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| Monday, May 12th, 2008 | | 8:23 pm |
Your chance for stardom!
Do you live in Cambridge? Have you rented from a buy-to-let landlord and found it a nightmare? Do you want to appear on Look East on Wednesday and talk about it?
I ranted to BBC have-your-say about the troubles of renting from landlords who get divorced and have to sell up, or decided that emigrating to Australia wasn't in fact for them, and someone from Look East rang up this afternoon wanting me to appear; but since my troubles took place some years ago and in Cheltenham, I wasn't appropriate.
Comment here by tomorrow lunchtime and I'll put the lady from the BBC in touch with you. | | Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | | 3:13 pm |
Discarded food ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ewx points at this article, which is the very carefully-surveyed source for the various claims you see about food waste. It's tedious to read, because the food is divided into categories which are all carefully named with the names always referred to in full, so the string 'meat and fish meals' appears much more often than in continuous prose, and there's lots of data presented as paragraphs which would take up less space as unadorned tables of numbers. I'm a bit surprised by the clause on composting, because food waste thrown on the compost heap is just as much thrown away as food waste thrown in the bin in the sense of not being food thereafter. It's an interesting report, and it seems to fit in with what I can remember of my experience: throwing gone-off food away isn't something that sticks in the memory, but certainly sprouty potatoes and brown apples are among the things I remember throwing out. I've deliberately bought very little prepared food for several years, after living off it in my first year living out as an undergraduate; but packaged salads do turn swiftly to compost in the bag. The conclusion I think I'd want Tesco to draw is that many of the products they sell, particularly salads, pork products and cooking sauces, need more preservatives and a longer shelf life, and possibly to be sold in smaller portions - for potatoes, certainly, I buy a five-pound bag and let two pounds of them turn into sprout-ridden monsters at the bottom of the cupboard. I've often thrown away half a pack of bacon, since I think of bacon as a staple, make one meal using three or four rashers, and actually only eat bacon once every couple of weeks by which time the rest has turned green and smells nasty. Similarly I've often used half a jar of pasta sauce and found the second half of it covered in white mould when next I want pasta sauce. The conclusion for food-eaters to draw is that they should weigh out rice and pasta rather than pouring it into cooking-water from the jar, probably not buy packaged salads, and shop more often buying smaller portions of things. The last is of course not a counsel of economy; my aunt's habit of buying lots of one-pint milks and freezing them in the plastic may well make sense. I don't know how alone I am in always clearing my plate, where 'food left on plate' accounts for 30% of avoidable food waste; this is less avoidable in families with picky children. | | Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | | 8:26 pm |
Scotland
My aunt and uncle occasionally complain that their nephews rarely come and see them ever since they moved to a cottage on the north side of the Beauly Firth just opposite Inverness, so I used the Bank Holiday to fix this.
I managed to pick the weekend between the end of the rainy season and the start of the midge season, so got to see the Highlands at their best. It's a primary-coloured place, the blue of the sky and the sea, the yellow of the gorse among the verdent velvet of well-sheeped grass. I saw a red squirrel just behind the cottage, a Moray Firth dolphin playing in colliding currents just off the point at Fortrose, and some gannets; Sunday took us to Brodie Castle and the new visitor's centre at Culloden Moor, and on Monday we went on a long drive in perfect weather, to see the length of Skye and the teeth of the Cuillins from the edge of the mainland at Applecross, with Lewis dim in the distance beyond it, and Loch Kishorn from the high pass at Bealach na Ba. Two hundred photos, as yet unsorted.
