Cartoon photo, a photo by viralbus on Flickr.

It does the cartoonification on the fly, so you can move around and look for something that looks good in your chosen style, rather than applying a slow transformation afterwards.

It’s free, so give it a try!

However, this is a feature Scots shares with Northern English dialects (J.C. Well, Accents of English 1, pp.185f):

North of a line running from southern Cumbria to the Humber estuary, the present-day dialectal reflex of Middle English /oː/ is a front vowel, e.g., [gɪəs] goose, while Middle English /uː/ remains monophthongal, e.g. [huːs] house. [...] It Scots dialects, too, the back vowels were exempt from the Great Vowel Shift. It seems that what happened north of this Lune-Humber line was that Middle English /oː/ had become fronted to /øː/ some two centuries before the Great Vowel Shift took place. This meant that in these dialects there was no half-close back /oː/ to raise and thus push the close /uː/ aside into diphtongality in the way it did elsewhere (and /eː/ did to /iː/ everywhere) when the Great Vowel Shift came into operation.

In other words, with regard to these two groups of words, the Northern English dialects could also be regarded as Southern Scots dialects. If Scotland had always remained independent and had managed to incorporate this part of England, they would probably now be writing “guiss” and pronouncing it [gɪəs], and there would be some pressure to drop the schwa and say [gɪs], instead of replacing it with [guːs], as I’m sure is happening at the moment.

Of course these dialects aren’t like Scots in all regards. For instance, I believe their reflex of Old English /aː/ isn’t /e/ or similar like in Scots (where we get hame /hem/ “home”, gait /get/ “goat”, hale /hel/ “whole”), but something more similar to standard English /əʊ/.

I don’t know much about these dialects, so I’m not sure whether they share many more features with English than with Scots, or whether they really are equidistant from both.

Ostkaka, a photo by Dvortygirl on Flickr.

Mig bekendt findes der ingen traditionel dansk ostekage, så de eneste ostekagetyper, jeg har kendt i årevis, er tysk Käsekuchen og den angelsaksiske cheese cake.

Men Google er jo et genialt værktøj, når man skal finde obskure opskrifter, så det tog ikke lang tid at finde en opskrift på rigtig
ostekage fra Småland.

Til forskel fra de mere velkendte typer er der ingen bund i en smålandsk ostekage, og man bruger ikke ost, men mælk og osteløbe.

Jeg prøvede at bage den, sidste gang mine forældre besøgte os, men forsøget var ikke nogen ubetinget succes. Ostekagen smagte lidt som en sammenfaldet soufflé, men det skyldes måske nok, at vi begik den fejl at spise den varm — den blev bedre efter et ophold i køleskabet.

Den var dog ikke direkte dårlig, og jeg prøver nok igen, men måske følger jeg næste gang en anden opskrift.

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders Meeting, a photo by timbu on Flickr.

Companies have these advantages to encourage investment and promote growth.

However, one might argue that this should apply to individuals, too.

Imagine if every individual automatically owned a “personal” company (i.e., at birth I would have been made sole director of Thomas Widmann Ltd.), and all their work took place through their company (it would be illegal for companies to employ people rather than other companies). In this scenario, everybody would need to decide when to take profits out of their personal company instead of investing the money (which would be tax-free).

With the move away from direct employment towards self-employment, this is increasingly becoming a reality for a large number of people, so perhaps it would be worthwhile making this approach universal.

After this change, it would be possible to completely abolish income tax, because employment would then always an issue between two companies, and all that would be needed would be company taxation and taxes on withdrawing profits. I guess many people would let their personal companies own their house and their car and let their personal company provide free meals to its employee in order to minimise tax and VAT, but that would be a good thing as it would just be levelling out the playing field (which is currently distorted in favour of companies and rich people).

At the moment, most rich people have companies (or charities) to lower their tax bill, so giving everybody a VAT-registered company would basically just give normal people the benefits that the rich currently enjoy.

gold cast bar, a photo by hto2008 on Flickr.

He’s arguing that Gordon Brown wasn’t an innumerate idiot when he sold most of the UK’s gold reserves at a ridiculously low price, as most people had assumed.

What he really did was trying to salvage the banking system:

It seemed almost as if the Treasury was trying to achieve the lowest price possible for the public’s gold. It was.

[...]

Faced with the prospect of a global collapse in the banking system, the Chancellor took the decision to bail out the banks by dumping Britain’s gold, forcing the price down and allowing the banks to buy back gold at a profit, thus meeting their borrowing obligations.

If true, this puts the gold sale in a completely different light. It was perhaps after all the right thing to do at the time (although I wonder whether bailing out a few banks would actually have cost more than the value of all that gold today), but why didn’t Gordon Brown afterwards try to strengthen the banking system instead of letting them continue their merry games until the system finally crashed in 2007?

