Tom Womack

While walking to Waterbeach with bugshaw today, it was observed that nobody had yet organised a trip to see Wall-E.

Would anyone join me for the 8pm showing on Tuesday at Vue?

I am in Vienna for a conference this week.

The hotel has five different kinds of cheese and three kinds of pork product for breakfast, so I am happy already.

Every other day, I have a bath.

It is 50cm wide, 130cm long, 15cm deep, say 0.1 cubic metres or a hundred kilos - the water weighs slightly more than I do - and made of water at 40C, heated to that temperature from the 15C at which it arrives in the house.

So that's about ten megajoules - about three kilowatt-hours - of heat that had to be applied to the water. I've got a reasonably modern boiler of say 60% efficiency, the energy content of natural gas is 37 megajoules per cubic metre, so I'm using about half a cubic metre of gas to heat the bath, say twenty moles of methane. I've turned it into twenty moles of CO2 - 880 grams.

So my bathing habit produces 160 kilos of CO2 annually. Easyjet produces 100 grams of CO2 per passenger-kilometre, so my bathing habit is equivalent to an annual return flight to Berlin.

One ton of CO2 emission is equivalent to three hot baths a day for a year - that's a nice human-scale unit.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to hope that, as civilisation progresses, everyone in the world would be able to share my bathing habits. That would be a billion tons of CO2 annually, slightly under 4% of current planetary CO2 output and a little under the present output of the Chinese cement industry; not entirely unreasonable.

It is, however, also three billion cubic metres of natural gas a day, or say a round trillion a year (about 30% of the planetary consumption of 2.819Tm^3/year from reserves of about 200Tm^3); if the water was heated electrically, it's thirty petajoules a day - a third of a terawatt, three times the output of all the nuclear power stations in France, or the power produced by covering Luxembourg in solar panels.

This sounds as if the world can have a bath every other day in an entirely sustainable fashion for an infrastructure input of around fifty billion dollars a year (nuclear power stations costing $3 per watt and lasting twenty years); large but doable. I'm glad of this, I didn't know at the start of the calculation whether my ablutory habits alone would be enough to make my lifestyle unsustainable on planetary scale.

Do not follow this recipe, it makes a bland and insipid stew

Acquire a quantity of beef bones from the butcher. Roast them in the oven for about half an hour, then stick them in a large saucepan with 2pts water, one onion quartered, one carrot roughly chopped. Ignore on low heat for four hours, turn off and leave overnight. Discard the bones, strain the stock.

Take one pack of Asda casserole beef; roll the bits in seasoned flour (flour + two sprinkles mixed herbs + a bit of ground pepper) and fry them in olive oil until brown on both sides. Put them in a casserole.

Chop five medium boiling-potatoes into bits about the size of the beef bits, chop four normal carrots into bits which are carrot-cylindrical and as long as they are wide. Put them in the casserole

Chop one onion into small bits, fry them in the pan you fried the beef in until well-fried. Deglaze the pan with a bottle of beer (I used Hobgoblin), transfer the beef-with-onion-in to the casserole. Add about half the stock.

Stick in the oven at 180C for an hour and a half, notice that the liquid is still very watery, add two tablespoons of cornflour mixed up with water, stick in the oven for 45 more minutes. Eat with peas and complain about the bland insiptitude. The texture's good, the meat lumps look right, but the flavour has escaped the meat and somehow not ended up in the gravy.

When did they start calling deployed photoelectric power sources on spacecraft 'solar wings' rather than 'solar panels'?

I suppose they are very occasionally actually used as wings, but the only example I can think of it aerobraking into orbit around Mars.

echo "3o 185203545384014444998415700339182963094565346115682981302539679248192554448695865898272140289 14324129286424100231861565705311821806023066083407911748417199121054089089998098987789407767132602369 100512627347897906177 12079910333441 22320686081 134382593 *****p" | dc

A month of sieving on two dozen distributed computers and a 450-hour sequential calculation here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7420848.stm

"MPs could seek to avoid future expenses criticism by awarding themselves an automatic lump sum of £23,000 a year for second homes, a newspaper says"

"If a lump sum payment were made to each MP, the need for these documents to be produced would disappear and there could be a considerable cash boost for those MPs who spend less than the £23,000 permitted."