Even the train journey up and down is very pretty: the line goes by the sea for miles, with lovely views of Berwick and Alnmouth on their peninsulas, and there's a great view from the Forth Bridge. With a bit of luck with connections, it's eight and a half hours from Cambridge to Inverness: no further than Bordeaux, Marseilles or Frankfurt. | | Saturday, April 26th, 2008 | | 4:34 pm |
Thoughts on a Sevastopol war memorial Poll #1177990 The Thirteen Hero Towns of the Soviet Union
Open to: All, results viewable to: AllI have heard of: I could find on a map In addition | | 2:00 pm |
Back in the UK For future reference, having flight A arrive at 11pm when you need to check in for flight B at 7am is probably sensible at some major first-world airports: where you can be sure there's a hotel with spare rooms on-site, and speak the language enough to be confident of finding it, and are sure it will accept a waved credit-card. I'd do it at Heathrow or JFK if there were no choice. I cannot recommend the domestic waiting-room at Borispol airport as a place of restful sleep. The last few days in Ukraine were good; on Thursday I walked for a few hours in the hills around Balaclava, up to a WW2 German fortress set into the top of the sea-cliff with one cast-iron sentry-box cantilevered right over the drop - some brave local has written 'I love Tanya' on the outside of the box. This Google picture shows the sentry-box as a small brown blob in the very centre; I left my camera at the hostel for ease of clambering. Silent, acre after acre of vineyards, not a soul around, the smell of spring and the sea far below. Also Yalta: the Livadia Palace seems shut for reconstruction. I gather from the guide that the reconstruction would involve putting up a statue of the three leaders of the Yalta conference, and that the local Crimean Tatars, returned during the nineties from their mass exile to Siberia by Stalin in 1944, are adamant that the one thing Crimea does not need is a new statue of Stalin, so the reconstruction may take some time. Yalta is a marvellous setting, among colossal crags, for the kind of seafront promenade that I've assiduously avoided going to in Blackpool; the road from Sevastopol runs right along the top of the cliffs and is clearly one of the great scenic roads of the world. I don't think I'd recommend Ukraine as whole-heartedly as I recommend Romania and Poland: the hostels aren't quite there (though the Kosmonaut Hostel in Lviv is excellent; anyone backpacking in Krakow should consider the nine-hour train trip east, and it's probably worth the fifteen hours from Warsaw), the transport infrastructure is just slightly too ropey to be fun - I twice had public transport fail and had to take a forty-pound taxi trip - and the opening hours for the major attractions are weird enough that I didn't manage to get to the Chernobyl museum or the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet, both of which I was rather looking forward to. You would have thought that any of a total lack of knowledge of the Ukrainian language, a strong dislike of Slavs and a nasty temper would make one consider a job other than hostel manager in Kiev, but this hasn't disqualified the man who owns and runs Kievsky Backpacker. | | Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | | 6:35 pm |
Sevastopol
This is the city that you would get if you mixed the Soviet Union with the can-do spirit of Greece or southern Spain. It's definitely Russian rather than Ukrainian - the tricolour flies over half the buildings, the streets and tramcars are full of sailors of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and the signage is monolingual Russian except in museums that really want to flout their Ukrainianitude. As you walk past, every tenth building seems to be being painted.
I'm staying in an apartment in Balaclava, a beautiful almost-fjord in which the Russians built a secret submarine base (tours now cost 2 pounds; some areas of the base have not yet been explored), and to the south of which the Light Brigade charged (battlefield tours 30 pounds with personal guide). My point of contact is a scarily entrepreneurial sixteen-year-old; I have handed over the phone he gave me to the other person staying in my room, since being rung up by a guide at 8:30 and asked which expensive tours you plan to do today is not part of my definition of a relaxing holiday. In Soviet Union, guide rings you ...
The weather's great, the landscape is amazing in a Greek way - rolling stony hills on which a carpet of wildflowers is breaking out with a wonderful spring smell, acre after acre of vineyards preparing their grapes for the Crimean Champagne Company.
Any idea why someone would be giving a speech praising Lenin and Stalin to a crowd of a couple of hundred people, including military people waving red banners and civilians waving the flag of the Communist Party of Ukraine, in front of a carpet of flowers laid on the Lenin monument, today? It was slightly alarming to come across; had I not only got lost in Sevastopol but also in time? | | Friday, April 18th, 2008 | | 7:20 pm |
Lviv
The overnight train takes you from the Former Soviet Union to Mitteleuropa. Cobbled streets rather than eight-lane boulevards, buildings fronted in plaster and pastel paint. Cake shops in vast multitudes, tea and coffee; might as well be Vienna at a sixth the price.
