fivemack | Recent Entries

Logitech announced today that it had manufactured its billionth mouse.

I think (given that 2.2 million lab mice were used in England in 2007) that computer mice probably just about outnumber lab mice. There are about 25 million households in Britain, and I don't expect that each of them contains forty mice, so computer mice made by Logitech alone may well outnumber house-mice in Britain.

I'm always impressed how common humans are as an animal their size; the Great Wildebeeste Migration in Africa is of 1.5 million wildebeeste at 150 kilograms each, which is fewer individuals but probably a bit more mass than the daily Commuter Migration into and out of London.

Thanks to a very useful dataset pointed out by

shimgray, I can say that there are more people than mice in the UK; however, field voles outnumber humans. For every other person in the UK there is a mole.

~~I can't find a good estimate for the number of rabbits in Britain~~The survey suggests that there are about forty million rabbits in the UK. The cows outnumber the population of Greater London, but not by much, and I suspect cows are heavy enough that there's probably more weight of cow than of human in the UK.

(it's a doorway in the Wawel palace in Krakow)

(taken by

darcydodo, half an hour after I first met her, in a nice Dim Sum restaurant in Montreal)

These are from Kaohsiung. The temple on the left is the Dragon Tiger Pavilion; you enter via the dragon and leave via the tiger, and the walls inside are hung with brightly-coloured depictions of the torments of Hell. The right is the Dark Heaven God Temple.

Demons have trouble with corners, hence the bridge.

OK, they may have been an all-male group of bold botanic explorers who had been lost in the Mexican desert for months, but still 'mammillaire' is not immediately the first anatomical suggestion that that cactus brings to even my pure and innocent mind.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7751981.stm

I think the Great Powers refrain from acting in Congo because the task is near enough to impossible that they don't have the power to act usefully. The Congo wars are unimaginably large; in area covered and in death toll they're equivalent to the western front of World War II, in disorganisation and horror they remind me of the Thirty Years' War in what's now Germany, a time of roving bands on several separate sides raping, massacring, pillaging and destroying.

You hear very little from the war zone. There are three sorts of war reportage that you expect nowadays: embedded reporters with the armies, journalists pre-placed in the regions under attack, and the view from somewhere between 60,000 feet and low Earth orbit presented in PowerPoint slides from the White House press room. None of that's available; armies on foot in jungle don't show up from orbit, to a good approximation nobody has ever reported from Mbuji-Mayi, and the armies don't seem to be carrying reporters with them. You get the pictures of starving refugees, because the only regions safe and accessible enough for Western journalists with cameras are the ones to which the starving refugees have fled.

I don't know what a good outcome would look like; I'm not sure there's ever been a situation in Congo stable enough to go back to. I can imagine a series of Partitions of Congo, Angola tearing bits off in the south, Uganda in the north and Rwanda in the east. I'm reading a history of Prussia at the moment and there's some vague Prussianness to Rwanda, but turning out as well as Prussia in the long run is still scarcely well.

VAT has gone down by 2.5% as of 1 December, which means the fancy camera I want to buy could conceivably cost 15 quid less in the New Year than it does now. Of course, fancy cameras being made mostly of microchips, it's likely to cost fifteen quid less anyway thanks to process optimisation in the silicon foundries of Taiwan, but hopefully these are cumulative.

But the purpose of an economic stimulus can't just be to move lumps of consumption around by a few months; I don't think that even in the current climate it's necessary to run a big sale in November purely so that you have the cash to pay the salaries for your shop workers in December.

So Alistair Darling's job is to make Britons more profligate than they are now for the next two years (despite the financial mess being, as far as I can see, a function of a decade of unbalanced profligacy) and more frugal than they are now for at least four years to follow. I don't see how subtle tweaks to the tax system can do this; indeed, I don't know if it can be done. Interest rates are the obvious instrument, but profligacy and frugality are functions of upbringing and circumstance in that order; after-tax interest rates on straight savings accounts are now below the rate of inflation, but this has meant that I grumble slightly, keep most of my money in just-as-insured short-term bonds, and devote slightly more to the stock market where there's a possibility of higher returns.

What government policy would make you go out and spend more in February?

My sentiments precisely!

This is a lovely serene statue, and I like the way it comes with its own brush; does anyone reading this speak enough 中文 to tell me who it represents?

It's in Taipei, somewhere between the 228 Peace Park and the railway station.

This is a view from the cliffs at Uluwatu. It's apparently a wonderful place to surf, but only for the exceedingly competent since the waves crash into the cliff bases with some force.

I'm afraid there will be no photo tomorrow or Thursday; I'm at a conference on 'resolving problems in structure-based drug design' at glamorous Stansted Airport. Not only does it have a Working Dinner on the Wednesday, there's an hour-long session 'summarising progress made at the Working Dinner' on the Thursday. A good time will, I'm sure, be had by all.

Before the eruption, there was a quiet cabbage-growing village where nothing ever happened on the other side of the lake too. The lake is suspiciously perfectly clear, and its bottom is of black cinders.

This is an assembled panorama, because everything was perfectly still, and life is too short to take an extra wide-angle lens on a backpacking holiday.

One of these has a well-defined scale to it. The other, less so:

Most guidebooks to Kuala Lumpur will tell you of the Petronas Towers, but it seems that very few guidebook writers survive the drooling attentions of the Great Central Plant Beast.

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Tom Womack

Recent Entries

Murine whimsy

Sadly, the subsequent history of Poland made it clear that the answer was "Everybody"

And to conclude November Photo Posting Month:

Guaranteed demon-proof

Bulbous things with spines

Do we discriminate against Congo?

Chilly

I would call it verdent, were it less pink

So, economic stimulus

Some parts of Tokyo are less exclusively composed of decorous calm than the Meiji shrine

And the branches brush meaningless characters on the gravel

Esteemed

Hungry

Upstanding

Oooh ...

Aww ...

A quiet cabbage-growing village in Bali, where nothing ever happens

The dog and duck

Two desktop backgrounds from Bali for you

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March 2024

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