On a Lighter Note

See this for a list of some of the more bizarre complaints allegedly sent in by Thomas Cook customers. It is difficult to believe that these are genuine but if they are ...

Listen to your Leader

Via Witterings from Witney comes this, a message from Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, talking about the European Council meeting on Friday 4 February.
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There is a transcript of his speech here.

Incidentally, do you remember voting for him, for a single energy market, for interconnectedness, for one single market of brains? No, neither do I.

Update
Surprise, surprise, at 06.53 this morning on the Today programme on  BBC Radio 4 there was an article explaining how we need a European-wide network for electricity transmission in order to move "power from the sun in the south and from the wind in the north." How incredibly fortuitous that they chose to highlight this burning problem on exactly the same day as the Council of Europe are about to discuss it. Bizarre that the reporter never mentioned the Council of Europe though.

Wind Turbine Accidents

Thanks to EU Referendum I found myself perusing the "Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 December 2010". It is fascinating. Did you know that there were 18 incidents of blade failure last year? Or that pieces of failed blades have been known to travel over 1300 metres (6.5 furlongs or 0.8 mile)? However, for me the most remarkable fact is that there were 5 fatal accidents last year, clearly it is a dangerous business.

Statistics above come from Caithness Windfarm Information Forum (www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk)

Wet

This is well worth watching, is safe for work and you don't need to hear it.



What would you do after that, especially if you were on your way to work?

Back Down to Earth

Since writing the previous blog I have discovered that Pekka Pohjola died 27 November, 2008 and Bo Hansson died April 24, 2010. What with the recent deaths of Gerry Rafferty, Pete Postlethwaite and Professor Sir Maurice Wilkes it would seem that I have reached a certain age.

Esoteric Music Tastes

Whilst working on my computer this evening I decided to do what my children do which is use YouTube to provide some musical entertainment. I thought of some of the albums I had not listened to for a long time and came up with the following esoteric list of tracks that I fancied listening to again:

Pekka Pohjola, Mathematician’s Air Display, Title track
Bo Hansson, Lord of the Rings, The Black Riders
King Crimson, Lizard, Indoor Games
Kevin Ayers, Joy of a Toy, Girl on a Swing

I am still amazed that every single one of them was there. I had a lovely evening.

Repeated Highway Robbery

I thought it was time to update my post on how much petrol actually costs before the government gets involved, see original post here. The fuel duty is now at 58.95 pence per litre, see here and VAT is now at 20%. This means that the £1.239 per litre that I paid the night before last consists of 20.65p in VAT, 58.95p in fuel duty and 44.3p as the actual retail cost of the petrol. This means that I am now paying a total of 79.6p in tax on a litre of fuel. This is up from the 72.71p per litre I was paying last March which represents an increase of 9.5%. The cost of a litre of fuel has gone from £1.109 to £1.239 which is an increase of 11.7% which is larger than the tax increase thus the effective taxation rate has come down from 190.4% to 179.7%. The final sentence of this blog is depressingly similar to the previous one; it is sobering to note that the duty will increase by 1% above inflation every 1 April from 2011 to 2014.

A Lack of Respect

I was alerted to the existence of this story from Big Brother Watch. What I learnt is that a gentleman in Grimsby has been fined £175 and ordered to pay £250 costs after being found guilty of wilfully obstructing a police officer in the course of her duties. So, what did Mr Thompson do that led to him gaining a criminal record? Well he flashed his headlights to warn oncoming motorists of a mobile speed hand gun.


Now, forgive me for being naive but I thought that the point of a speed trap in any form was to encourage drivers to slow down. I think that Mr. Thompson’s actions were made with the same intent. So how can he be considered to have been ‘wilfully obstructing a police officer in the course of her duties’?

As a mathematician I am aware that a proof using Reduction Ad Absurdum means that an absurd consequence implies that the original hypothesis must be false. I have an absurd consequence, namely that Mr. Thompson as obstructing the police officer when he intended to effect the same outcome. Thus my hypothesis that a speed trap exists to reduce speed must be false. This leaves me to conclude that the only reason that the police officer was there was to capture speeding drivers in order to gain revenue.

