The Blogger Himself

The Americans have their knickers in a twist over this.

I hav a feeling I know who is the catering manager for that camp. Indeed, I might even be related to him…..

Or at least my behaviour when trying to fix things does.

see more Funny Graphs

Apologies, but taking a month off from blogging.

No, no blogger\’s block or anything.

Rather, I\’ve got a new job of sorts. I\’ve spent a month playing with it part time and the results have been satisfactory in terms of income. Now I need to do it for a month properly and full time. To see whether that actually makes much difference in terms of income or not (I have my suspicions that it won\’t but that\’s the point of trying it out).

The sad part is I cannot write there in the way that I do here, it needs to be slightly more pofaced than that. And fewer quick and snide asides. Proper articles only really. Well, they can be short, but not blog post-like.

I\’m also not going to be reading blogs, or at least not very much. Possibly not even UK newspapers.

But that won\’t matter to you all, will it, for you\’re all off on your hols anyway, right?

Anyone who is insane enough to want to do so can pick up the RSS feed here. It\’s all going to be very US centric, a mixture of chasing whatever has Google Trends spinning and commentary on US stories. Snidery might break out though, you never know.

I guess that will just leave Ritchie having to find his own errors, eh?

Anyone with access to Science or the AAAS out there?

Would you like to send me the .pdf of this article?

My knee jerk reaction is that those fisheries that are seeing stocks rebound are those that have sorted out property rights. I\’d like to see how well the old knee is jerking at the moment.

Update. OK, got it now, thank you !

The area around us here in Southern P (or the Northern Algarve as it might be called) is pretty rural stuff. It\’s also pretty bad soil: fruit trees are the only commercial crop for most of the area and in fact, most of the land is left pretty much fallow. It used to be farmed, for sure (the two fields right outside still have straggly almonds in them) but pretty much isn\’t now.

The land is all owned, of course, but in reality the only value extracted from much of it is by shepherds and their peripatetic flocks. And no, they don\’t pay for the grazing.

This of course means ticks: lots of them and in a household which didn\’t manage to snip the female cat living here on our arrival in time (although now done unto the nth generation, except for those that turn up anew of course) that means lots of cats at risk of various Rickettisae, thyphus and Lyme Disease like infections carried by ticks.

Except this year there are almost no ticks: for there are almost no sheep. Last summer most of the flocks down here died (or were destroyed because of) of brucellosis.

No real point to this other than that odd to think of a decline in Frontline or Advantix sales being driven by sheep dying.

The Agincourt database.

Nope, not a single one.

Not all that hugely surprising as at that time we were all French, Irish, Inca (allegedly) and in fact, absolutely anything other than English or Welsh.

Slightly cheeky perhaps but I do mean it.

Why I\’m on the left.

So, we already have too many cats as a result of one semi-feral cat not being done in time.

But we did then have her and her four daughters done. So, while too many, not increasing in number.

Until about 4 am this morning, when another semi-feral that we\’d seen around for a couple of weeks announced her presence on the top of our wardrobe.

With her three new kittens.

Sigh.

I simply won\’t drown them nor ask anyone else to. And do you know how difficult it is to give away kittens in rural Portugal?

Yes, quite, you can\’t.

Sigh.

From someone who knows how to do economics. Or at least statistics.

Or maybe it\’s even just someone who knows how to us excel.

I\’ve got two sets of data about US States.

One is the population of each state.

The other is the Gini (a measure of inequality) for each State.

What I want is one plotted against the other.

Quite simply, I want to try and see whether there\’s a correlation between the amount of inequality and the number of people. I would, after all, expect greater variance in incomes the larger the number of people (as we expect greater variance in height, weight, sexual prowess and all the rest the larger the population).

Anyone able to do that simply?

Update: Thanks, this has now been done. Yes, there does seem to be, eyeballing the graph, a connection between gini and population size. That\’s what I wanted.

I wrote something elsewhere about how someone says they\’re going to reveal the Ark of the Covenant to an adoring world.

