Danske kirkebøger
Jeg opdagede i går, at alle de danske kirkebøger fra før ca. 1910 (og nogle af de lidt nyere) er scannet ind og er frit tilgængelige.
Det gør det jo en del nemmere at lave sit stamtræ, når man bare kan bladre i kirkebøgerne på sin computer i Skotland uden at skulle en tur til Landsarkivet i Viborg.
Som et eksempel er her fødselsregistreringen for min morfars farfar, Jens Nielsen Skipper fra Mols (klik på det for en større udgave):
Man lærer en del af det. Jeg troede for eksempel, at Skipper var et øgenavn, men manden hed det jo officielt (men gav det ikke videre til sin søn, Jens Marius Nielsen).
Do people just give up?
The Guardian is reporting this morning that “there were 32,300 fewer people receiving jobseeker’s allowance in February than in the previous month [...] The wider Labour Force survey measure, which also includes people out of work who are not claiming benefits, also fell, by 33,000 in the three months to January to 2.45 million, the biggest drop since July 2007.”
So far, so good.
However, further down in the same article, it is pointed out that “employment is down 54,000 to 28.86 million, the lowest level since 2006. A record 8.16 million people are now classed as economically inactive, which includes students, people on long-term sick leave and those who have given up looking for a job.”
So this really is not good news. Unemployment is down because people are not looking for jobs, not because more people are working.
It would have been useful to see figures for underemployment, too – other surveys have recently pointed out that more and more people are forced into part-time jobs.
What it looks like is that the regular jobs are disappearing. Some people get part-time jobs instead, but others move back to their home country, retrain (which means they’re counted as students), take early retirement, or just give up.
Rotated maps
Some years ago, a colleague of mine from Cartographic gave me a wonderful map: It showed Scotland and Ireland, but rotated so that Scotland was straight above Ireland, and with all place names in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
I’m not sure why, but the usual way of displaying Ireland next to England makes me feel Ireland is far away from Scotland, when they really are very close together.
The map sadly got lost when I moved from Mavisbank Gardens to Rose Street, but I’ve tried to recreate the effect here, although I’ve arranged to two countries horizontally instead of vertically:
Feel free to tell me that everything looks entirely normal to you.
If you’re anything like me, however, you will be amazed how some places (such as Belfast or Islay) suddenly look like they’re central rather than on the periphery.
Selling books on Amazon
I own far too many books, so as an experiment, I decided to try and sell a few on Amazon to see whether it’s worth my while.
I put six books up for sale – fiction and non-fiction, hardbacks and paperbacks – a couple of weeks ago, but although I agreed to sell them at very low prices, I didn’t sell the first one till three days ago.
It was a paperback, and the price was £1.69.
However, that’s only vaguely related to what Amazon are paying me:
Buyer’s Price: £1.69
Shipping: £2.75
Amazon Fees: £-1.64
Your Earnings: £2.80
Envelope: £-0.33
Postage: £-1.04
Grand Profit: £1.43
Note how Amazon’s fee is almost exactly the exactly the selling price, so my profit is basically the difference between the fixed shipping fee and the actual cost.
Given that it must have taken me at least ten minutes to list the book on Amazon, print out the receipt, wrap the book and go to the post office, there really are better ways to make money.
So how do I get rid of a thousand books more easily and/or profitably?
iScroll?
The problem with tablet computers is that they’re too big and too light at the same time: Too big to fit into a soft and safe pocket, and too light to make a hard case feasible.
So products like the iPad will probably break all the time unless people put them into big cases, in which case they might as well have bought a notebook.
So I started wondering whether the solution would be to roll up the computer instead, and my father-in-law has now sent me a video that shows that I wasn’t the first person with this idea:
It looks like a great idea, although I’m wondering whether the outer casing won’t scratch the screen when it’s rolled up — I would have thought it needed to be soft on the outside. I also wonder whether it needs to be so big. An iPad rolled up wouldn’t be much bigger than an banana, I reckon, so it would fit into a jacket pocket or a lady’s handbag.
Sadly, however, this is just a design project AFAIK, not an actual product.
But perhaps somebody will make an actual product out of this one day. If it’s Apple, they could call it the iScroll.
Coalition stability and the UK
More and more people are pointing out that coalitions can lead to stable and successful governments, at least in continental Europe, the point being that one shouldn’t fear the so-called “hung parliament” that so many supporters of the two big parties dread.
I agree, and I actually think that it would be much better for the UK instead of the adversarial two-party politics that Westminster is focused on.
However, discussing coalitions, Fraser Nelson was worrying that “if everyone thinks they’re one year away from a new election how popular are cuts going to be”.
I think this is exactly why coalitions have worked badly in the UK in the past.
In countries where coalitions are successful, it’s also the case that they have fixed-term parliaments and/or an electoral system that means that there is no hope for any one party to get a majority.
In other words, in many countries the parties know that they have to make coalition a success, because they have no alternative.
Sadly, however, if no single party gets a majority after this year’s general election, it’s likely they’ll only treat coalition as a way to prepare for the following general election, which will happen as soon as the PM of the day thinks that he can get a majority by calling an election.
The consequence of this is that the LibDems shouldn’t hope for four years of influence. At the most, they’ll be influential for a year, so they’ll have to make the most of it, especially by changing the electoral system.
En og et
Léon hører normalt godt efter, så hvis man læser en bog om “et egern” eller “et får”, er der en god chance for, at han vil gentage artiklen korrekt, hvis man taler med ham om historien eller billederne.
Men det gik op for mig i forgårs, at hvis man stiller ham spørgsmål om ting, man ikke lige har talt om, og hvor det oplagte svar er “et”, siger han altid “en”:
– Hvor mange borde er der på billedet?
– Én.
Så jeg har nu brugt et del tid på at stille pædagogiske spørgsmål, så han kan få lært at bruge køn korrekt. Han er trods alt næsten 4½ år gammel og skal starte i skolen efter sommerferien.
Han skal nok blive glad for det i længden. Jeg har i hvert fald ofte ærgret mig over, at jeg kun fik lært tysk køn og kasus i det omfang, det var nødvendigt for at forstå talt tysk.
Det er jo forbandelsen ved at være tosproget i en situation, hvor man næsten aldrig har brug for at tale sprog nummer to: Man lærer at forstå det som en indfødt, og ens udtale er stort set perfekt, men man laver stadigvæk dumme fejl, der straks afslører en som ikke-indfødt.
The inevitable election date
The media today agree it is now inevitable that the general election will take place on 6 May.
I’m not convinced.
It could well be that Brown thinks he’s going to go for the 6th, but when he has to make the announcement in April, he’ll check the opinion polls, and what will the Great Ditherer do if they’re going against him again? Go for the planned date or postpone it for another month in the hope that things will be better then?
I have put good money on a June election, and all the budget date has told me is that the election won’t take place in March or early April.