There was a time when I used to have respect for policeman; I wonder when I lost it?

A Million Angry People

I posted earlier today about the lack of rebellion. It seems that I may be wrong. First read this litany of what is wrong with this country’s government. Then read, if you haven’t already, about the surrender of our sovereignty noting in particular the last two paragraphs. Follow the ‘lawful and legal’ link to an article titled ‘Living by the Rule of Law’. Finally read Richard North’s call for a Million Angry People. Now will you do something?

I Must be Wrong

A series of links led me to this blog. Alarmed by what Ian Parker-Joseph had written I pasted part of the BIS quote into Google and arrived at the Top Stories section of the BIS website. Writ there for all to see, it says “The key to the new measures … will be the principle of copying out the text of European directives directly into UK law.” Is that not admitting that we do not run our own country anymore? Are we really paying 650 MPs a minimum of £65,738 per year just to cut-and-paste?

Maybe I am wrong in thinking that we are a sovereign state, which by definition is a state which administers its own government, and is not dependent upon, or subject to, another power. Perhaps the majority of this country is happy with being ruled by Brussels because that is the only reason I can imagine for the complete lack of criticism, lack of protest and lack of rebellion.

Words

On the drive in to work this morning I had two occasions to think about words. The first was when I heard that there had been a bad accident at the roundabout near Bracknell Sports Centre. Unfortunate for somebody as that was, I recalled that the offices opposite were occupied by a company called cadence. I have always liked the word cadence, I am tempted to say that the word has it's own rhythm but I shall refrain.
Later, a cyber-security expert was asked how a business could defend itself against denial-of-service attacks to which the expert replied that there were a number of ways that a business could ameliorate the threat. Ameliorate, isn't that a lovely word?
On the other hand  there are words I dislike. The words I dislike most are seersucker, gingham and especially bap.

Absolutely Crackers

Do you recall parliament debating The Pyrotechnic Articles (Safety) Regulations 2010? No, neither do I. I can tell you that these regulations stem from this countries requirement to implement (or transposition to use the government's terminology) the European Directive on the placing on the market of pyrotechnic articles, 2007/23/EC (see discussion paper here).

Following the consultation exercise this was then discussed by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, JCSI, as can be seen in the annex (search for 1554) to the report of the meeting dated 21 July 2010 here. The annex lists the regulations under the title 'Instruments subject to annulment' which sounds a bit odd since the legislation doesn't exist. However, the way that Statutory Instruments are handled are explained in a word document snappily titled "Statutory Instrument Practice. A manual for those concerned with the preparation of statutory instruments and the parliamentary procedures relating to them" (follow link from here). On page 65 it explains how the negative procedure works. As far as I can tell it is this negative procedure that the JCSI are applying to the proposed pyrotechnic regulations. As you will have understood if you have ploughed through the 'use of negative procedure' explanation, the instrument is laid before the house and if either house resolves within 40 days that the 'address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the instrument be annulled, no further proceedings may be taken under the instrument after the date of the resolution, and Her Majesty may by Order in Council revoke it'. In other words if nobody does anything in forty days then it becomes law.

Thus there never was any debate about these regulations and they are now law. Amongst these regulations are the fact that Christmas crackers are category 1 fireworks. In regulation 15(2) it states that the 'minimum age limit for supply of category 1 fireworks is 16 years'. So now your shopkeeper will have to check the age of the people to whom it sells Christmas crackers. All because the following 12 people didn't think it would be a problem:

Lord Campbell of Alloway (Conservative)
Lord Clinton-Davis (Labour)
Baroness Eccles (Conservative)
Earl of Mar and Kellie (Liberal Democrat)
Lord Rees Mogg (Crossbench)
Baroness Stern (Crossbench)
Mr George Mudie MP (Labour, Leeds East) (Chairman)
Mr Robert Buckland MP (Conservative, South Swindon)
Michael Ellis MP (Conservative, Northampton North)
John Hemming MP (Liberal Democrat, Birmingham, Yardley)
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger MP (Conservative, Bridgwater and West Somerset)
Toby Perkins MP (Labour, Chesterfield)

Is that how democracy is meant to work?

