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.

Buchwider Bräu α₂

Although I was pleased at the time, I later came to view it as a bit of a failure — it wasn’t really pleasant enough to be enjoyed on its own.

I therefore decided I would try again. I more or less used the same recipe before, but I used a different yeast (Wyeast Bavarian Wheat Blend instead of Wyeast Bavarian Wheat).

I’ve tried one bottle so far, and although it’s somewhat better than my first Weißbier, it’s still not quite right. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it lacks a certain fruitiness.

I guess I’ll need to try again next year!

Isoglosses for ‘last’, ‘cross’ and ‘sun’. Based on this image by NordNordWest modified by User:Xhandler, with isoglosses from An Atlas of English Dialects
.

For some bizarre reason one split I never suggested in these blog posts was in many ways the most obvious one.

As a linguist, I’ve been aware for years that English dialects split into two main groups: Southern English south of a line roughly from the Severn to the Wash, and Northern English north of this line. (Scottish dialects are a completely different story.) Three of the most important isoglosses are shown on the map on the right.

However, this line turns up in lots of other contexts, e.g.:

• Economics: “The current government’s attempts to bridge the north-south divide look doomed to failure. All but one of the 20 worst districts for hidden unemployment lie north of a line from the Severn to the Wash [...]”
• Politics: “South of a line drawn from the Wash to the Severn estuary, Labour has just 10 seats outside of London.”
• Geology: “The line links the mouth of the River Tees between Redcar and Hartlepool in the north east of England with the mouth of the River Exe in Devon, the south west. The lowlands (sedimentary rocks) are predominant to the east of the line and higher land (igneous and metamorphic rocks) dominates to the west. As well as geology, those areas to the north and west of the line are generally wetter in climate than those to the east and south. Similar lines are commonly drawn, for similar purposes, between the Severn Estuary and the Wash, and between the Severn and the mouth of the River Trent.”
• Ornithology: “[The nightingale is] a secretive bird which likes nothing better than hiding in the middle of an impenetrable bush or thicket. In the UK they breed mostly south of the Severn-Wash line [...]”
• Medicine: “Although the 1916 and 1917 waves of meningitis in the civil population were less intense than the primary wave of 1915 [...], the underlying pattern of heightened disease activity in counties to the south of the Severn-Wash line persisted.”

I’m sure there are many more examples, but these should suffice to show that the Severn-Wash line is the most obvious border. North England and South England would be different in so many ways that they would quickly develop separate identities.

Obviously I don’t think England will ever be divided, but the consequence is that an undivided England will always dominate the UK to such a great extent that Scottish independence becomes a necessity.

Multiple Tweets Gradient, a photo by mkhmarketing on Flickr.

This happens automatically when I bookmark a link so long as I add a certain label to it.

To do this, I use two free websites, del.icio.us and Twitterfeed.

Del.icio.us is simply a bookmarking site that allows me to save bookmarks and attach labels. All links that I want to appear on Twitter get the label “aop”. (You can see all my aop links here.) The most important del.icio.us feature from this point of view is that you can retrieve these bookmark lists in RSS format (e.g., this RSS feed for my aop links).

Twitterfeed posts RSS feeds to Twitter, so all you need to do is to tell it the address of your del.icio.us RSS feed and determine the posting frequency etc.

Del.icio.us and Twitterfeed work really well together, and it’s my impression that many of my Twitter followers really appreciate the links I’m posting.

Buchwider Bräu ι₁.

My ι₁ is a clone of Caledonian Deuchars IPA, using a recipe from CAMRA’s Brew Your Own British Real Ale.

I think it’s a very pleasant beer, and my dad praised it highly when he and my mum visited us two weeks ago. Unfortunately I haven’t got a chance to compare it directly with the real Caledonian Deuchars IPA — I must do that with my last bottle!