(The music is of course Drink, Drink Yer Zider Up by The Wurzels.)

PM meets with Angela Merkel, a photo by The Prime Minister’s Office on Flickr.

However, it’s now increasingly clear that voters are drifting towards UKIP for many different reasons (immigration being one of the major ones), which means that the referendum promise now looks utterly futile.

However, many Tories (such as Lawson) are already stating clearly that they’ll vote No, no matter what, just as others (such as Heseltine) are planning to vote Yes even if Cameron doesn’t get a good deal.

UKIP will of course recommend a No in all circumstances:

What we will see is nothing more than the Wilson renegotiations in the Seventies that will be trumpeted and applauded by the establishment as a great victory for the Prime Minister and Britain, as these things always are. Nothing of any substance was achieved in the Seventies, nor will it be today.

In these circumstances, I really can’t see why the other EU countries should enter in serious negotiations with David Cameron’s government. There might be a few voters who will actually look at the deal before deciding on Yes or No, but my gut feeling is that it really won’t make much of a difference during the referendum campaign.

My advice would be to refuse to change one iota in the UK’s membership terms, or perhaps even ask the UK to join Schengen and some of the other EU policies that the UK has opted out of over the years. In other words, make this a fully in or fully out referendum, not a fifty or ninety percent out one.

I sincerely hope the upcoming EU referendum won’t affect Scotland in the slightest because we’ll already be an independent country and a full EU member by 2017.

Rosie, a photo by viralbus on Flickr.

We bought her on a farm in the Coatbridge area today. She was born on 12th April 2013 (so she’ll be one month old on Sunday), and she seems to be really lively and not shy at all.

So far she’s just exploring her cage, but we’ll start handling her soon.

If you’re interested, there are some photos of Rosie and her siblings on Facebook, and Phyllis has also created a whole photo album there.

Rosie will hopefully be with us for the next two years or so, so with a bit of luck she’ll live to see an independent Scotland!

Google Glass Prototype, a photo by Ars Electronica on Flickr.

Although Google Glass is looking great, I’m sure it’ll evolve rapidly over the next few years. Apart from increasing the resolution, I expect it to expand from one eye to two, to allow for three-dimensional display. I also wonder whether it’s really the best idea to put the display above the line of vision rather than below it — if you’re using it for reading a book, surely it must feel like holding the book above your head.

However, the main area for improvement is how you interact with it. Google Glass apparently requires you to touch the frame to control it, which is essential one-dimensional and tiring. However, traditional devices such as keyboards, mice and touch-screens are not going to be very effective, either. I’m not sure what they’ll come up with, but I won’t be surprised if Google Glass 3D in 2016 will be accompanied by a Google Glove (or perhaps just by small sensors on your finger nails).

Euro, a photo by aranjuez1404 on Flickr.

However, one might argue that this reform was partly responsible for the current euro crisis.

In any area using one currency there will necessarily be areas doing well and other areas doing badly. Normally one would expect the rich areas to have higher salaries, pensions and prices, so that the poorer areas can compete through lower costs.

However, by ruthlessly cutting the costs of doing business, Germany and several other countries in northern Europe have made it almost impossible for southern Europe to compete. In the old days, they would from time to time have devalued their currencies, but now that they can’t do that, they have a real problem. Cutting salaries and pensions (as for instance Greece is doing at the moment) is hardly a great solution, because it makes the local economy grind to a standstill.

I believe Germany (and other high performers in the Eurozone) should accept that they’re benefiting a lot from the euro. If it didn’t exist, lots of European countries would have devalued their currencies drastically, and businesses would be leaving Germany in huge numbers.

I’m half German, so I think I’ve got the right to say that Germany — because of what happened there in the 1930s — has a moral obligation to prevent other countries from sinking into the kind of situation that leads to the emergence of fascism.

My preferred solution would be putting up German salaries and pensions (perhaps by 20% or so). This could be very popular in Germany (“you’ve worked hard, so we think you deserve a pay rise”), and it would immediately make it much more attractive to place a business in Greece or Spain instead of Germany. However, the markets would probably immediately react by lowering the exchange rate of the euro by approximately the same amount, so it’s likely that German products wouldn’t actually get any dearer outwith the EU, which means that unemployment probably wouldn’t rise too much in Germany.

An alternative would be creating eurobonds, as suggested by George Soros and others.

I don’t really care what Germany does, but I’m sick and tired of hearing Merkel lecturing the southern Europeans to become Schwäbische Hausfrauen. I have tons of Swabian housewives in my family, and while they’re absolutely wonderful people, I really don’t think the solution to the Eurozone’s troubles is to turn Greece into a Mediterranean Schwabenland.