2011/11/27 23:05
Once Scotland becomes independent, it would be natural to get its own international calling code instead of the British +44.My guess is that Scotland would get +424 – it's similar to +44, it's available, and it's in the European block.There's of course nothing that would prevent Scotland from stopping there, resulting in phone numbers such as +424 (0)141 639 9718....
2011/11/20 22:21
I've blogged before about the fact that Scotland on its own has a very normal-sized population within an northern European context.It's quite illustrative to look at all the member states of the European Union (logarithmic scale):Scotland (the small pink column) is slightly smaller than the average, being of almost exactly the same size as Denmark, Slovakia and Finland, and somewhat...
2011/11/29 20:27
There’s only about 60 km between Scotland’s two largest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh (counting from city boundary to city boundary along the motorway), yet they have separate airports and it takes 50 minutes to take a train from city centre to city centre.
Looking further afar, Inverness is only about 180 km north of Glasgow as the crow flies, or about 270 km by road, yet the fastest train is under way for almost 3½ hours.
I could give similar figures for travel to the other Scottish cities, such as Aberdeen and Dundee.
This is ridiculous! It’s like all efforts go into providing good connexions to London, instead of tying Scotland closer together.
In an ideal world, I’d shut down Glasgow and Edinburgh airports and build a new one south of Falkirk (the exact location would of course have to depend to the geography). I’d then build some very straight rail tracks from Glasgow via the new airport to Edinburgh, so that the trains could achieve a decent speed (I’m imagining something like 15 minutes from either city centre to the airport, or about 30 minutes from Glasgow to Edinburgh).
Furthermore, I’d straighten out the tracks to at least Inverness and Aberdeen, add parallel tracks and electrify the whole lot, so that decent speeds could be achieved there, too. I’m not sure exactly what would be possible, but I reckon it should be possible to get the travel time from Inverness to Glasgow or Edinburgh down to under two hours, and hopefully close to one hour.
The effect would be that all Scottish cities would be within easy reach of each other, which would no doubt do wonders for the Scottish economy. It would also mean only one airport was needed for mainland Scotland, which would result in a big airport with lots of direct connexions, instead of just having small airports mainly sending passengers on to the larger hub airports such as Heathrow.
Besides, I’m sure a big infrastructure project such as this would be just what the doctor ordered against the recession…
2011/11/24 15:07
I've been trying for a wee while to deploy iOS apps to my two-year-old iPod Touch. I kept getting an error message from codesign: “object file format invalid or unsuitable”.At first I thought it had something to do with my provisioning profile or something, or perhaps that my iPod was too old to work with the newest Xcode, but the error turned out to be quite different, obscure, yet simple to fix.I found the solution in Martian Storm. Somehow /usr/bin/codesign_allocate...
2011/11/21 18:29
It seems that the European Parliament can decide on its own how to distribute the seats amongst the various member states:The Treaty of Lisbon therefore leaves it to the European Parliament to propose its own distribution of seats, but lays down the basic rules under which that distribution is to take place:the maximum number of MEPs is set at 751,...
2011/11/19 10:48
Europe is a real mess when it comes to railway networks. The gauges aren't the same, the ways they've been electrified vary (see the map on the right), and the signal systems aren't the same.To quote from Wikipedia:While most railways...
2011/11/17 22:32
Most British commentators and politicians seem to be very happy that the UK never joined the euro. There's sadly a lot of schadenfreude in the British media at the moment, as if the UK was doing well while the eurozone...
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There’s only about 60 km between Scotland’s two largest cities, Glasgow and Edinburgh (counting from city boundary to city boundary along the motorway), yet they have separate airports and it takes 50 minutes to take a train from city centre to city centre.
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