365 days - Day 1

Inspired by Lauren over on Walk You Home, I have decided to do that flickr 365 days thing, you know, the one where you post a self portraity photo every day for a 365 days.

This is Day 1's photo



The lighty bit reflected in my eye is the mirror in my attractive young ladyfriend's flat.

New years resolutions

For 2010 I hereby resolve to:-

• Play a gig in London in front of people who've paid to come in
• Find a new job with better hours that's a bit more career-orientated rather than just rent-paying
• Build my own audio pre amp
• Draw more traffic to this blog (+100 pageviews a day)
• Reduce my debts by more than 50% (£3,500)
• Mercilessly crush my enemies
• Run 10K in less that 25 minutes

They're not particularly ambitious resolutions, and a little project planning will see them through. I'll to keep you informed with monthly updates.

Paying for costs

Back to my theme of questioning why the government wants to extract as much money as possible from the population. Via Mark Wadsworth I stumbled on this blogpost where this bit jumped out.

Over 30 years, alcohol consumption has increased by just 19%. But the cost of treating alcohol-related conditions has increased by 100% in just 5 years. It sounds to me rather as if the problem is not increasing levels of drinking, but astonishingly rapid increases in the cost of related healthcare.

The report also mentions "the focus of the 2004 national alcohol reduction strategy". So that strategy has covered the last five years - the period over which the NHS Confederation is saying the cost has doubled.

So clearly the national alcohol reduction strategy has failed miserably. Three possibilities present themselves:-

• the strategy requires more funding to be effective
• the strategy requires less funding because its a bottomless pit, but nice to have ongoing
• cancel the whole damn exercise

One stat that's missing from the blogpost is whether alcohol deaths have increased, cos what I'm thinking is we can compare alcohol deaths to road traffic deaths, cos like road deaths are at their lowest level for almost a hundred years, whatever the powers that be are doing is working, whatever draconian laws, speedlimits, punishments and technological advances have been applied have reduced road deaths, whatever money has been poured into the issue has been effectively spent, but still the various lobbying groups are calling for more money and tighter rules.

Let me briefly summon the National Statistics Office website for alcohol-related deaths:-

Figures on alcohol-related deaths in 2007 indicate a levelling-off of the trend, following rapid increases since the early 1990s. There were 8,724 alcohol-related deaths in 2007, lower than 2006, but more than double the 4,144 recorded in 1991.

So what is it with alcohol deaths? Why isn't it working? Why aren't the numbers coming down. If its all bullshit, why do the numbers go up.

Has the doubling of the cost of treating alcohol-related conditions doubled the effectiveness?

For road deaths you could pull up the figures for car ownership over the last thirty years (28% increase from '79 to 2000) and then the death rates:-

The total number of deaths in road accidents fell by 7 per cent to 2,946 in 2007 from 3,172 in 2006. However, the number of fatalities has remained fairly constant over the last ten years.

The decline in the casualty rate, which takes into account the volume of traffic on the roads, has been much steeper. In 1967 there were 199 casualties per 100 million vehicle kilometres. By 2007 this had declined to 48 per 100 million vehicle kilometres.

So for driving, whatever has been spent has worked. For drinking, it hasn't, and there's no evidence that spending more or doing more will reduce deaths.

All this reasoning is of course a red herring, the cost to the NHS of alcohol related treatment has doubled or increased by whatever factor not because of people's behaviour, its barely a correlation, not causation. The NHS could easily reprioritise and half the spending regardless of how much you and I drink.

But no, any excuse for the state to justify trying to extract as much money as possible from the population.

North vs Pachauri

Now, if I was recruiting someone to be the head of my UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, I'd want someone who really knew their stuff, someone who was signed up to all the mailing lists, Facebook groups, international institutes, organisations and companies. Dr Richard North of EUReferendum would have you think that these are vested interests and that Dr Pachauri is lining his pockets on the back of all this climate change stuff.

