace all the more annoying. I reached for my phone and searched Google News for the name of the troubled main road, hoping for some traffic update or the like. No articles came back. Not even one about the recent stabbing that had led to the road closure, nor anything about the big pile of blood and what appeared to be body-shrapnel (brain bits?) outside the road’s Post Office I saw the other month.
Maybe I should have searched Transport for London, but I didn’t think of that. My belief was that their systems wouldn’t be geared to getting such news out so quickly to their customers. And I also figured that while the Tube line is entirely under the remit of TfL, roads aren’t, so are less likely to receive the same level of focus as Tube issues.
So I called my colleague to inform him that my attendance at the 9am meeting was touch-and-go because of transport issues south of the river. Without my asking or him looking up the information, he immediately told me of a RTA (road traffic accident) on said road that was bringing south London to a standstill. He read the news somewhere at Victoria Station, apparently.
So my colleague knew, but the internet didn’t. Or at least the bit of the internet that I was looking at didn’t.
How do we get this information into the hands of the public quickly and in a digestible format? I should be able to click on a bus number and find out the latest. Maybe I can, and am looking in the wrong place. Or maybe it’s not there.
If it doesn’t already exist, we need a system that allows you to upload snippets of information based on your GPS location and to tag it as necessary with appropriate information—road names, bus numbers etc.
Does it exist? If not, why not? Does this belong in Twitter?
Bank Holiday weather
Typical Bank Holiday weather ahead.
Bank Holiday weather
Out of orifice emails
The Outlook interface for creating and editing your out-of-office email response is dreadful. In Outlook 2007, it constitutes a text-box four lines high, maybe 350 pixels wide for entering raw, unformatted text. Keep typing and you’ll get a vertical scrollbar.
And the interface does not allow for spell-checking.
The dreadfully constrained interface and the lack of a spell-checker make for out-of-office emails littered with typos and grammatical heathenry, an email that is sent to way more people than any other. I would estimate that over half of those I receive contain at least one error.
Today’s examples:
- I am out of the office until Friday 22nd May and will limited access my emails during this time
- I am out of the office at a and will be back at work on the 26th May 2009
Please. Copy your email into Word. Read it, check it and double-check it before turning your out of office on. Thank you.
Wolfram Alpha
Well. It seems that everyone else has written about it. So it’s probably time I joined the bandwagon.
Wolfram Alpha. It’s quite impressive isn’t it? Type in some terms that it likes and it’ll tell you all about them. Type in comparable items (apple and orange, for example), and it’ll compare them for you. Enter a couple of cities, and it will tell you about the journey between the two and the relative times of sunrise in the respective locations. And it’ll eat complex mathematical formulae for breakfast. *
* As long as lots of other people aren’t using the site at breakfast time, in which case it will apologise in a humorous way for its inability to deal with your request.
But where does it sit? I’ve seen articles asking whether it’s a Google-killer. (None believes it is, but many ask the question.) While I also read one that instead suggests that WA will instead eat into Wikipedia’s traffic.
I don’t think either is true. WA as a site is a flash in the pan. Mathematicians and a few geeks will bookmark it; a tiny proportion of those will make it their homepage.
Yet WA uses a phenomenally powerful semantic technology. It allows certain queries to be parsed quite beautifully to give pertinent, insightful, useful information.
But I don’t want to choose which search engine to turn to based on what I’m looking for. (As an aside, I’d never go to Wikipedia to search for stuff—I rely on Google giving sufficient prominence to Wikipedia results for pertinent queries, such is the travesty that is Wikipedia search.) I want something else to decide which search engine to use and return the results that are most appropriate to my query.
I want search to be good enough for the “I’m feeling lucky” button to be the default. If I search for HMRC, don’t give me a bunch of results; take me straight to the website, maybe with a link in a header bar to its Wikipedia entry, or to wider search results. If I search for y = sin x, take me straight to the WA results page, again with the option of going to the wider results if I so choose.
Google is best placed to integrate search in this way, with such dominance in so many markets and so many eyes looking no further. Whether it develops its own Wolfram Alpha equivalent, buys up their technology, or merely links off to it as it does with Wikipedia remains to be seen.
(As an aside, it’s interesting that Wolfram has registered www.wolfram.com, but not managed to secure www.wolframbeta.com.)
Twetiquette
If I follow you on Twitter but don’t know you or know of you, don’t d me; unless I actively invite you to do so.
And if you have a site that you want me to visit, don’t beg me to do so. I’ll visit your site if I find the content sufficiently enticing. Your begging is vulgar and rather pathetic, and detracts from what I otherwise consider to be worthwhile content.