There's a nice hill which looks down onto the historic centre on one side and onto the Soviet side on the other; in fact, several acres of hill with an intriguing maze of unsigned paths around them. There's a certain kind of comfort in going from a city of Orthodox to a city of Catholic churches: I'm much less easy with Orthodox iconography, there's the constant vague fear that you're in the queue to kiss the icon. | | Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | | 7:07 pm |
Less radioactive parts of Kiev
I have exhausted the cultural sites in my guidebook, though I'm getting the impression that it's not a particularly good guidebook. Sunday was the Sofiya Cathedral, an enormous green-domed edifice with eleventh-century wall paintings and mosaics inside, and a gilded carved-wood altar-screen. Someone in the nineteenth century installed cast-iron floor tiles with alternating motifs of crescent moons and Stars of David; a chance to trample competing religions underfoot rather than an ecumenical measure, I suspect. Some twelfth-century sculptures of dragons very much in Viking knotwork style: the hostel was filled with Scandanavians on Tuesday night, who were very keen to point out that Kievan Rus, and hence Ukraine, was essentially a Viking settlement project. I had a rather expensive steak that evening: Kindzmarauli Georgian wine would I suspect have been more a success than the Georgian wines on which I attempted to hook Cambridge two years back.
Monday took me to the parks along the west side of the Dneipr: the huge monastery complex, with a really striking collection of Ukrainian folk art in primary colours which reminded me of the best sort of Sixties children's-book illustrations, and some amazingly obsessively detailed flower-paintings by Katerina Bilokar, Ukraine's answer to Gauguin. It's about the only part of Kiev which has been recently painted; the walls are white, the roofs and the windowsills are a deep green, the spires are gilded, and the trees are painted white up to chest height. The lower monastery is famous for its mummified saints; these aren't really worth the visit, you get to walk by the light of a guttering candle along a two-foot-wide corridor, at the sides of which sit glass boxes containing sets of robes in which the saints are said to be.
Further along the parks you get to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, with the gardens filled with field-guns, tanks and helicopters. There is an angle from which you see both the sixty-metre titanium statue of Mother Russia with sword and shield, and the ICBM that the museum has on display: a definite sense of 'never again, by whatever means that takes'.
I fell in with the crowd and ended up dancing and drinking until 3am, so Tuesday was distinctly subdued; coffee and a German Breakfast (bacon and eggs; the English Breakfast on offer was porridge with honey; I think the coffee shop needs some cultural consultancy); errands from one side of the city centre to the other to pick up tickets (I got the timing completely wrong; I could have been on the train to Lviv now but am in Kiev another 24 hours), a quick trip to the Marinski palace (blue, shut for renovation until 2010) and the Parliament (grey, glass dome reminiscent of the Reichstag, surrounded by journalists setting up for live pieces for the 7pm news, not open for visits). | | 6:40 pm |
Chernobyl
The countryside outside Kiev to the north reminds me of nothing more than Thetford Forest, particularly that part just after Mildenhall before you turn off to Go Ape: sandy soil, long straight roads flanked by forestry-commission lattices of fir trees. The road goes ever on and on; there are silver birches planted by the sides of the roads, and then the fields roll, hedgeless, empty of visible labourers and not obviously filled with rows of carefully-weeded crops, to the horizon. The landscape rolls a little - it's not Lincolnshire, if only because there are no huge drainage canals.
After a couple of hours in a minibus, you get to the checkpoint for the First Exclusion Zone; at once the road becomes less well-maintained, and the fields themselves are filled with young silver birches. Twenty more kilometres to the Second Exclusion Zone to pick up a guide and head up to the power plant itself.
