Tom Womack

More photos here or on Facebook

This is James and Marian's son Oliver, born about ten hours before this photo was taken, weighing 2.155kg.

I will be seeing him in Madrid in about nine days.

This is not the chart of a prudent year (and nor really was last year): in May I bought a large computer, which cost roughly all the savings I made in 2011. The large computer came with an implicit obligation not to buy any more computers until 2014, and indeed I have sold four computers this year.

The holiday was in southern India, mostly on a bicycle, and was generally awesome; photos are here, unpruned pictures here but will take more than a little while to load.

Since I have a khaki safari shirt, why not wear it? I assert that a Victorian explorer would remove his waistcoat and bow tie only when fighting a crocodile of unusually prodigious size; after battling a tiger it is permitted for the bow tie to be somewhat askew.

I recently took out £200 in two-pound coins, as part of a plan to make carrying large sums of money around with me sufficiently uncomfortable that I'd stop doing it. In particular, if I've just put three two-pound coins in my pocket to buy lunch at the canteen, I don't need to have a wallet, and so I don't have my credit-card readily accessible.

I spent some of them, and counted the rest. Two weeks later, I did the same again; in early January 2012 I did the same again and managed not to spend any before counting them:

Coin type	15 October (93)	29 October (87)	7 January (100)	25 February (99)
Normal Isaac Newton gears	80	69	80	87
Darwin-and-ape [2009]	3	2	0	0
Thistle-and-portcullis jigsaw [2007]	3	1	1	1
Rocket steam-engine [2004]	2	0	1	1
Paddington station arches [2006]	2	2	1	1
Rugby World Cup [1999]	1	2	0	0
Broken-chain abolition-of-slave-trade [2007]	1	5	0	0
Auld Lang Syne [2009]	1	0	2	1
Brunel's mighty hat [2006]	0	3	5	1
St Pauls [2005]	0	1	2	1
Marconi [2001]	0	1	0	2
Gunpowder plot wheel-of-symbols [2005]	0	1	3	3
DNA [2003]	0	0	3	1
Commonwealth Games (Scotland) [2002]	0	0	1	0
Florence Nightingale hands [2010]	0	0	1	0

I think the little-locomotive £2 coin is about the best piece of currency ever issued.

An iPhone 4S costs three treasure-chests like this

Eleven books this month: I've been making rather more use of the Kindle, and been on more train trips than average.

Greg Egan's Oceanic. Egan has written some of the best SF short pieces that I've read in the last decade, and this volume includes several of them. There's a little more idee-fixe coming in at the edges than in Axiomatic, a few stories which assume that the reader finds the quantum multi-world theory as philosophically alarming as Egan or the characters in the story do, but generally it's pretty excellent. library.

Jean Johnson Theirs Not To Reason Why is a piece of formulaic milsf, but you can feel the writing straining with the difficulty of using precognition as a story element. kindle.

Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island, because it was free on the Kindle and I hadn't read it yet. kindle.

Daniel Abrahams The Dragon's Path is very well-executed, but felt like extruded fantasy product where what was being extruded was a compote of early-21st-century fantasy; Abercrombie characters in a Scott Lynch world. kindle.

H Rider Haggard Allan Quatermain which is a classic of the Great Imperial Adventure. kindle.

Charles Darwin Origin of Species. Surprisingly comprehensible and clear; I suppose that was why it made such an impact, but I had thought that Dawkins and Gould existed because Darwin couldn't be read on its own, and I don't think that's the case. kindle.

Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm. This one's a famous, broad lampoon of books I hadn't read; there are some beautiful passages, but the sexism fairy has not been kind with it; pulling women out of the morass of rural existence and turning them into the non-working wives of local gentry doesn't feel as much of an improvement as it might have in 1933. A tale of a 1930s rural household being set into well-meaning well-ending upheaval by taking in a relative. kindle.

CJCherryh Regenesis. First-person writing from the point of view of a princeling, born to power (shaped to power before her conception), trying to figure out how to use infinite power in an unforgiving society on an unforgiving planet, and figure out who murdered her mother into the bargain. Paranoid in a very Cold War and fairly explicitly Soviet mode, though everyone around is an awful lot nicer than any senior Soviet I've read about. library paper.

Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief. This one had been pretty widely praised, and I'd carefully avoided reading reviews of it, but, well, it's extruded Stross product wrapped around the Count of Monte Cristo. I didn't find that the writing made the concept of alternating lifespans as human and as golem anything like as terrifying as it should have been. kindle.

Stella Gibbons Nightingale Wood. A tale of two stereotyped 1930s aristocratic households being set into well-meaning well-ending upheaval by taking in a relative; quite a well-written domineering father. Again turned into social history by the passage of time, since everything depends on nearly all the female characters being too posh to work. kindle.

Neal Stephenson's Reamde. It's a romp in Stephenson's inimitable style - effectively a series of braided chase scenes covering eight hundred pages - set in the contemporary world and rather reminiscent of the early thrillers co-written with Stephen Bury. kindle.

Would any of my readers be interested in a tour of Drax, the four-gigawatt coal-fired power station located mid-way between Leeds and Hull? Tours have to be arranged specially, but the logistics are not substantially worse for a small group than for an individual. I am a shareholder, but I don't think that owning eleven hundred nanodraxes will get me any usefully special treatment.

I'll need to ring and get absolutely basic information like whether it's possible to go at a weekend, but I'd quite like to know before then whether I'd be going alone or contemplating booking a minibus. Would be planning to go sometime-in-October, assuming that plans don't have to be made months in advance.

[Poll #1779585]

I don't understand how the Open University can justify its fee increase.

From the annual report, at the moment it gets about 40% of its income from fees and the rest from the state. With the fees it was charging in 2009-10, it had a surplus equal to about 15% of its fee income.

I get the impression that the OU is one of David Cameron's pets, and I haven't seen any statements that its state funding is being substantially reduced.

Increasing the fees is likely to reduce the number of students, but presumably they've modelled this and expect to end up with a higher total income; and a lot of the OU's costs are proportional to the number of students, so the surplus would go up enormously.

Well, it'll grow, and my ears will be pleasantly cool for most of July.

[Poll #1757933]