Tom Womack

Anyone want a brand-new copy of K J Parker's Colours in the Steel ? An unobserved shopping error at Amazon meant that I ordered two copies. Yours for a pint.

His trilogy beginning with Devices and Desires caught me by page three of the first volume when I picked that up at a con a few years back, and was good enough to the end that I bought this earlier trilogy of his sight-unseen.

(I had to check his gender; for some reason initials make me assume a writer is female, and the writing style, possibly by comparison with papersky, struck me as ineffably feminine)

I made Sunday lunch for mobbsy, sonicdrift and my housemate-brother Ben; 1.3kg of lovely leg of lamb from the local butcher, rubbed with garlic and thyme and salt and olive oil and with a whole bulb of garlic cut in half horizontally and roasted under it for tasty caramelised-garlic goodness, gratin dauphinois so that I could indulge my desire to peel potatoes into non-existence with my clever swivelly potato peeler (this turned out to be unspeakably tedious, though to produce potato nubs of bizarre geometric shapes; the cheese-slicing blade on the grater works better), green beans, roast butternut squash with sage. Afterwards, a chocolate pudding (standard four-ounce-of-everything chocolate cake mix, add raisins, bake in a long thin thing rather than a cake tin) served with vanilla ice cream from the shop. It was all well-received.

Now I have a large lamb leg-bone. There's clearly three sandwiches of meat on it, which can come off into sandwiches; then I have a big bone, and given bones I usually contemplate boiling them and making soup. I have carrots, parsnips, broccoli and leeks to put in soup; the caramelised garlic was so nice that I'd happily caramelise another garlic, but I'm not sure how well it works as a soup ingredient.

The last sheep stock I made was very thin and rather greasy; can I have some advice on the making of sheep soup? Something, probably one of the feasts from papersky's The King's Peace, makes me think pearl barley should be involved; I have pearl barley, but the pack says it must be boiled for an hour before it softens, and surely it would have to go in after the soup is blended, and at this point we'd be eating soup at ten after an evening of stressful soup synthesis.

Beelzebub is starting to complain that his commute to the upper world is being blocked by a surfeit of countries in handbaskets.

Pakistan was clearly already balancing on the edge of its basket and waiting for a push; I'm a bit surprised that Kenya has fallen in so firmly so fast. Not a vintage year for democracy in the former Soviet Union - Georgia backsliding after a very promising start, and Russia itself displaying the tact and subtlety that has so often characterised the KGB. Ukraine muddling through.

Thailand seems to be getting out of its basket a little, though I don't know if we've seen all of the generals' response to the election results.

And most of the countries of the rich West have managed to wedge themselves sideways in handbaskets made out of inadequately-decorrelated securitised debts.

Could someone please follow up with a succession of glorious successes?

I've played, with great enjoyment, graphical adventure games from Day of the Tentacle to Discworld Noir, by way of Grim Fandango and Curse of Monkey Island. Are such things still made?

A cursory look around GAME at the weekend failed to show me any games of that form, and I couldn't even work out what there was that would be a single-player first-person not-pure-shoot-em-up game with a plot - Little Big Adventure, Flashback were ones of those that I liked, in what is I fear now the far past. Half-Life 2 had too little plot and too much shooting for my taste; Oblivion sounds as if it might appeal, but I've often had trouble finding the plot-line among the universe in that kind of free-flowing RPG, and got bored. I might well like a big-world lots-of-little-missions game, if any existed with a more pleasant world-view than the GTA series or Canis Canem Edit: do they?

Here are two pictures of the same region of the head of Cetus, taken a month apart

November 12	December 12

You will see with the eye of faith that, not only have the stars moved relative to the tree, but one of the stars has moved relative to the rest of the stars. How on Earth Piazzi managed to spot that in 1801, without the benefit of photography and not even sure that it was there to be found, I know not; I knew the asteroid was somewhere near the head of Cetus, and it still took me some time to see the blinking dot after I'd lined up the images.

Comet Holmes is still up there, it's expanded a bit, moved out a bit past the α Persei cluster, and the tail is a little more visible. Click for bigger colour image, but be warned that the sky from central Cambridge is very bright orange.

( Images with the asteroid marked )

I am sure there are those among my readers who can spend a happy hour with

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc1a.ps.gz

which is a write-up, in Knuth's inimitably erudite style, of most of the field of bit-twiddling. Highlights include a data structure for addressing the hyperbolic plane based on arithmetic in base minus-phi, and some very non-obvious algorithms for processors with arbitrarily wide words.

He recommends that processors should include the instruction MXOR, which views its two inputs as 8x8 matrices over GF(2) and multiplies them.

This isn't a ship going through icy water; it's the wake in the clouds where the Roaring Forties hit Bouvet Island, a medium-sized volcano conveniently located a thousand miles from one of the less-visited parts of Antarctica.

Halifax will sell me a 3-month bond paying 6.85%, a 6-month bond paying 6.5%, a 1-year bond paying 6.45%, a 3-year bond paying 6.4%, or a 5-year bond paying 6.2%.

I thought that longer terms were supposed to be rewarded by better interest rates; on the other hand, why shouldn't I jump at this?

If I assume that Halifax would rather borrow money on the money-markets, where LIBOR is 6.61%, than through the time-consuming process of assembling small sums from thousands of tiny savers, then I conclude that the money markets want to charge Halifax perceptibly more than 6.85%. I think that this means that they believe there is a chance of perceptibly more than 0.89% [(6.85 / 6.61) ^ (3/12)] that Halifax will be unable to repay.

On the other hand, I'm a small saver, and the regulatory framework likes small savers. If Lloyds lend Halifax fifteen million pounds, and Halifax goes bust, Lloyds get nothing back. If I lend Halifax fifteen thousand pounds, and Halifax goes bust, I get £13,700 back. So I should be more willing to lend Halifax money than Lloyds is - indeed, since the money is otherwise making 5.8%, I should lend it to Halifax if I believe the odds of Halifax still being around in mid-February are better than about 20:1 for.

This seems somehow counter-intuitive; on the other hand, I will go off to the local Halifax tomorrow with a chequebook. There is then the question of hedging: I wonder what odds the local Ladbrokes will offer on Halifax being bust by mid-February?

It takes about an hour and a quarter from the time the heating turns off to the point that the house is cooling to the stage that you might want to be lying under a warm duvet and a blanket.

It takes about an hour and a half from the time the heating turns on to the point that the house is warm enough that you can bear to get out from under your warm duvet, and retrieve the blanket from down the side of the bed where you've kicked it.

So, heating should come on at 0700 and off at 2200, and I might end up with something that you could confuse with a sleep pattern if you held it upside-down and squinted.