The good Dr North makes a compelling case, listing thirty or forty organisations that Dr Pachauri holds positions in that funnel money into his various TERA-branded business/charities. Including but not limited to:-

• Director and Head of Tata Energy Research Institute
• Director General TERI
• Strategic Advisor to Pegasus Capital Advisors LP
• Member Senior Advisory Board of Siderian Ventures
• Board member of the Nordic bank Glitnir
• Chairman of Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund
• Board member of the Credit Suisse Research Institute
• Member of the Advisory Group for the Rockefeller Foundatio, USA
• Member of the board International Risk Governance Council, Geneva
• Chairman of Advisory Group at the Asian Development Bank
• Member of the Policy Advisory Panel for SNCF
• President of the Asian Energy Institute
• Director to GloriOil Limited
• Scientific Advisor
• Chairman of IPCC
• Far East Oil Price Advisory Board
• Member of International Advisory Board of Toyota Motors
• Member of the Climate Change Advisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG
• Chairman International Association for Energy Economics
• Independent Director of National Thermal Power Corp
• Part-time Directory of National Thermal Power Corp
• Director of Indian Oil Corporation
• Director of Gail India Ltd
• Member of National Environmental Council, Government of India
• Member of International Solar Energy Society
• Member of World Resources Institute
• Member of the World Energy Council
• Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India
• Member of the Oil Industry Restructuring Group, for the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India
• Director of Consulting and Applied Research Division at the Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad
• Visiting Professor, Resource Economics at the College of Mineral and Energy Resources, West Virginia University
• Visiting Research Fellow at The World Bank, Washington, DC
• McCluskey Fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University
• Board chairman Climate-Risk centre, The Earth Institute at Columbia University

So, SPECTRE TERI-Europe has 27 Albert Grove, in Merton, South London listed as its UK office. Dr North sites this as being jointly owned by Dr Pachauri and Dr Rita Kumar and also the home of Dr Kumar and a gentleman known as Nicholas Robins.

I happened to be just passing the suburb of Merton in South London earlier today and thought it would be a bit crazy and stalkerish if I went to have a look at this 27 Albert Grove address that Dr Pachauri and Dr Kumar have as their UK offices, and I've got to say, it looked a bit pokey. Maybe there's some kind of secret underground villainous headquarters and the address above is just a cover.

Tied to the 00's #15

Way back in the mists of time, at the start of the 00's, I was the life and soul of Strathclyde University.

In our first photie you can see Simon dressed as a vicar for the 2000 Halloween party taken in the Fusion Radio offices.

The second photie is from a German beer party in the Barony Bar, I think that was the coolest hairstyle I've ever had, check out those sideburns ladies.

The third photie is from the 2000 RAG Christmas dinner, I was just involved with charities enough to get invited. Half them peoples in the picture are on my Facebook friends list, but I don't speak to them half as much as I ought to.

Blog stat pron - 2009

Good afternoon, and welcome to my summary of this blogs web traffic for the year. I know that its still a few hours to 2010 but I'm bored and have other things to do, like homework and cake making, so I'm wasting time on the internet. Without further ado here are the overall traffic figures for 2009:-

10,451 Absolute Unique Visitors
23,212 Pageviews

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree, but I don't have the complete 2008 figures to compare it to, and as Climategate has taught us, you really need continuous data to make any comparisons. Luckily I do have complete data for 2008 and 2009 from Statcounter:-

	Unique Visitors	Pageloads
2009	17,858	22,482
2008	7,614	10,126

I've more than doubled my traffic, coolio. Lets look at statcounter's graph showing monthly traffic:-

Crazy stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. We can clearly see that returning visitor traffic has been dying off for months and months since the peak in the middle of 2008 when the kindly folks from a certain indie messageboard used to visit here often. On the other hand, pageloads have been increasing in steady chunks over the two year period, but have pretty much levelled out now. I'm going to have to start doing something different and new if I want to keep growing.

Moving on, the latest metrics for feed readers are as follows:-

23 subscribers - GoogleReader (up two from October)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
7 followers - Blogger (up one from October)

These are my top referers for the year (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 726 visitors
2. Twitter - 657 visitors
3. EUReferendum - 249 visitors
4. UK Bubble - 198 visitors
5. Mark Wadsworth - 180 visitors
6. Iain Dale - 110 visitors
7. Matt Wardman - 85 visitors
8. Counting Cats - 69 visitors
9. Longrider - 66 visitors
10. Devil's Kitchen - 43 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during 2009.