And please don’t ask that I visit the homepage because you’re unsure whether it’s up. (”Is anyone having problems with the my site’s homepage? Or had problems in the past? Take a look.”) Test it yourself—don’t patronise me with such a thinly veiled plea.
That is all.
House of pi
If I were to build a house from scratch (from the ground up, if you will), I’d like to think I’d have the balls to put a digit on each brick. While building work would start at the bottom of the house, owing in the main to tradition and the effects of gravity, the design would be such that the front of the house would display the first digits of pi, reading from left to right, top to bottom, a three appearing in the top left corner, just under the eaves. To its right, a unique “decimal point” brick.
To achieve the goal, the number of rows of bricks (m) and the number of bricks on each row (n) would need to be pre-defined. And you’d work backwards from the (mn-2)nd digit of pi in the bottom right corner.
Is that a job that you’d trust to a brickie?
Average expenses by political party
A quick update showing the average expenses claim in 2007–8 by political party. Of the big three, the Lib. Dems. out-expensed Labour by £4,448 per MP (3.1%), who in turn out-expensed the Conservatives by £6,700 per MP (4.8%).
- IND: £160,727
- SDLP: £154,365
- Plaid Cymru: £153,232
- Liberal Democrat: £150,287
- SNP: £149,769
- DUP: £146,608
- Labour: £145,839
- Sinn Fein: £142,283
- UKIP: £140,987
- IND Labour: £139,210
- Conservative: £139,139
- RES: £136,390
- UUP: £134,004
- IND Conservative: £118,910
- SPE: £74,522
Overall average: £144,176
High-level analysis of MP expenses
The Guardian made the data available for the expense totals, broken down by type, of each of the 645 MPs for the last year. Below is my summary.
Expenses for the year totalled £92,993,748, an average of £144,176.35 per MP. Eric Joyce, MP for Falkirk, topped the list with a claim of £187,334. Philip Hollobone, MP for Kettering, claimed the least: £47,737.
Sixty percent of the total claimed was for staffing costs, 12% for office running costs, 12% for the cost of staying away from the main home. Then we have comms. allowance (5%), rail travel (2%), stationery-associated postage costs (2%) and mileage (2%) followed by a bunch of other expenses each making up lesser percentages.
Andrew Robathan, MP for Blaby in Leicestershire had the highest allowance for living away from the main home, at £23,083. Margaret Beckett topped the list for staffing costs, at £107,458 compared to an average of £85,872. 59 MPs (9%) did not make any claims for living away from home.
Sarah Kennedy, wife of Charles, was the spouse that benefited most from the spouse’s travel allowance, accounting for £6,046 across 30 journeys. Donald Kennedy, their four-year-old son, seems to have been the biggest beneficiary of the family travel allowance: £5,250, also over 30 journeys.
Owen Paterson, Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was the biggest petrol-head, claiming £1,764 in mileage. Angus MacNeil was the biggest flyer, claiming £28,137 on air fares. In all, the taxpayer picked up the bill for 6,181 journeys made by family members of MPs, a bill of £461,067.
Cameron grounds the kids
Just when you thought it impossible for Gordon Brown to lose any more ground against the Conservatives (or the Conservatories, as I’d like them to be called hereafter), he’s lost a huge amount of ground in the last few hours.
Earlier today, David Cameron acted like the parent of a naughty set of kids. He strongly berated members of his party, holding his own hands up about his wisteria-trimming ways, and put in place firm sanctions for their behaviour. He confronted the issue of what is right vs. what is legally allowed, siding with the public opinion that legality doesn’t matter, and what is right and just is more important. And he ordered that his “kids” owned up to the errors of their ways and paid money back to the fees office for anything that fell outside the spirit or letter of the law, or else face eviction from the party.
Compare this to Hazel Blears’ phraseology when declaring that she would repay the capital gains tax that she previously avoided, a position that she vehemently defended not 24 hours earlier.
It’s not enough to simply abide by the rules and the law…
Hardly the most contrite position.
When asked whether any other Cabinet ministers would need to act in a similar manner, Alistair Darling, for example, Gordon Brown suggested that “Hazel Blears is in a different position to other members of the Cabinet”, reluctant to indict his ministers, Blears included. In the same interview with Nick Robinson, Brown confirmed that “people do make mistakes”.
Cameron’s hard line is impressive, and he is likely to come out of this not smelling of roses, but certainly with the moral high-ground over Brown. He said an independent review of every claim made would help MPs show they are “worthy of public trust”.