Radiation levels are a bit above ambient - three microsieverts an hour at the plant visitor centre, fifteen for a minute or so as the bus drives past a place where it rained at a particularly inopportune time on 26 April 1986. The visitor centre has a fantastic fold-out model of the current state of the plant's interior, as far as it's known - only 60% of the rooms have been explored since the accident, since several of them were hurriedly filled with concrete in the first days of the clean-up without seeing what lay beyond.
What is known, and what the guide described with some terror in her voice, is at least two hundred tons of melted fuel rod mixed with molten rock; at the start of the accident these glowed white hot with nuclear decay, they're now 40 degrees above ambient and the worry is that water can now get in and leach soluble fission products out. The sarcophagus is not watertight; there is a plan to build a huge sealed structure to cover reactor and sarcophagus alike, but the last time I saw that plan the completion date was 2007, and the completion date on the plan on the wall of the visitor's centre is 2012.
The plant sits there under its sarcophagus, square and grey apart from some new yellow steel reinforcing-buttresses which keep the west wall from falling over under the weight of the hastily-installed beams which hold up the hastily-installed roof. The sarcophagus took 206 days of 24-hour work to build, and apparently 90,000 workers: I can't see how they'd fit in, though I imagine all the concrete parts were prefabricated in parallel throughout the Soviet Union, and that an enormous number of workers came in, got their lifetime's permitted radiation dose in a single construction procedure and then left.
There is a never-commissioned fuel storage facility a few kilometres down the road; apparently nobody told the French company building it in the Nineties that Chernobyl's fuel rods were twenty centimetres longer than the standard. You can see the nearly-completed Reactor Five and the start of work at Reactor Six; had all gone to plan and the Soviet Union not fallen, there would be twelve reactors at Chernobyl by now.
Then to Pripyat itself. It's a ghost town, you've seen the documentaries, you've seen the children's play-park rusting away and the secondary school with books discarded on the door, Soviet posters warning you not to swim in unknown waters hanging on the wall, and a copy of a twenty-year-old Pravda browning gently in the corner. It's still pretty striking to see it yourself.
They check you before you leave the Second Exclusion Zone; so for the first time I *know* that my shoes are not radioactive. | | Sunday, April 13th, 2008 | | 12:22 pm |
In Kiev
I got here safely, with no more fuss than you'd expect from getting up at 5:45 to get a taxi to get a train to get a plane to get a маршрутка to walk to the hostel. I got quite lost on the way to the hostel, but waving a map with a suitably plaintive 'скаджите мене, где Я?' was enough to find myself again.
Kiev is big - half a London, two to three Birminghams. It's sewn through with six-lane highways, though they usually have underpasses, built in majestic granite after the War and not maintained since. There's a Metro, which on a Sunday morning is as crowded as a London rush-hour; the city's quite hilly, so the elevators to the Metro go down forever. I can make myself understood in my vestigial Russian, though I'm trying to get at least 'please' (будт ласка) and 'thankyou' (денкуиу) in Ukrainian.
The very centre has what you would expect in the way of Central European monumental architecture, insensitively covered with large adverts for the kind of Western luxury goods that I wouldn't contemplate buying on a Western salary, mixed with the occasional large Soviet memorial obelisk with a big gold star on top. This is supposed to be one of the greener cities of Europe, but the green is in a thick band down the Dneipr rather than particularly visible from the centre.
Tomorrow the monastery complex and the Great Patriotic War exhibition; church-hopping on a Sunday during orthodox-Lent may not be quite ideal, but that's my plan for today. Some sort of large march with drums is proceeding down the street outside the window of this Internet-cafe, and outside the Metro they were handing out what looked like political leaflets. | | Friday, April 11th, 2008 | | 5:11 pm |
Why I like *computational* chemistry Because, consider the alternative: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/08/fun_with_tunichromes.php#commentsThis is, I admit, about as bad as wet-lab chemistry gets; but it's pretty bad. Extracting a vanadium-binding protein, which decomposes in the presence of heat, light, oxygen, or most of the solid supports used in chromatography, from a couple of litres of the blood of sea-squirts, when each sea-squirt supplies very little blood, and your supply of sea-squirts, whilst large, is of indifferent freshness. I strongly recommend pipeline.corante.com to chemistry groupies; the author is very good at conveying the frustration of medicinal chemistry. | | Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 | | 3:38 pm |
Finance question #8871b
This is the classic question that occurs whenever you read about mildly exotic financial instruments: how do I go about buying them?
