Just over 50 years ago, there was an election, the first one that I was around for (if not eligible to vote). One party other than Conservative or Labour won 9 seats, 1.4% of the total (and that includes Northern Ireland). It was thus almost certain that either Labour or the Conservatives would win a majority. It was pretty much the zenith of the ( Read more... )

The Economist, who should know better, present as a problem here the statistics that 75% of deaths from non-communicable diseases, and 80% of premature deaths, occur in developing countries. But the population of the OECD countries plus Russia is only about 1.4 billion, so 80% of the world's population live in developing countries (unless they're ( Read more... )

Yes, well, having animals at home does cut down on the amount of travelling. In 2014 I spent at least one night away from home in:

• Glasgow
• London
• Nottingham
• Hadfield
• Chester

Re-reading Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold, and Miles Vorkosigan has just purchased as gifts ear-ring-sized replicas of a few planets, which are apparently "displayed under various levels of magnification, where they proved to be perfectly-mapped replicas of the worlds they represented, right down to the one-metre scale.” A quick calculation ( Read more... )

For the benefit of the EU, here's how taxing things that are both sold and delivered over the Internet works.

Can we tax them based on the location of the vendor? No, because vendors will simply relocate to a jurisdiction that doesn't tax such transactions (e.g. Amazon in Luxembourg).

Can we tax them based on the location of the purchaser? No, ( Read more... )

So does the VATMOSS craziness mean that while I'm on one of my occasional tax-avoidance day-trips to buy cigarettes and wine in Belgium and France respectively, I can also pop over the border into Luxembourg, connect to a local wireless data network, and stock up on ebooks at 3% VAT instead of 20%? Even while still using my UK credit card and ( Read more... )

Everyone is trying to sell "natural language" calendar programs, that let you enter new appointments and reminders more naturally. And that's great, but all the examples they use to sell them are completely noddy ones like "10am next Monday", because doing it properly is very, very difficult. If you want to sell me your program, show me it can cope ( Read more... )

We took Jodie to the beach this afternoon, since it was nice and sunny, low tide, and after the closed season for dogs on (some of) the beach.

( Cut for a video, and big photos )

Here's a panorama taken from Milo's field, with our house in the middle.

( Cut for excessively wide photo )

Thanks to my new iPhone 6, here's a slow-motion video of Jodie in action. Note the wildly flapping tongue and ears.

Click to view