Brown’s continuing reference to “mistakes” and his very suggestion that MPs might be worthy of trust are not sentiments the public wants to hear at the moment. Nor do they want to hear Blears refer back to her legal cleanliness when offering to write her cheque to HMRC.
They want to hear that the kids have been grounded and their pocket money stopped. That’s where Cameron has captured the public’s imagination and further increased his lead over Brown in the election race.
Brown, Blears, New Labour and the Olympic Village
The revelations that have graced BBC News’ number one spot for the last several days, and will no doubt grace it for a good few days more, are despicable.
For those abroad, or those whose heads have been buried down a rabbit-hole for the last few weeks, the story is about ministers’ abuse of the expense system, particularly the rules surrounding the second homes that most ministers are entitled to given their need to divide their time between Westminster and their respective constituencies.
Or in many instances it’s not about their abuse; it’s about them following the expenses policy to the letter. (For some, they’ve clearly gone outside the policy, but for the moment let’s concentrate on those that have read the expenses policy and followed it.)
While Gordon Brown sympathises with the rising numbers of unemployed, he spends £6,577 of tax-payers’ money on cleaning services in the space of 26 months. While you could argue this to be modest at £58.22 per week, this is for what should surely be a small flat in London. That’s some thorough cleaning. More than we pay for our three-storey main residence. (We don’t get our second property professionally cleaned mainly due to its non-existence.)
If the above example is not sufficiently clear-cut, then surely Hazel Blears’ antics are enough to leave you with a sick taste in your mouth. To the Commons Fees Office that polices the expenses, she declared her London property as her second home, allowing her an £850 per month contribution to the mortgage. Yet when selling the property, she told HMRC on the other side of Parliament Square that it was her main residence, saving her an estimated £18,000 in capital gains tax. FTW.
The latest revelations surround the Conservatives, and the stories continue to abound detailing the antics that the public is now both tired of and livid at. But the stereotypically self-centred policies of the Tories suggest that maybe we expect them to find and exploit the loopholes to maximise their own gain. For Labour, they were elected in 1997 on a promise to move away from such values, to bring about greater equality and opportunity for all, and to generally do the right thing. Given these “New Labour” aspirations, it’s hard not to shout obscenities at Blears on the TV when she tells us that she operated within the rules.
I have complied with the rules of the House, the rules of the Inland Revenue and that’s the situation as it is
Time will tell whether she has—The Guardian today revealed that HMRC is investigating possible cases of tax evasion by MPs such as Blears. (Slightly worrying, btw, that a Cabinet minister has not yet been informed of 2004’s machinery of government changes—yesterday was the fifth anniversary of HMRC being named for the first time in public, by Sir David Varney.) But whether or not she followed the rules, surely Labour’s ethos and reason for being means that she shouldn’t ever try to defend her actions in this way. Surely to God. I’m not sure whether her diminutive 4′10″ stature, a fact that has been stripped from her Wikipedia entry after I added it a couple of years ago, intensifies my anger at this particular incident. If it does, I can only apologise.
The expenses system certainly needs shaking up. But so too do the values of the people representing the Labour party.
In an attempt to find a solution to this debacle, instead of having an expenses system for second homes, why not just commandeer an ex-council block and house all the ministers there. Or better still, why not give them a bit of the Olympic Village come autumn 2012? Or would that be considered too far from Westminster, necessitating a second property within a spit of SW1?
Where fonts end and formats begin
I was wondering the other day how the separation was defined between fonts and formats.
In the olden days of newspaper and book printing everything was a piece of lead. An italicised e required a different piece of lead than did a regular e—both appearing backwards of course, to allow them to be readable when printed. And leading itself, the spacing between lines of text, was introduced by inserting varying amounts and widths of lead horizontally between the rows of text. My interest in typefaces may be related to my grandfather’s career as a typesetter—doubtful though, as sadly he died on the day of my fourth birthday.
And when word processing was brought to the masses by way of the typewriter (I still love the fact that you type that word using only the top row of the QWERTY keyboard; and I’m still baffled by the fact that I always type QWERTY by hunting out the letters one-by-one rather than automatically sweeping acros the top row), variable fonts, italics and bold were out, and underlining was done sub-optimally by retracing your steps and overtyping some underscores. Leading was created through the carriage return, with variation of the standard created through adjusting the roller on which the paper sat.
And now in the world of the computer-based word processing, there is a clear separation between fonts and formatting. Well, mostly clear. Bold is part of formatting, apart from instances in which it’s been wrapped up in the font, in the likes of Arial Black. Underlining and strikethrough are a format that can be applied to characters irrespective of their fonts.