I'd like to buy, through the European ETS, permission to emit fifty tons of CO2 in 2008-9. I have no intention of emitting fifty tons of CO2 this year - it's about five times the UK's per-capita annual CO2 output, the equivalent of ten round-the-world flights or fifteen years of my electricity usage - but as far as I have read a carbon-trading scheme only works in a green fashion if there are people prepared to buy CO2-emission permits and then not emit the CO2.
Lots of sites give a vague figure as to how much an ETS ton of CO2 costs, lots of sites say that there's a secondary market in the things; www.pointcarbon.com has a graph at the side of the page suggesting that the fifty tons of CO2 would cost me about a thousand pounds (EUR23.40/ton), and will graciously permit me to see more data for the trifling sum of twelve hundred Euros, but I can't find anywhere that will take a cheque for a thousand pounds, inscribe me on the EU Carbon Registry at www.emissionsregistry.gov.uk, and give me the certificates. | | Saturday, March 29th, 2008 | | 5:03 pm |
Automated stupidity: the best kind of stupidity
Excel just marked a cell as 'contains possibly wrong formula' because I wasn't adding in the date.
In C1, there is a date; in C2:C10 there are a collection of sums of money, some positive and some negative; in C11 there is sum(C2:C10), and Excel has stuck a little green note in the corner of that cell suggesting that maybe I meant sum(C1:C10).
Dates are stored internally as a count of days since January 1st 1904, so if you look at them as numbers they're around 37000. Adding them to a collection of sums of money which are things like 'income tax deducted from salary this month' or 'pension contribution this month', so of the order of hundreds of pounds, screws up the calculation right royally. | | 12:19 pm |
The disc plague briefly defeated I am clearly the calibration standard that disc makers use; the drive on my Mac Mini died a month after anything resembling a warranty that it might have had expired. So I acquired a new drive of twice the size, and a 1GB memory stick because OSX 10.4 is much less happy in 512MB than 10.3 was, and went over to ewx's house to fit them, because he has a putty knife. It has to be a putty knife, it needs to be springy and really no thicker than a train ticket; I bought a paint-scraper but that was too solid and too thick. Observations: open a Mac Mini by inserting the putty knife between plastic and metal casing on the underside at the front (where the CD-hole is) and inserting a normal kitchen knife to keep the case open once you've got it slightly open. The front left screw holding the hard drive in can be reached through an access hole if you have a really long jeweller's screwdriver, but it's easier to get at it by using a slightly larger normal screwdriver at an awkward angle from the top, then throw it away without worrying about putting it back in. The three screws around the CPU fan are weird self-tapping ones and each has its favourite hole, so it is wise to label which one came out of which hole, though you can determine this by experiment since they do not go even with excessive force into holes they don't like. Drop the medium-length black screws that hold the hard-drive-and-CD assembly into the deep holes they come from before refitting the assembly, taking care that the one in the shortest hole doesn't spring out when you put the assembly back. Shut the Mac Mini starting at the back, otherwise a weird complex of catches at the back fails to engage. You could save ten minutes of worry by bringing the PSU for the Mac Mini to the place where you're dismantling it, so that you can check it works before putting the top back on, wrapping it up and cycling home with it. The wind blew with some vigour in an axis precisely from my house to ewx's. | | Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 | | 11:15 pm |
Dance, and dance, and dance
Would anyone be interested in going to a contra dance in Cambridge on Saturday evening? It's at the Emmanuel URC on Trumpington Street, 8-11pm; it's like a ceilidh (so there's a caller, you change partner after each dance, and the music is fiddle and bass), only faster, twirlier and more American. | | 10:55 pm |
Debt-free! I have just paid off my student loan. Mine was the first year that had loans, at a highly uncommercial interest rate; I let the loan mature for four years while I did a PhD, and started paying it off at £125 a month in about June 2003. Now I can switch that standing order into savings, so that I never see the extra money to feel that it's there to be spent. I think tombee, to whom I sold in the second year of my PhD the computer which I bought with my second undergraduate year's student loan, threw it away about three years ago; hardware dies, but debt endures. | | Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 | | 6:44 pm |
