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09:17 am
[Link] |
Regrets, I've had a few, but then again...
Toyota has just sent me a personalised email.
Hello Mr Brock
Everyone has regrets. The job you didn't take. The friendship you neglected. The words you wish
you'd said...
But the risks that paid off, when you look back, loom larger. The flirtatious glance you acted upon. The day you bought your home. That time, against every instinct, when you answered "Yes"...
Take a chance on the Toyota Auris.
» Book your test drive now
I bought the car 2 weeks ago. Are they trying to pimp me another one in some bizarre automotive threesome?
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02:41 pm
[Link] | I was wandering through the Oxfam bookshop yesterday and noticed D&D's Deities and Demigods priced at £20. I remember this as being the very weak fourth AD&D publication and feeling rather cheated when I purchased it new for about £10 when that was a significant sum to me. It had poor illustrations and weak descriptions of gods from a range of mythologies with some numerical characteristics that I could have made up off the cuff as a DM had it been necessary. Why does a work like that increase in value? What I actually was looking for and bought was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein for £2. I remember this rather fondly and my copy has gone missing (possibly to my brother). This does rather confirm my view that keeping books is a waste of space as anything you want to reread will be easily available if you look for it. Is the judgement of history that the worth of Hugo award winning Moon is a Harsh Mistress is 1/10 that of Deities and Demigods?
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09:48 am
[Link] |
Car loans
So the government will guarantee up to £1bn in car loans http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7853149.stm.
The economics of building cars are quite well known. Car companies are geared up to produce a certain number of cars per year and the fixed costs of running the business are about equal to the marginal cost of each car. So if you produce half as many cars as you plan they have to cost half as much again to cover your overhead. The best companies that match production and demand to capacity manage a profit of about 10%. At the moment demand is down by 25% so this will bankrupt every manufacturer who cannot massively reduce capacity if it carries on for long. The companies are well aware of the economics and use their finance companies as one tool to boost demand so it has never been difficult to get a car loan. Because they are giving the finance companies an asset that they have (a car) rather than the normal intangible credit the credit crunch does not affect them in quite the same way as it does the banks. So what will the government underwriting loans do? Car companies must now choose whether to lend a car to dodgy customers in exchange for very useful cash (a deposit and the repayments) knowing that if the customer doesn't repay they'll still get paid or they can go bankrupt. As a scheme designed to fail it takes some beating.
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11:47 am
[Link] |
Merit pay
The University is having a debate on its merit pay system. Oxford is a strange sort of workers collective where the voting shareholders, congregation (made up of lecturers and above and senior support staff (of which I am the most junior grade)) get to vote on their own pay system (though the funding council does seem to exercise a lot of control. Currently the system is that every year you have to make a case to a department committee. As far as I can work out currently every academic gets a merit award of between 3K and 35k (where that leaves the funding council's UK wide equal pay for equal work policy I don't know but we'll ignore that) and support staff usually don't get one. At the moment it is supposedly there to attract global talent and has been criticised for people getting it by threatening to leave. Now the official proposal is to make department managers propose the most worthy. This is being criticised for requiring them to be fair which the critic seemed to regard as unduly onerous (either department heads are not used to being fair or more likely the process they would have to go through to be seen to be fair would be incredibly tortuous).
I've been involved in various merit payment schemes and I have never come across one that I think achieves its usually stated goals of promoting long term organisational improvement so I'd abolish it. Does anyone know of a system that does work in some sense?
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09:02 am
[Link] | Night before last the darkening. Rain and cold with miserable people hunched against the weather.
This morning ice on the road. Drivers with steamed up windows navigating by clairvoyance. I'm wary of carnage. Winter has come.
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01:45 pm
[Link] |
Grass
So I have finally finished my Open University Biology course. A huge amount of work but loads of useful info on plants, animals and microbes. For instance;
Grass is a C4 plant (as only about 1% of plant species are). This means it has a mechanism for fixing of Carbon into sugar by presenting it in a concentrated 4 Carbon compound to the sugar creating enzyme in photosynthesis. The upshot of this is that in the presence of fertiliser grass grows much more efficiently than most other plants. So if you want a good lawn then fertilize it, if you want a wild flower meadow then don't. I have been sort of aware of this kind of thing for ages but it makes much more sense having studied all these things as an integrated whole.
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11:07 am
[Link] |
Icelandic banks
Why have councils taken money off us and then squirreled it away in Icelandic banks?
According to the Times;
Cherwell District Council £7m
Oxfordshire County Council £5m
Underspending you budget is just as much bad management as overspending it.
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11:04 am
[Link] |
Bonekickers
Having just seen the final episode of Bonekickers I was thinking it might make a good Open University 10 point level 1 course - like Life of Mammals or Coast. S1xx The History and Science of Achaeology. No?
