Neil Hopcroft's Journal

Time:

8:42 am.

Back from Tokyo into the beta maelstrom, its still going to take a while to catch up properly. I've finally uploaded some pictures. Its fantastic to be back there and makes me want to go back for more. I'll write some more about it at some point, but don't expect anything very quickly. Right now I've got a project to concentrate on.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Do we really Need To Know?
Time:	11:53 pm.

For some reason Operation Falco seems relevant again, 11 years on. Is it really that long? www.word.com were the first one down, now replaced by Merriam-Webster

Lets play. Who is going down this time around?
(anon ok)

Comments: Add Your Own.

Subject:	Goodbye to the alpha beard
Time:	12:18 am.

Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.

Time:

9:35 pm.

Comments: Read 6 or Add Your Own.

Time:

11:43 pm.

Product manual archive

Mitsuoka finally produce something worth looking at

Sex Pixels (worksafe, probably, but with thumbnails that look like they're not)

25 best programmer errors (which actually look like security mistakes to me, not actually the kind of bugs that I was expecting)

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Book review: Squandering Aimlessly
Time:	10:15 pm.

by David Brancaccio.

This book started out where Gullibles Travels left off. At the Mall of America. As far as I can work out this is just coincidence.

David explored how people have dealt with excess money, coming up with some options for handling a lottery win covering spending, charity, retirement and a number of other possibilities.

For some reason this book really didn't grab me, the subject matter is quite interesting but the writing style was somewhat flat. A nice tour of ways of spending money, but without any particular value, I was expecting more education from this book.

Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Book review: Gullibles Travels, adventures of a bad taste tourist
Time:	12:00 am.

Cash Peters (awful website, sadly) is a Brit who has managed to get himself pigeonholed as the man for the job when an American radio station needs someone to visit an obscure attraction.

This book follows some of his journeys to the kinds of places nobody really wants to visit. Of course the prospect of a barbed wire museum or a crazy golf course in the basement of a funeral home appeals to me. And his descriptions of encounters with various people dressed as foam animals (normally ending in a fight of some sort) and Elvis fans (also ending badly).

I loved this book, he's a very funny writer bringing a lot of life to what could easily be a dull subject, somehow he seems somewhat overwhelmed by everything, approaching all with a childish wonder at the prospect of discovering the worlds largest ball of string, followed by the utter disappointment when he has seen it.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Time:

9:12 pm.

Watching the economic situation pan out is fascinating, hilarious and scary in roughly equal measures. Of course, I could pretend that I could see what was going to happen two years ago, like all the commentators out there. In fact, no, I could see something bad was going to happen but I didn't know what it would be. Or how deep it would be.

There are a few things that concern me about the way the UK authorities are handling the situation.

Firstly, nationalisation of banks on condition of availability of continued loan funds has a couple of significant implications. This makes it very clear that the government will not allow the failure of a major bank, meaning that in the medium to long term future they are in a position to take on more risk than they have in the past since they know that the government will bail them out if the going gets tough. This has bad implications for shareholders while the executives of the banks are unlikely to suffer significantly because of their risk-taking.

However, in the short term, the government is backing lending to people of poorer creditworthiness (they must be, because the banks would continue lending to people of good credit risk anyway). Which means the government is underwriting loans to people who are (more) likely to default. Effectively subsidising risky ventures that would never receive funding from unsubsidised banks in the current climate.

Secondly setting a low interest rate does a couple of things. It makes people more likely to borrow and it makes people less likely to save. In order for people to borrow the money must come from somewhere. In the fractional reserve banking system it gets created from thin air by a magic multiplication of money from reserves. There are a number of measures of money supply, interesting ones are M0 "bank notes" which is the money made they government and M2, "commercial money" which is money made by the commercial banks through loans based on the fractional reserve system.

There are a number of ways to increase money available for borrowing (which is a close relative of M2), M0 could be increased (print more money), required reserves could be reduced (increase the amount of loan for each pound of deposit), increase the deposits, or many other ways. With interest rates lowered the amount of deposit won't increase, so there is likely to be an increase in one or other of the money supply figures. This will most likely lead to inflation, since there is more money in the system but the amount of goods in the system remains the same, meaning each good will cost more in terms of pounds but will remain roughly level in terms of time taken to earn the money to buy it.

If I was really cynical, I would tie this information up with Grandis observations about inflation and suggest that the government has a lot to gain by increasing inflation.

Of course, inflation also leads to the increase (in pound terms) of the GDP, which would mean that the government can claim (with a straight face) that it has lead us out of recession (no longer shrinking GDP) although, for a while at least, everyone can buy less with their weekly wages.

No wonder they call it the dismal science.

Comments: Read 7 or Add Your Own.

Time:

9:39 pm.

Hyperbolic crochet coral reef

"One can probably say that, as a species, cows are not the world’s most earthquake-sensitive animals"

Ich Will, Pooh

Bears in space

(I'm hoping theres no repeats here, some of these have been kicking around here for a while and I can't remember if I've posted them before)

Comments: Add Your Own.

Time:

10:21 pm.

We went to the Technical Museum for my birthday last week. A number of the museums here in Stockholm open late on wednesday evenings, so we headed down after I finished work. The smell of machine oil perks me up every time, there is a main hall with many old steam and early internal combustion engines, and a few old cars including one of the original Saab 92s (not a Saabaru, so wrong but so right).

The interactive section is a lot more fun when its not full of children - I made

meme_me a Möbius strip.

After the museum we went to the Kaknästornet, where we arrived just in time to get some food at the restaurant on the 30th floor. Being the only people there we got the finest seat in the house overlooking the lights of central Stockholm, with a view from Nacka in the south all the way around to Lidingö in the north. There was some excitement going on in the park around the tower, with some flashing blue lights apparently closing in around someone in the darkness.

And now I'm drinking apple and cloudberry yogourt, and reminiscing about previous birthday trips to the London science museum.

Comments: Add Your Own.

Time:

12:00 am.

For some reason its a public holiday here in Sweden tomorrow, so I was looking for something to do. I wasn't very successful but I did find Volvo abuse on a scale only possible in rural Sweden. Comes complete with a little giggle in the background that brings to mind

hirez throwing a sack of hammers down a stone staircase.

Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.

Time:

12:16 am.

The car was registering -5 outside today when I was heading out for a walk. I drove to the other side of the nature reserve north of Akalla, before walking across to the memory fields. There was a biting wind and the snow underfoot was being creaky. There were a few streams and pools nearby the path covered in ice, the surface on a couple had been broken to show an inch of ice on them.

I was glad to get back to the car and thaw out, its such a nice feeling being able to move your face again and getting the burning sensation in your ears so you know you didn't get frostbite in them.

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Subject:	Happy New Year
Time:	8:31 pm.

One of my resolutions this year was (as probably has been before) to be a bit better at communicating - I've somewhat lost touch with a lot of people over the last couple of years. So I'm going to start writing here a bit more.

We started by seeing the new year in with the Burnt Out Punks, well, we would have done if there hadn't been quite such a crowd in the way, so actually we just saw some flames twirling above peoples heads on stage.

The view over the city across the harbour from Skansen was fantastic, so we got a panoramic view of the cities fireworks.

Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.

Time:

9:54 pm.

Lego playstation

Really, I was joking about a Lego wedding ring

Dammit, I haven't yet gotten to the Frag Grenades in my Advent Calandar.

Comments: Read 7 or Add Your Own.

Time:

11:51 pm.

The first in an intermittent series celebrating Swedish cakes. Today we have a Napoleon Cake, a frog cake and a mini mint cake.

Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.