Eastercon Along with about half my friends list, I spent the Easter weekend in a hotel near Heathrow airport, at a science fiction convention. Apparently it was the biggest Eastercon for twenty years, but it didn't feel especially crowded. It was excellent; really without notably annoying flaws. I slept fifteen hours on Friday night, danced wildly until 2am on Saturday, and slept sensibly on Sunday. The rooms had ceilings and decent sound systems, the buffet suppers were mostly Tasty Stew but that's what you want, the infinite cooked breakfasts mean there is now four pounds more fivemack than there was on Thursday. There was lots of space in which you could hear yourself think, there were cheap soft drinks and cheap potatoes so you could keep yourself fed and watered while buying books. A complete success of a con. annafdd was there, which is on its own enough to make any weekend a good weekend. And Mitch Benn, who I'd never previously encountered. I was on a couple of panels, which seemed to go well, though my observation that, by a lot of common Utopian metrics, life as a citizen of any country in contemporary Western Europe is near enough Utopian did not go down well - does Utopia require that injustice is absent, rather than merely rare, well-reported and noted as bad? I was not obviously worse prepared or significantly less sure what I was doing than anyone else on the panels, and any panel with the infinitely erudite and impressively composed Edward James on is predestined to reasonably glorious success. I bought nine books, which is much more sensible restraint than the last Eastercon I went to; since I donated a year's worth of do-not-wish-to-reread books to be auctioned for the Alzheimer's Trust, I actually left with lighter bags than I came with. | | 12:59 pm |
Observations from the way of folly If you gave up coffee for Lent, it is not wise to restart with a large cup of your office's fabled triple-strength espresso. I suspect the path of wisdom would lead me not to restart at all. The cartoons of coffee-driven enthusiasm never mention the persistent low-level back-of-the-headache and the strange taste in your mouth; they remind you that this is in fact plant-alkaloid poisoning. Current Mood:  hyper | | Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 | | 10:27 am |
Today's piece of forty-year-old engineering lunacy http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690014329_1969014329.pdfis a design for a heat exchanger, from the primary sodium-potassium-eutectic coolant loop of a space-based nuclear reactor to the secondary mercury coolant loop. Not quite the chemical fun of a liquid-sodium/water heat exchanger, but I think sodium and potassium both dissolve enthusiastically in mercury to produce amalgams combining the toxicity and gets-everywhere of mercury with the violent reactivity with everything of the alkali metals. See http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/POWER/mercury/mercury.htm for more examples of the lure of boiling mercury to power-station designers; it seems to be a very appealing improvement on normal superheated steam, at least if you're not too concerned about expense, weight or neurotoxicity. In a similar vein, http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/POWER/steamwheel/steamwheel.htm talks at length about a variety of designs for steam engines with liquid-metal pistons, dating all the way back to James Watt. You have the choice between mercury, which is not good for kittens and other living things, or bismuth/tin-based alloys, which solidify when the steam-engine is turned off, and sometimes expand enough to burst the engine. | | Friday, March 14th, 2008 | | 11:37 am |
Have I been needlessly verbose these many years?
Suppose I have an object of some naturally-occurring reasonably fiddly C++ STL type: say
map<float,vector<map<string,pair<int,clipper::Coord_orth> > > > W;
and I want to iterate over it.
Is there any way that I can say something like typeof(W)::iterator, rather than having to write for loops whose initialiser is already wider than the screen?
for (map<float,vector<map<string,pair<int,clipper::Coord_orth> > > >::iterator Z = W.begin(); Z != W.end(); Z++) |
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