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01:51 pm
[Link] |
Robot pack dog
http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog
I'd rather have a St Bernard.
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04:30 pm
[Link] | 
From this image and article the naive might deduce that relaxing licensing laws causes a rise in alcoholism http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7518843.stm. The naive might also suggest that generalising this kind of thing might lead one to believe that relaxing drug laws might lead to a large increase in hospital admissions. Of course the reactionary libertarian has no fundamental issue with this it being their choice but for those who believe in protecting people from the consequences of their actions it may suggests that progressively increasing control is the way to go. Certainly not relaxing it.
Are you a heartless libertarian or do you support government restriction of harmful activity?
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10:04 am
[Link] | Pope hits out against consumerism http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7510862.stm.
A bit hypocritical from someone living in a palace like the Vatican I think.
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04:02 pm
[Link] | http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7484131.stm
Having collected more information on the population than they know what to do with the government tries to justify this by offering a prize for anyone who can think of a use for the data.
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08:51 pm
[Link] | In Canada at the moment
Highlights so far:
The Royal Tyrrel dinosaur museum at Drumheller in Alberta. Very good Burgess shale stuff though it sounds like the Smithsonian is the place to go for this and excellent Permian stuff in general. Also good dinosaurs Albertosaurus (of course) but also Styracosaurs. They also had a conservator on display so you could chat to her about how they do it.
Lake Louise still partially frozen but the legendary green colour under the ice. Wonderful climb up through the pine forest and the melting ice into the snow at lake Agnes.
Having trouble with the distances especially in Alberta. Went to sleep after an hour travelling along a straight road. Woke up half an hour later and it looked like we hadn't moved. Still the same straight road.
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10:17 am
[Link] | Just when you thought the Moseley sex scandal couldn't get any more lurid
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3953837.ece
For me the issue is why are all these people leaving their jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with their competence? Is it naive to think that you should have to demonstrate corruption or dishonesty before punishing someone for it?
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02:07 pm
[Link] | Grand Theft Auto IV has sold out in Oxford. Even Halo III didn't do that so it seems that what people really want for entertainment is brutality. I'd say simulated brutality but this morning a bus forced me off the road on my bicycle at traffic lights and yesterday a different bus tried to force me into the pit they are digging for the new mains in Summertown.
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01:34 pm
[Link] | A difference engine is just child's play.
http://acarol.woz.org/FullEngineFrontLarge.jpg
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01:59 pm
[Link] | I have just had an internal email notifying me that computing services will be running the 'in house basic food hygiene training course'. I reread it several times but it appears to be genuine.
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09:41 am
[Link] | At the Mohammed al Fayad circus in the Diana he inquest he was reported to have muttered about Charles wanting to marry his crocodile wife so presumably he thinks the whole thing was part of the giant lizard in human skin conspiracy. Since Diana had children with Charles then presumably she was a giant lizard and since he believes she was pregnant with Dodi's child then he must be a giant lizard. One presumes that he is upset that despite being a giant lizard none of the other giant lizards will conspire with him.
Will we be seeing the royal family on the final episode of life in cold blood?
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07:30 pm
[Link] | I replaced my brake blocks today. Apparently a year of cycling making emergency stops for homicidal bus drivers and suicidal pedestrians will wear out your brakes front and rear. Last time I did this was about ten years ago. Then I had centre pull brakes and it involved a lot of tedious pulling of cables through screw clamps with needle nosed pliers. The previous time I had side pull calipers and it wasn't possible to align the block so when you finished it scraped slightly on one side. Now I have a V-brake and you can align it by just adjusting a few screws. It seems to me that engineers are doing their bit to ensure we all live in a bright shiny future but there are still some underperformers - I am giving politicians the hard stare here. Am I being unfair?
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11:11 am
[Link] | I have just had a discussion with some physicist where we couldn't agree so I thought I'd challenge the collective physics knowledge of my friends.
I am designing a cryostat and the inner tank is at liquid nitrogen temperatures. This inner tank is supported in a vacuum on thin strips so the major heat load is by radiation. The conventional method to reduce this is by having a thin sheet of reflective material between the outer wall and the tank. Normally this is at a temperature roughly halfway between but in this case it will not be. My argument is that this does not matter much because it is has a very high emissivity (0.99) so very few photons are emitted or absorbed. They were very dubious and the discussion became rather philosophical.
Basically their point was that if a perfect reflector emitted no photons it would have no temperature and this would violate the laws of thermodynamics. I countered this and we came to no conclusion. So my questions are as follows.
1) Does a perfect reflector emit photons? (so an almost perfect reflector emits almost no photons)
2) Will a radiation shield work even if it is close to the temperature of one of the wall?
3) Does a perfect reflector violate any law of thermodynamics?
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