1. Facebook IQ test gubbins - 1,031 views
2. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 855 views
3. Origami flapping bird animation - 579 views
4. Facebook ChainRxn graphs and hints - 516 views
5. Facebook Scramble graphs - 355 views
6. Animation with Windows Movie Maker - 351 views
7. Names of the dead in Gaza - 219 views
8. Sea level rises - 195 views
9. Band Nationalities - 160 views
10. Names of the dead in Iran - 152 views

Its a bit overwhelming, I know, but that's it for this years blog stat pron update. Thanks to all the folk who've linked here in 2009, I hope to return the favour a bit more in 2010.

Gilmour out

Tied to the 00's #14

This one time towards the end of 2006, Rachel was back up in Glasgow and a few of us met up in a pub on Great Western Road. I dunno about you but it was a weird night for me.


I think it was StereoDonut who made gingerbread men, one of them looked like Robbie.

Tied to the 00's #13

I seem to be missing any decent photies of me and people from towards the end of the decade. This is a nice one from 2008 and the final Bowlie meetup weekend, some pub in Kensington that Rups lead us to when torrential rain opened up on us in Hyde Park.

My return to the good graces of that messageboard only occurred in its death throes. But I telegraphed it with a storyline in my old attempt at a webcomic, ill theatre, its still out there on the web. Alas my imagination is failing me to do that sort of thing again.

Brief political interlude

Its been with great interest that I've been reading Devil's Kitchen's and Sunny Hundal's discussion about the nature of class war and race war, how ugly Devil's Kitchen is and whether you need to have read Adam Smith to be the leader of a UK political party, and elsewhere the discussions on the nature of determining what class people are in.

Me, I had a privileged upbringing, my parents worked hard to provide for my education at what was then a good school, and now I'm scraping by just above minimum wage.

Anyhoo, I was attempting to summarise the debate for my attractive young ladyfriend, she gets quite angry when I'm so negative so I tried to spin my own views positive.

Firstly, the phrase 'taxing the rich' fills me with dread, surely they mean taxing high earners, for these are two different things. The former suggests kicking down a rich person's door and informing them that the powers that be have determined they are too rich and need some of their wealth redistributed to life's losers, the latter suggests that those who work hard and are successful owe the state more than the losers do.

Then there's the whole nature of taxing high earners, who my some measure of life's successful people. Should the state be dissuading, nay punishing them for being successful?

Succinctly, my political beliefs are to question why the state tries to take some much its citizens? Shouldn't the government endevour to let the population keep as much of their earnings as possible?

And if by some quirk of democracy the population have voted for a party that's into redistribution of wealth so there's more balance between rich and poor, shouldn't it simply be a case of determining the median wealth or income and then only taxing people on the rich side and not taxing those on the poorer side?

Sure, its far more complicated than that, there's the welfare state to pay for, and law and order, defending borders and taking away the rubbish. But surely such things affect all people to pretty much the same degree regardless of class and race.

Its been a couple of hours since I read the Devil or Sunny, and maybe the debate has moved on, that Sunny's point was merely that class war would be a good electoral strategy for Labour, rather than a good strategy for government.

Wasn't there a byelection in Crewe where Labour tried playing the class card and failed miserably? They could try it again if they like losing.

Tied to the 00's #12

In the absence of any decent photies of me from 2005, this is from the New Years party that Idles arranged at Mental Sarah's back then.

Mostly Bowlie folk from all over the world, I vaguely recall around the moment this photo was taken either Dave in the Dumps or Radar was playing The Divine Comedy's 'My Lovely Horse'.

We'd all met up at The crnrvn beforehand, and whilst I hadn't specifically been invited to the party, at the time I was under a secret alias known only to a few, anyhoo, I just hung around in the pub until folk were heading off to the party, my old Ford Fiesta parked nearby, and then offered my taxi driving services.

God knows precisely how we got seven fully grown men in a Fiesta, but we did and we got to Mental Sarah's house.