Maybe the modern-day divide is true to the spirit of its lead predecessor, with typefaces coming in boxes and formatting (e.g. leading) being typeface-independent. But the instances where formats play with the fonts themselves (e.g. italics, strikethrough) make it a little more complex.
Still, I think the divide is perfectly-positioned. Except for Arial Black, of course.
Musical artists I know little about
In an effort to extend the breadth of the publicised subject matters I know little about, I thought I’d continue with the theme set out in this post of a month ago, in which I asked for index cards on each of religion, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine to bring me up to speed. (Apart from a link kindly provided on Israel/Palestine, nothing has been forthcoming.)
This post lists a few musical artists that are sufficiently mainstream and well-respected to warrant people having a good, high-level background on them, but for which I have no such background, for whatever reason. (Too busy listening to shit pop in the 80s, I expect.)
Anyway, in no specific order, below is my starter list for ten.
- Neil Young
- Bob Dylan
- Johnny Cash
There are lots more. But I can’t think of them right now, so I’ll append as I remember them.
Apologies if this ill-education offends anyone.
My marathon running order
I’m not sure I’m cut out to do a marathon. Which is a bit of a bitch given that I’ve entered into the ballot for LDN 2010.
I decided to get off my lazy arse last Sunday lunchtime while my daughter slept (which I just mis-typed spelt), and ran 6.32km in 32m 55s. It was my first outing in twelve months, and I ran too far, too fast.
I spent the afternoon hacking and went downhill from there. A visit to the doctor on Thursday morning equipped me with steroids and antibiotics, and fingers crossed they’re doing the trick, along with the ibuprofen, Lemsip and Strepsils. Today is the first day I’ve felt good since. Not great, but good. But don’t speak to me. My face is still hiding a wealth of ghastly goo that makes me sound like Monica in The One With Rachel’s Sister. I’m fine-d!
Anyway, I was thinking. If I am one of the “lucky” ones who gets selected in the ballot, I’ll run it (mentally) in the following order:
- 194 metres
- 2 km
- 10km (x4)
It would be very painful to do it in the reverse order, finishing four stints of 10km only then to have to do a further 2km, only to find you’ve still got 194m to run.
It’ll be tough to think of it that way, particularly with the big milestone banners throughout the route of the course. But they’re probably all in miles, so maybe easier to ignore if I work in kilometres.
A month in
It’s exactly a month since the site moved half way round the world from Sydney to its new Wordpress home in Jersey. And today, Akismet, the anti-spam add-on for Wordpress, celebrated by successfully hiving off its 1,000th spam comment. Not a bit of intervention needed on my part.
Overall, I’m happy with Wordpress. Very happy. I need to get FTP access to the file system so that I can do some playing. And I need to figure out just where some of the code is stored for some of the modules, because while the interface allows me to do quite a bit of stuff to the visuals (e.g. what appears in the right-hand columns), it’s not at all obvious where the resultant code goes and indeed what’s styling it—to me at least.
And there’s one outstanding bug that diverts all links to old posts using the old pLog URL structure to this post about paragraph numbering in the civil service. Rob, if you can sort that last one out, that’d be peachy 
Many more months of Wordpress loveliness to follow.
Paginated articles: don’t patronise me
I hate paginated articles. I hate them with a passion.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand why sites create them. They give the user the “opportunity” to load another page, allowing more, and varied, advertising to be served to me, thus increasing your revenue. And in days gone by, bandwidth might have been a driver. In appreciation of my 28.8kb connection, the site might have shown some mercy, loading pages in bite-sized chunks to allow me to start reading as soon as possible. (I doubt it, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.)
But bandwidth is no longer an issue in this context. And surely the world of Web 2.0 allows adverts to be changed on the hoof without loading a new page.
So please stop patronising me. Please stop making me hunt for the Page 2 link. And serve me the content in its entirety that I’ve chosen to read. Thank you.
Twoogle enhanced: Twitter to Google Docs
Google Spreadsheets introduced new functionality the other day allowing sheets to be protected individually. Previously, you either protected a workbook in its entirety or you didn’t.
In my earlier version of the Twitter to Google Docs feed (now named Twoogle in deference to the continuing trend for Twitter apps to begin with the letters TW), I separated the Friends list from the Feed to save people breaking the latter.
I’ve just created a new, enhanced version, combining the two spreadsheets into a single one, and locking down the Feeds sheet to save people from themselves. 
Click here to access the new version. Please leave comments here to let me hear your feedback.