I loved this book, although of course I didn't agree with all of it. Take the swimming pools versus guns thing. Levitt says that swimming pools are statistically more dangerous to kids to have at a house, than guns. That may be, but swimming pools are fun and so shouldn't …

In my lifetime, everything's gone from being analogue to being digital. These terms are usually used when talking about electronics, but they needn't be.

I think of digital as being where a range of values correspond to another discrete value. In his book, The Digital River, Richard Dawkins says that …

I think my boiler's getting furred up because I can hear fragments of limescale move around when I turn the central heating on. Also, I live in a hard water area and everything gets covered in limescale.

It's a problem because it significantly impairs the efficiency of the boiler.

I'll …

Limescale is starting to fur up the boiler in my house. The cheapest solution is one of those magnetic water conditioner things, but I'm doubtful that they work. There's an interesting article from Cranfield University that suggests that that anti-scale magnetic water treatment can work. I think I'll give the …

I heard on the radio that someone's come up with the idea of making it illegal to deny the holocaust in Europe.
I think that the holocaust did happen. Why do I think that? I'd like to be able to say that I've done a thorough review of the historical …

Reading http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/conformancing reminded me of a similar thought I had. There are plenty of things that are socially unacceptable, but that are not morally unacceptable. I think that behaviour that fits into this category is disquieting because it implies that the person might disregard all …

Living to over 145 years, flying carpets, a year of continuous rain followed by 10 years of drought. These preposterous things occur in One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I'm literal minded, and so I also found difficult all the premonitions and apparitions and such.

Generation after …

I've added mapping to The Elected. I've only mapped one constituency so far. As it's a wiki, anyone can add mapping data to a constituency. Let me know if you try it and have any problems.

To get an XSL stylesheet to output XML with JavaScript in it, do this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"&t;
<xsl:output method="xml"
    doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
    doctype-system="http://www.w3 …

Andy's pointed me to this Economist article on the ethical buying of food. There are several different issues involved:

• CO~2~ emissions. Many people attempt to buy food that has caused the minimum CO2 pollution. But as the article points out, this is incredibly difficult. I buy groceries from an …