Tom Womack

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I've wanted to do this for ages, but never managed to get a set of photos without gaps in to make the panorama. I now have a ridiculously wide-angle lens (12mm), with which you only need to take thirteen pictures; I can manage to take thirteen pictures without making a mistake, and here's the result. 20 second exposures, f/4, ISO 1000 on a D90.

Castle Hill has probably the clearest horizon in Cambridge, apart from the tree to the north, but Cambridge is quite brightly lit. You can see Shire Hall (obviously), New Hall, the University Library, King's Chapel and the tower of St John's.

[Poll #1333743]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7813791.stm: "But for every £500 they have saved over [£6000], the authorities assume they earn £1 per week in "tariff income" and reduce the benefit payments accordingly."

£1/week/£500 is 10.9%, a significantly better deal than Madoff!

Changing that figure to 25p would seem a nice boost to poor pensioners in next year's budget; I think that a truly honorable government should also commit to providing an investment which pays the "tariff income", at least on sums up to that on which the tariff income equals the State pension, and that would provide the right incentive to keep the assumed rate of tariff income sensible.

A narrow aperture, a long lens and a flash used in daytime permits a strikingly taxidermied look without all that tiresome messing about with intestines, cotton-wool, and specially-shaped metal hooks:

This year (21 December to 21 December, because that's where the billing cycle rolls), I have used on average 642 watts of electricity, and 858 cubic metres of gas.

That is, if I remember my units and my GCSE physics correctly, enough electricity to smelt enough aluminium to make a seven-foot-high solid statue of myself, and enough methane to inflate a balloon larger than my house and capable of lifting that above-life-size statue.

I don't have any plans at present to divert my electricity and gas supply for 2009 entirely to that endeavour.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admlty/2008/3034.html

I can't help thinking that identical cases must have come before similarly-constituted Admiralty Courts for at least the past three thousand years, the Trading Company of Sidon complaining to the Towing Corporation of Zephyrion that the bireme procured to tow three dozen cedar-logs to Kition had been provisioned according to an inaccurate estimate of the draft of the lumber.

Though I would have thought that no ordinarily prudent Phoenician ship-owner would name their vessel "A TURTLE".

I think this goat would like to meet the Indonesian duck from last month.

Great. Savings rates are now at 2%; the perfect moment for the Government to launch a token encouraging-saving program whereby, if you are sufficiently poor and put away six pounds a week, after two years a magic wand will be waved and it will be as if you had put away nine pounds a week.

At the very least it would seem to make sense to raise benefits and pensions by those six pounds a week, with a claim that it's to encourage saving. If you add only a couple of hoops to jump through to keep the £6 from going automatically to a savings account of the right sort, it might well actually end up saved, and if not then a marginal six pounds on benefits is infinitely more likely to get spent in an economy-stimulating way than any process which, for example, gives money to me.

(Anyone who has sixty spare pounds a week, set up a monthly saver with Barclays ASAP before they decide that paying more than three and a half times the current base rate, fixed for a year, is silly. You need to turn up in person with your passport and a utility bill, the process takes about twenty minutes, and you have to set up a standing order into the account manually rather than have Barclays arrange it through direct-debitry)