Wind Farms

Wind farms are stupid. When we need power, the wind doesn't blow. This week is a pretty good example of this phenomenon.
Take a look at this article from the Independent in September, it states that "The 100-turbine Thanet wind farm ... brings the UK's total power from onshore and offshore wind to more than 5GW". I have no reason to dispute this figure but I would contend that it is misleading. Looking at the table below one learns that currently wind farms are producing 141 MW (the table comes from here) which, if the 5GW value is to be believed, is a paltry 2.82% of their maximum ability.

Did I mention that the temperature is low at the moment? That means that we need electricity to help keep us warm. This graph is a good illustration of the amount of electricity we need, as you can see we currently need between 42 GW and 60 GW.



The wind farms are managing to furnish, at best, 0.3% of that requirement.

Pathetic and a waste of our money.

This is a Blog Entry Title

This is an excellent article.

Paul Chambers

I could not have put it better myself, see here.

Your Money or Your Life

You may well be aware that at the moment letters from HMRC are being sent out to individuals who have paid too much or too little tax through the PAYE system. As far as I can ascertain this is because the individuals were given the wrong tax code, whatever the reason, it seems to be universally agreed that the root cause is due to HMRC.
Imagine my surprise then when I heard that HMRC are proposing that we move to a system where your employer pays your gross salary to them, they make the tax deductions and then put the net amount in your bank account. The details are in this consultation document. What made me laugh when I read it, was the first line of paragraph 5.13 which read

“HMRC would be responsible for ensuring deductions were correct”.

Privacy

I urge you to read this.

Averages

From an article in today's Daily Telegraph, "... it is logistically impossible for the average man to have more partners than the average woman." Discuss.

A Challenge

If manufacturing output in the UK, excluding oil and mining, in 2005 is 100 what value do think output was in 1990? In 1980?


The answers are:

a) In 1990 the output index was 93.3
b) In 1980 the output index was 77.2

Clearly rumours of the death of our manufacturing ability are exaggerated

These values were taken from the Governments own statistics that as you can see here.

Other Peoples Money

Last night at our parish council we had our annual look at the finances. This is the time when we are presented with the balance sheet, then the income and expenditure sheet and finally the annual return. We all scrutinise the figures whilst trying to make sense of it and make sensible comments. Then we have to all answer yes to the following questions:

1. we have approved the statement of accounts which have been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the Accounts and Audit Regulations and proper practices.
2. we have maintained an adequate system of internal control, including measures designed to prevent and detect fraud and corruption and reviewed its effectiveness.
3. we have taken all reasonable steps to assure ourselves that there are no matters of actual or potential non-compliance with laws, regulations and codes of practice which could have a significant financial effect on the ability of the council to conduct its business or on its finances.
4. we have provided proper opportunity during the year for the exercise of electors' rights in accordance with the requirements of the Accounts and Audit Regulations.
5. we have carried out an assessment of the risks facing the council and taken appropriate steps to manage those risks, including the introduction of internal controls and/or external insurance cover where required.
6. we have maintained throughout the year an adequate and effective system of internal audit of the council's accounting records and control systems and carried out a review of its effectiveness
7. we have taken appropriate action on all matters raised in reports from internal and external audit.
8. we have considered whether any litigation, liabilities or commitments, events or transactions, occurring either during or after the year end, have a financial impact on the council and, where appropriate have included them in the statement of accounts.
9. Trust funds- in our capacity as the sole managing trustee we have discharged our responsibility in relation to the accountability for the fund(s)/assets, including financial reporting and, if required, indepenent examination or audit.

Our internal auditor has to answer a similar set of questions. The form containing the return figures, our answers and the internal auditor's answers is then sent to an external auditor. This is all to ensure that we are not abusing the parishioners' money and quite right too. The last thing we want is for people in a position of trust taking advantage of the money handed over by the people that they should be serving. Bear that in mind whilst you read this http://tinyurl.com/2eudr86.