This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Friday 18th May 2012 at 1.18pm
Rapid
I have no idea whether this is a wind-up, but it makes for an enjoyable read either way!
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Posted Wednesday 16th May 2012 at 7.25pm
All the progress we've made
Stare at that graph two posts below and repeat after Mr. Cameron:
"We cannot blow the budget on more spending and more debt. It would squander all the progress we've made in these last two, tough years."
Now buck your ideas up Europe, because this just won't do!
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Posted Wednesday 16th May 2012 at 9.43am
Butternut squash and mango soup
1 tablespoon sunflower oil
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 butternut squash, chopped
1 mango, chopped
1 onion
1 small (thumbnail-sized) piece ginger, finely chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 vegetable stock cube
1 heaped tablespoon plain flour
1.5 litres boiling water
Heat the butter and oil on a medium-high heat. Add the cumin and coriander seeds and leave for 2 minutes, then add the onion and ginger and fry until the onions begin to soften. Add the squash, and when it begins to stick add a little bit of water, the stock cube and the flour. Stir together until it begins to stick again, then add the mango and the rest of the water. Simmer for 20-30 mins, stirring occasionally, until the squash has softened and you can easily crush it against the side of the pan. Then either stick the whole lot in the blender and give it a whirl, or use one of these hand blenders - my flatmate has one and it works really well.
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Posted Monday 14th May 2012 at 11.44am
Not the treasury view
An interesting short piece with several killer graphs - thanks to Rob Morris for posting it somewhere other than his office wall in Rio!
What the author fails to mention is that besides the creaking infrastructure and severe lack of housing in the UK, the entire world is locked in an environmental crisis, oil prices are high and unlikely to decrease in the long term, and many of Britain's power stations are reaching their expiry dates. Yet more reason for investment.
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Posted Friday 11th May 2012 at 9.20pm
Küküllömenti legényes
That's Hungarian for folk dance! (I think!)
Thanks to Hamed for bringing my attention to this...
How many of your papers can you dance to?
PS I have no idea how to do Hungarian umlauts in html, so you'll have to make do with the humdrum German ones... sorry about that!
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Posted Friday 11th May 2012 at 8.54pm
Still
Apparently the songs on my blog are always happy :)
Here's a sad one.
I had begun to fill in all the lines
Right down to what we'd name her.
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Posted Sunday 6th May 2012 at 9.04pm
Wham bam
I took my new camera for a test drive today. Click for higher res.
In other matters, I missed the obvious soundtrack to one of my posts last week!
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Posted Wednesday 2nd May 2012 at 10.02am
Taxing
The mouseover text on this xkcd comic is wrong. You don't need to know how to get your taxes done. Just live in the UK instead. Maybe Dave and co should give up on trying to tempt tourists over, and instead go for "come to Britain... where we have people who are good at working out how much tax you have to pay and we pay them to work out how much tax you have to pay instead of making you do it yourself!"
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Posted Sunday 29th April 2012 at 4.24pm
It's all a mystery
I was talking to a friend yesterday who mentioned that the UK citizenship test is pretty tough. I had no idea what it involved - I remember someone important many years ago joking that anyone who wanted UK citizenship should be able to name the England cricket captain - so my friend asked me a sample question: "when did women get the vote in the UK?" I was able to rattle off the correct answer, 1918.
This morning I tried the practice test here... and got 11/24. OK, so I didn't really think through my answers (I finished in about 4 minutes whereas 45 are allowed), and I did no preparation for the test, but I like to think I'm a reasonably intelligent UK citizen with at least a passing interest in politics, and I failed horribly.
Question 1: In the 1980s, the largest immigrant groups were from the West Indies, Ireland, India and Pakistan.
A) True
B) False
I know that these four groups probably make up some of the largest immigrant groups in the UK; I have no idea whether this was the trend in the 1980s in particular though. I presume immigration from Ireland has been commonplace for a long time, and I'm pretty sure there was a fair amount of immigration from the West Indies as far back as the late 1940s. Immigration from the subcontinent might be a more recent phenomenon. But if you were born in 1983, for example, like me, how are you supposed to know the answer? In fact even knowing the question, I think it would take a fair amount of work to find out the answer. I guessed true, but I don't know if I was right or not.
Question 2: Which TWO of these are names for the Church of England?
A) Methodist
B) Episcopal
C) Anglican
D) Presbyterian
I wasn't sure, but I went methodist and anglican. I've now looked the four of them up on wikipedia and I still don't know the correct answer. Methodist isn't a name for the Church of England - I knew that before I first did the test - but it is a name for a branch of the Church of England. The others seem to be more US-based (so I guess I got the question right) but in their wikipedia pages the word "Anglican" is featured prominently. In summary this is a poor question.
Question 3: How many parliamentary constituencies are there?
A) 464
B) 564
C) 646
D) 664
I guessed 664, because there were three answers ending in 64 and two involving the digits 4,6,6. The answer is 650, although it was 646 in 2005 (it'll change again soon). So the structure of the answers is deliberately misleading and all of the answers are wrong.
Question 4: Which of these statements is correct?
A) Education at state schools in the UK is free and this includes the cost of school uniform and sports wear.
B) Education at state schools in the UK is free but parents have to pay for school uniform and sports wear.
I knew the answer to this one (it's B), because I remember the boredom of going to buy school uniform. But what relevance does it have to UK life? If you're sending your kids to school, you're told by the school what you have to do about uniform. If you don't have kids then who gives a firetruck? There's no need to know this information.
I could, of course, go on. So it turns out that the question about women getting the vote was actually much more reasonable than most of this practice test. At least there's a reason to remember the date (it was the end of the first world war) and it has some importance to the history and culture of the UK, even if it's not really relevant to everyday life.
Tell us the story, Wayne...
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Posted Saturday 28th April 2012 at 7.18pm
A cocked-up conspiracy
This article by Jonathan Freedland is one of a distinct minority this week to mention the economic news: the UK is back in recession. Too many have concentrated on the Ceremy Hunt saga, which must be highly embarrassing for him and his pals but is hardly earth-shattering. "Government minister kept Murdochs up to date with process that ended up being cancelled anyway" would be a fairly accurate headline, and while I think it's important that this kind of washing is hung out to dry, surely (at least in the short to medium term) the dire economic tidings are more important to the state of the nation.
You don't need to be an economist to notice that the government's economic strategy is starting to whiff. Continuing along this road is going to be painfully slow at best. Let's do something proactive: build more houses, invest in green energy, simplify the tax system, and either modernise council tax or introduce some kind of land tax.
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