Handing out lump sums in cash to MPs is the kind of behaviour for which we tut and deduct at least three points when rating the governmental virtue of random countries in South America; what's next, black Mercedes? Is there any merit at all to the idea that important people do not need to provide receipts when spending public money?

If the issue is that MPs need second homes in London, would it make more sense to get Parliament to buy a random seven-hundred-room hotel, a class of building which London hardly lacks, and have them live there?

Do you live in Cambridge? Have you rented from a buy-to-let landlord and found it a nightmare? Do you want to appear on Look East on Wednesday and talk about it?

I ranted to BBC have-your-say about the troubles of renting from landlords who get divorced and have to sell up, or decided that emigrating to Australia wasn't in fact for them, and someone from Look East rang up this afternoon wanting me to appear; but since my troubles took place some years ago and in Cheltenham, I wasn't appropriate.

Comment here by tomorrow lunchtime and I'll put the lady from the BBC in touch with you.

My aunt and uncle occasionally complain that their nephews rarely come and see them ever since they moved to a cottage on the north side of the Beauly Firth just opposite Inverness, so I used the Bank Holiday to fix this.

I managed to pick the weekend between the end of the rainy season and the start of the midge season, so got to see the Highlands at their best. It's a primary-coloured place, the blue of the sky and the sea, the yellow of the gorse among the verdent velvet of well-sheeped grass. I saw a red squirrel just behind the cottage, a Moray Firth dolphin playing in colliding currents just off the point at Fortrose, and some gannets; Sunday took us to Brodie Castle and the new visitor's centre at Culloden Moor, and on Monday we went on a long drive in perfect weather, to see the length of Skye and the teeth of the Cuillins from the edge of the mainland at Applecross, with Lewis dim in the distance beyond it, and Loch Kishorn from the high pass at Bealach na Ba. Two hundred photos, as yet unsorted.

Even the train journey up and down is very pretty: the line goes by the sea for miles, with lovely views of Berwick and Alnmouth on their peninsulas, and there's a great view from the Forth Bridge. With a bit of luck with connections, it's eight and a half hours from Cambridge to Inverness: no further than Bordeaux, Marseilles or Frankfurt.

For future reference, having flight A arrive at 11pm when you need to check in for flight B at 7am is probably sensible at some major first-world airports: where you can be sure there's a hotel with spare rooms on-site, and speak the language enough to be confident of finding it, and are sure it will accept a waved credit-card. I'd do it at Heathrow or JFK if there were no choice.

I cannot recommend the domestic waiting-room at Borispol airport as a place of restful sleep.

The last few days in Ukraine were good; on Thursday I walked for a few hours in the hills around Balaclava, up to a WW2 German fortress set into the top of the sea-cliff with one cast-iron sentry-box cantilevered right over the drop - some brave local has written 'I love Tanya' on the outside of the box. This Google picture shows the sentry-box as a small brown blob in the very centre; I left my camera at the hostel for ease of clambering. Silent, acre after acre of vineyards, not a soul around, the smell of spring and the sea far below.

Also Yalta: the Livadia Palace seems shut for reconstruction. I gather from the guide that the reconstruction would involve putting up a statue of the three leaders of the Yalta conference, and that the local Crimean Tatars, returned during the nineties from their mass exile to Siberia by Stalin in 1944, are adamant that the one thing Crimea does not need is a new statue of Stalin, so the reconstruction may take some time. Yalta is a marvellous setting, among colossal crags, for the kind of seafront promenade that I've assiduously avoided going to in Blackpool; the road from Sevastopol runs right along the top of the cliffs and is clearly one of the great scenic roads of the world.

I don't think I'd recommend Ukraine as whole-heartedly as I recommend Romania and Poland: the hostels aren't quite there (though the Kosmonaut Hostel in Lviv is excellent; anyone backpacking in Krakow should consider the nine-hour train trip east, and it's probably worth the fifteen hours from Warsaw), the transport infrastructure is just slightly too ropey to be fun - I twice had public transport fail and had to take a forty-pound taxi trip - and the opening hours for the major attractions are weird enough that I didn't manage to get to the Chernobyl museum or the Museum of the Black Sea Fleet, both of which I was rather looking forward to.

You would have thought that any of a total lack of knowledge of the Ukrainian language, a strong dislike of Slavs and a nasty temper would make one consider a job other than hostel manager in Kiev, but this hasn't disqualified the man who owns and runs Kievsky Backpacker.