I was not, as you might imagine, all that serious about their claims.

But this is scary. In the comments, someone has, I assume seriously, put this:

Is anyone even concerned about what will happen if anyone but sanctified Levites try to move the Ark? It doesn\’t matter if you think it is idolatry or Ark worship the truth is God does not change and He gave instructions concerning the Ark and they have not changed.

Eh?

Full marks to her here:

Rumblings suggest they may, as the latest poll has Labour at 19%, neck and neck with Ukip for fourth place.

We\’ve had so many snide remarks and references from the columnar classes. Michael White wrote about a council by election in Hartlepool and said we came fourth. We came second. A Times leader said we had "imploded". Sam Coates at The Times claimed that we weren\’t even going to stand in these elections. The Sun carried their own poll and the online version was rewritten to remove any reference to UKIP.

But here we have someone simply reading the polls and reporting what they say. A welcome step forward.

Oh, and if I might just add?

If you are in the London region and you vote on June 4 th for UKIP then you\’ll be voting in part for me, your jovial and avuncular blog host. There will have to be an awful lot of you who do to get me elected but that\’s a good thing, not bad.

I wonder if I might be able to persuade Polly herself?

As you lucky people who live in London already know, you\’ll have an opportunity to vote for me in the euro-elections on June 4th.

Or, at least, for the party I\’m standing for, UKIP.

I\’m hoping rather that voters will, or at least many of them will be, easier to convince than this particular one who has just advised me by email that:

Here\’s the plan then. I get up at 4am and go to the pubs of Smithfield, down pints until lunchtime, go to lunch, easy on food, heavy on drink, go to pub near polling station, order beer, aft 4th maybe 5th pint I\’ll be ready to vote for you.

Although it has to be said, this is from a journalist (meaning that the drink taken is just a normal day) and one who has been known to appear in the same pages as Oour Wullie Hutton.

That was always going to be a tough nut to crack really.

Update. Another, different reason to vote!

"I just think those bastard in Brussels deserve you"

Access to the page:

http://mail.google.com/mail/

… has been denied for the following reason:

Banned phrase found.

Strange page to be banned from really….

I\’m thinking about a little business to occupy me over the summer.

And I need to dig into the collective knowledge of you web savvy and development types for a moment.

The basic idea is to sell prescription specs online. Yes, OK, I know many people already do this but there is a wrinkle, a differentiator. Which, for obvious reasons, will remain unexplained for the moment.

What I want to know is, does anyone know of (or even where I should go looking for) a toolkit to make the building of the website simple?

Here\’s some windows based software called Optisoft, designed for instore use. It does the right sort of things. You enter the prescription, then you can play around with frames, upload a photo to see how the frames will look then when you\’ve ordered, it makes the order, runs the stock etc.

Some of this is standard to any web site selling stuff, others, like the prescription bit and the looking at the frames are subject specific.

Anyone out there in the open source community made a toolbox that would make this sort of thing easy? Commercially? Or would we need to either build the whole thing from scratch or partner up with a company that already had a web interface?

Any ideas?

"The snow fell crisp and even over night so when we arose, Arkady and Sasha worked with the horses to get the troika ready. Our breath looked like clouds and the animals steamed in the cold winter air. Then we were off, to town, a glorious journey through the winter wonderland. Sadly, we lost Uncle Vanya though, we had to throw him overboard as the wolves gained upon us along the South Lambeth Road."

more animals

So I write about the campaign against prostitution. In the comments is this.

Anyone who\’s ever seen Julie Burchill\’s likeness, or Jacqui Smith\’s or Harriet Harman\’s for that matter, know that it comes down to sheer jealously. All three know that if they went on the game they\’d starve.

Well, no, I didn\’t say it, but there are indeed times of the night, levels of sobriety, when I might.

And other times of the day, other levels of sobriety, when I wish I had.

And I\’m sticking to it.

Too much thinking could make you fat, according to a new study.

Slight server issues. Apparently the computer went to Trafalgar Square last night.