2010/12/22 11:59
My mum was reading East Renfrewshire's magazine last night and asked me why there were so few council members.I hadn't really thought of that before, so I checked the figures: East Renfrewshire has 89,200 inhabitants and 20 council members, whereas an equivalent Danish council area ("kommune") such as Silkeborg has 88,481 inhabitants and 31 council members.Why is there such a...
2010/12/11 19:14
Danish media are reporting that stocks of road salt are running low:"Britain is the big culprit. They use too much [salt]", says Per Nygaard.He justifies this with the country's road network, where A roads are narrow and bad. This means that in his view, all it takes is just a little bit of snow on the roadside before they begin...
2010/12/31 18:38
Here are my predictions for 2011:
- There will be a general election in Denmark. The Social Democrats and SF will form a minority government, which will quickly get into serious trouble trying to carry out their legislative programme.
- There won’t be a general election in the UK, but the LibDems will get more and more worried about their lack of support in the opinion polls.
- In Scotland, Labour will win the election but will be unable to find a coalition partner, so they’ll form a minority government.
- The outcome of the AV referendum will be Yes (but it’ll be a narrow victory).
- There’ll be snow on the ground in Scotland for most of the time until the end of March. We’ll then have a warm and sunny early summer, but late summer and autumn will be cold and wet, and we’ll have another white Christmas.
- Facebook will get serious competition, but they won’t be overtaken yet as the default social networking site.
- The best-selling tablet computer towards the end of 2011 won’t be the iPad.
- Economically, Germany will start pulling the Eurozone out of the slump, but there’ll be more bad news from the US. There won’t be any sovereign defaults (yet).
- Petrol prices will reach £1.50 per litre.
- Neither Denmark nor Scotland will qualify for the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship.
2010/12/19 22:09
I happened to watch Marks & Spencer's new Christmas dinner ad on telly the other day (embedding it here doesn't seem to be possible).At first it sounds nice, but listen to what is being said: The uncle gets one starter, but the niece gets another; a turkey for one half of the family, but sirloin on the bone for the other half; two different puddings.What has happened to the idea of sitting down together to share a meal? A meal...
2010/12/17 15:19
Google have released something called the "Books Ngram Viewer" which lets you investigate the frequency of lexical items over time (in several languages).As an example, here is the graph it produces for telegraph (red), telephone (blue) and email (green):As you would expect, 'telephone' overtakes 'telegraph' shortly before 1920, and 'email' comes from nowhere around 1990 and quickly becomes a frequent...
2010/12/11 11:18
This morning, I stumbled upon a map generator written by NASA called G.Projector.It's really good fun to play with: It's reasonably fast (especially considering that it's written in Java), it knows dozens of different map projections, and there are lots...
2010/12/09 22:36
Earlier this year, I decided to split my blog into two: One for politics in English, and one for everything else.In retrospect, this was probably caused primarily by my focus on the general election in May 2010.However, since then I...
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